Book Review:
“Blue Covenant, the Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water” By Maude Barlow, 2007.
This book is a handbook for water activists – ‘water warriors’ Barlow calls them. A sequel to Barlow’s 2002 “Blue Gold,” it is the most up-to-date look at the ‘players’ in the war for water. Barlow is a head of the “Council of Canadians”, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and is particularly sensitive to the issue because of the role water plays in Canada.
Lack of water, like peak oil and climate change, threaten the very foundation of 'some' humans existence on this planet. Water is intimately connected to climate. And water is intimately connected to capitalism, which has selected water as perhaps an even more important product than oil. Capitalism, as this book shows, stalks humanity like the black death, as it is one of the main reasons for lack of clean water in country after country.
Let Ms. Barlow count the ways. The main organizations of the capitalist world – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the World Water Council and parts of the U.N., the main agricultural and water corporations, and most First World governments – all believe in privatization of water. They want to put a price on the most essential element of daily life. And if you cannot pay, you cannot … ‘play.’ Every day more children die of drinking dirty water than any disease in the world, including AIDS.
POLLUTION
By 2025, according to Barlow, 2/3rds of the world will be ‘water stressed.’ Climate change is accelerating drought. This is affecting, not just regions far away, but the southern half of the United States and most of Mexico. She asserts 36 U.S. states will have water shortages in the next 5 years. The Colorado and Rio Grande, Nile, Yellow, Indus and the Jordan rivers no longer reach the sea. Inequality is growing, as the average North American uses 600 litres of water a day, while the average African uses 6 litres. Between pollution of surface waters and over-mining of ground-water, there will be little left for everyone. The Dead Sea, the Ural Sea and Lake Chad are all but gone. The fabled Ganges in India is an open sewer. 75% of inland Russia’s water is polluted. Only 10 percent of Mexico City’s water waste is treated. 40% of U.S. rivers are not fit to swim or eat fish out of, even after the Clean Water Act. A tenth of the world’s crops are irrigated by … sewage water.
OVER-USEAGE
Irrigation of deserts and desert cities, over-usage of water for oil substitutes like ethanol and tar sands, over-mining of ground water by agribusiness, bottled water – all are leading to shortages. Non-renewable aquifers are being drained in an unregulated way in country after country, including the Ogallala here in the U.S. Due to lack of water, major sandstorms are now affecting parts of China. Glaciers are disappearing due to climate change, and glaciers feed many rivers. Ecuador, Peru & Bolivia all depend on glacier melt as their only source of fresh water. Large scale irrigation, a key component of the “green” revolution, loses up to 50% of water due to seepage or evaporation.
Barlow believes that certain products are really a way to ‘export’ water. Barlow calls this ‘virtual water.’ Vietnam is sucking water out of their country to export coffee beans. Flowers in Africa are sent to England, drying up Lake Navisha in Kenya. While Brazil’s sugar cane bio-fuel has far more energy than U.S. corn ethanol, it uses massive amounts of water to produce as well, and rivers in northern Brazil are drying up. The export model of World Bank capitalism actually results in a water transfer to … the wealthier countries.
Deforestation and urbanization result in interrupting the hydrologic cycle, as less moisture is produced into the atmosphere. Desertification is the most obvious example of what is happening, and this directly contributes to further drought. Rising salt seas are also starting to seep into freshwater marshes and wetlands, like the Everglades. All of these effects could lead to a billion climate change refugees. By 2050, 5 times as much land could be under extreme drought as exists today. Barlow insists that ‘high tech’ solutions favored by international finance, like big dams, desalination plants and water diversions, make the problem worse. Desalinization is very expensive (the Saudis have the most plants in the world, as you would expect…) and energy-intensive, i.e. not sustainable. Desalinization plants result in massive ocean pollution as a black brine is injected back into the ocean – 20 billion litres a day presently. And the desalinization plants only filter out the salt – not other pollutants in the ocean water.
CORPORATIONS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS
Barlow goes on to address how the First World capitalist concerns like Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and Suez only contribute to the problem, as their main interest is ‘profit’, not clean water or available water for everyone. Northern water aide to other countries is really designed to benefit the leading Western banks and corporations more than the people they are intended to ‘help,’ in spite of the rhetoric. This also agrees with the experience of John Perkins. She details the history of the development of water cartels, not surprisingly initiated by Margaret Thatcher and neo-liberal, free-market ideologues, who first privatized Britain’s water supply in the 80s.
Barlow then illustrates the international web of mostly people’s organizations fighting, and sometimes winning against the water cartels. The famous struggle in Cochabamba, Boliva, also mentioned by Perkins, is an example of struggles in Latin America that have helped to turn the tide against U.S. neo-liberal economics across the continent. This war is being waged on every continent. It is a war that will come home to us here in the U.S. very soon.
There are more acronyms in this book than a dictionary. Every single corporate water front and profit-making venture, every governmental and quasi-governmental agency interested in water, national and international, and every people’s organization dedicated to stopping the privatization of water floats in the alphabet soup inside. If you can fight through the initials, like unknown characters in a long novel, you will be able to make sense of the narrative. And in the process, it delivers a roadmap to the players in this play.
And I bought it at May Day books, on recommendation of Craig!
Red Frog, 5/27/2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
"Free trade" with Guatemala
Good piece in Dissident Voice on what's happening in Guatemala. The Guatemalan president was in town (D.C.) a couple of days back to meet his imperial master. There was the obligatory photo-op, where GWB explained to the great unwashed how Guatemala was making strides in "development" (as I seem to recall) and how "free trade" would benefit everyone. Anyway, here's an excerpt from the DV piece:
Less than 24 hours after President Bush met with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom at the White House on Monday, a worker from a union that filed a trade complaint with Washington against the Guatemalan government was murdered.
Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the Guatemalan government was not upholding its labor laws and was failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against union members–which include rape and murder. The complaint states that violence against trade unionists has increased over the past two years (since CAFTA was ratified) and that the Guatemalan government may be responsible for some of the violence. The violence from this year alone includes 8 murders, 1 attempted murder, 2 drive-by shootings, and the kidnapping and gang rape of a top union official’s daughter who was targeted because of her father’s union work.
The ongoing violence against workers in Guatemala makes it clear that talk of free trade improving human rights in developing countries is lost in translation. Free trade has done nothing but exacerbate poverty and inequality, while rewarding governments for sustaining repressive conditions that allow corporations to exploit vulnerable, and often powerless workers. No country in the world exemplifies this hostility towards workers’ rights more than Colombia, a country that the Bush Administration is currently trying to reward by pressuring congress to pass a free trade agreement.
Less than 24 hours after President Bush met with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom at the White House on Monday, a worker from a union that filed a trade complaint with Washington against the Guatemalan government was murdered.
Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the Guatemalan government was not upholding its labor laws and was failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against union members–which include rape and murder. The complaint states that violence against trade unionists has increased over the past two years (since CAFTA was ratified) and that the Guatemalan government may be responsible for some of the violence. The violence from this year alone includes 8 murders, 1 attempted murder, 2 drive-by shootings, and the kidnapping and gang rape of a top union official’s daughter who was targeted because of her father’s union work.
The ongoing violence against workers in Guatemala makes it clear that talk of free trade improving human rights in developing countries is lost in translation. Free trade has done nothing but exacerbate poverty and inequality, while rewarding governments for sustaining repressive conditions that allow corporations to exploit vulnerable, and often powerless workers. No country in the world exemplifies this hostility towards workers’ rights more than Colombia, a country that the Bush Administration is currently trying to reward by pressuring congress to pass a free trade agreement.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Riots and protests in Europe
There were riots and protests throughout Europe yesterday. Rather than duplicate the post in my personal blog, I'll simply refer interested readers to the post.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
NLR essay on subprime and financialisation
There's a new essay by Robin Blackburn on subprime and financialisation which is in the current edition of New Left Review, which can be read online here. He's right to point the finger at the complicity of quants and dodgy and obscure quantitative techniques which have turned out to be nothing more than sleight-of-hand.
Monday, April 28, 2008
More on hunger
Related to my previous post, I've just found a couple of articles in the same vein. In the first one, Mike Whitney, at Dissident Voice, quotes Chavez:
“It is a massacre of the world’s poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis.”
And the second, by Otto Spengler (mentioned by Whitney) in Asia Times:
The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.
Because such a small proportion of the global rice supply trades, the monetary shock from the weak dollar was sufficient to more than double its price.
(I recommend the article be grokked in fullness). In essence, those buying in dollar-tied currencies have seen their purchasing power wither. Those not tied to such currencies have also seen their purchasing power decline as cash-rich countries use their dollars the only way they can: buying up commodities. For sure, the surge in prices of commodities (food, precious metals, real estate) over the last few years can certainly be ascribed to a world awash with liquidity, in large part US dollars. In the case of food, there are other complicating factors Spengler doesn't consider (poor harvests, biofuels, and so on). But even the use of biofuels can be ascribed at least to some extent to the weakening of the dollar and the concomitant surge in crude oil prices. In a nutshell high commodity prices in general (including food staples) and the impact of biofuel on food prices can both be ascribed to US monetary and economic policies of the last several years. It strengthens my argument that the food crisis is an engineered one (albeit inadvertently). But the poor are powerless.
“It is a massacre of the world’s poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis.”
And the second, by Otto Spengler (mentioned by Whitney) in Asia Times:
The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.
Because such a small proportion of the global rice supply trades, the monetary shock from the weak dollar was sufficient to more than double its price.
(I recommend the article be grokked in fullness). In essence, those buying in dollar-tied currencies have seen their purchasing power wither. Those not tied to such currencies have also seen their purchasing power decline as cash-rich countries use their dollars the only way they can: buying up commodities. For sure, the surge in prices of commodities (food, precious metals, real estate) over the last few years can certainly be ascribed to a world awash with liquidity, in large part US dollars. In the case of food, there are other complicating factors Spengler doesn't consider (poor harvests, biofuels, and so on). But even the use of biofuels can be ascribed at least to some extent to the weakening of the dollar and the concomitant surge in crude oil prices. In a nutshell high commodity prices in general (including food staples) and the impact of biofuel on food prices can both be ascribed to US monetary and economic policies of the last several years. It strengthens my argument that the food crisis is an engineered one (albeit inadvertently). But the poor are powerless.
World hunger
Interesting piece in today's FT:
The last sentence deserves a bit of elaboration. Notwithstanding the lies of Western "leaders," hunger in the Third World isn't principally caused by uncontrollable circumstances such as droughts and overpopulation. Droughts and overpopulation are problems to be sure, but not the primary culprits. The primary culprit is the superimposition of an artificial system of resource extraction from the Third World, using arcane tools of banking, finance, and international law, and backed by military coercion, overthrow of legitimate governments, and targeted assassinations if the earlier measures fail (aka neocolonialism). To give a simple example, poor countries are frequently having to devote their land to the growth of export-oriented cash crops to service the debts of Western loan sharks -- and these loans are meant to be unpayable. Similar examples are rife. In like vein, the use of corn for fuel is bringing about higher food prices all over the globe. The point is that world hunger and malnutrition -- both in poor countries and the affluent North -- is an engineered phenomenon.
QUOTE "The correct response is to give priority to dealing with hunger, with access to foodstuffs and to food production in poorer countries" Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister, told the FT last week. "And to give priority to tackling the root of the problem: the enormous subsidies in rich countries that undermine production in developing nations. World hunger is not a result of a lack of supply, but principally of the low income levels in poor countries."UNQUOTE
The last sentence deserves a bit of elaboration. Notwithstanding the lies of Western "leaders," hunger in the Third World isn't principally caused by uncontrollable circumstances such as droughts and overpopulation. Droughts and overpopulation are problems to be sure, but not the primary culprits. The primary culprit is the superimposition of an artificial system of resource extraction from the Third World, using arcane tools of banking, finance, and international law, and backed by military coercion, overthrow of legitimate governments, and targeted assassinations if the earlier measures fail (aka neocolonialism). To give a simple example, poor countries are frequently having to devote their land to the growth of export-oriented cash crops to service the debts of Western loan sharks -- and these loans are meant to be unpayable. Similar examples are rife. In like vein, the use of corn for fuel is bringing about higher food prices all over the globe. The point is that world hunger and malnutrition -- both in poor countries and the affluent North -- is an engineered phenomenon.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Kevin Phillips' new book
I just got hold of Phillips' "Bad Money," which came out about a week ago. I've posted a couple of comments on my initial impressions of the book in a post at my blog; rather than doing a cut-and-paste, my blog post can be found here.
Friday, April 18, 2008
The mechanics of subprime
For a quick and accurate explanation of the mechanics of subprime, there's a powerpoint presentation, put together by Michael Perelman, available at his blog here.
Another perspective on the financial crisis
Most of the readers of this blog are doubtless aware that a tectonic shift in global economic relations has been taking place, with the inexorable rise of Asian economies and a resurgent Russian economy coupled with the anemic and problematic performance of the US economy. And for those of us who know our history, we know that major changes in relationships are usually precipated by some sort of crisis or major event. Thus the growing weakness of Britain vis-a-vis Germany and the USA needed WW1 to throw it into bold relief. It might be argued, I suppose, that the present financial crisis is also an indicator and precipitator of tectonic shifts. I found a good article at rense.com this morning, written from a realpolitik perspective, which in large part mirrors my own outlook:
But there is more to the story. The sub-prime crisis grew in the context of real and portentous developments across global trade, financial and economic systems. The Fed, Treasury and Wall Street, distracted by their own crisis, probably have had little time to focus on the tectonic plate shifts in the global system that probably mean they cannot go home again. The epicenters of international trade and finance simply are shifting. In essence, a good part of the wealth that might be needed to finance a recovery is in the wrong places or pockets, mostly in Asia, and when the dust settles, the global configuration will be different.
Whatever the approaches, the system is unlikely ever to be the same again, because the facts underlying global developments are profound. For starters, the solutions do not lie merely with changes in liquidity. They lie with recognition and adjustments around real changes in global economic structures including the scale and distribution of productivity and wealth. The sub-prime crisis simply adds to the adjustments already made necessary by those global changes.
However, as other economies have grown, diversified and prospered the dollar has faced rising competition from the Japanese Yen, then the Euro and, most recently, from the Chinese
Renmembi or Yuan and the Brazilian Real. These new challenges reflect both the growing
global strength of other economies and accumulating flaws in the strength of the American economy, notably continuing Federal deficits, rising international debt and growing import dependence. Those developments weakened the Dollar by exposing it to the competition of other currencies, reduced its traditional role as a stabilizing international trade benchmark, and sent its value plunging as resource prices rose in response to increasing global demand for oil and
industrial materials.
To the degree that the United States is able to reduce its debt, curb its appetites for imported goods, adjust its affluent lifestyles, extricate itself from absurd levels of military expenditure, and restrain inflation, in short, put its economic house in order, declines in the value of the Dollar can be mitigated. However, the declining role of the Dollar in the world economy appears persistent.
In terms of GDP stated at purchasing power parity, the United States is now not only behind the European Union, it is being rapidly overtaken by Asian economies. World Bank estimates show that the Asian combination of China, Japan and India exceeds the United States and is breathing down the neck of the European Community for global first place. With the numbers for smaller Asian economies such as Malaysia, Asia is already globally in the lead.
The containment strategy that ultimately dominated the US Cold War posture actually provided an umbrella for potentially pre- emptive military moves that positioned the US virtually everywhere any economic resource of importance could be had.
