From the Anarchist Book Fair:

“Anarchism and its Aspirations” – by Cindy Milstein, 2010

This short book has been described as a good introduction to modern anarchism. I’ve reviewed several books in the anarchist tradition or close to it: “The Coming Insurrection,” “Non-Violence Protects the State” and “Facing Reality,” the work of CLR James (however, a council communist), and the Situationist ‘Society of the Spectacle,” (all reviewed below.) However, this book is different in that it tries to layout the politics of anarchism in 122 pages.

I expected much more. In fact I was somewhat shocked by how naïve this book seemed. Of course, there are various brands of anarchism, and not all of them can be judged by these writings. Milstein points out that anarchism is primarily an 'ethics.' And the ethic leads to the destruction of capitalism, any state and hierarchy – and this all in one time period, simultaneously. In other words, communism now. And it is to be done by free and happy people who will reach the true, the good and the beautiful. Milstein centralizes the role of ‘ethics’ in anarchism – as if anarchism was kind of a hyper-humanism or hyper-liberalism. She uses the term ‘substantive humanism’ and ‘libertarian socialism’ to describe it. The phrases “class consciousness’ and ‘class struggle’ are nowhere to be read. The working class makes no appearance. Milstein does endorse much of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, but not his view of the state. Milstein considers the state to be a separate entity from capital, representing a third force in society, not the expression of the ruling class, as Marxists understand it. However, what economic class this ‘state’ represents is unclear. She brings forth no factual basis for the existence of this ‘third force’ or economy, but her intent here is not factual or scientific analysis.

Hatred of an abstract 'state' is also popular on the libertarian right, which some say is the anarchism of small capital. And it is, of course, the main target of the Republican Party - or at least those parts of the state that don't benefit them. So the left anarchist attack on the 'state' finds echoes in the broader culture, on the right and far right. And this may explain the ease with which some youth accept anarchism.

Milstein insists that modern capitalism can exist without corporations – and indeed that is a truism. But monopoly indicates what form is really in control now – and it is not shoe-store owners. She praises anarchist attempts to build counter-institutions, and I have no problem with this. Of course, a counter-culture is not the product of anarchism alone – populism, Marxism and simple cooperation among people lead to various co-operative endeavors being constructed. You have only to look at the grain co-ops from the 30s or the food co-ops of the 1960s to see this. However, a ‘counter-culture’ was tried in the 60s and failed to overwhelm the capitalist system – because you cannot ignore the system away. Capital, as it did to the former workers’ states, will attempt to destroy or undermine anything that does not conform to it.

This leads to another thing missing from Milstein’s book – the idea of a revolution to overthrow the state. Milstein ignores the question of force, as if the capitalists will just disappear when their oil wells, car factories, steel mills and wealth are taken from them. The implication is actually that you can just ‘work around’ the state, and ignore it. She praises what could only be called ‘charity’ and self-help efforts by anarchists in this regard. Yet, as even churches understand, the scale of misery in the society cannot be ameliorated by charity alone. Much as Republicans theorize otherwise, and evidently, some anarchists too. Without Welfare/WIC, unemployment insurance or social security/Medicare, etc., the working classes in this society would be even more destitute.

Milstein’s argument against Marxism is a somewhat inaccurate one – that a ‘classless yet statist society’ is undesirable. (p. 81) Well of course it is. Because it is impossible. States do not need to exist if classes disappear. Milstein evidently does not agree that a state exists because classes exist. It is not really clear why she thinks states exist except perhaps that ‘mean people’ organize them! People do not set up a bureaucracy, system of laws protecting private property, and back them up with many armed bodies of men if there is no significant economic privilege to maintain. In a way, Milstein also disappears economics, replacing it with a hostility to ‘hierarchy’ in any form. Of course, what is actually behind her criticism is the very real experience of Stalinism and bureaucracy in the workers states, and the congealing of the Leninist party into an anti-democratic bureaucratic organization. However, anarchism is not the only political force in the world that noticed this.

Milstein believes in direct democracy (although she makes some nods to the practical necessity of electing delegates at times) but, along with the other invisibilities, never mentions elections or voting. Anarchists believe on principle in not engaging in the political arena, I suspect, and that is the reason.

Milstein is not totally sanguine about anarchism. She seems to be aware of some of its limitations – even calling the anarchist founders ‘naïve’ over their endorsement of the essential ‘goodness’ of human nature. She also says that some ‘street actions translate into nothing more than counter-cultural version of interest group lobbying…” And her take on small-group actions (perhaps the ‘black bloc’…)? “There is ultimately something slightly authoritarian in small groups taking matters into their own hands …”

What Marxists, democratic socialists and anarchists can agree on, I think, is that society should eventually be run by workplace and geographic councils. Of course, the whole issue right now is just getting there. And there's the rub.

And I bought it at the Anarchist Book Fair from Mayday Books!
Red Frog, September 25, 2011

Last Battle of the Civil War?

James-Younger Gang Attempt to Rob Northfield Bank – 1876; Reenactment in Northfield, September 11, 2011

I stopped by Northfield this weekend to check out the reenactment of the James-Younger gang's bank raid on Northfield back in 1876. The town has been putting this show on since 1948. The bank and hardware store are preserved as a historical site and museum. Dark black circles surround certain large holes in the old bricks of the hardware store, where old bullets are reputed to have struck.

The bridge to Bridge Square, near the bank.

I call it the last battle of the Civil War, although we might reflect that the civil war is still going on. Unlike old histories, such as George Huntington’s 1896 “Robber and Hero,” which does not mention the issue; or the 1972 film the “Great Northfield, Minnesota Bank Raid,” full of idiotic historical fantasies as big as the 'mountains' looming over the town, neither focuses on the strong Civil War connection.

The raiders did not come to the town because it had ‘the most money’ west of the Mississippi, although it was one of several banks targeted in southern Minnesota. To get sympathy from ex-Confederates, Cole Younger mentioned to the press that Benjamin Butler, an abolitionist union general, had money in the Northfield Bank, as did Adelbert Ames, former Reconstruction governor of Mississippi. (See Ames mentioned in the review of the ‘The State of Jones,’ below.) In doing this, he implied that this was one of the reasons they chose this bank to rob. However, Younger was wrong, as it was J.T. Ames, the brother of Adelbert Ames, who sat on the board of directors of the bank. Butler’s daughter had married Adelbert Ames, so there was indeed a family connection at the bank - a Union connection.

There is an argument as to whether Adelbert Ames was in Northfield on that day - the re-enactors say he was. Or whether one of the Ames brothers was addressed as ‘guvnuh’ by a southern voice as he crossed the bridge to the Ames mill (now owned by Malt-O-Meal), which caused Ames to glance at the riders and see pistols under their linen dusters - also claimed by the re-enactors. This alerted Ames and supposedly lead him to follow the riders back into town. However, it is no secret that Joseph Heywood, the bank teller killed by Frank James, and others in the street in Northfield shooting back, were former Union soldiers. Heywood fought at Chickasaw Bayou, Champion’s Hill and finally at Vicksburg under Sherman and Grant, after which he got sick. Anselm Manning, who killed raider Bill Stiles/Chadwell, had been a Union soldier. The Younger brothers – Cole, Bob & Jim - fought with Quantrill and the James brothers – Frank & Jesse - had ridden with Bloody Bill Anderson’s blood-thirsty guerrillas. They were fighting for the South as irregulars in the Confederate Army.