When the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) surfaced in the early Bill Clinton presidency with plans to invade Iraq and with a global military power agenda, the altruistic side of American foreign policy had pretty well atrophied. The game had become power maintenance by military dominance. The PNAC designers appeared to have no clear-cut economic agenda, but their military scheme, if it succeeded, would have provided more than adequate cover for a
self-centered and pre-emptive resource acquisition strategy. As perceived by other advanced and advancing nations, this scheme drove 21^st century global resource acquisition strategies toward a nineteenth century capitalist model. One only has to look at Darfur, the Congo, Zimbabwe, and much of Central Asia as well as the Middle East to see how neo-colonial present day resource acquisition has become.
In the end, the sub-prime mess is likely to accelerate the transition of the US economy to a new position in the global system. Unless several major world economies-Japan, European Union, China, India, Brazil, and others-suddenly contract instead of continuing to grow at faster than US rates, the US weight in the global system will continue to decline; the Dollar will continue to play a reduced role in the global trade and payments system.
A military power strategy won't cut it. We are already going deeply into debt to sustain the present military posture. Other countries are not enamored of a US trying to run the world at the real or implied point of a gun. The system now needs truly global leadership. The United
States can lead in that direction, helping to create and strengthen the institutions that will provide global leadership in the common interest. It is not leading now; it is forcing or trying to force global conformity to a self-centered US model, and that strategy eventually will fail. Such failures as the sub-prime fiasco only hasten the time when the present US model must be
abandoned.
I apologise profusely for such copious pasting (even though I've tried to be selective) and insist that this is not my wont but seldom do I come across such careful and perceptive analysis. The fortunes of the US will continue to decline and in a sense the present crisis is a harbinger of more bad news to come over the next few years. It will be interesting to see how US policy makers try to use the one undoubted edge they still have -- US military superiority -- to bully or cajole other nations into complying with US demands.
But there is more to the story. The sub-prime crisis grew in the context of real and portentous developments across global trade, financial and economic systems. The Fed, Treasury and Wall Street, distracted by their own crisis, probably have had little time to focus on the tectonic plate shifts in the global system that probably mean they cannot go home again. The epicenters of international trade and finance simply are shifting. In essence, a good part of the wealth that might be needed to finance a recovery is in the wrong places or pockets, mostly in Asia, and when the dust settles, the global configuration will be different.
Whatever the approaches, the system is unlikely ever to be the same again, because the facts underlying global developments are profound. For starters, the solutions do not lie merely with changes in liquidity. They lie with recognition and adjustments around real changes in global economic structures including the scale and distribution of productivity and wealth. The sub-prime crisis simply adds to the adjustments already made necessary by those global changes.
However, as other economies have grown, diversified and prospered the dollar has faced rising competition from the Japanese Yen, then the Euro and, most recently, from the Chinese
Renmembi or Yuan and the Brazilian Real. These new challenges reflect both the growing
global strength of other economies and accumulating flaws in the strength of the American economy, notably continuing Federal deficits, rising international debt and growing import dependence. Those developments weakened the Dollar by exposing it to the competition of other currencies, reduced its traditional role as a stabilizing international trade benchmark, and sent its value plunging as resource prices rose in response to increasing global demand for oil and
industrial materials.
To the degree that the United States is able to reduce its debt, curb its appetites for imported goods, adjust its affluent lifestyles, extricate itself from absurd levels of military expenditure, and restrain inflation, in short, put its economic house in order, declines in the value of the Dollar can be mitigated. However, the declining role of the Dollar in the world economy appears persistent.
In terms of GDP stated at purchasing power parity, the United States is now not only behind the European Union, it is being rapidly overtaken by Asian economies. World Bank estimates show that the Asian combination of China, Japan and India exceeds the United States and is breathing down the neck of the European Community for global first place. With the numbers for smaller Asian economies such as Malaysia, Asia is already globally in the lead.
The containment strategy that ultimately dominated the US Cold War posture actually provided an umbrella for potentially pre- emptive military moves that positioned the US virtually everywhere any economic resource of importance could be had.
When the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) surfaced in the early Bill Clinton presidency with plans to invade Iraq and with a global military power agenda, the altruistic side of American foreign policy had pretty well atrophied. The game had become power maintenance by military dominance. The PNAC designers appeared to have no clear-cut economic agenda, but their military scheme, if it succeeded, would have provided more than adequate cover for a
self-centered and pre-emptive resource acquisition strategy. As perceived by other advanced and advancing nations, this scheme drove 21^st century global resource acquisition strategies toward a nineteenth century capitalist model. One only has to look at Darfur, the Congo, Zimbabwe, and much of Central Asia as well as the Middle East to see how neo-colonial present day resource acquisition has become.
In the end, the sub-prime mess is likely to accelerate the transition of the US economy to a new position in the global system. Unless several major world economies-Japan, European Union, China, India, Brazil, and others-suddenly contract instead of continuing to grow at faster than US rates, the US weight in the global system will continue to decline; the Dollar will continue to play a reduced role in the global trade and payments system.
A military power strategy won't cut it. We are already going deeply into debt to sustain the present military posture. Other countries are not enamored of a US trying to run the world at the real or implied point of a gun. The system now needs truly global leadership. The United
States can lead in that direction, helping to create and strengthen the institutions that will provide global leadership in the common interest. It is not leading now; it is forcing or trying to force global conformity to a self-centered US model, and that strategy eventually will fail. Such failures as the sub-prime fiasco only hasten the time when the present US model must be
abandoned.
I apologise profusely for such copious pasting (even though I've tried to be selective) and insist that this is not my wont but seldom do I come across such careful and perceptive analysis. The fortunes of the US will continue to decline and in a sense the present crisis is a harbinger of more bad news to come over the next few years. It will be interesting to see how US policy makers try to use the one undoubted edge they still have -- US military superiority -- to bully or cajole other nations into complying with US demands.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The present crisis of finance capitalism
The paucity of theoretical (left-wing) analysis concerning the present financial crisis has been bothering me for the last several months. In recent days, however, theorists have begun to examine the context in which this crisis has occurred and its various ramfications.
First of all, there's John Bellamy Foster's essay in the April 2008 edition of Monthly Review, which can also be read online here. I'd suggest that one first read a piece he wrote for Monthly Review a year earlier, in April 2007, to flesh out the theoretical picture, which can be found here. As I understand Foster, the gist of what he's saying appears to be that the shift from an earlier industrial capitalism to today's finance capitalism was prompted by stagnating profit and the concomitant lack of profitable outlets for investment. But a corollary of this move has been a national economy (and increasingly, a global one) that is susceptible to booms and busts (in contrast to the relatively mild cycles of forty and fifty years ago), to speculative fevers and savage "corrections" of the sort not seen in an earlier post-WW2 age. And that what we have today is the inevitable collapse of a financial house of cards, which has been built on -- and succumbed from -- inherent contradictions such as insufficient purchasing power on the part of ordinary people, the explosion of credit, and the frantic and feverish search for super-profits. I hasten to add that I'm not sure to what extent I'm paraphrasing Foster and to what extent I'm depicting my own weltanshauung.
What troubles me now is how little theory informs current political discourse. The ideas put forward so far appear to be to lower interest rates, to provide some relief to mortgage holders, to "stimulate" the economy, to (half-heartedly) attempt some mild regulation of the markets -- all patch-and-mend. What's really needed is an ideological alternative: one that provides a theoretically different perspective from the neoliberal dogma of the last three decades. One that proposes that there may be an alternative to (ostensibly) free markets and ever-widening disparities in wealth and income; one that situates the present crisis as systemic and reveals the ideological bankruptcy of neoliberalism. One cannot, of course, expect the paid apes of the Democratic Party to initiate any such discourse; as I maintain, if the Republicans are killers, the Democrats are whores. So any such discourse will have to come from elsewhere, from some fringe or periphery. Yesterday evening I serendipitously stumbled across a couple of analyses which resonated with me; they can be found here and here. I'd just like to mention a couple of points that I found particularly noteworthy about Chazelle's essay.
First of all, he contends that any real ideology has to be disbelievable just as any real scientific theory has to be falsifiable: this resonates with me because I'm trained as a scientist. Thus saying that the sun will arise in the east doesn't constitute a theory; predicting the existence of Uranus or the existence of radio waves does. And if an ideology is to be disbelievable, it needs to be making concrete proposals that are based on tough choices. Any ideology that doesn't 1) indicate that there are alternatives and 2) suggest which of these alternatives should be chosen (i.e., tough decisions) and why, is no ideology. This is precisely why the Democratic Party is talking through its backside most of the time: it's not proposing a rival ideological framework. It merely puts a smiley-face on harsh realities and "feels your pain." And Democratic politicians assiduously avoid portraying any alternatives to the current status quo. But I digess. Both of the analyses are well worth reading and should provide food for thought.
First of all, there's John Bellamy Foster's essay in the April 2008 edition of Monthly Review, which can also be read online here. I'd suggest that one first read a piece he wrote for Monthly Review a year earlier, in April 2007, to flesh out the theoretical picture, which can be found here. As I understand Foster, the gist of what he's saying appears to be that the shift from an earlier industrial capitalism to today's finance capitalism was prompted by stagnating profit and the concomitant lack of profitable outlets for investment. But a corollary of this move has been a national economy (and increasingly, a global one) that is susceptible to booms and busts (in contrast to the relatively mild cycles of forty and fifty years ago), to speculative fevers and savage "corrections" of the sort not seen in an earlier post-WW2 age. And that what we have today is the inevitable collapse of a financial house of cards, which has been built on -- and succumbed from -- inherent contradictions such as insufficient purchasing power on the part of ordinary people, the explosion of credit, and the frantic and feverish search for super-profits. I hasten to add that I'm not sure to what extent I'm paraphrasing Foster and to what extent I'm depicting my own weltanshauung.
What troubles me now is how little theory informs current political discourse. The ideas put forward so far appear to be to lower interest rates, to provide some relief to mortgage holders, to "stimulate" the economy, to (half-heartedly) attempt some mild regulation of the markets -- all patch-and-mend. What's really needed is an ideological alternative: one that provides a theoretically different perspective from the neoliberal dogma of the last three decades. One that proposes that there may be an alternative to (ostensibly) free markets and ever-widening disparities in wealth and income; one that situates the present crisis as systemic and reveals the ideological bankruptcy of neoliberalism. One cannot, of course, expect the paid apes of the Democratic Party to initiate any such discourse; as I maintain, if the Republicans are killers, the Democrats are whores. So any such discourse will have to come from elsewhere, from some fringe or periphery. Yesterday evening I serendipitously stumbled across a couple of analyses which resonated with me; they can be found here and here. I'd just like to mention a couple of points that I found particularly noteworthy about Chazelle's essay.
First of all, he contends that any real ideology has to be disbelievable just as any real scientific theory has to be falsifiable: this resonates with me because I'm trained as a scientist. Thus saying that the sun will arise in the east doesn't constitute a theory; predicting the existence of Uranus or the existence of radio waves does. And if an ideology is to be disbelievable, it needs to be making concrete proposals that are based on tough choices. Any ideology that doesn't 1) indicate that there are alternatives and 2) suggest which of these alternatives should be chosen (i.e., tough decisions) and why, is no ideology. This is precisely why the Democratic Party is talking through its backside most of the time: it's not proposing a rival ideological framework. It merely puts a smiley-face on harsh realities and "feels your pain." And Democratic politicians assiduously avoid portraying any alternatives to the current status quo. But I digess. Both of the analyses are well worth reading and should provide food for thought.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Brecht in Finland
Bertold Brecht’s “Puntila and His Hired Man Matti,” Frank Theatre at City of Minneapolis Garage
The Frank Theatre is probably one of the most political theatre companies in this town, along with Penumbra, Mixed Blood and Intermedia Arts. Frank specializes in left-wing content, and moves its ensemble cast to unique locations, acting in a different venue for every show. I consider it the best political theatre in town. This time the production, which has now ended, was in a truck garage along Hiawatha Avenue used by the City of Minneapolis. Frank built comfortable risers to sit in, painted parts of the walls, railings, and various objects to look like birch trees, and generally used the space well.
The play, a typical comic cabaret, is set in Finland, where Bertold Brecht lived in exile for a time. It was written in collaboration with Finnish-Estonian playwright Hella Wuolijoki, but then Brecht renamed it and published it under his own name entirely. It tells the story of a landowner Puntila with multiple personalities, who is interested in marrying-off his daughter, Eva, to a diplomat. The play is based on the transitions between a drunken, gregarious and generous life-of-the-party Puntila to a sober and vicious milk landlord Puntila, and back again. Matti, his trusty chauffeur, has to deal with the transitions, never forgetting that the drunk will turn back into a landlord with a hangover. Matti is almost the sole voice of logic and reason in the play. Matti the actor, with a beard, goatee and driver’s hat that made him look vaguely like V.I. Lenin, at one point asks, “What is to be done?”
Indeed. What is to be done with the bourgeoisie?
While drunk, Puntila and Matti engage in banter, and Puntila discovers that Matti is a ‘real human being.’ Puntila is also acting like a ‘real human being’ when drinking, though a high-handed and arbitrary one even then. When drunk, Puntila loves Finland’s natural beauty – its birch forests, 70,000 lakes and mountains – and even chastises Matti for thinking he would ruin a forest to make money. Marx himself equated the destruction of nature with the exploitation of the working class. It seems that Brecht is echoing this theme here. Puntila, played by the actor Grant Richey, is a non-stop fun show when drinking. Over one randy past-midnight jaunt to a small village, he somehow manages to get engaged to four different village women, inviting them all to come to his estate on the same day for the culmination of their ‘engagements.’
The engagement day actually centers on the engagement of his daughter Eva to the “attache,” a gay young man in the foreign-service who owes Puntila a lot of money. Puntila, for somewhat obscure reasons, is encouraging the romance in order to gain favor with people in the government. Chain-smoking Eva is a pampered young woman schooled in Switzerland who is trying to rationalize her engagement to a homosexual, but is having some doubts. Matti and she eventually hatch a plan to break the engagement by pretending to have a romantic tryst in the sauna. Minnesota readers will appreciate the sauna scenes, which incidentally feature no nudity. Now, at least, we know what goes on in such places..
The big day arrives. Early in the morning, Puntila’s four prospective brides arrive, each with a ‘ring’ on their finger made out of curtain rod loops that Puntila had given them, and the requisite ‘drink’ of aquavit. In a sober rage, Puntila orders the foolish women home and they trudge the many miles back to their village while telling stories about the cruelty of the landlords and businessmen of Finland. One story involves the reds jailed after the working class rising there in 1918. Finland, after 600 years of Swedish rule, was from 1908 until 1917 under the control of the Czar. In 1918 the Soviets gave Finland independence, something Kerensky had not been willing to do. During the white terror of 1918 during and after the Finnish civil war, won by the Whites under Mannerheim, between 8,400 and 14,600 red guards were executed out of hand. Anyone missed by the terror was blacklisted from work, kicked out of school or otherwise brutalized. This is the historic background for the seemingly innocuous joking atmosphere of the play itself.
The big day continues as the now drunk Puntila examines his prospective son-in-law, who misses the point of an obvious joke. Puntila realizes the attaché is a waste of a forest and an idiot, not to mention a bad match for his daughter. (He would have had to sell a forest as, I think, a dowry.) Puntila chases the attaché off the property, along with his senior sponsor, another government minister.