Raiders Clell Miller and Chadwell/Stiles were killed by the armed citizens of Northfield that day. Cole and Bob Younger were injured. During the manhunt, lead by Union veteran William Murphy and also organized by J.T. Ames, the Missourians fled towards Madelia, Minnesota. There Charlie Pitts was killed and the three Younger brothers shot up and captured. The three were later sentenced to Stillwater Prison, where Cole Younger started the prison newspaper. Only the James brothers escaped, though, typical of this history, there is a bit of doubt whether one or the other was in Northfield. It was admitted to by several of the band, but Cole Younger tried to deny their presence, which is something any smart 'pard' would do. Six of eight of the gang were killed or captured (though some claim there was a ninth gang member on the edge of town), and this ended the exploits of the gang. The re-enactors take great pains to point out that the James/Younger gang was no bunch of “Robin Hoods’ but were instead interested only in buying good liquor, prostitutes and high-quality horses and guns. They gave their money to no one but themselves.

The roots of this raid in the Civil War are unmistakable. The James brothers participated in the Centralia massacre, where more than a 100 unarmed Union soldiers were killed and mutilated. These Missouri bushwhackers, who were part of a movement that had also burned down Lawrence, Kansas and killed dozens in cold blood there, lived up to their name, again, even in 1876. Both Heywood and a Swedish immigrant, Gustafson, died that day. Killing unarmed tellers and conductors was the gang's habit. But the ex-Confederate raiders met the same fate at the hands of Minnesota farmers and unionists in Northfield as the Confederate Army met in the battles of Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge and Nashville, all battles where Minnesota units distinguished themselves.

Lessons? There’s only one way to deal with a slaver… and their modern equivalent, a fascist, if they ever show up again.

And I saw it in southern Minnesota!
Red Frog, September 12, 2011

Obama Wakes from his Beauty Sleep

The American Jobs Bill Speech, Thursday, September 8.

Since the Simpson-Bowles Commission released its findings in December 2010, the bi-partisan discussion among both Democrats and Republicans has been about deficits. The basic question was how much to destroy the ‘safety net’ for the working class, and how much to hand money up to the wealthy and the corporations. Like any clever bill, a few good ideas nestled next to many reactionary ideas. Of course, they all had an equal chance of passing, didn’t they? In a sense, there was a complete continuum between the Tea Party and the Democratic Party leadership about the paramount importance of deficits, going on for 9 months now. Snzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

All of a sudden, as the stock market starts falling again, and the threat of another ‘official’ recession advances (as if the real recession isn’t still going on…) Obama has suddenly woken up and realized he has to get elected. Of course, to the short-term deficit geniuses of the U.S. government, this was all unexpected! In order to be re-elected, Obama had to attempt some kind of a successful deal with the Republican Party on ‘jobs.’ Hence the September 8 speech.

This speech was given directly to the Republicans, and no one else. Yes, The Mustache – Richard Trumka - sat in the audience and thrilled once again to hear about how construction workers and teachers might be getting jobs. Or that rich people should pay their ‘fair’ share. Yes, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, also affiliated to the AFL-CIO, might hold their nose, but they were also generally enthusiastic. Yet nothing in this proposed bill hasn’t been tried before or agreed to before by some or all members of the Republican Party. Bloomberg even called it borrowing from an ‘old playbook.’ The AFL-CIO probably appreciated that the topic now was on jobs, and not the ‘deficit’ – but if you look carefully at this plan, it is also a sleight of hand – using the jobs ‘emergency’ to further the capitalist agenda. The chatter after the speech was all about how it didn’t have a chance of passing, and so was a political move by Obama to finally show he cared about jobs – again.

The real question is – what if all or some of these suggestions DO get passed into law? Because this reveals what the Democratic Party leadership is really all about. Let’s look into them in a bit of detail.

First off, Obama said, “it’s all going to be paid for.” How? The “Super-Committee”! This body of Democrats and Republicans is tasked with adding the $447B price-tag for this bill to their deliberations. If you’ve heard them talking, they thunder about not listening to ‘special interest’ groups, which presumably also means their constituents. We’ve seen this before. A member of Congress is elected, and then does what he is supposed to do by the unwritten rules of the ruling elements in the society, not what he was elected to do. Which shows every day that the bourgeois democratic system in the U.S. doesn’t work. What this means, if you read between the lines, is they will do what is best for the ‘country.’ And what is best for the country they understand is what is best for the capitalist economy. Which means, to hell with my constituents, I will cut spending like a muthafucka as I'm being told.

So how is this a stimulus if they are going to cut $447B down the road? The only difference is timing. As one friend put it, they are ‘buying time.’ It might ‘dent’ another recession just enough to get the election over with. Overall, however, there will be insufficient Keynesian impact to this bill, even if passed, but many nasty effects that will last longer.

So what are the elements?

1. The biggest part of the bill is another tax cut – 3.1%. It is a payroll tax cut for businesses and workers, the money coming from Social Security taxes. The theory is that demand will increase, and pay Social Security back. However, as with most tax cuts, they actually have very little ‘stimulative’ effect. Most people use them to pay off debts, or stick the money in the bank – as corporations have been doing for years now. Very few jobs will be created and very little will be bought. If you look at the ‘Cash for Clunkers' program and the credit for purchasing a house - both were far more direct attempts to channel money into the economy – and their effects wore off almost immediately, a quick high. What this proposal will really do is further deplete the Social Security fund, which has been robbed by bourgeois politicians for years to pay for other programs. This is another blow to Social Security. This tax cut is part of the $250B in new tax incentives, now added to the ones passed during the deficit ‘emergency.’

2. More tax breaks with shaky effects: Tax holiday for new hires for one year. Bloomberg pointed out that businesses hire people for longer than one year, so the only people that might use this are seasonal or low-end service/retail businesses. This will not create long-term decent jobs. And again, fewer taxes paid by businesses means less tax money to fund municipal/state and federal jobs. Can you say 110,000 layoffs at the Post Office? Obama also proposed a fifty percent reduction of the tax rates businesses pay on the first $5 million in payroll; and a $4,000 tax credit for employers who hire long-term unemployed workers. But do they have to keep them? No.

3. A plan, now being used by Georgia Republicans, to make unemployed workers work for free for businessmen, which Clinton initiated many years ago under the “Workfare” label. I.E. taxpayers are directly subsidizing businessmen to hire people. More corporate welfare. What will stop them from not hiring people they intended to hire and instead hire ‘free’ labor? Nothing. Perhaps the next step will be lending out prison labor from our federal lockups to needy businessmen. Oh, wait, we do that already. Will they prevent this practice or stop the fake B1 Visa program to create jobs? No. That would piss off the corporations, you see.

4. Obama again brought up the ‘free trade’ bills for South Korea, Columbia and Panama – three of our direct client states – as a way to ‘create’ jobs. This plan has been floated since 2010. Identical to the debate over NAFTA, (as chronicled in the book on Wal-Mart, “God & Walmart,” reviewed below) Obama waived the ‘vision’ of American cars being sold in South Korea. Of course, under NAFTA, the exact opposite happened, and Mexican goods appeared in American Wal-Marts. And now, of course, Chinese goods are in Mexican and American Wal-Marts. The Obama administration has already put a rider to these bills concerning ‘possible’ American job losses and ‘retraining’ – so even they know what it will lead to. The AFL-CIO sees through this scam, of course, but John Boehner clapped! So the Republicans are on board. The “Jobs Council” Obama mentioned in the speech is made up of businessmen from different industries – which is sort of like putting the foxes in charge of preparing the chickens.

5. The best parts of the bill is some amount between $105B//$125B/$175B (estimates are all over the place) for aid to states for education and spending on infrastructure, which might prevent some teacher or municipal/state worker layoffs in the near future, and hire some construction workers. This is similar to the ‘shovel ready’ part of the 2009 stimulus bill. However, again, the money is being taken out on the back end by the ‘Super-Committee’, so this is really a ‘take from Peter to pay Paul’ scheme. Again, buying time. As the Keynesians are pointing out, even in the short term, too little to make a difference - similar to the first Obama medicine.

6. Infrastructure Bank – seems to be some kind of publicly-run hedge fund that will pay interest to private parties who invest in infrastructure projects. Is this a wedge to get private investment owning 'public' property?

7. $62B (per Bloomberg) will be to extend unemployment benefits for a year. If you noticed, the deficit bill passed by the Democrats and Republicans a few months ago after Naomi Klein's “U.S. deficit ceiling emergency” (see below – the ‘Accident on the Potomac’) actually got rid of extended unemployment benefits, so Obama is now trying to slip this back in. At this point, so many people have been out of work for so long that it is unprecedented in recent labor history. And these extensions have never been needed before. However, this, again, does not create jobs or aggregate demand.

8. Another tax break for businesses to be able to write-off investments quicker. Again, nothing to do with jobs. This was also in prior bills.

9. Help with refinancing underwater homes at 4% through FNMA/FMC. Again, not directly connected to jobs, but it would put more money in people’s pockets. However, will they spend that money on new purchases? The odds are no – what gets people to spend is a real job. Obama’s prior mortgage program basically did almost nothing to stem foreclosures. Also part of this is a plan to fix up neglected foreclosed homes. However, private parties seem to be already doing this, so this could be part of another subsidy to businessmen.

10. And quite noticeably, Medicare had a big red target publicly painted on it by this ‘Democratic” President. Obama vowed that Medicare, ‘with an aging population and rising health-care costs, is spending too fast to sustain the program.” This repeats in public Obama’s private proposal in the ‘grand bargain’ with Republican Paul Ryan to cut Medicare. And who is raising health-care costs? Hmmm? Big Pharma? HMOs?

11. There was no proposal to ‘tax the rich’ or the corporations, only rhetoric. Richard Trumka, sit down at the children's table.

Right now, this is a ‘mini-stimulus’ bill that undermines Social Security and Medicare, will not result in long-term job growth and in some respects, undermines long term job growth through tax cuts and mini-NAFTAs. It continues the redistribution of wealth up the ladder through tax cuts. Even on its own terms – as a jobs stimulus – it is insufficient – and will not create enough jobs. It does not mention the elephant in the room – military spending – perhaps because the U.S. will never seriously drop military spending due to its key role in absorbing surpluses and policing the world for corporations.

This bill continues to pay bi-partisan credit to the myth that small businessmen are the ‘job creators.’ Given their failure since fall 2007 to create jobs, I’d say continuing to buy into this myth is merely throwing good money after bad. Of the 33 million corporations, partnerships and sole proprietorships in the U.S. only 200 corporations generate a 3rd of the profits and income. You do the math.

Capital in the U.S. is lurching from political paralysis to fighting the deficit to short-term stop-gaps. This bill is a last attempt to again come to terms with a situation that has been going on for 4 full years. They are betting the U.S. population will once again be satisfied with a small carrot, rather than the long stick. Their paramount purpose is to prevent any kind of mass mobilization outside the bourgeois parties – strikes, demonstrations, political activity, occupations, bombings etc. And so far, their bet that a Democratic president could control the mass movement better, in a time of economic and military failure, has been successful. Anti-war organizations like Move-On showed their real colors and shut up. The AFL-CIO is making 'noises' and tiny moves, but still ultimately buys the folderol. The 'left' of the Democratic Party has created no primary opponent to Obama. Not one single large organization has seen through the con-job, except perhaps parts of the Latino movement.

The real question is, is being afraid of Rick Perry enough to convince people that a 'soft' Rick Perry is a viable option?

Red Frog
September 10, 2011

Short Attention Span Theatre

“Politics Noir – Thirteen Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power” – Various Authors, 2011

Fiction provides a window into the ‘memes’ floating through the culture. This collection registers immense cynicism about the ‘democratic’ system in the U.S., while still not going for the jugular. American politics is shown in this collection, in the words of Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy, as ‘how political parties evolved into vote-gathering and patronage-dispensing machines without program or discipline.’ Plus blood.

This volume is another in the series of short-story modern noir (‘Native Noir’ reviewed below). Murder is the central event of most American TV, and this volume does not shy away from many, many political murders. Of course, we know ‘noir’ doesn’t always have to involve death – sometimes living while maimed or humiliated can be worse. Perhaps the most ‘noirish’ of all is when the powerful and rich get away with massive political crimes, perhaps without killing a soul. In that case, our whole brightly-colored culture hides noir day-in and day-out.

While most killings written here are shabby professional hits, the most high-profile is an assassination planned in 2008 by a female Democratic Party politician of her half-black rival for the presidency. Another features several black professionals being ‘penalized’ for falling in love with Condi Rice. Mike Davis dips back into history for a story of Dick Nixon administering fellatio to long-time director of the CIA, J Edgar Hoover, and the rampant chances for black-mail that affords. A Minnesota local, Pete Hautman, gives us a somewhat unbelievable tale of political killings in the metro-area by a small-time politician. There’s even a story of how New York hip-hop can make and ‘break’ politicians. One story actually involves no murders – just the attempted hi-jacking of a NY borough election by bogus robo-calls, fliers and illegal removal off the voter roles – shades of Florida 2000, Ohio 2004 or Election 2012. Only one gun is drawn.

Some of the stories do not directly reflect on politics – at least not in the narrow sense. One narrates the struggle of a Mexican kid learning to surf, and the problems he runs into in all-white and all-blond Palos Verdes, California. Another details the ‘happy-ending’ of a fundamentalist Muslim Iman in Pakistan being stoned to death for breaking his own Sharia laws – because of watching porn. Another portrays de-mobilized IRA soldiers taking on their former leaders, who now drive BMWs and live in mansions. And it proves that, indeed, Irish English is another language.