Here starts the central scene of the play. The remaining parties gather along a long table reminiscent of the last supper, with the Rabelasian Puntila in the Christ position. He suggests to his daughter that she should really marry Matti. A priest is appalled. Eva, cigarette-in-hand and tipsy, however agrees. Matti then attempts the ‘education’ of Eva, showing her how she would live as the wife of a chauffeur. Her hands would be reddened by work. They would eat herring 5-7 times a week – the main staple. There would be no money for anything. Cigarettes would be too expensive. He’d be woken at night and have to go to work, no matter what. There would be little romance for Eva, as the exhausted chauffeur would just need his boots removed and herring on the table. Eva reluctantly agrees that perhaps that type of life would not be so enjoyable. And so Brecht undermines one of the key myths of bourgeois society – that there are no barriers between classes, and that ‘love’ conquers all.
The next morning the hung-over and sober Puntila returns, fires a worker that might have had ‘red’ sympathies (it is unclear the offense) and then pledges to destroy all the booze in the house. Booze, after all, is the liquor of democracy, it seems. The servants bring out bottle after bottle of aqua-vit to be broken, and Puntila … starts drinking again. He creates a hysterical and dangerous scene upon a pile of tables and chairs over his love of the Finish landscape. The traditional bourgeois ending of the play, of course, would have been for Puntila to find his inner 'human,' and then Matti could freely marry Eva - perhaps getting a sawmill in the bargain, and everyone living happily ever after. Instead Matti, now thoroughly sickened, leaves the estate the next morning, never to return.
The play is full of singing, as Brecht plays tend to be, and ends with a socialist hymn to a time when there will be no masters and slaves, only men. The alternation of the semi-sympathetic ‘drunk’ Puntilla with the sober/cruel Puntilla shows that bourgeois society has two faces – and that even if one is in force, the other is not far away. A dry drunk is the most dangerous of men!
The Frank Theatre is probably one of the most political theatre companies in this town, along with Penumbra, Mixed Blood and Intermedia Arts. Frank specializes in left-wing content, and moves its ensemble cast to unique locations, acting in a different venue for every show. I consider it the best political theatre in town. This time the production, which has now ended, was in a truck garage along Hiawatha Avenue used by the City of Minneapolis. Frank built comfortable risers to sit in, painted parts of the walls, railings, and various objects to look like birch trees, and generally used the space well.
Indeed. What is to be done with the bourgeoisie?
While drunk, Puntila and Matti engage in banter, and Puntila discovers that Matti is a ‘real human being.’ Puntila is also acting like a ‘real human being’ when drinking, though a high-handed and arbitrary one even then. When drunk, Puntila loves Finland’s natural beauty – its birch forests, 70,000 lakes and mountains – and even chastises Matti for thinking he would ruin a forest to make money. Marx himself equated the destruction of nature with the exploitation of the working class. It seems that Brecht is echoing this theme here. Puntila, played by the actor Grant Richey, is a non-stop fun show when drinking. Over one randy past-midnight jaunt to a small village, he somehow manages to get engaged to four different village women, inviting them all to come to his estate on the same day for the culmination of their ‘engagements.’
The engagement day actually centers on the engagement of his daughter Eva to the “attache,” a gay young man in the foreign-service who owes Puntila a lot of money. Puntila, for somewhat obscure reasons, is encouraging the romance in order to gain favor with people in the government. Chain-smoking Eva is a pampered young woman schooled in Switzerland who is trying to rationalize her engagement to a homosexual, but is having some doubts. Matti and she eventually hatch a plan to break the engagement by pretending to have a romantic tryst in the sauna. Minnesota readers will appreciate the sauna scenes, which incidentally feature no nudity. Now, at least, we know what goes on in such places..
The big day arrives. Early in the morning, Puntila’s four prospective brides arrive, each with a ‘ring’ on their finger made out of curtain rod loops that Puntila had given them, and the requisite ‘drink’ of aquavit. In a sober rage, Puntila orders the foolish women home and they trudge the many miles back to their village while telling stories about the cruelty of the landlords and businessmen of Finland. One story involves the reds jailed after the working class rising there in 1918. Finland, after 600 years of Swedish rule, was from 1908 until 1917 under the control of the Czar. In 1918 the Soviets gave Finland independence, something Kerensky had not been willing to do. During the white terror of 1918 during and after the Finnish civil war, won by the Whites under Mannerheim, between 8,400 and 14,600 red guards were executed out of hand. Anyone missed by the terror was blacklisted from work, kicked out of school or otherwise brutalized. This is the historic background for the seemingly innocuous joking atmosphere of the play itself.
The big day continues as the now drunk Puntila examines his prospective son-in-law, who misses the point of an obvious joke. Puntila realizes the attaché is a waste of a forest and an idiot, not to mention a bad match for his daughter. (He would have had to sell a forest as, I think, a dowry.) Puntila chases the attaché off the property, along with his senior sponsor, another government minister.
Here starts the central scene of the play. The remaining parties gather along a long table reminiscent of the last supper, with the Rabelasian Puntila in the Christ position. He suggests to his daughter that she should really marry Matti. A priest is appalled. Eva, cigarette-in-hand and tipsy, however agrees. Matti then attempts the ‘education’ of Eva, showing her how she would live as the wife of a chauffeur. Her hands would be reddened by work. They would eat herring 5-7 times a week – the main staple. There would be no money for anything. Cigarettes would be too expensive. He’d be woken at night and have to go to work, no matter what. There would be little romance for Eva, as the exhausted chauffeur would just need his boots removed and herring on the table. Eva reluctantly agrees that perhaps that type of life would not be so enjoyable. And so Brecht undermines one of the key myths of bourgeois society – that there are no barriers between classes, and that ‘love’ conquers all.
The next morning the hung-over and sober Puntila returns, fires a worker that might have had ‘red’ sympathies (it is unclear the offense) and then pledges to destroy all the booze in the house. Booze, after all, is the liquor of democracy, it seems. The servants bring out bottle after bottle of aqua-vit to be broken, and Puntila … starts drinking again. He creates a hysterical and dangerous scene upon a pile of tables and chairs over his love of the Finish landscape. The traditional bourgeois ending of the play, of course, would have been for Puntila to find his inner 'human,' and then Matti could freely marry Eva - perhaps getting a sawmill in the bargain, and everyone living happily ever after. Instead Matti, now thoroughly sickened, leaves the estate the next morning, never to return.
The play is full of singing, as Brecht plays tend to be, and ends with a socialist hymn to a time when there will be no masters and slaves, only men. The alternation of the semi-sympathetic ‘drunk’ Puntilla with the sober/cruel Puntilla shows that bourgeois society has two faces – and that even if one is in force, the other is not far away. A dry drunk is the most dangerous of men!
The Culture Vulture
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Forum on Economy
"Global Capitalism and the Next Great Depression."
The Campaign for a Working Democracy is hosting a discussion of the present economic meltdown on Wall Street and extending into world markets, and also how it is impacting many communities. Jeff Miller will be speaking at 7:30 P.M. at Mayday Books on Friday, April 11.
The Campaign for a Working Democracy is hosting a discussion of the present economic meltdown on Wall Street and extending into world markets, and also how it is impacting many communities. Jeff Miller will be speaking at 7:30 P.M. at Mayday Books on Friday, April 11.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
The Hitman Cometh Again
Book Review: “The Secret History of the American Empire”, by John Perkins, 2007. “Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.”
This is the sequel to John Perkins’ book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” The books could have probably been combined, as they cover the same territory, although “Secret History” is mostly concerned with a later time in Perkins’ life.
If you haven’t read Perkins yet, he worked in the 70-80s for ‘consulting’ companies that planned dependencies in poor and developing nations, and even in oil-rich ones. They did this by advocating massive building and agricultural projects that would create debt to U.S banks and agencies like the World Bank. The construction projects used huge construction firms from the U.S. like Bechtel, and guaranteed ongoing needs for U.S. products during and after the projects completion. In the process, privatization was demanded as part of this ‘modernization,’ part of the “Structural Adjustment Program” used by the IMF.
In preparation for each project, Perkins created bogus ‘economic’ projections to justify the projects (as he says, econometrics can be used to justify almost anything), while others engaged in bribery to gain support for the projects from local government and business officials. The upshot was and is an ongoing dependency on U.S. imperialism, and a corrupt local comprador bourgeoisie – what Perkins calls the “corporatocracy.” The projects were always couched as if they would help the ordinary working person in the country at issue, but these were, of course, the people who actually lost the most. Iraq could be seen as an example of the ECM plan, but through a 'disaster' – benefiting almost exclusively U.S. corporations with contracts, tax monies and higher oil prices. “Disaster capitalism,” as this version has been called, was also brought in after the ‘opportunity’ of the Asian Tsunami, according to Perkins.
Perkins called this being an economic ‘hit’ man – an EHM. The partner to the economic hit man is a ‘jackal’ – essentially the person brought in when the initial bribery and bogus economic projections don’t work. The ‘jackal’ is the person who tells the head of the country that they can cooperate and accept bribes, or … die. That usually gets their attention. Perkins, from personal information, suggests this was done to a former president of Ecuador, who became a lackey for the World Bank and the IMF after a jackal visit.
Perkins books are couched in the terms of a ‘mea culpa.’ While an EHM, he enjoyed high salaries, luxurious accommodations, trips to exotic locales, sexual favors and the respect of powerful people. He got to order about officers from local governments, as he illustrates here in a story about Egypt. He, with only a lowly BS in economics! Now he is an activist with several grass roots organizations dedicated to helping Amazonian and Ecuadorian native communities fight the oil companies. He started out as a Peace Corps volunteer in this same area, and credits that experience, as well as his working-class background, with being able to see through the EHMs.
Here are some nuggets from this book.
From personal reports by soldiers involved, the U.S. has special armed forces in Colombia training Colombian troops for intervention in Venezuela, under the cover of a ‘drug’ war. Mercenaries are also being trained by the U.S. in Guyana, on the other side of Venezuela. As if in confirmation, only a month ago, Colombian troops crossed the border into Venezuela to kill FARC guerillas that they claimed were drug dealers. Venezuela and Ecuador moved troops to their borders in response to this incursion. As Perkins points out, drug dealing and drug running have been common tactics of the CIA and their Latin American cronies themselves for many years. Colombia is the only nation in Latin America right now that allows this kind of massive U.S. military presence. Colombia is the 4th largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. The implication is the government will use Colombia like they used Costa Rica and other countries' territory against Nicaragua in the 80s. The name ‘drug’ war is clearly a misnomer.
Perkins’ coverage of Latin America hails the recent election of indigenous and progressive leaders after years of dictators and U.S. puppets. His own experience in Bolivia is part of the story. He was actually offered the presidency of the largest power company in Bolivia, Bolivia Power, by its U.S. owner, Leucadia National. They treated him like royalty, he toured the country, he saw the rivers and dams and especially the key “Zongo River” project, staying in that Zongo valley in an exquisite cabin. They told him he would be the second most powerful person in Bolivia after the president, because he would control the country’s electricity. Perkins told Leucadia he would take the job only if he could turn Boliva Power into a model of environmental and popular economics, aiding the poorest Bolivians, and not flooding valleys and towns. Leucadia never called him back.
Perkins details the famous fight waged by the people of Bolivia against the water companies. Part of the World Bank plan is to privatize any commodity possible, including water. The Cochabamba water system was privatized by Bechtel. After Bechtel’s front group bought the public water system, water rates skyrocketed. The population of Cochabamba revolted in 2000 and shut down the city. Bechtel demanded ‘protection’ from the federal government and the president, Hugo Banzer, rushed in troops to protect privatized water. Dozens of indigenous people were injured and one died. Banzer then declared martial law, and, in a corner, eventually voided the contract. Bechtel did not give up but sued Bolivia in a world court, claiming profits from their ‘expropriated’ investment. These events later lead to the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Now the water system in Cochabamba is run in the interests of all people , as a public service.
Assassination is a well-used tactic of the U.S. empire.
Perkins, and most Latin Americans, consider that the plane crashes of the president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, and the president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, were assassinations carried out by the U.S. Only a month after standing up to the U.S. government and Houston oil interests, Roldos plane went down in 1981. Two months later in 1981,Torrijos plane also crashed, after he refused to make a deal on the Panama Canal with Washington. There is quite a long list of left-wing and 'controversial' people who go down in small airplanes.
Paul Wellstone’s plane also ‘inexplicably’ crashed after he became one of the most liberal members of the highly-contested Senate right here in Minnesota. Reportedly, FBI agents showed up at the crash site near Virginia within an hour of the crash … after traveling from Minneapolis. Impossible without foreknowledge, as anyone who has driven that road knows. It takes almost three hours to drive from the Cities to Eveleth, near where the crash happened. Cellular communications in the area were disrupted just before the crash. It is clear the government has powerful signal technology to turn airplane motors off or confuse navigation systems, and it's use is not limited to abroad.
Other targets of the empires’s jackals? Besides Arbenz of Guatemala, Allende of Chile, Mossedegh of Iran, Lumumba of the Congo and other well-known examples, Perkins mentions that Saddam Hussein was on a CIA hit squad that tried and failed to kill a former nationalist head of the Iraqi government, Abdul Qasim, after Qasim threatened to nationalize Iraqi oil. Later, U.S. and British troops executed Qasim on television. 5,000 more Iraqi people accused of ‘communism’ were also rounded up and executed. Hussein himself met the same fate years later, after acting as a U.S. agent and buyer of U.S. armaments and gas in the war against Iran. Similar to Manuel Norriega, who was used as a CIA agent against Torrijos, then went to jail after an illegal invasion of his country when he partially turned against the U.S.
Because of Perkins high profile, other EHMs and jackals give him information. A friend of his told him how the U.S., through South Africa, tried to assassinate and overthrow the president of the Seychelles, France Albert-Rene, for opposing the U.S. presence on Diego Garcia, and the expulsion of thousands of residents of that island to make way for a massive U.S. airbase. They failed, in a bloody shoot-out at the Seychelles airport, also in 1981. But this had the desired effect on Mr. Albert-Rene, nevertheless, who became much more circumspect about his opposition to Diego Garcia.
As Perkins makes clear, control of oil is a large part of the world pattern pursued by the U.S. He is most proud of his role in pegging oil to the dollar, which has propped up Wall Street and U.S. imperialism since the dollar went off the gold standard in the early 70s. He calls it the 'oil standard.'
Perkins sees Africa as the dead canary in this world coalmine. Conditions in Africa, in spite of the propaganda about improvments, are worse now after decades of foreign 'aid' and World Bank programs. At present, Africa is being looted openly by any corporate power that is able to do so. War, famine, environmental degradation and sickness haunt the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan and any country that has oil, diamonds, ores and cheap labor - Sudan/Darfur have much oil and the Congo metal ingredients vitally necessary for cell phones and computers. Perkins points out that many NGO’s are actually working for the corporatocracy as part of either cultural imperialism or direct aid. He cites an example of inexperienced Malian Peace Corps volunteers sent to Mali to ‘teach’ Malians how to farm. Their real purpose was to get Malians to use pesticides, oil-based fertilizers, GMO seed and World Bank money – i.e. increase Mali's dependence on Western corporations. In the process, they put Malian farmers into debt, depleted the soil and ruined local seed varieties.