The series features plenty of power-hungry women who will stop at nothing to be elected or get their candidate elected. (Where does this come from?) And who’d have known politicians know so many hit-men? But when I say pulls its punches, it is because good noir should be believable. And many of these stories are humorous but overdrawn to make a point. And the point is that the political system is rotten to the core. However, you don’t really need to exaggerate much. Just look at the headlines

My dream noir story is about Dick Cheney ordering the assassination of Paul Wellstone. I think that would be very revealing – and not ‘noir’ at all. More like a documentary. Or the CIA smuggling drugs into south-central Los Angeles. Or the captivity of Bradley Manning. Or the situation in the maximum security isolation prisons of California. Or the 2000 election in Florida. Or Guantanamo/ Bagram Air Force Base/ Abu Grahib. The CIA even sent people to Libya for ‘rendition’ - how’s that for noir? Or the killings of Joe Hill, Huey Long, UAW leader Walter Reuther, the U.S. Phoenix program in Vietnam, Lumumba, Malcolm X, the Chicago Black Panthers, the Kennedys, Salvador Allende and his aide, Orlando Letelier, South African radical Steven Biko, Harold Washington and every other convenient political death.

There’s noir for you.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, September 3, 2011

Sorry! Once more on economics:

“Monopoly Capital” by Baran & Sweezy, 1966

This classic of American Marxism, written in a clear, somewhat dull style unlike the sometimes convoluted meanderings of Zizek, or the algebraic chapters of Amin, remains relevant today regarding present economic debates. It was written in the mid-sixties, when the ‘exceptional period’ of American corporate capital was in full swing. It claims to be an examination of monopoly capitalism in its highest form, similar to what Marx himself did to early British capitalism in “Capital.” This was prior to the full development of the corporation.

Like people who drive cars or live in homes and understand almost nothing of what makes them ‘tick’ – so too, Americans live in an economy in which many understand little about how it ‘ticks.’ And the result is, just as you will eventually pay a lot to some ‘professional’ to ‘fix’ your home or car, so too will you pay a lot when the ‘professionals’ of economics – monetarist or Keynesian - try their ‘fixes.’ However, unlike automobile or house repair, which can involve unneeded costs but is still a relatively straight-forward mechanical process, the economy is ‘political’ in the deepest sense; not merely a machine but more like several living organisms.

I am going to bullet-point Baran & Sweezy’s (B&S) most salient points. They quote and use the statistical work of various authors – Thorstein Veblen, Vance Packard, Kalecki, Schumpteter, etc. throughout their book:

1. The first point, and one largely accepted now by everyone but monetarists, Libertarians and Tea Party rhetoricians, is that corporations control the U.S. (and world) economy. As a result B&S think that ‘competition’ is now largely a fiction. Within those corporations, or the “oligarchy’ as the authors call it, prices are controlled informally between the giant combines. Small business, entrepreneurship and individually-owned ‘mogul’ businesses are no longer the dominant paradigm of capital, and as such, the ‘competitive’ system is no longer truly competitive.  Of course, this theory denies the reality of war and continuing economic competition between firms.

2. For me, and others I imagine, the main theoretical problem is addressed on page 72 of the Monthly Review edition, in the chapter “The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise.” The authors here make the point that monopoly capital has mostly overcome the problem of the falling rate of profit. Instead, the problem to be addressed under oligarchy is the inability to get rid of surpluses, and without getting rid of them, a resulting stagnation. Certainly, excess ‘surpluses’ explain part of the frequent financial and manufacturing bubbles / busts, the massive amount of waste in the system and even military spending. Ideologically, on the surface though, a system that has ‘too many surpluses’ seems a pleasant problem to have! Their analysis does not explain why oligarchic / monopolist manufacturing concerns needed to go to the U.S. south, to Mexico and overseas if their profit rate was adequate. A good Marxist argument has been made that capital earns super-profits by receiving ‘imperialist rent’ from the financial colonies, as Amin puts it. Nor do they explain exactly why Marx’s analysis of fixed capital has so changed. I think these two factors are actually operating side-by-side, even under ‘monopoly’ - because it is not a perfect monopoly due to its current world-wide character.

3. Back to the authors’ arguments: Surpluses under monopoly capital can then be: A, invested; B, consumed or C, wasted. Baran/Sweezy discuss the various means whereby the system attempts to get rid of its surplus – foreign investment, R&D, technological innovation, capitalist consumption, sales efforts, military spending, etc. They do not, however, dwell on the issue of 'waste' except tangentially. On the issue of why there is always ‘too much’ under monopoly capital:
“If he is a worker, the ubiquitous fact of unemployment teaches him that the supply of labor is always greater than the demand. If he is a farmer, he struggles to stay afloat in a sea of crop surpluses. If he is a businessman, his sales persistently fall short of what he could profitably produce. Always too much, never too little.”

4. Baran/Sweezy point out that under monopoly capital, sales issues come to even dominate production. They look at the car industry in the 50s and conclude that 25% of every car was needless changes for marketing purposes only. They show studies that indicate cars used more gas and contained more unneeded changes in 1956 than the 1949 model car, so the issue of ‘progress’ was actually backwards. They also estimate that a rationally-built car would cost 75% less than one made by GM. Following this, it doesn't take much to understand that the present constant software and hardware changes in phones, computers, games etc. are mostly cosmetic, generating sales - making prior products unusable, thus a big part of the whole process of planned obsolescence.

5. They note that the FIRE sector (Finance, insurance and real estate) reached 10.2% of the nation’s aggregate economy in 1960, large for its time. They call it an almost entirely parasitic sector. However, they make no case in this book for ‘financialization.’

6. Baran & Sweezy go on to talk about how the government can attempt to absorb surpluses in 3 main ways – defense, transfer payments and non-defense benefits. B&S back-up Keynes’ understanding that government spending, even deficit government spending, has a ‘multiplier’ effect that goes beyond the simple amount of money spent by the government. Government spending can make idle capacity come alive, which leads to higher private profits. Of course, this analysis hurts monetarist / libertarian theories of the dangers of deficits. However, they also point out that the oligarchy will only put up with so much 'deficit spending' - thus a Keynesian solution can never really be tried.

This logic should still apply, at least up to some point where debt service to the banks and rich, of course drags down the original stimulus. Baran & Sweezy wrote this when government deficits were small. I am not aware of any Marxist analysis of the level of corporate and government debt now, however, and whether this Keynesian point still holds. I myself do not think it holds to the enth degree.

Corporate taxes during the '50s and early '60s were high due to rises in the war years, yet corporate profits continued at the same rate. Corporations raised prices or cut benefits to workers to pay the taxes. As another foot-noted writer said, “the government simply used the corporations as tax collectors.” Another lesson about high corporate taxes.

7. B&S have a great description of the U.S. governmental system that runs a few pages, but essentially captures the hollow notion that this is an actual democracy. The Pith? The system is ‘democratic in form and plutocratic in content.’ In this context, Baran & Sweezy note that the greatest government spending increase in 1957 since before the Depression was a 66% increase in defense spending. They call this ‘the key fact of post-war American economic history.’ They contend that if that spending was taken away, the economy would have fallen back into recession or depression, as 9% of the labor force was involved in military production. And here we come to the crux of the matter. Well-meaning calls by anti-war activists and pacifists for a reduction of the military budget and a switch to civilian production is actually impossible under capitalism, as it is a key source for the absorption of surplus. But, according to B&S, a continually increasing military budget, to avoid stagnation, is not a reality either. They cite reductions in military spending in the early 60s to indicate that it cannot grow endlessly.

8. In short, B&S conclude, there is no fail-safe way to avoid stagnation over the long term. However two things do counteract the effect of overly-large surpluses, which then lead to lack of production, unemployment and empty factories, and end in stagnation. They are technological innovations and war. They track U.S. capitalist history since the 1870s, when monopoly became dominant in capitalist economics. B&S look at the economic effect of steam power, railroads and the automobile, all which lead to periods of actual growth. Then they track the obvious effect of the wars – WWI and WWII – and show the same thing. Notably, they diagnose a period before WWI – between the effects of railroad expansion ending in 1907 and war spending in 1915, which showed a period of high unemployment, low capacity utilization and stagnation. If you were to apply this logic today, you would look at the ‘computer’ revolution, which fits their definition of ‘overturning’ prior methods, and should be able to find growth based on this new technological paradigm. And of course, war is now almost a constant. But you should also be able to find the economic end of this paradigm.

9. B&S take up the black question and show that black liberation is not possible under capitalism. They raise the well-known history of prior immigrant groups – the Irish, the Italians, etc., and how they rose out of poverty and marginalization to become ‘accepted’ members of society. And yet black people – to their day, certainly, and to THIS day, have not moved beyond being at the bottom of U.S. society. In the 60s, Lyndon Johnson’s decision to back programs creating a black petit-bourgeoisie was part of a global struggle against the USSR, and was also a way to remove talented leaders from the black masses. Johnson had to prevent the development of a mass ’fifth column’ with no allegiance to capital. However, without leaving the South as sharecroppers and becoming employed in the army and later, government jobs on the municipal, state and federal level, black people would have never been able to increase their economic level. They also benefited from the automobile revolution, but that has now run its course. At present, black people are the main target of reductions in government workforces. This crucial attack may lead to a revival of the radical black movement, who’ve finally seen through the tokenism of Barack Obama.

10. B&S look at the imperial strategy of the U.S. during this period, which boiled down to ‘defending profits’ anywhere in the world. Ultimately, this resulted simply in opposing the U.S.S.R. and its surrogates, and any independent political movements in the world. While their economic scope is not international, B&S mention that all U.S. policy was driven by anti-communism after WWII ended. And that was because any encroachments by nationalists or socialists on private property had to be resisted for the corporations sake. Thus the long, bloody history of the post-war period. It should be noted that the decay and the collapse of the USSR and eastern Europe in the late 1980s (and the long-time abandonment by China of any revolutionary intentions) was not inconsequential to the ‘triumph’ of neo-liberalism domestically and across the globe. I.E., there was a ‘global class war’ – not just one inside the U.S. - and one side won, at least for now.

11. The last section deals with the quality of capitalist culture – education, housing, poverty, human relations and artistic endeavors. In ways, this is an odd section, but attempts to reflect the bourgeois economic effect on human life here in this country. B&S first take on U.S. education, pointing out that it was far inferior to Soviet education. In 1960, U.S. outlay on education was 5.5% of national income; in the USSR it was 10-15%. In third grade, the American child was supposed to be familiar with 1,500 words while the Soviet child was supposed to be familiar with 8,000 words. In fourth grade, the American child was supposed to know 2,032 words, while the Soviet child was supposed to know 10,000 words. These discontinuities continue up into the upper levels of college. Anyone who knows graduates of schools in the USSR or eastern Europe can easily acknowledge the difference. They rake “IQ” tests over the coals as merely showing the likelihood of success at U.S academics and nothing else – certainly not indicators of actual intelligence. They point out that teaching schools in the U.S. were academic jokes. This was all because, under it all, the real intent was that only a small proportion of the upper-class students were to be educated.

B&S point out that poor-people’s housing programs were done in such a way as to fail. In anticipation of the writings of James Kunstler, B&S examine the deformed suburban lifestyle based on the automobile. They jump around on their opinion of divorce, sounding sometimes like stuffy right-wingers, and sometimes not. They make the correct references to Michael Harrington’s study of poverty, Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd”, Freud and Wilhelm Reich; poke fun at sports conversations at work; seemingly knock Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee as ‘abandoning the language of art;’ (!) criticize people who collect records or books as phonies; and in one crotchety comment:
“so-called beatniks looking for emotional fulfillment through renunciation of the ‘square’ way of life with its comforts and amenities, and through the adoption instead of a way of life characterized by eccentricity, promiscuity and narcotics."

OK, well, anyway, pass the weed, professors.  These chapters are still soaked – though unknowingly - in the coming civil rights, anti-war and cultural movements that were to define the second part of the sixties. Quite clearly, the early sixties were not a period of quiescence. At one point they make the claim that the war in Vietnam could be a turning point for U.S. capital – a prescient thought. This book is required reading for those seeking more modern Marxist viewpoints than the classics.  But beware the revisions!

And I bought it in the used section at May Day Books for $4.00.

Redfrog
August 28, 2011

Free! Two Reviews for the Price of One:

“The Law of Worldwide Value,” Samir Amin, 1978/2010
And
“Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” Kevin Phillips, 2008.

Both of these books analyze capitalism from two different perspectives. Amin is a modern Marxist connected to the Monthly Review 'school,' intent on updating the Marxist analysis of value on a worldwide scale, something Marx had planned to do in the 6th volume of Capital, but died before accomplishing. Phillips has developed his own idiosyncratic brand of analysis that combines historical analogy, regulatory reformism and a cultural critique to create an independent view of events. He is not a partisan of either party, and this gives him the ability to be intellectually honest… unlike those shills of the Democratic Party we know so well.

AMIN
Amin’s book suffers a bit from being originally written in 1978, thus missing the capitalist rise in certain 2nd and 3rd world nations. And this mars its somewhat muddy conclusion – exactly ‘who’ in the nations of the ‘periphery’ will rise above imperialist under-development. Amin seems to be a former member of the Communist Party of Egypt, and hence that might be where some of the confusion comes from.