Perkins sees the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. corporatocracy as a human and environmental disaster threatening the world, and he claims the only way to change it is to ‘change’ corporations. Perkins cites the work of explicitly pro-capitalist organizations like RainForest Action Network (RAN), who have run what he calls successful campaigns against Shell Oil, Home Depot, Mitsubishi, Kinkos, Boise Cascade, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, McDonalds and Goldman Sachs to mitigate environmental damage to the worlds’ forests. Perkins calls it a “new capitalism” - to make capitalists stop being imperialistic and become democratic. Others call this capitalism 3.0... His point is, they are human too, and will move beyond short term profit. Perkins cites MoveOn and Amnesty International’s shareholder activism as the routes to changing corporations. He also mentions Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project, which he says have influenced Coca Cola, 7 Eleven, Shoneys, Coors and others against discrimination.
This is where Perkins goes off the rails. The issues of corporate America are so multifarious that, let’s say a pledge not to cut ‘old growth’ or endangered timber by Home Depot is, A, difficult to monitor, and B, incomplete. Many companies will sign “green” or ‘progressive’ documents, but will not actually act on them. He gives no evidence that RAN is actually able to monitor whether these companies are keeping their promises… which in the past, have not been worth the paper they are printed on. An example is Coca Cola. On the exact same page in Perkins' book, Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project lauds Coke for being against discrimination presumably… and in the next paragraph, TIAA Cref drops Coca-Cola from their socially responsible mutual funds because Coke was killing and intimidating union organizers in Columbia. And I know that "Coke" is depleting the water table in parched Georgia to produce their useless bottled waters. Each single-issue organization tries to get some paper pledge to action in one area, while the corporation oozes out in another direction, still acting like the imperialist consortium it is. Viewed as a whole, corporate America runs rampant, and has no united national or even international opposition that can call them on ALL their shots.
Recent articles in the world press have shown that governments and even traditional corporate boards are being superseded by 6,000 trans-international financiers, mostly older white males, acting as an ‘uber’ ruling class for the whole world. These people are like the hyper imperialist ‘hedge’ funds of the corporatocracy, the ultimate jet-setting Davos star chamber. After painting a picture of a bloody years-long struggle for domination by the worlds’ corporations, Perkins expects us to think the people who hire ‘jackals’ will calmly lie down with the lambs after some meek pressure. Never does he mention as desirable unions, or strikes, or demonstrations, or land occupations, or Peoples Partys, or even revolutions - any of the really powerful mechanisms the working class has to influence the world. He relegates them to secondary status, while the massive force of negative advertising, consumer boycotts, shareholder resolutions, on-line petitions, board room elections and street theatre work their magic. His one saving grace is that he supports communities organizing for their own needs.
Perkins is to be admired for being part of the solution, but his solutions are not sufficient. I wish they were. Attempts to give corporate capitalism a human face will fail, if only because corporations are not human – they are legally and solely profit centers dedicated to growth and not much else. Certainly they can be mitigated. But there is no evidence that the rapacious practices of the corporatocracy have changed sufficiently to warrant the optimism that half-measures will succeed. That is why socialism still is on the agenda for the world.
...And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 3/23/08
This is the sequel to John Perkins’ book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” The books could have probably been combined, as they cover the same territory, although “Secret History” is mostly concerned with a later time in Perkins’ life.
In preparation for each project, Perkins created bogus ‘economic’ projections to justify the projects (as he says, econometrics can be used to justify almost anything), while others engaged in bribery to gain support for the projects from local government and business officials. The upshot was and is an ongoing dependency on U.S. imperialism, and a corrupt local comprador bourgeoisie – what Perkins calls the “corporatocracy.” The projects were always couched as if they would help the ordinary working person in the country at issue, but these were, of course, the people who actually lost the most. Iraq could be seen as an example of the ECM plan, but through a 'disaster' – benefiting almost exclusively U.S. corporations with contracts, tax monies and higher oil prices. “Disaster capitalism,” as this version has been called, was also brought in after the ‘opportunity’ of the Asian Tsunami, according to Perkins.
Perkins called this being an economic ‘hit’ man – an EHM. The partner to the economic hit man is a ‘jackal’ – essentially the person brought in when the initial bribery and bogus economic projections don’t work. The ‘jackal’ is the person who tells the head of the country that they can cooperate and accept bribes, or … die. That usually gets their attention. Perkins, from personal information, suggests this was done to a former president of Ecuador, who became a lackey for the World Bank and the IMF after a jackal visit.
Perkins books are couched in the terms of a ‘mea culpa.’ While an EHM, he enjoyed high salaries, luxurious accommodations, trips to exotic locales, sexual favors and the respect of powerful people. He got to order about officers from local governments, as he illustrates here in a story about Egypt. He, with only a lowly BS in economics! Now he is an activist with several grass roots organizations dedicated to helping Amazonian and Ecuadorian native communities fight the oil companies. He started out as a Peace Corps volunteer in this same area, and credits that experience, as well as his working-class background, with being able to see through the EHMs.
Here are some nuggets from this book.
From personal reports by soldiers involved, the U.S. has special armed forces in Colombia training Colombian troops for intervention in Venezuela, under the cover of a ‘drug’ war. Mercenaries are also being trained by the U.S. in Guyana, on the other side of Venezuela. As if in confirmation, only a month ago, Colombian troops crossed the border into Venezuela to kill FARC guerillas that they claimed were drug dealers. Venezuela and Ecuador moved troops to their borders in response to this incursion. As Perkins points out, drug dealing and drug running have been common tactics of the CIA and their Latin American cronies themselves for many years. Colombia is the only nation in Latin America right now that allows this kind of massive U.S. military presence. Colombia is the 4th largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. The implication is the government will use Colombia like they used Costa Rica and other countries' territory against Nicaragua in the 80s. The name ‘drug’ war is clearly a misnomer.
Perkins’ coverage of Latin America hails the recent election of indigenous and progressive leaders after years of dictators and U.S. puppets. His own experience in Bolivia is part of the story. He was actually offered the presidency of the largest power company in Bolivia, Bolivia Power, by its U.S. owner, Leucadia National. They treated him like royalty, he toured the country, he saw the rivers and dams and especially the key “Zongo River” project, staying in that Zongo valley in an exquisite cabin. They told him he would be the second most powerful person in Bolivia after the president, because he would control the country’s electricity. Perkins told Leucadia he would take the job only if he could turn Boliva Power into a model of environmental and popular economics, aiding the poorest Bolivians, and not flooding valleys and towns. Leucadia never called him back.
Perkins details the famous fight waged by the people of Bolivia against the water companies. Part of the World Bank plan is to privatize any commodity possible, including water. The Cochabamba water system was privatized by Bechtel. After Bechtel’s front group bought the public water system, water rates skyrocketed. The population of Cochabamba revolted in 2000 and shut down the city. Bechtel demanded ‘protection’ from the federal government and the president, Hugo Banzer, rushed in troops to protect privatized water. Dozens of indigenous people were injured and one died. Banzer then declared martial law, and, in a corner, eventually voided the contract. Bechtel did not give up but sued Bolivia in a world court, claiming profits from their ‘expropriated’ investment. These events later lead to the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Now the water system in Cochabamba is run in the interests of all people , as a public service.
Assassination is a well-used tactic of the U.S. empire.
Perkins, and most Latin Americans, consider that the plane crashes of the president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, and the president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, were assassinations carried out by the U.S. Only a month after standing up to the U.S. government and Houston oil interests, Roldos plane went down in 1981. Two months later in 1981,Torrijos plane also crashed, after he refused to make a deal on the Panama Canal with Washington. There is quite a long list of left-wing and 'controversial' people who go down in small airplanes.
Paul Wellstone’s plane also ‘inexplicably’ crashed after he became one of the most liberal members of the highly-contested Senate right here in Minnesota. Reportedly, FBI agents showed up at the crash site near Virginia within an hour of the crash … after traveling from Minneapolis. Impossible without foreknowledge, as anyone who has driven that road knows. It takes almost three hours to drive from the Cities to Eveleth, near where the crash happened. Cellular communications in the area were disrupted just before the crash. It is clear the government has powerful signal technology to turn airplane motors off or confuse navigation systems, and it's use is not limited to abroad.
Other targets of the empires’s jackals? Besides Arbenz of Guatemala, Allende of Chile, Mossedegh of Iran, Lumumba of the Congo and other well-known examples, Perkins mentions that Saddam Hussein was on a CIA hit squad that tried and failed to kill a former nationalist head of the Iraqi government, Abdul Qasim, after Qasim threatened to nationalize Iraqi oil. Later, U.S. and British troops executed Qasim on television. 5,000 more Iraqi people accused of ‘communism’ were also rounded up and executed. Hussein himself met the same fate years later, after acting as a U.S. agent and buyer of U.S. armaments and gas in the war against Iran. Similar to Manuel Norriega, who was used as a CIA agent against Torrijos, then went to jail after an illegal invasion of his country when he partially turned against the U.S.
Because of Perkins high profile, other EHMs and jackals give him information. A friend of his told him how the U.S., through South Africa, tried to assassinate and overthrow the president of the Seychelles, France Albert-Rene, for opposing the U.S. presence on Diego Garcia, and the expulsion of thousands of residents of that island to make way for a massive U.S. airbase. They failed, in a bloody shoot-out at the Seychelles airport, also in 1981. But this had the desired effect on Mr. Albert-Rene, nevertheless, who became much more circumspect about his opposition to Diego Garcia.
As Perkins makes clear, control of oil is a large part of the world pattern pursued by the U.S. He is most proud of his role in pegging oil to the dollar, which has propped up Wall Street and U.S. imperialism since the dollar went off the gold standard in the early 70s. He calls it the 'oil standard.'
Perkins sees Africa as the dead canary in this world coalmine. Conditions in Africa, in spite of the propaganda about improvments, are worse now after decades of foreign 'aid' and World Bank programs. At present, Africa is being looted openly by any corporate power that is able to do so. War, famine, environmental degradation and sickness haunt the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan and any country that has oil, diamonds, ores and cheap labor - Sudan/Darfur have much oil and the Congo metal ingredients vitally necessary for cell phones and computers. Perkins points out that many NGO’s are actually working for the corporatocracy as part of either cultural imperialism or direct aid. He cites an example of inexperienced Malian Peace Corps volunteers sent to Mali to ‘teach’ Malians how to farm. Their real purpose was to get Malians to use pesticides, oil-based fertilizers, GMO seed and World Bank money – i.e. increase Mali's dependence on Western corporations. In the process, they put Malian farmers into debt, depleted the soil and ruined local seed varieties.
Perkins sees the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. corporatocracy as a human and environmental disaster threatening the world, and he claims the only way to change it is to ‘change’ corporations. Perkins cites the work of explicitly pro-capitalist organizations like RainForest Action Network (RAN), who have run what he calls successful campaigns against Shell Oil, Home Depot, Mitsubishi, Kinkos, Boise Cascade, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, McDonalds and Goldman Sachs to mitigate environmental damage to the worlds’ forests. Perkins calls it a “new capitalism” - to make capitalists stop being imperialistic and become democratic. Others call this capitalism 3.0... His point is, they are human too, and will move beyond short term profit. Perkins cites MoveOn and Amnesty International’s shareholder activism as the routes to changing corporations. He also mentions Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project, which he says have influenced Coca Cola, 7 Eleven, Shoneys, Coors and others against discrimination.
This is where Perkins goes off the rails. The issues of corporate America are so multifarious that, let’s say a pledge not to cut ‘old growth’ or endangered timber by Home Depot is, A, difficult to monitor, and B, incomplete. Many companies will sign “green” or ‘progressive’ documents, but will not actually act on them. He gives no evidence that RAN is actually able to monitor whether these companies are keeping their promises… which in the past, have not been worth the paper they are printed on. An example is Coca Cola. On the exact same page in Perkins' book, Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project lauds Coke for being against discrimination presumably… and in the next paragraph, TIAA Cref drops Coca-Cola from their socially responsible mutual funds because Coke was killing and intimidating union organizers in Columbia. And I know that "Coke" is depleting the water table in parched Georgia to produce their useless bottled waters. Each single-issue organization tries to get some paper pledge to action in one area, while the corporation oozes out in another direction, still acting like the imperialist consortium it is. Viewed as a whole, corporate America runs rampant, and has no united national or even international opposition that can call them on ALL their shots.
Recent articles in the world press have shown that governments and even traditional corporate boards are being superseded by 6,000 trans-international financiers, mostly older white males, acting as an ‘uber’ ruling class for the whole world. These people are like the hyper imperialist ‘hedge’ funds of the corporatocracy, the ultimate jet-setting Davos star chamber. After painting a picture of a bloody years-long struggle for domination by the worlds’ corporations, Perkins expects us to think the people who hire ‘jackals’ will calmly lie down with the lambs after some meek pressure. Never does he mention as desirable unions, or strikes, or demonstrations, or land occupations, or Peoples Partys, or even revolutions - any of the really powerful mechanisms the working class has to influence the world. He relegates them to secondary status, while the massive force of negative advertising, consumer boycotts, shareholder resolutions, on-line petitions, board room elections and street theatre work their magic. His one saving grace is that he supports communities organizing for their own needs.
Perkins is to be admired for being part of the solution, but his solutions are not sufficient. I wish they were. Attempts to give corporate capitalism a human face will fail, if only because corporations are not human – they are legally and solely profit centers dedicated to growth and not much else. Certainly they can be mitigated. But there is no evidence that the rapacious practices of the corporatocracy have changed sufficiently to warrant the optimism that half-measures will succeed. That is why socialism still is on the agenda for the world.
...And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 3/23/08
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Dust Bowl Blues
“The Worst Hard Time”, by Timothy Egan, 2006
There’s a thunder of dust coming towards you. It is crawling down the walls of your house. Your wet sheets have no effect. It has shorted out the battery in your car. Your kids are coughing it out of their lungs. Drifts of dust are covering the windows. The crops are dead and buried. The cattle cannot find a blade of grass. The chickens are running for shelter. And it happens many days in the year, year after year, from the beginning to the end of the 30s, until you stay or you leave. Northern Texas panhandle, Oklahoma panhandle, southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, southern Nebraska. This is the dust bowl. Your land. It should have never grown crops, but it did, wheat, for a few years in the early 30s. An environmental tragedy. A human tragedy. A tragedy created by government, greed and ignorance.
Timothy Egan, a reporter for the New York Times, got out of town and covered a story that only touched old New York City a few times. The dust from the West actually darkened the skies in New York and Washington D.C. in 1934 several times, enough to get the Roosevelt administration to enact some kind of policy to deal with this disaster, the darkest hole within the depression.
Egan paints a picture of the tough people who settled these plains and stayed, not the people that left. The area was originally covered by long prairie bluestem and buffalo grasses, home to nomadic Native Americans and bison. The grasses were tough enough to last through the periodic droughts, and still hold the soil down. They provided nutrients for the millions of bison, and the life of the Cherokee and Comanche who settled these lands, and even the cowboy and European cattle that came after them.
All that changed with the advent of the farmers. While other parts of the Great Plains were settled earlier, and the northern Great Plains were already being slowly depopulated, a last area of cheap land was made available, where even the most desperate farmer could find land and, rumor had it, grow crops. And they did for a few years, when the rains were plentiful, which old-timers knew was rare. To raise wheat, they had to plow up the 12 foot tall grasses with mechanical plows, and close the ranches like the XIT ranch in northern Texas. The cowboys were aghast. The native Americans were aghast. The small town boosters like editor John L McCarty, of Dalhart, Texas, and cretinous right-wing governors like William ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray of Oklahoma, and presidents like Herbert Hoover, thumped their tubs, and proclaimed the new era of plenty and crops was at hand. American would grow wheat in the desert. Wheat won out – for two years. Then the desert did.