Several chapters in this thin book devolve around economic algebraic equations – and for those, dear reader, I had to skip to the conclusions. Real economists might find them interesting. Amin’s central thesis is that ‘surplus value’ - which he calls ‘value’ – can be extended as an analysis beyond the borders of the central capitalist countries to include, not just unequal exchange of trade or import/export substitution, but the increased value culled from dependent nations he calls ‘imperialist rent’ – resulting in what he calls “globalized value.’ He looks at the relation between the imperial center and the financial ‘colonies,’ taking into account the ever-popular extraction of minerals (‘extractive’ or ‘mining’ rent), the exploitation of the natural resources of the imperial colonies (like water) and the extreme differential in wages for labor power – and combines them as a concept. Amin gets this concept of ‘imperialist rent’ from Marx’s ‘ground rent.’ He shows how alliances with colonies allow the imperialists to lower prices or wages in their ‘home’ countries. Imperialist rent is mostly invisible – ‘a transfer hidden behind the observed wage and price system.’ Amin maintains this asymmetry has been maintained and deepened by capital – hence the popular understanding of how capital ‘under-develops’ the rest of the world. As he puts it, the way capital functions will not allow the rest of the world to every fully ‘catch up.’ Amin calls his theory, the “shoreless Marx. He is not interested in just regurgitating Marx, but advancing Marxist analysis into the modern day, and that means a full grasp of the global profit system.

On the way, Amin makes a stab at Joseph Stiglitz, the sainted hero of the Keynesians. Amin says that at the UN General Assembly in 2009 Stiglitz proposed ‘an auction of the world’s resources (fishing rights, license to pollute, etc.)” This statement makes Stiglitz just another imperial barbarian waiting to buy the water from under Tanzania.

Amin endorses the Monthly Review position that, added to Marx’s ‘two departments’ (capital and labor) there is a 3rd economic department – the ‘state’ – which plays a role in absorbing surpluses. He also agrees with Monthly Review on the absolute centrality of the environment in any analysis of the economy and capital’s ruthless (and unavoidable) exploitation of it.

Amin maintains that there can be ‘no economic theory of the world economy,’ only an analysis of the elastic struggle between various factors and classes:

“Vulgar economics is obsessed with the false concept of ‘true prices,’ whether for ordinary commodities, for labor, for money, for time, or for natural resources. There are no ‘true prices’ to be ‘revealed’ by the genius of the ‘market.’ Prices are the combined products of rates of exploitation of labor (rates of surplus-value), of competition among fragmented capitals and the deduction levied in the form of ‘oligopoly rents,’ and of the political and social conditions that govern the division of surplus-value among profits, interest, ground rents and extractive rents.”

Until recently, of course, underdevelopment was the only pattern. However, we know, for instance in Brazil, that a booming local capitalist economy has been made possible by a partial liberation of the Brazilian nation under Lula’s “Worker’s Party,” which succeeded a long line of subservient (to imperialism) military and liberal comprador governments. However, all of Brazil is not part of this – not the landless peasants, not the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and not the favela’s. While conditions have improved for the working classes, the rich and middle classes are the biggest gainers. And that is because Brazil is still under indirect imperial control. As Brazil shows, a simple endorsement of the struggle of ‘southern’ or ‘periphery’ countries against imperialism, as Amin hints at, is simply not possible as a tactic in the struggle against capitalism itself.

PHILLIPS

I have reviewed one other Phillips book, “American Theocracy,” (see review below) which is a better introduction to his thought. This book, “Bad Money,” is centered around the August 2007 events which lead to the deepening of the crash in 2008, and being written in 2008, smacks of some ‘haste’ to publish while the iron was hot. Even authors must make money. As such, he misses many events, but these would probably not change his views.

Phillips’ thesis is that mercantilist and fully capitalist societies which aspire to ‘empire’ are brought down by four things: finance/debt, religious rigidity, the failure of their particular brand of physical power, and war. It doesn’t take much time to show that the U.S. role as an empire is threatened by all four. Financialization and debt, according to Phillips, brought down the U.S. economy in 2007. (He repeatedly emphasizes, unlike the twin parties of government, that PRIVATE debt is far more of a threat than public debt. And indeed, corporate debt is the largest worldwide.) Fundamentalist Christian religiosity in the U.S. has captured at least one party, and part of another. Oil, the power source of the American imperium, is running ‘out’ due to peak oil. And war, the war economy, and the costs of war have become endemic to American capitalism.

However, Phillips should ask himself why all 4 seem to show up in Spain, Holland, Britain and now the United States. What underlying dynamic unites these nations? I would say it has to be the development of capital in each. Let’s just look at one of his arguments. Phillips spends pages thundering against financialization. He claims no one but Minsky (“the Minsky moment”) and perhaps the Austrians (!) caught the deep problems with it – except the …“Marxists, mostly given to repeating ideological doctrine.” (BM, p. 40) As we know, in America, Marxism is verboten. Yet much scientific and historical materialist work was done years ago, initially being included in Baran/Sweezey's "Monopoly Capital." Starting in 1972, again by the Monthly Review school, they picked up on the development of financialization (and debt) in the U.S. Dismissed, though. Invisible men, as they say. Even when you’re right, you’re wrong.

And what is Phillips solution to the financialization dilemma of modern capitalism (or the former capitalisms)? Re-regulation. A return to the ‘real economy.’ The return of manufacturing to the U.S. Themes echoed by Krugman, Stiglitz and other reformists, including trade union economists. Now it is not to say that these are not laudable goals. The destruction of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999 by the neo-liberals under Clinton and the Republicans was a historic loss, leaving us open to more market-driven financial instability. Earlier revisions of financial law in the 80s under Reagan lead to the massive S&L crisis. However, it is happening for a reason.

Phillips himself mentions that many manufacturing companies (GE, Ford, General Motors) have immense financial arms. GE, Obama’s poster child, even gains most of its profits from operations abroad now, and a big chunk of that is financial. While Phillips tries to ‘separate’ finance and manufacturing capital, the actuality is that they are combined, two arms of the same thing. It was precisely the dropping of profits in manufacturing in the United States that led corporations to send manufacturing south, then to Mexico, then to China and everywhere else. And at the same time, those same firms turned to ‘paper’ to make more money, because manufacturing was looking for an outlet for their profits outside manufacturing. Manufacturing capital now needs the profits from Wall Street in order to fund their manufacturing operations - of course if they ever do so. That is the basis of M&As, IPOs, stock offerings, stock splits, derivatives, options, futures and every other arcane financial transaction undertaken by manufacturing capital. In essence, capital can no longer make money only ‘the old fashioned way.’ They have to have Wall Street, like athletes need steroids or junkies need a fix, to dispose of surpluses and, oddly enough, to make super-profits. Unlike the golden age of the 50s and 60s, manufacturing capital seems no longer to be able to fund itself from internal surplus value, gained off of labor, and must find other outlets. It must turn to derivatives and the casino to generate profits and/or get rid of surpluses.