That is when the drought came. So farmers plowed up more land to try to keep up with falling production, plowing under 80 million acres total, until hardly any of the original prairie was left. And the dust started. June 1931 the main bank in Dalhart closed its doors due to the financial depression. In January 1932 the first giant dust storm hit – a 10,000 foot cloud rolled over Amarillo from the south, then went into the panhandles and into Colorado and Kansas. And the cowboys knew what had happened. As Egan puts it, 'the soil was on the move.'
Dust storms hit from 1932 to 1939, numbering from 2 to 15 a month. They destroyed the farming economy of the southern plains. They forced 1/3rd of the “Okie” population to emigrate, as portrayed in the book, “Grapes of Wrath.” But of the 2/3rd that stayed behind, a good quantity died of lung diseases, similar to miners’ black lung. Many babies did not live much past birth. Nearly all farm animals eventually died. Nearly all trees, bushes and grasses also died, except Russian ‘tumbleweed’, which farmers tried to feed to salted their cattle. The dust bowl created a huge voting surge for Roosevelt, who started programs to pay farmers not to plant, or bought farmers off the land to allow it to grow fallow. Roosevelt hired an actual scientist, Hugh Bennett, who understood soil science, to try to reclaim the southern plains. Roosevelt even came up with an idea himself, to plant trees to break the wind. From these efforts, soil reclamation areas still exist today in rural areas as an inheritance of the dust bowl. And treeline windbreaks are as common as fence-posts.
The diehard civic boosters and some farmers thundered against Roosevelt and the ‘scientists’. The poor of the dust bowl killed grass-eating rabbits in giant roundups, or hired frauds to shoot cannons in the air to make it rain, or just took to drink. Roosevelt had made 3.2 beer legal almost immediately upon taking office. Many did not want to believe that human action had created this dark immensity, that it was the normal work of nature, and that it would soon be over. It was not, and it did not end for a long time.
The biggest dust storm happened on “Black Sunday” – April 14, 1935. It started out as a beautiful blue, quiet sun-drenched day, like few on the plains. It was, ironically, Palm Sunday, which tells you the ‘lord’ doesn’t order the events of nature to the Christian calendar. It seemed the best day of the year so far. However, in Bismark, North Dakota, temperatures plunged 30 degrees as a cold high pressure front from the Yukon barreled down into the States with a violent wind, picking up the darkest wall of dirt anyone had ever seen. Visibility was less than a 100 yards as it began. It was a cold black blizzard. When the storm hit Kansas, it was 200 miles wide, like a tornado turned on its side, carrying soil from 4 states, dropping temperatures 25 degrees in a few minutes. Winds blew 65 miles per hour. Animals fled before the storm. Barbed-wire fences glowed with static electricity. Cars quit. Planes turned back. A mile of high swirling dirt darkened the day like the end of the world. It swept all the way south, then across Texas. As Woody Guthrie sang the song, based on this very storm, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya.”
Capitalism had raped the land, and the ‘deniers’ stood around claiming it was no one’s fault but “Gods,’ and that the ‘guvmint’ should stay out of it and let business take care of ‘itself.’ Sound familiar? The dust bowl is no more than a forerunner to the events already being triggered by unchecked global climate change and peaking oil, brought on by uncontrolled and inveterate capitalist growth. There will be our own “dust bowls,’ but writ large. And the same capitalist boobs and their political coat holders hold sway… but perhaps not for long.
--Red Frog, 3/11/08
And I bought it at May Day Books!
There’s a thunder of dust coming towards you. It is crawling down the walls of your house. Your wet sheets have no effect. It has shorted out the battery in your car. Your kids are coughing it out of their lungs. Drifts of dust are covering the windows. The crops are dead and buried. The cattle cannot find a blade of grass. The chickens are running for shelter. And it happens many days in the year, year after year, from the beginning to the end of the 30s, until you stay or you leave. Northern Texas panhandle, Oklahoma panhandle, southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, southern Nebraska. This is the dust bowl. Your land. It should have never grown crops, but it did, wheat, for a few years in the early 30s. An environmental tragedy. A human tragedy. A tragedy created by government, greed and ignorance.
Egan paints a picture of the tough people who settled these plains and stayed, not the people that left. The area was originally covered by long prairie bluestem and buffalo grasses, home to nomadic Native Americans and bison. The grasses were tough enough to last through the periodic droughts, and still hold the soil down. They provided nutrients for the millions of bison, and the life of the Cherokee and Comanche who settled these lands, and even the cowboy and European cattle that came after them.
All that changed with the advent of the farmers. While other parts of the Great Plains were settled earlier, and the northern Great Plains were already being slowly depopulated, a last area of cheap land was made available, where even the most desperate farmer could find land and, rumor had it, grow crops. And they did for a few years, when the rains were plentiful, which old-timers knew was rare. To raise wheat, they had to plow up the 12 foot tall grasses with mechanical plows, and close the ranches like the XIT ranch in northern Texas. The cowboys were aghast. The native Americans were aghast. The small town boosters like editor John L McCarty, of Dalhart, Texas, and cretinous right-wing governors like William ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray of Oklahoma, and presidents like Herbert Hoover, thumped their tubs, and proclaimed the new era of plenty and crops was at hand. American would grow wheat in the desert. Wheat won out – for two years. Then the desert did.
That is when the drought came. So farmers plowed up more land to try to keep up with falling production, plowing under 80 million acres total, until hardly any of the original prairie was left. And the dust started. June 1931 the main bank in Dalhart closed its doors due to the financial depression. In January 1932 the first giant dust storm hit – a 10,000 foot cloud rolled over Amarillo from the south, then went into the panhandles and into Colorado and Kansas. And the cowboys knew what had happened. As Egan puts it, 'the soil was on the move.'
Dust storms hit from 1932 to 1939, numbering from 2 to 15 a month. They destroyed the farming economy of the southern plains. They forced 1/3rd of the “Okie” population to emigrate, as portrayed in the book, “Grapes of Wrath.” But of the 2/3rd that stayed behind, a good quantity died of lung diseases, similar to miners’ black lung. Many babies did not live much past birth. Nearly all farm animals eventually died. Nearly all trees, bushes and grasses also died, except Russian ‘tumbleweed’, which farmers tried to feed to salted their cattle. The dust bowl created a huge voting surge for Roosevelt, who started programs to pay farmers not to plant, or bought farmers off the land to allow it to grow fallow. Roosevelt hired an actual scientist, Hugh Bennett, who understood soil science, to try to reclaim the southern plains. Roosevelt even came up with an idea himself, to plant trees to break the wind. From these efforts, soil reclamation areas still exist today in rural areas as an inheritance of the dust bowl. And treeline windbreaks are as common as fence-posts.
The diehard civic boosters and some farmers thundered against Roosevelt and the ‘scientists’. The poor of the dust bowl killed grass-eating rabbits in giant roundups, or hired frauds to shoot cannons in the air to make it rain, or just took to drink. Roosevelt had made 3.2 beer legal almost immediately upon taking office. Many did not want to believe that human action had created this dark immensity, that it was the normal work of nature, and that it would soon be over. It was not, and it did not end for a long time.
The biggest dust storm happened on “Black Sunday” – April 14, 1935. It started out as a beautiful blue, quiet sun-drenched day, like few on the plains. It was, ironically, Palm Sunday, which tells you the ‘lord’ doesn’t order the events of nature to the Christian calendar. It seemed the best day of the year so far. However, in Bismark, North Dakota, temperatures plunged 30 degrees as a cold high pressure front from the Yukon barreled down into the States with a violent wind, picking up the darkest wall of dirt anyone had ever seen. Visibility was less than a 100 yards as it began. It was a cold black blizzard. When the storm hit Kansas, it was 200 miles wide, like a tornado turned on its side, carrying soil from 4 states, dropping temperatures 25 degrees in a few minutes. Winds blew 65 miles per hour. Animals fled before the storm. Barbed-wire fences glowed with static electricity. Cars quit. Planes turned back. A mile of high swirling dirt darkened the day like the end of the world. It swept all the way south, then across Texas. As Woody Guthrie sang the song, based on this very storm, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya.”
Capitalism had raped the land, and the ‘deniers’ stood around claiming it was no one’s fault but “Gods,’ and that the ‘guvmint’ should stay out of it and let business take care of ‘itself.’ Sound familiar? The dust bowl is no more than a forerunner to the events already being triggered by unchecked global climate change and peaking oil, brought on by uncontrolled and inveterate capitalist growth. There will be our own “dust bowls,’ but writ large. And the same capitalist boobs and their political coat holders hold sway… but perhaps not for long.
--Red Frog, 3/11/08
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Sunday, February 24, 2008
"Oil" in the Petrostate
“Oil” by Upton Sinclair (1927) - Upon which the film “There Will Be Blood” is based.
This book is the basis of the present film, “There Will Be Blood,” nominated for an Oscar this evening. The lead actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, is also nominated for best actor. My prediction? At least Day-Lewis will win.
This book is the basis of the present film, “There Will Be Blood,” nominated for an Oscar this evening. The lead actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, is also nominated for best actor. My prediction? At least Day-Lewis will win.
The film is only loosely based on the book. The film is an anti-capitalist Brechtian horror-show about oil capitalism, riveting and obsessive. Day-Lewis plays the oil baron, Daniel Plainview, as a larger-than-life monster interested in only one thing – oil wealth. In the process, Plainview raises a baby, left by a dead oil worker, to charm investors, and perhaps give him one human thing to love. Even this fake son is rejected by Plainview at the end of the film. The film ends in a Grand Guginol murder in a private bowling alley, where rapacious capitalism and crooked religion come to terms.
Upton Sinclair has enjoyed something of a revival in these times. Eric Schlosser was inspired by Sinclair's “The Jungle” when he wrote “Fast Food Nation”, an exposure of the state of corporate food in the U.S., especially the meat industry. The recent secret Humane Society tapes of downed and sick cows being forced into the slaughterhouses only shows the problem of animal cruelty and enforcement has not changed since Sinclair wrote about it. It may even have gotten worse.
Now Sinclair’s take on oil has gotten a revival. What bourgeois writer has ever talked about oil, except perhaps as a backdrop to a human interest story, as in “Five Easy Pieces?” Try going on a website and advocate the nationalization of the oil industry – especially at this critical time. The sheep will “Baa” and “Baa” and say you cannot do that. Oil still holds the ultimate power as a product in late imperialist capitalism. Our government, our president, our economy and our wars are based on it.
The book and film both display the concrete nitty-gritty of real oil work and oil workers’ lives. People who have worked in the oil industry in East Texas say the film is quite accurate, and the film is based on Sinclair’s images. Detailed descriptions of how to drill for oil, all the equipment necessary to drill a well, and the problems encountered while doing so, run through the book. In the book, Plainview is not described as a monster. He is a quite skilled, hard-working and kind man, who has a real son, Bunny, not a fake son. Bunny accompanies him everywhere he goes and even helps discover oil, as he accidentally steps in some pooling on the ground around Paradise, California while they are quail hunting. The boy Paul, who tells them there might be oil on the family farm, is not a thieving informer as in the film, but a tough, bright boy who grows into being a Communist, and is beaten to death by fascist American thugs at the end of the book.
In the book, Plainview loves Bunny, and Bunny loves his old man. But Bunny, who is actually the central character of the book, is appalled at what the old man has to do to lease, drill and defend ‘his’ oil. Plainview buys off politicians to get roads built, gives ‘premiums’ to vendors to get equipment in place quickly, deceives land owners about what is under their property, is close friends with the police, newspapermen and heads of schools, and eventually has to join the Employers Association. The Federal Government orders an oil workers’ union contract while World War I is going on, to ensure labor peace. When the war ends, things change. The Association hires gun thugs to break the eventual strike in the oil fields that develops against de-certification. They bring in scabs, deport anyone they can, jail everyone they can, blacklist pro-union workers, and coordinate propaganda campaigns against “communism” with the local newspapers. The old man tells Bunny he can’t quit the Association or they would destroy him too, even if he is a capitalist. This subtly shows that even 'kind' people have to do awful things if the system requires it.
Paul’s brother becomes the religious leader and Prophet Eli, of the Third Revelation. In the book, Eli becomes wealthy performing fake healings and making endless bombastic radio sermons. He tells the oil workers that they don’t need a union, they only need God to take them to heaven. Even Plainview makes donations to him, in case Eli’s help is needed in some oil matter. When Paul is assassinated at the end, Eli lies and claims Paul had told him he was no longer an atheist, and so gives Paul a religious funeral.
The larger political environment of the book is around the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. Bunny’s dilemma, as he is repulsed by raw capitalism, is whether he will become a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist.’ This dialog between the two left sides goes on through most of the book. Bunny helps arrested union strikers get out of jail, rescues an old Jewish socialist from being deported, and gets Paul out of jail too. This is all due to the money his father gives him, and also due to his father’s weight in the community, Angel City, which is probably a thinly disguised version of Los Angeles. They call Bunny a ‘parlor pink’ in the yellow newspaper, the Daily Howler, but he does his best to help the working class.
Bunny is swayed to the left by Paul, who is drafted into the U.S. army and sent to Vladivostok to help the Whites during the Russian civil war. There Paul sees how the business men are using the U.S. army to gain a foothold in Russia and Siberia. He becomes a Bolshevik, along with many other American soldiers, and returns home to the oil fields. Sinclair, who ran for Congress as a Socialist in California, is quite positive about the Bolshevik Revolution throughout the book. He quite rightly shows how it was the ordinary people that had finally seized the reins of power.
Bunny lives his personal life going through college, having romances with rich women, driving his motorcars, taking foreign trips and eventually hooking up with a movie star. It is clear Sinclair, ever the materialist, sees that no matter what Bunny thinks, he is swayed by his money and class condition to live life in a certain way. Bunny is kind of able to have his radical cake and eat his bourgeois cake too. He is still an honest boy at that, and starts a left-wing sheet for students and young people with one of the members of the youth arm of the Socialist Party, Rachel. He eventually weds Rachel and starts a school for leftists on a farm, with money from his now dead father’s depleted and looted oil fortune.
Sinclair clearly sees oil as not just an American issue. Sinclair show Plainview becoming part of a syndicate getting an oil lease in Mosul, now Iraq. Some things never change. No blood for oil ... otherwise “there will be blood.”
Order it from May Day Books!
--Red Frog, 2/24/2008
Upton Sinclair has enjoyed something of a revival in these times. Eric Schlosser was inspired by Sinclair's “The Jungle” when he wrote “Fast Food Nation”, an exposure of the state of corporate food in the U.S., especially the meat industry. The recent secret Humane Society tapes of downed and sick cows being forced into the slaughterhouses only shows the problem of animal cruelty and enforcement has not changed since Sinclair wrote about it. It may even have gotten worse.
Now Sinclair’s take on oil has gotten a revival. What bourgeois writer has ever talked about oil, except perhaps as a backdrop to a human interest story, as in “Five Easy Pieces?” Try going on a website and advocate the nationalization of the oil industry – especially at this critical time. The sheep will “Baa” and “Baa” and say you cannot do that. Oil still holds the ultimate power as a product in late imperialist capitalism. Our government, our president, our economy and our wars are based on it.