So, re-regulation will actually not return the U.S. to the ‘good old days’ because those days are actually gone – the product of a short historical hiccup. Financialization is now the ‘real’ economy too. Manufacturing will only return to the U.S. if it can exploit the American worker at the same level as the Chinese worker. Or if oil becomes so expensive that shipping becomes less cost effective. Even Keynesian solutions will not be pursued by the American ruling class – not without class struggle. It is not an ‘intellectual’ question – it is truly a question of force. Krugman can talk all he wants about a jobs program – but until the American working classes put some kind of a political and strike gun to the government’s and the businessmens’ heads – there will be no jobs program. Nobel laureates do not win class wars. Classes do.

As to Phillips position on peak oil – he ignores global warming. Fighting peak oil with more coal will accelerate global warming. Or his idea that the U.S. can limit war making – it ignores the very real bind that capital is in. War necessarily absorbs and destroys profit surpluses, while providing part of the economy with a constant “Keynesianism” stability. Human society, not just capital, is in quite a bind, and capital, presently, has no way out.

I bought Amin at Mayday Books.
I bought Phillips at Chapman Street Books, Ely MN

Red Frog
August 11, 2011

The Accident on the Potomac

Obama Set to 'Fold' Too

Well, if you’ve been trying to follow the accident on the Potomac, good luck. It’s like a crashing plane zig-zagging across the sky. Republicans making $350B math mistakes, Obama putting Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block, Vice President Biden getting a backroom deal to cut the bejesus out of the U.S. budget to the trillionth degree, the Tea-Party standing strong, markets dropping and rating agencies ready to downgrade U.S. treasuries and probably munis too, even without a formal default. And a frankly dysfunctional government. This is really a moment for U.S. capitalism, and we have to understand it fully. In 2008 the economy nearly collapsed. Now their government is on the edge of a crash similar to 2008. Although lord knows the U.S. debt is justifying a downgrade. Its just that many other country’s debt is even sadder, including the EU. Except perhaps the Chinese.

The silence on the left of the Democratic Party is deafening. Black representatives standing in Congress telling us that, no, Medicare and Social Security should not be cut for hard-working people, who spent their lives paying in. And all for show. Not a real spine in the House so far. Will Obama raise the debt limit by executive order? Hmmm. Not many indications he will do so.

The national course will be similar to the local course, unless something unlikely happens. And that is cuts. The vast agreement will be to cut trillions in aid to states and local governments, for one. States are already ‘planning,’ if you can call it that, because this situation is unprecedented. And it almost guarantees an ‘official’ recession to add to the unofficial one. Krugman is even calling the present situation the “Little Depression” and, based on length and actual unemployment, he has a point. Right now I'd say we are in the Great Stagnation or Great Decline.

In anticipation of a decline in bonds, or a crash, some investors are betting against an increase in value for U.S. Treasury bonds, the center of this financial storm. Right now PIMCO, a large mutual fund company, is shorting U.S. Treasury bonds, and has been since April. And who else is shorting Treasury bonds? Eric Cantor, Republican from Virginia, House Majority leader, is shorting Treasury bonds. So he will gain financially with a decline in bond values and even a government default. A Democratic Party with spine would go crazy over this, but not a word from the 'oh so polite' ones. Other's who are shorting the market or treasuries? Still hidden.

Here is what Jeffrey Sachs has to say. This is the man that brutally instituted instant capitalism in the Soviet Union, which led to 10 years and more of misery under Boris Yeltsin. And regretted what he did ever since. Jeffrey Sachs on July 23rd, 2011:

“The idea that the Republicans are for the billionaires and the Democrats are for the common man is quaint but outdated. It's more accurate to say that the Republicans are for Big Oil while the Democrats are for Big Banks. That has been the case since the modern Democratic Party was re-created by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin."

Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather than the country's needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle? The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and the middle class, and invests in America's future - not just in Obama's speeches but in fact.

America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites. Until that happens, the political class and the media conglomerates will continue to spew lies, American militarism will continue to destabilize a growing swath of the world, and the country will continue its economic decline."

So get this, even intelligent capitalists are calling for an anti-corporate third party to keep capital from driving itself off the rails. Of course, they don’t call for an end to the capitalist system, which is actually the real culprit – not just a rigid bunch of free-market political chuckleheads. The working class can take advantage of this moment – of the supreme weakness of the capitalist government – to understand that it too is fundamentally broken – and will remain so permanently. There is no hope that the U.S. government will become a friend of labor, or able to change its declining stripes.

Red Frog
July 27, 2011

The Accident on the Mississippi

Lockout Over - Dayton Blinks, then Dayton Collapses

Well, the sad, sorry story of the state government shutdown in Minnesota is nearly over. 22,000 mostly union workers let go, many other contractors out of work or sent away, parks shutdown during the 4th of July, gaming and gambling money not coming in, job search facilities shutdown, workers compensation investigations stopped, funds for private daycare facilities for poor parents stopped until a few days ago, no fishing licenses being issued and a looming transit shutdown in the Twin Cities. And worst of all - to some - liquor licenses not being renewed and booze disappearing from store shelves and bars.

Was it worth it? As one MAPE union official commented, "If Dayton would have gotten something out of this, it would have at least been worth the lost days."

However, 'class-warrior' Mark Dayton, standing alone against the whole vicious Republican Party, like King Canute before the waves, or George Wallace in the Schoolhouse Door, with his union allies turning out in small numbers and most of the DFL silent on the issue of taxing the rich - blinked, then collapsed like a house of cards.

Dayton's position started by "taxing the rich." That is what he was elected on. However, as the negotiations got underway, he quickly agreed to $3.2-$3.5 billion in spending cuts to solve the $5B deficit. Then 'rich' was redefined down to the 2% of the Minnesota population who are mostly millionaires. The unions like AFSCME got out their little banners out and waved them to 'tax the 2%.' Well, then that negotiating point disappeared a few days ago, and Dayton decided (like a long line of Democrats before him) to tax anyone who'd pay the bill, not just the rich or the 2% rich. You see Dayton, and the Minnesota DFL, long ago abandoned the position of 'progressive taxation' as some kind of socialist plot.

Of course, the Republicans said no again. And so ... Dayton agreed to the original Republican position on June 30 and opted for selling more tobacco bonds and delaying payments to the schools to make up the remaining $1.5B or $1.8B. These are same accounting tricks used by former "Real Estate Taxes" governor Tim Pawlenty of Nothing to postpone a real day of reckoning. The MAPE officer was pointing out that the 'lockout' lead us all right back ... to the beginning. In other words, the workers died for no one's sins.

Tobacco money is to be used to improve the health of the people in Minnesota - not to subsidize the rich or the corporations in this state. Minnesota's taxpayers will have to pay investors tobacco bond interest for up to 20 years, just to fix the budget for one year. Delaying payments to the schools only makes their situation more precarious.

Barring some right-wing culture war crap, this 'deal' has to be approved by the legislature. We can assume the Republicans will vote for it, and Dayton will sign it and all the disgruntled DFL'ers will ... grumble. It would be voted down by anyone with a spine.