The book and film both display the concrete nitty-gritty of real oil work and oil workers’ lives. People who have worked in the oil industry in East Texas say the film is quite accurate, and the film is based on Sinclair’s images. Detailed descriptions of how to drill for oil, all the equipment necessary to drill a well, and the problems encountered while doing so, run through the book. In the book, Plainview is not described as a monster. He is a quite skilled, hard-working and kind man, who has a real son, Bunny, not a fake son. Bunny accompanies him everywhere he goes and even helps discover oil, as he accidentally steps in some pooling on the ground around Paradise, California while they are quail hunting. The boy Paul, who tells them there might be oil on the family farm, is not a thieving informer as in the film, but a tough, bright boy who grows into being a Communist, and is beaten to death by fascist American thugs at the end of the book.
In the book, Plainview loves Bunny, and Bunny loves his old man. But Bunny, who is actually the central character of the book, is appalled at what the old man has to do to lease, drill and defend ‘his’ oil. Plainview buys off politicians to get roads built, gives ‘premiums’ to vendors to get equipment in place quickly, deceives land owners about what is under their property, is close friends with the police, newspapermen and heads of schools, and eventually has to join the Employers Association. The Federal Government orders an oil workers’ union contract while World War I is going on, to ensure labor peace. When the war ends, things change. The Association hires gun thugs to break the eventual strike in the oil fields that develops against de-certification. They bring in scabs, deport anyone they can, jail everyone they can, blacklist pro-union workers, and coordinate propaganda campaigns against “communism” with the local newspapers. The old man tells Bunny he can’t quit the Association or they would destroy him too, even if he is a capitalist. This subtly shows that even 'kind' people have to do awful things if the system requires it.
Paul’s brother becomes the religious leader and Prophet Eli, of the Third Revelation. In the book, Eli becomes wealthy performing fake healings and making endless bombastic radio sermons. He tells the oil workers that they don’t need a union, they only need God to take them to heaven. Even Plainview makes donations to him, in case Eli’s help is needed in some oil matter. When Paul is assassinated at the end, Eli lies and claims Paul had told him he was no longer an atheist, and so gives Paul a religious funeral.
The larger political environment of the book is around the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. Bunny’s dilemma, as he is repulsed by raw capitalism, is whether he will become a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist.’ This dialog between the two left sides goes on through most of the book. Bunny helps arrested union strikers get out of jail, rescues an old Jewish socialist from being deported, and gets Paul out of jail too. This is all due to the money his father gives him, and also due to his father’s weight in the community, Angel City, which is probably a thinly disguised version of Los Angeles. They call Bunny a ‘parlor pink’ in the yellow newspaper, the Daily Howler, but he does his best to help the working class.
Bunny is swayed to the left by Paul, who is drafted into the U.S. army and sent to Vladivostok to help the Whites during the Russian civil war. There Paul sees how the business men are using the U.S. army to gain a foothold in Russia and Siberia. He becomes a Bolshevik, along with many other American soldiers, and returns home to the oil fields. Sinclair, who ran for Congress as a Socialist in California, is quite positive about the Bolshevik Revolution throughout the book. He quite rightly shows how it was the ordinary people that had finally seized the reins of power.
Bunny lives his personal life going through college, having romances with rich women, driving his motorcars, taking foreign trips and eventually hooking up with a movie star. It is clear Sinclair, ever the materialist, sees that no matter what Bunny thinks, he is swayed by his money and class condition to live life in a certain way. Bunny is kind of able to have his radical cake and eat his bourgeois cake too. He is still an honest boy at that, and starts a left-wing sheet for students and young people with one of the members of the youth arm of the Socialist Party, Rachel. He eventually weds Rachel and starts a school for leftists on a farm, with money from his now dead father’s depleted and looted oil fortune.
Sinclair clearly sees oil as not just an American issue. Sinclair show Plainview becoming part of a syndicate getting an oil lease in Mosul, now Iraq. Some things never change. No blood for oil ... otherwise “there will be blood.”
Order it from May Day Books!
--Red Frog, 2/24/2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Open forum on the elections
The major candidates do not support immediate withdrawal from Iraq, universal single-payer healthcare or any number of goals of the progressive movement. So what is to be done? Come to a forum and discuss!
Thursday, February 7, 2008
UNIVERSITY IN CHAINS
"The University in Chains – Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" by Henry Giroux, 2007
This is one of those cases where someone reads a book so that you don’t have to. This book by a Canadian professor is heavy on the pedagogical and repetitious verbiage of academe, and low on clarity and brevity. Its laudable point is to warn about the present attack on academic freedom in the university, waged by fundamentalist Christians, corporate theorists and right-wing politicos. I assume its target audience are those academics who can tolerate jargon. He takes the title, of course, from an actual quote by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican who looks like a liberal Democrat in light of the decay of politics in the U.S.
Giroux’s thesis is that after 9/11, the government and right wing in the United States have increased their attack on the ‘traitors’ in higher education, in an attempt to control the faculty, course content, research and direction of the modern college. He separates his book into three main chapters – one on the militarization of the universities, one on the corporatization of the universities, and one on the right wing assault, lead by people like David Horowitz, against academic freedom, progressive faculty, research and course material. To boil it down, Giroux thinks the right wants the university to train, not teach, and to prevent a free range of thinking, and replace it by allegiance to corporate and military America. The plan, in essence, is to have universities be the direct handmaidens of the military, the corporation and the government, and to eliminate ANY official space for democracy, and dissident thinking or research. This thesis fits with the thesis that claims U.S. society is slowly veering into a sort of absolutist ‘corporatist’ environment, a totalitarian ‘democracy’, call it what you will.
His first chapter on the military on campus is the most vague, generally attacking national government policy. Military penetration of the University has gone far beyond the ROTC program. Giroux identifies the military as the third largest source of research grants in the U.S. university system - 350 colleges engage in it, mostly in electrical engineering, computer sciences, metallurgy and oceanography. MIT, Carnegie Mellon and the U of Texas are the most prominent. Certain ‘for-profit’ colleges have now become almost exclusive higher training centers for U.S. military personnel, including internet universities like the University of Phoenix. In the 70s, the CIA worked with hundreds of academics over a hundred campuses. That number has now increased, as the military is absolutely flush with money. Prominent members of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia faculty openly encourage students to join the secret services like the CIA. The DOD even convinced some members of the American Anthropological Association to develop some of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Theories like ‘non-linear’ warfare, which says that the military should move LATERALLY through walls and buildings, or above or under obstacles, were developed by theorists in the university setting.
Needless to say, people who work with the CIA and DOD are secretive and trade in disinformation, compared to the normal openness required by academic research. This is one of the obvious democratic contradictions ‘military’ academics faces.
Giroux’s second chapter is about the penetration of U.S. corporations into the life of the university to an unprecedented degree. Anyone working at the University of Minnesota will no doubt be aware of this. Medical companies contract immense amounts of research at the U. In fact, nationally, Big Pharma spends more on advertising than research, as much of theirs is done at public institutions like the University, on the public’s dime.
The modern theory, according to Giroux, is that the University is not a democratic space for the pursuit of truth or facts, but a corporation itself. Students are consumers, professors should tailor their teaching to the ‘market of ideas’ and the administrators are the CEO’s running this show. Worried about costs, and returns on investment, and ideas which do not fit into corporate America, only those benefiting academic ‘entrepreneurs.” Money, not truth, is the new standard. Intellectual ‘property’ is more important than intellectual competence. In fact, 60% of academics are now without tenure, partly due to the efforts of these new “CEOs,” thus ‘proletarianizing’ the faculty. Part time faculty increased 82% from 1987 to 1993. Even tenure for those now have it is no longer secure, as certain recent cases have shown.
The first step is to welcome corporate America in the front door – grants from corporations for buildings and sports pavilions; food corporations taking over food service; Barnes and Noble handling the book stores; VISA putting it’s name on “university’ credit cards, and perhaps even mandatory product placement inside classroom Powerpoint presentations!
Part of creating a new University is stopping the democratization of the University, and creating a ‘privileged’ elite, which can afford soaring tuition rates, even if they have to put themselves in peony for many years by taking on large student loans. Giroux estimates the average student debt now at $30,000, almost double just 5 years ago. This process has been obvious on the U of M campus, where tuition increases have been much higher than inflation for years. The old ‘land grant’ institution of the 60s-70s, which lead to tens of thousands of working class children going to college (and leading to much radicalism on campus) has been replaced by an ostensibly ‘elite’ school, with the poor and working class elements being sent to 2 year or out-state schools.
While people still study the liberal arts (a dangerous thing, that), the hard and useful sciences are where the emphasis of the modern University is, as the liberal arts do not translate directly into jobs, or act as very good feeder ramps for local corporations.
He gives examples of academics in the pay of outside corporations who have done studies that support the products they study, while routinely ignoring proper methodology. If the study finds problems with a product, sometimes it has been suppressed. Professors who’s research creates problems for certain products or ideas favorable to some corporation are attacked in public, and academic journals have pressure put on them not to publish their work.
Giroux points out universities may even face the great threat that blue collar workers have faced for many years – being replaced by a software program or ‘professor’ in India, teaching over the web, for a quarter of their pay. Students in the new corporate university will sit at home, alone at terminals, taking on-line tests, watching pop up videos, and will e-mail questions to instructors. Half of all universities in the U.S. now have on-line education. This way libraries, classrooms and labor can be trimmed immensely. Secondary education will become no more than mail-order ‘matchbox’ universities for many people. And of course the content of all these materials will be owned and controlled by the universities or the vendors that provide the content.
The third section concerns the right wing assault on the democratic space represented by the University. Giroux sees the best example of this in the myriad efforts of people like David Horowitz, a former leftist, now a lunatic reactionary who still sees commies and terrorists under every bed. Foundations dominated by extreme right businessmen, starting in 1973, have committed much money to black-listing professors that they see as insufficiently patriotic, or hostile to Israel, or as dissidents against the corporate state. They attempt to control curricula, staff, research and visiting professors. To do this, they work with reactionary yellow newspapers and cable channels, state institutions and conservative politicians, and corporatist ‘intellectual’ foundations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise, Manhattan, Hoover and Claremont Institutes. If it all looks somewhat like the McCarthy era, it is. Though Giroux insists this attempt is more sinister, as it is now directed, not just at ‘terrorists’ or ‘communists’ but at democracy itself. In essence, democracy has become explicitly subversive.
Giroux goes on to cite examples of attempts by Horowitz’s organizations to inhibit democracy on the University campus in recent years. Horowitz usually uses several reactionary students to either outright lie or to complain about hearing ideas they do not agree with, thus putting pressure on professors to tailor their courses to all their ‘customers’ – especially the conservative students. Instead of an exchange of ideas, normal for a democratic space, Horowitz wanst only a prescribed list of approved ideas. This can lead up to fights where conservative campus administrations and trustees, responding to massive pressure from right-wing groupings outside campus, and against the recommendations of department faculties, suspend or deny tenure to left-wing professors who have ideas and do research that does not flatter the corporate state.
An example of this left out of the book is the recent denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in Chicago, after much pressure by Alan Dershowitz and the Likud lobby in the U.S. Finkelstein's work centered on the misuse of the Holocaust in the service of a "my country, right or wrong" position toward the State of Israel. Finkelstein, after being recommended for tenure approval by his peers, was denied tenure by the school's Board on Tenure, and that decision was upheld by the president of DePaul. This decision reflects both the weakening position of the faculty and the inhibition of scholarship.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 2/6/2008
This is one of those cases where someone reads a book so that you don’t have to. This book by a Canadian professor is heavy on the pedagogical and repetitious verbiage of academe, and low on clarity and brevity. Its laudable point is to warn about the present attack on academic freedom in the university, waged by fundamentalist Christians, corporate theorists and right-wing politicos. I assume its target audience are those academics who can tolerate jargon. He takes the title, of course, from an actual quote by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican who looks like a liberal Democrat in light of the decay of politics in the U.S.
His first chapter on the military on campus is the most vague, generally attacking national government policy. Military penetration of the University has gone far beyond the ROTC program. Giroux identifies the military as the third largest source of research grants in the U.S. university system - 350 colleges engage in it, mostly in electrical engineering, computer sciences, metallurgy and oceanography. MIT, Carnegie Mellon and the U of Texas are the most prominent. Certain ‘for-profit’ colleges have now become almost exclusive higher training centers for U.S. military personnel, including internet universities like the University of Phoenix. In the 70s, the CIA worked with hundreds of academics over a hundred campuses. That number has now increased, as the military is absolutely flush with money. Prominent members of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia faculty openly encourage students to join the secret services like the CIA. The DOD even convinced some members of the American Anthropological Association to develop some of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Theories like ‘non-linear’ warfare, which says that the military should move LATERALLY through walls and buildings, or above or under obstacles, were developed by theorists in the university setting.
Needless to say, people who work with the CIA and DOD are secretive and trade in disinformation, compared to the normal openness required by academic research. This is one of the obvious democratic contradictions ‘military’ academics faces.
Giroux’s second chapter is about the penetration of U.S. corporations into the life of the university to an unprecedented degree. Anyone working at the University of Minnesota will no doubt be aware of this. Medical companies contract immense amounts of research at the U. In fact, nationally, Big Pharma spends more on advertising than research, as much of theirs is done at public institutions like the University, on the public’s dime.
The modern theory, according to Giroux, is that the University is not a democratic space for the pursuit of truth or facts, but a corporation itself. Students are consumers, professors should tailor their teaching to the ‘market of ideas’ and the administrators are the CEO’s running this show. Worried about costs, and returns on investment, and ideas which do not fit into corporate America, only those benefiting academic ‘entrepreneurs.” Money, not truth, is the new standard. Intellectual ‘property’ is more important than intellectual competence. In fact, 60% of academics are now without tenure, partly due to the efforts of these new “CEOs,” thus ‘proletarianizing’ the faculty. Part time faculty increased 82% from 1987 to 1993. Even tenure for those now have it is no longer secure, as certain recent cases have shown.
The first step is to welcome corporate America in the front door – grants from corporations for buildings and sports pavilions; food corporations taking over food service; Barnes and Noble handling the book stores; VISA putting it’s name on “university’ credit cards, and perhaps even mandatory product placement inside classroom Powerpoint presentations!
Part of creating a new University is stopping the democratization of the University, and creating a ‘privileged’ elite, which can afford soaring tuition rates, even if they have to put themselves in peony for many years by taking on large student loans. Giroux estimates the average student debt now at $30,000, almost double just 5 years ago. This process has been obvious on the U of M campus, where tuition increases have been much higher than inflation for years. The old ‘land grant’ institution of the 60s-70s, which lead to tens of thousands of working class children going to college (and leading to much radicalism on campus) has been replaced by an ostensibly ‘elite’ school, with the poor and working class elements being sent to 2 year or out-state schools.
While people still study the liberal arts (a dangerous thing, that), the hard and useful sciences are where the emphasis of the modern University is, as the liberal arts do not translate directly into jobs, or act as very good feeder ramps for local corporations.
He gives examples of academics in the pay of outside corporations who have done studies that support the products they study, while routinely ignoring proper methodology. If the study finds problems with a product, sometimes it has been suppressed. Professors who’s research creates problems for certain products or ideas favorable to some corporation are attacked in public, and academic journals have pressure put on them not to publish their work.
Giroux points out universities may even face the great threat that blue collar workers have faced for many years – being replaced by a software program or ‘professor’ in India, teaching over the web, for a quarter of their pay. Students in the new corporate university will sit at home, alone at terminals, taking on-line tests, watching pop up videos, and will e-mail questions to instructors. Half of all universities in the U.S. now have on-line education. This way libraries, classrooms and labor can be trimmed immensely. Secondary education will become no more than mail-order ‘matchbox’ universities for many people. And of course the content of all these materials will be owned and controlled by the universities or the vendors that provide the content.
The third section concerns the right wing assault on the democratic space represented by the University. Giroux sees the best example of this in the myriad efforts of people like David Horowitz, a former leftist, now a lunatic reactionary who still sees commies and terrorists under every bed. Foundations dominated by extreme right businessmen, starting in 1973, have committed much money to black-listing professors that they see as insufficiently patriotic, or hostile to Israel, or as dissidents against the corporate state. They attempt to control curricula, staff, research and visiting professors. To do this, they work with reactionary yellow newspapers and cable channels, state institutions and conservative politicians, and corporatist ‘intellectual’ foundations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise, Manhattan, Hoover and Claremont Institutes. If it all looks somewhat like the McCarthy era, it is. Though Giroux insists this attempt is more sinister, as it is now directed, not just at ‘terrorists’ or ‘communists’ but at democracy itself. In essence, democracy has become explicitly subversive.
Giroux goes on to cite examples of attempts by Horowitz’s organizations to inhibit democracy on the University campus in recent years. Horowitz usually uses several reactionary students to either outright lie or to complain about hearing ideas they do not agree with, thus putting pressure on professors to tailor their courses to all their ‘customers’ – especially the conservative students. Instead of an exchange of ideas, normal for a democratic space, Horowitz wanst only a prescribed list of approved ideas. This can lead up to fights where conservative campus administrations and trustees, responding to massive pressure from right-wing groupings outside campus, and against the recommendations of department faculties, suspend or deny tenure to left-wing professors who have ideas and do research that does not flatter the corporate state.
An example of this left out of the book is the recent denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in Chicago, after much pressure by Alan Dershowitz and the Likud lobby in the U.S. Finkelstein's work centered on the misuse of the Holocaust in the service of a "my country, right or wrong" position toward the State of Israel. Finkelstein, after being recommended for tenure approval by his peers, was denied tenure by the school's Board on Tenure, and that decision was upheld by the president of DePaul. This decision reflects both the weakening position of the faculty and the inhibition of scholarship.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 2/6/2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Book Review: "Revolution in the Air"
“Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum, published 2002
This book is about “the new communist movement.” As a former member of the ‘Trend’ here in Minneapolis, I intersected with the ‘new’ communist movement (“’N’CM”) for a time. Max Elbaum was an independent radical around the Guardian newspaper in San Francisco, and was briefly in the Guardian clubs. He and others around that paper, including the famed Irwin Silber, formed the organization “Line of March,” part of the anti ultra-left correction to the ‘N’CM, and also part of the ‘Trend.’ Elbaum highlights the period between 1968 to 1973 as the ‘N’CM’s high water mark, then traces it slow decline throughout the rest of the 70s and 80s. At least two U.S. organizations still exist from this movement, one of them the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which is actually two organizations now, and the second, the Revolutionary Communist Party ("RCP").
I am grateful for histories of this period that do not denigrate the left. Todd Gitlin’s “The Sixties” for instance is completely antagonistic to the later revolutionary developments in SDS. But I also don’t want to read a history that is only a partial history. Full disclosure here. I was in SDS, Progressive Labor Party, the “Trend,” a supporter of the Spartacist League; then a member of the Global Class War tendency, a “Marcyite” splitoff of the SWP and Worker’s World Party; then a member of Socialist Action, then of the Communist Party, and then the Labor Party. So I’ve been around the block, checking every pretender to Leninism. I’ve been, for periods of time, an anarchist, a Maoist, a Stalinist, a Trotskyist of various types and a labor activist, so, there you go. Trotsky is still my loadstone prior to 1940.
It’s not pretty. But on the other hand, as Elbaum points out, some of the most dedicated, hard-working and competent people joined the communist organizations of the time, desiring to overthrow capitalism. And what is wrong with that? They could have been pricks and gotten careers, but then they would have missed all the fun. I never got a career, but then we didn’t overthrow capitalism - yet.
Elbaum details each and every collective, third world organization, rank and file committee, group and party that took up mostly Maoism in the period after the split in SDS in 1969. They were all mentioned on the pages of The Guardian, a national paper that most everyone read sometimes. Probably because of its intense identification with the ‘N’CM, it folded when this movement collapsed in the late 80s, closing it's doors in 1992. The Guardian had started during the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in the 50s, and became more left wing in the 60s, and later specifically attached itself to this tendency in the 70s.
While Elbaum mentions Amilcar Cabral or Che or Castro or Ho Chi Minh, or every other Marxist and semi-Marxist in the world, it was Mao “ZeDong” that the “new” communist movement grouped around. Which is why I have a beef with the term “new” communist movement. While the left in the U.S. was influenced by Che “moral incentives” Guevara and Kwame “Black Book” Nkrumah and Nguyen “People’s War” Giap and even the Port Huron statement, the ideological foundation of the vast majority of the ‘new’ communist movement was Mao. And Mao wasn’t really all that new. He was trained by the Soviets, and developed his own ideological twists in the 40s, 50s and 60s in response to Stalin's bad advice. Elbaum uses the term to distinguish the ‘new’ communists from those in the CP and those in the Trotskyist organizations, who were the ‘old’ communists. I think a more correct and honest term would be the new Maoist movement or just Maoist movement. The organizations that were dedicated to Cuba, Venceremos for instance, were marginal. The Communist League, which Elbaum includes in the ‘new” movement, was anti-Mao and pro-Stalin. But they got a stipend to be called ‘new’ while PL, who used Mao against Mao himself, got called ‘old.’ This was a movement that read Stalin’s “On the National and Colonial Question” and called themselves ‘new.’ Go figure. Elbaum uses the terms “Leninist” and “Marxist-Leninist” in the same proprietary way as he uses the term ‘new communist movement,’ as if they owned these phrases. They didn’t, and still don't.
In fact, no Party in this crowd got the Cuban ‘franchise” or the Vietnamese "franchise." And even the Chinese, more interested in making a block with Nixon and the U.S., encouraged only “U.S. – China Friendship Associations" during this period. No Peking millions for some lucky Lenin! Avakian and Klonsky must have been miffed. Even Progressive Labor, when it was recognized by Peking prior to the block with the U.S., probably did not get too much in the way of aid. Signs of things to come.
But I digress.
I respect historians who specify what part of a river they are studying. To me, the wonder of the 1960s and 1970s is that it gave world-wide birth to many Marxist movements, of various stripes. Even the sclerotic Communist Party USA was able to increase its membership during this period, especially behind Angela Davis. The focal points of this book are organizations like Revolutionary Union / RCP; Worker’s Headquarters / October League; Communist League, Communist Workers Party, League of Revolutionary Struggle, DRUM, Puerto Rican Socialist Party and Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committees, all part of this “new’ communist movement. However, the world wide Marxist upsurge also gained recruits in the U.S. for the ‘old’ Trotskyist (at the time) Socialist Workers Party, the ‘old’ Schactmanite International Socialists, the ‘old’ Marcyite Worker’s World Party, the ‘old’ CP, various 'old' Trotskyist groups and even the ‘old’ PLP. So the question naturally arises, why does Elbaum only focus on part of the river? An historian interested in the whole revolutionary U.S. worker’s movement would cover all the groups. But Elbaum was hip deep in his end of the movement, and it is understandable that he might not feel qualified to write about the rest of the movement. I assume that is his motivation.
Good enough.
However, when some of his descriptions of the rest of the movement read like a clever and diplomatic “Line of March” theoretical article, I begin to wonder if this is a history, or another, more ‘objective’ polemic from that journal.
Elbaum’s tale goes something like this. There was the bureaucratic and reformist Kruschevites of the CP. The radicals of PL split from them, carrying the revolutionary banner until they got too sectarian (or perhaps hostile to the politics of the other factions in SDS). Later PL went crazy and denounced Mao for blocking with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. Well, someone had to uphold the revolutionary banner, and who better qualified than the loyal and reasonable hippie youth Maoists of RYM II (a grouping within SDS). SDS collapsed, PL became insignificant, and the only real forces that mattered from 1968-1973 were the multifarious organizations of the ‘new’ communist movement, until it too went off the rails in the late 70s, and had to be corrected by the magnificent “Trend”, which saved us all to work within the Rainbow Coalition in the 80s, ending up on the left of the Democratic Party. The end. I joke, but not much.
I’ll admit to being one of those ‘prairie’ roughnecks who, perhaps too late, began to give the various left leaders in New York and San Francisco a hard time (Elbaum is from San Francisco, headquarters of several left organizations, including Line of March.) From my own experience, our Minneapolis SDS did not collapse after the convention in 1969, unlike Elbaum’s fable. We had a large presence in 1972, during the anti-war rebellion here on the U of M campus. PL cadre, along with the SWP, organized Local AFSCME 1164 of the U of M Hospital Workers union in the period PL supposedly became irrelevant. While PL was doing this, Maoism dominated the original and tiny May Day Books located on Selby-Dale and later, Franklin Avenue.
Maoism did inspire many organizations in the U.S. across a large ethnic spectrum - black, Latino, Asian and 'white.' The Panthers, legend goes, sold the Red Book to radicals at Berkley to make money, and didn’t read it until later. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party probably had more influence from the ‘old’ Communist Party than from Mao, but was still inspired by that milieu. Black working class radicals in Detroit, working in the auto industry, read and acted on Maoist teachings, and developed a powerful strike wave in that industry, and a mass presence for a time in some of the shops. This to me is the high point of the Maoist movement’s positive influence. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Workers Congress, DRUM, ELRUM, FRUM and the whole Detroit movement are a great expression of the work Marxist cadre can do in the labor movement. This work is wonderfully described in the book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin.
From my experience, as I moved to Chicago during part of this period, the left was pretty balkanized, based on city. Perhaps the ‘N’CM had a large role in the Bay Area or Detroit. Perhaps other groups were strong in Atlanta or New York or Minneapolis? Elbaum’s selectiveness is such that he reports on splendid auto walkouts in Detroit lead by DRUM, and ignores walkouts lead by PL – Mack Avenue in 1973 for instance. Why? Because it does not fit with the fable. Or the overwhelming presence of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the national MOBE and other anti-war groups. Or the campus presence of Youth Against War and Fascism in New York. A Freedom Road comrade here in Minneapolis told me that Line of March never had comrades in factories, and claims Elbaum’s book does not identify factory work done by some forces in the ‘N’CM. I’m sure many comrades could say the same thing as to the carefully chosen nature of this history.
Elbaum points to events in Boston in 1974-75 as showing the first large failure of the RU/RCP, which was the largest of the 'N'CM's organizations at that time. RU/RCP thought the main problem in Boston was busing, not racist attacks on busing. So the RU paper attacked the busing scheme, and black activists noted that their line and the line of racist ROAR were coincidentally the same. Progressive Labor, which was supposedly dead according to the fable, lead 2,500 people waving red banners in Boston in 1975, marching against the racists in ROAR, this mostly from the New York and Boston branches of the party. PL also organized a summer project that year that brought hundreds of anti-racist students to the city to oppose racism. The main large demonstration at Boston’s Carson Beach during that summer, to ‘integrate’ the beach, and against the racist violence of ROAR, was led by forces close to the SWP, NAACP and INCAR. Where is the ‘N’CM in all this? Elbaum identifies the most correct group as the “Proletarian Unity League”, a handful of comrades in Boston. I.E. the ‘N’CM managed to have almost no presence on the progressive side of this fight, while the “old” communist movement did. But that is not in this book. As an aside to this 'feet on the ground' issue, PL, in all it's ultra-left and thuggish glory, had a split of 100 people in Boston at the time. I think this split alone had more people in it than the organized cadre in the whole Boston 'N'CM. Nothing new here.
Ideologically, Elbaum reports that the ‘new’ communist movement was initially inspired and guided by the ‘deep’ political work of the RU – principally Red Papers I, II and III, authored by Bob Avakian, a red diaper baby who went on to lead the RCP. As someone who tried to wade through those documents can tell you, they were turgid, cliched and slavishly Maoist. This was not clear, concise, factual, working class prose. This was a copy of something from China. Elbaum heralds his own group, Line of March and later ‘Rectification’ as producing the only sizeable theoretical work in the ‘N’CM. I don’t know if he’s right, but it couldn’t have been difficult to claim that title.
The second great failure Elbaum indicates was the debate over the USSR. Crucial to the ideological development of the ‘N’CM was the theory of the USSR as a capitalist and ‘social-fascist’ country. Mao’s bloc with Nixon in 1971 later lead the Chinese CP (minus victim-of- plane-crash Lin Piao) to attacking the Soviets as the ‘main enemy of the people of the world’ in 1971, a consequence of the erroneous theory of magical capitalist restoration. Somehow PL gets no credit, as Maoists, for immediately recognizing the logical consequences of this theory, and breaking with China. This same theory is opposed 6 years later by Elbaum and the developing “Trend” during a ferocious debate within the ‘N’CM over the Cuban intervention in Angola in the late 70s. The "Trend" lined up in support of the Cuban intervention. While most CP and Trotskyist forces in the world supported the Cuban intervention against South Africa and their Angolan front groups, the pro-Chinese groups opposed the Cuban intervention. The Chinese incidentally lined up with U.S. imperialism, which also opposed the Cubans and entered on the side of South Africa.
In order to hide how correct the “old” communist movement continued to be on the issue of the class character of the USSR, Elbaum uses Tariq Ali (unnamed affiliation, but a British Trotskyist at the time) to attack the semi-Trotksyist Schactmanite IS for exaggerating the capitalist nature of Russia. The funny part here is that Max Schactman developed his theory of the USSR’s ostensible capitalist nature about 20 years before Mao. Even in error, the ‘old’ communists beat the Maoists to the punch! Not in this book of course.
Elbaum rightly shows the drift of the U.S. to the right and the dispersal of the working class as the objective cause of the destruction of the ‘N’CM. He also identifies deep flaws in Maoist and Stalinist thinking and organization. This theoretical re-evaluation of the ‘N’CM occurred during the time of the “Trend” in the late 70s as the Angola situation developed. This effort was lead by groupings of local Marxists in various cities like Philadelphia (PWOC), Tucson (TR), Boston (PUL) and San Francisco (Rectification) that began to question ultra-leftism in the party-building Maoist movement, and tried to create an organizational and theoretical alternative, the "OCIC" - Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. Minneapolis also had a “Trend” group, which had a large presence at Honeywell, leading a rank and file caucus in Teamster’s Local 1145 of about 40 individuals for a time. Elbaum asserts that later forces in these Trend groupings formed the organizational basis for the left in the "Rainbow Coalition" movement in the 80s, behind Jesse Jackson.
Elbaum especially highlights the growth of the social-democratic organizations and papers, like Democratic Socialist of America ("DSA") and In These Times, and the weakening of the Maoist papers and organizations in the 80s, as a political barometer of the times. For example, Elbaum traces the trajectory of the New American Movement as it moved from engaging the Marxist left in the 70s, to later joining with DSOC to form DSA in the 80s, as indicative of the winds of 'bad' change.
Elbaum, while disappearing Trotskyism, sometimes repeats the same old slanders. In one passage, he slams the semi-Trotskyist IS as sectarians, a group he accuses of always splitting hairs, and unable to unite with anyone. (As the joke goes, if you had 2 Trotskyists in a room, you’d have 3 factions.) An astute reader of this book will notice the constant splits the ‘monolithic’ Maoists were prone to. But later in the book he includes Trotskyism as part of the left, and treats the Communist Party like something other than a ‘social fascist’ organization, which reflects his fairness. Elbaum himself seems to have ended up politically somewhere just to the left of the CP, but seems to be a person who now has a deeper understanding of the legitimacy of the various organizations across the whole left.
The most powerful part of reading this book, no matter what tendency you are in, is that it chronicles the times and events that we all lived in, and tried to react to politically. Whether it is the postal workers strike, the gas ‘crisis’, the Detroit walkouts, the Boston busing crisis, the Angola war, the Baake decision, the Air Traffic Controllers strike, the wars in Central America, or the election of the insurgent Harold Washington in Chicago, this makes you realize the tumultuous history we have lived through in such ostensibly ‘quiet times.’
And these cadres and former cadres – in whatever organization, from whatever party, who still struggle against capitalism in and out of the labor movement - should be given credit. Whether it is the activists in town from Freedom Road, which came out of the former SDS/ RYMII/ Maoist movement, or Socialist Appeal, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Action, which are part of the world Trotskyist movement, or the CP and SWP, which are still recruiting, or the TDU / Labor Notes groupings, influenced by IS; or those independent Marxists still lying in the organizational weeds – whatever the background, they are part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul workers movement. Quite clearly, we have all been in this together – our similarities are much greater than our differences. No history should pretend we don’t exist, or if it notices our existence, then disappear it. Read this book, but mind the gaps.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 1/13/2008
This book is about “the new communist movement.” As a former member of the ‘Trend’ here in Minneapolis, I intersected with the ‘new’ communist movement (“’N’CM”) for a time. Max Elbaum was an independent radical around the Guardian newspaper in San Francisco, and was briefly in the Guardian clubs. He and others around that paper, including the famed Irwin Silber, formed the organization “Line of March,” part of the anti ultra-left correction to the ‘N’CM, and also part of the ‘Trend.’ Elbaum highlights the period between 1968 to 1973 as the ‘N’CM’s high water mark, then traces it slow decline throughout the rest of the 70s and 80s. At least two U.S. organizations still exist from this movement, one of them the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which is actually two organizations now, and the second, the Revolutionary Communist Party ("RCP").
It’s not pretty. But on the other hand, as Elbaum points out, some of the most dedicated, hard-working and competent people joined the communist organizations of the time, desiring to overthrow capitalism. And what is wrong with that? They could have been pricks and gotten careers, but then they would have missed all the fun. I never got a career, but then we didn’t overthrow capitalism - yet.
Elbaum details each and every collective, third world organization, rank and file committee, group and party that took up mostly Maoism in the period after the split in SDS in 1969. They were all mentioned on the pages of The Guardian, a national paper that most everyone read sometimes. Probably because of its intense identification with the ‘N’CM, it folded when this movement collapsed in the late 80s, closing it's doors in 1992. The Guardian had started during the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in the 50s, and became more left wing in the 60s, and later specifically attached itself to this tendency in the 70s.
While Elbaum mentions Amilcar Cabral or Che or Castro or Ho Chi Minh, or every other Marxist and semi-Marxist in the world, it was Mao “ZeDong” that the “new” communist movement grouped around. Which is why I have a beef with the term “new” communist movement. While the left in the U.S. was influenced by Che “moral incentives” Guevara and Kwame “Black Book” Nkrumah and Nguyen “People’s War” Giap and even the Port Huron statement, the ideological foundation of the vast majority of the ‘new’ communist movement was Mao. And Mao wasn’t really all that new. He was trained by the Soviets, and developed his own ideological twists in the 40s, 50s and 60s in response to Stalin's bad advice. Elbaum uses the term to distinguish the ‘new’ communists from those in the CP and those in the Trotskyist organizations, who were the ‘old’ communists. I think a more correct and honest term would be the new Maoist movement or just Maoist movement. The organizations that were dedicated to Cuba, Venceremos for instance, were marginal. The Communist League, which Elbaum includes in the ‘new” movement, was anti-Mao and pro-Stalin. But they got a stipend to be called ‘new’ while PL, who used Mao against Mao himself, got called ‘old.’ This was a movement that read Stalin’s “On the National and Colonial Question” and called themselves ‘new.’ Go figure. Elbaum uses the terms “Leninist” and “Marxist-Leninist” in the same proprietary way as he uses the term ‘new communist movement,’ as if they owned these phrases. They didn’t, and still don't.
In fact, no Party in this crowd got the Cuban ‘franchise” or the Vietnamese "franchise." And even the Chinese, more interested in making a block with Nixon and the U.S., encouraged only “U.S. – China Friendship Associations" during this period. No Peking millions for some lucky Lenin! Avakian and Klonsky must have been miffed. Even Progressive Labor, when it was recognized by Peking prior to the block with the U.S., probably did not get too much in the way of aid. Signs of things to come.
But I digress.
I respect historians who specify what part of a river they are studying. To me, the wonder of the 1960s and 1970s is that it gave world-wide birth to many Marxist movements, of various stripes. Even the sclerotic Communist Party USA was able to increase its membership during this period, especially behind Angela Davis. The focal points of this book are organizations like Revolutionary Union / RCP; Worker’s Headquarters / October League; Communist League, Communist Workers Party, League of Revolutionary Struggle, DRUM, Puerto Rican Socialist Party and Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committees, all part of this “new’ communist movement. However, the world wide Marxist upsurge also gained recruits in the U.S. for the ‘old’ Trotskyist (at the time) Socialist Workers Party, the ‘old’ Schactmanite International Socialists, the ‘old’ Marcyite Worker’s World Party, the ‘old’ CP, various 'old' Trotskyist groups and even the ‘old’ PLP. So the question naturally arises, why does Elbaum only focus on part of the river? An historian interested in the whole revolutionary U.S. worker’s movement would cover all the groups. But Elbaum was hip deep in his end of the movement, and it is understandable that he might not feel qualified to write about the rest of the movement. I assume that is his motivation.
Good enough.
However, when some of his descriptions of the rest of the movement read like a clever and diplomatic “Line of March” theoretical article, I begin to wonder if this is a history, or another, more ‘objective’ polemic from that journal.
Elbaum’s tale goes something like this. There was the bureaucratic and reformist Kruschevites of the CP. The radicals of PL split from them, carrying the revolutionary banner until they got too sectarian (or perhaps hostile to the politics of the other factions in SDS). Later PL went crazy and denounced Mao for blocking with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. Well, someone had to uphold the revolutionary banner, and who better qualified than the loyal and reasonable hippie youth Maoists of RYM II (a grouping within SDS). SDS collapsed, PL became insignificant, and the only real forces that mattered from 1968-1973 were the multifarious organizations of the ‘new’ communist movement, until it too went off the rails in the late 70s, and had to be corrected by the magnificent “Trend”, which saved us all to work within the Rainbow Coalition in the 80s, ending up on the left of the Democratic Party. The end. I joke, but not much.
I’ll admit to being one of those ‘prairie’ roughnecks who, perhaps too late, began to give the various left leaders in New York and San Francisco a hard time (Elbaum is from San Francisco, headquarters of several left organizations, including Line of March.) From my own experience, our Minneapolis SDS did not collapse after the convention in 1969, unlike Elbaum’s fable. We had a large presence in 1972, during the anti-war rebellion here on the U of M campus. PL cadre, along with the SWP, organized Local AFSCME 1164 of the U of M Hospital Workers union in the period PL supposedly became irrelevant. While PL was doing this, Maoism dominated the original and tiny May Day Books located on Selby-Dale and later, Franklin Avenue.
Maoism did inspire many organizations in the U.S. across a large ethnic spectrum - black, Latino, Asian and 'white.' The Panthers, legend goes, sold the Red Book to radicals at Berkley to make money, and didn’t read it until later. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party probably had more influence from the ‘old’ Communist Party than from Mao, but was still inspired by that milieu. Black working class radicals in Detroit, working in the auto industry, read and acted on Maoist teachings, and developed a powerful strike wave in that industry, and a mass presence for a time in some of the shops. This to me is the high point of the Maoist movement’s positive influence. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Workers Congress, DRUM, ELRUM, FRUM and the whole Detroit movement are a great expression of the work Marxist cadre can do in the labor movement. This work is wonderfully described in the book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin.
From my experience, as I moved to Chicago during part of this period, the left was pretty balkanized, based on city. Perhaps the ‘N’CM had a large role in the Bay Area or Detroit. Perhaps other groups were strong in Atlanta or New York or Minneapolis? Elbaum’s selectiveness is such that he reports on splendid auto walkouts in Detroit lead by DRUM, and ignores walkouts lead by PL – Mack Avenue in 1973 for instance. Why? Because it does not fit with the fable. Or the overwhelming presence of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the national MOBE and other anti-war groups. Or the campus presence of Youth Against War and Fascism in New York. A Freedom Road comrade here in Minneapolis told me that Line of March never had comrades in factories, and claims Elbaum’s book does not identify factory work done by some forces in the ‘N’CM. I’m sure many comrades could say the same thing as to the carefully chosen nature of this history.
Elbaum points to events in Boston in 1974-75 as showing the first large failure of the RU/RCP, which was the largest of the 'N'CM's organizations at that time. RU/RCP thought the main problem in Boston was busing, not racist attacks on busing. So the RU paper attacked the busing scheme, and black activists noted that their line and the line of racist ROAR were coincidentally the same. Progressive Labor, which was supposedly dead according to the fable, lead 2,500 people waving red banners in Boston in 1975, marching against the racists in ROAR, this mostly from the New York and Boston branches of the party. PL also organized a summer project that year that brought hundreds of anti-racist students to the city to oppose racism. The main large demonstration at Boston’s Carson Beach during that summer, to ‘integrate’ the beach, and against the racist violence of ROAR, was led by forces close to the SWP, NAACP and INCAR. Where is the ‘N’CM in all this? Elbaum identifies the most correct group as the “Proletarian Unity League”, a handful of comrades in Boston. I.E. the ‘N’CM managed to have almost no presence on the progressive side of this fight, while the “old” communist movement did. But that is not in this book. As an aside to this 'feet on the ground' issue, PL, in all it's ultra-left and thuggish glory, had a split of 100 people in Boston at the time. I think this split alone had more people in it than the organized cadre in the whole Boston 'N'CM. Nothing new here.
Ideologically, Elbaum reports that the ‘new’ communist movement was initially inspired and guided by the ‘deep’ political work of the RU – principally Red Papers I, II and III, authored by Bob Avakian, a red diaper baby who went on to lead the RCP. As someone who tried to wade through those documents can tell you, they were turgid, cliched and slavishly Maoist. This was not clear, concise, factual, working class prose. This was a copy of something from China. Elbaum heralds his own group, Line of March and later ‘Rectification’ as producing the only sizeable theoretical work in the ‘N’CM. I don’t know if he’s right, but it couldn’t have been difficult to claim that title.
The second great failure Elbaum indicates was the debate over the USSR. Crucial to the ideological development of the ‘N’CM was the theory of the USSR as a capitalist and ‘social-fascist’ country. Mao’s bloc with Nixon in 1971 later lead the Chinese CP (minus victim-of- plane-crash Lin Piao) to attacking the Soviets as the ‘main enemy of the people of the world’ in 1971, a consequence of the erroneous theory of magical capitalist restoration. Somehow PL gets no credit, as Maoists, for immediately recognizing the logical consequences of this theory, and breaking with China. This same theory is opposed 6 years later by Elbaum and the developing “Trend” during a ferocious debate within the ‘N’CM over the Cuban intervention in Angola in the late 70s. The "Trend" lined up in support of the Cuban intervention. While most CP and Trotskyist forces in the world supported the Cuban intervention against South Africa and their Angolan front groups, the pro-Chinese groups opposed the Cuban intervention. The Chinese incidentally lined up with U.S. imperialism, which also opposed the Cubans and entered on the side of South Africa.
In order to hide how correct the “old” communist movement continued to be on the issue of the class character of the USSR, Elbaum uses Tariq Ali (unnamed affiliation, but a British Trotskyist at the time) to attack the semi-Trotksyist Schactmanite IS for exaggerating the capitalist nature of Russia. The funny part here is that Max Schactman developed his theory of the USSR’s ostensible capitalist nature about 20 years before Mao. Even in error, the ‘old’ communists beat the Maoists to the punch! Not in this book of course.
Elbaum rightly shows the drift of the U.S. to the right and the dispersal of the working class as the objective cause of the destruction of the ‘N’CM. He also identifies deep flaws in Maoist and Stalinist thinking and organization. This theoretical re-evaluation of the ‘N’CM occurred during the time of the “Trend” in the late 70s as the Angola situation developed. This effort was lead by groupings of local Marxists in various cities like Philadelphia (PWOC), Tucson (TR), Boston (PUL) and San Francisco (Rectification) that began to question ultra-leftism in the party-building Maoist movement, and tried to create an organizational and theoretical alternative, the "OCIC" - Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. Minneapolis also had a “Trend” group, which had a large presence at Honeywell, leading a rank and file caucus in Teamster’s Local 1145 of about 40 individuals for a time. Elbaum asserts that later forces in these Trend groupings formed the organizational basis for the left in the "Rainbow Coalition" movement in the 80s, behind Jesse Jackson.
Elbaum especially highlights the growth of the social-democratic organizations and papers, like Democratic Socialist of America ("DSA") and In These Times, and the weakening of the Maoist papers and organizations in the 80s, as a political barometer of the times. For example, Elbaum traces the trajectory of the New American Movement as it moved from engaging the Marxist left in the 70s, to later joining with DSOC to form DSA in the 80s, as indicative of the winds of 'bad' change.
Elbaum, while disappearing Trotskyism, sometimes repeats the same old slanders. In one passage, he slams the semi-Trotskyist IS as sectarians, a group he accuses of always splitting hairs, and unable to unite with anyone. (As the joke goes, if you had 2 Trotskyists in a room, you’d have 3 factions.) An astute reader of this book will notice the constant splits the ‘monolithic’ Maoists were prone to. But later in the book he includes Trotskyism as part of the left, and treats the Communist Party like something other than a ‘social fascist’ organization, which reflects his fairness. Elbaum himself seems to have ended up politically somewhere just to the left of the CP, but seems to be a person who now has a deeper understanding of the legitimacy of the various organizations across the whole left.
The most powerful part of reading this book, no matter what tendency you are in, is that it chronicles the times and events that we all lived in, and tried to react to politically. Whether it is the postal workers strike, the gas ‘crisis’, the Detroit walkouts, the Boston busing crisis, the Angola war, the Baake decision, the Air Traffic Controllers strike, the wars in Central America, or the election of the insurgent Harold Washington in Chicago, this makes you realize the tumultuous history we have lived through in such ostensibly ‘quiet times.’
And these cadres and former cadres – in whatever organization, from whatever party, who still struggle against capitalism in and out of the labor movement - should be given credit. Whether it is the activists in town from Freedom Road, which came out of the former SDS/ RYMII/ Maoist movement, or Socialist Appeal, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Action, which are part of the world Trotskyist movement, or the CP and SWP, which are still recruiting, or the TDU / Labor Notes groupings, influenced by IS; or those independent Marxists still lying in the organizational weeds – whatever the background, they are part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul workers movement. Quite clearly, we have all been in this together – our similarities are much greater than our differences. No history should pretend we don’t exist, or if it notices our existence, then disappear it. Read this book, but mind the gaps.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 1/13/2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