Now let's look at the union leaderships on this. They had a demonstration on June 30 in the morning of about 700. They had a 'vigil' that night, shining lights on the Capitol as if that might make it come to life. They had a demonstration the next Wednesday of 400 calling for taxing the 2% and a demonstration the next week too. They also had signs saying that a deal had to be reached to get state workers back to work. Unsaid, they wanted any kind of deal. And they got their wish - any kind of deal. This confusion of aims, and slavish following of Mark Dayton has once again made the AFSCME leadership, and the leadership of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, an embarrassment to their members. They don't have an independent thought in their heads. And it seems the Minnesota AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Labor Council, the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly and even the state employee unions did not really pull out their members for any of these events.

The crisis of the labor movement is too serious to paper over with cliches and reliance on people like Mark Dayton or the Democratic Party. It is time for labor to run its own candidates on a program of progressive taxation and supporting militant labor action. Meet fire with fire.

Red Frog
July 15, 2011

Strike This! Workman-Like Book by Local Activist

“Reviving the Strike” by Joe Burns, 2011

Joe Burns hits the nail on the head. A local activist and officer in many different unions, Burns recently got a law degree, and put it to work analyzing labor law and case law. After diligent study of the corpus of labor laws in the U.S., including various key decisions, he concluded that the only way for the labor movement to succeed in the present circumstances is to … break those laws. This advice, incidentally, was raised by the AFT initially. This is not advice you usually hear from a union lawyer. Of course he is not speaking in that capacity, as lawyers (including union ones) are for the most part taught to advise clients on how to minimize risk … not build a movement. Which is why any union that relies heavily on its attorneys is headed for the ash-bin, albeit slowly.

Essentially the AFT proposal was based on isolating unions from fines or jail by organizing strikes outside of the official union structure. I.E., there is no ‘leaders,’ no treasury, no by-laws, no union hall, no membership lists for the state to go after - nothing to lose, just a shadow organization.

Burns carefully goes through the various strategies that the labor movement has come up with to avoid breaking the laws that prevent effective strikes. The sorry list is familiar to anyone who was told or shown the ‘latest’ thing – work-to-rule, corporate campaigns, civil disobedience, organizing the unorganized, work centers, consumer boycotts, inside strategies, working for Democrats, organizing community-based organizations and campaigns, consumer mortgage-strikes, etc. Or, as seen this Thursday at the Capitol – labor vigils. Burns is not against any of these strategies, although he gently derides them as occasional middle-class sociology or closer to ‘bearing witness’ than class struggle.

By going through the history and opinions of even the conservative labor movement – people like Samuel Gompers and George Meany - he shows how these methods have replaced one method guaranteed to succeed, and that actually built unions in the first place – the successful mass strike that stopped production.

Burns shows how labor law – even the hallowed National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, ultimately puts the government in control of defining the labor movement. Sit-down strikes themselves were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1939. Burns spends much time on Taft-Hartley – the draconian anti-labor law passed in 1947 – which prohibited solidarity action. Wildcat strikes, jurisdictional strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, mass picketing, closed shops (creating ‘right to work’ states), the right of the federal government to institute injunctions and anti-communist affidavits for union officials were all part of the Act. Labor called it a ‘slave labor’ law. Even Truman said it restricted the freedom of speech of working class people. It imposed, in essence, a barrage of laws against labor protest so stringent that no other kind of activity in the U.S. faces the same restrictions. John L Lewis denounced it as the ‘first, ugly savage thrust of Fascism in America.” (Lewis, speech to AFL Convention, October 14, 1947). Taft-Hartley was a spear pointed at the heart of the effective strike and the labor movement itself.

Burns points out that, while labor grew even after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, as the labor movement in the 1950s was still strong, eventually the Act began to have its effect when the counter-offensive started in the early 70s. Judicial decisions built on the act had crippled labor in the courts. Burns has a section on how judges are from the upper-middle class, part of the ‘cream’ of the attorney strata, and most of them have never been in a union or workplace situation, and hence have no connection to the American labor movement, and no sympathy with it. Burns quotes one author who looked at many labor decisions and found that the hidden role of "property' was always primary, in spite of the fact that this 'force' was not even in the law. Just in the prejudices of the judges, the courts, the decisions, the lawyers, and eventually, the juries themselves.

Burns also clearly illustrates how the Democratic Party has played little role in defending labor. Many judges, especially liberal ones, enthusiastically enforce Taft-Hartley and other anti-labor decisions. A minority of the Democratic Party voted for Taft-Hartley itself. Truman himself, after panning it, used it 12 times. And can we forget that it was a Democratic governor, Rudy Perpich, who called out the National Guard on the Austin strikers in 1986, thus helping break the Hormel strike by escorting scabs past pickets? Or Jimmy Carter, who called out federal troops on the miner’s union in 1977? The Democrats recent tepid response to the card check is just the latest indication of where its real interests lie.

Burns calls capital’s laws ‘a system of labor control.’ He concludes that even when a law exists, if labor is strong enough, it can push past the law. Focusing on 5 recent strikes – the successful Republic Window’s and Doors sit-down, the Hormel and Staley strikes, the successful Charleston 5 solidarity actions and the successful Pittston strike, Burns hopes to draw lessons for a turnaround in labor, which he clearly admits is at a low point. Pittston, a strike lead by Richard Trumka, featured the union ignoring fines, at one point taking over a mine, engaging in mass civil disobedience, blocking roads with junk vehicles, sending masked roving pickets to other mines, and even tolerating random violence against scabs. The strike was won, leading to no concessions and an increase in health benefits.

Burns also clearly calls on an ideological change in American labor. The anti-communist clause in Taft Hartley – which John L Lewis refused to sign, and eventually did – is no accident. It is no accident that, de-fanged of socialist activists and ideas, labor is fighting with one – or eventually perhaps two - hands tied behind their back. The simple idea that labor and humans are not merely a commodity – which both Marxists and conservative labor leaders understood thoroughly in the past – is now no longer mentioned. We are instead told to sell ourselves to the highest bidder, like well-proportioned whores on parade. And indeed we are - until the concepts of real labor rights are renewed at the heart of the U.S. labor movement.

Burns makes a mention of how card check laws in Canada have stemmed the tide of losses in labor in some provinces there, but did not ‘revive’ labor there. However, the very fact of a card check law existing in Canada is a reflection of the New Democratic Party (“NDP”), a Party in which labor has a controlling stake. The NDP pushed for card check, and made it a reality in several provinces. Recently both Canadian postal workers and Air Canada workers staged large strikes shows that in Canada, like in every other country in the world, a strike movement is closely aligned to a strategy of labor political activity. It is no accident that in the U.S. labor is both virtually quiescent on the strike front and the political front, though events like Wisconsin shows this need not be the case.

And here is the main problem in Burns’ book. He makes, essentially, a syndicalist or ‘economist’ mistake – as Lenin used the term. Leaving politics and law to the bourgeoisie, and thinking that only militant strike activity is useful – actually hobbles the fight for an effective strike. The ‘30s are over – and one of the great failures of the 30s was the failure to create a political party based on the labor movement. If one had been created – not just in Minnesota but throughout the United States – the ease of instituting Taft-Hartley, of judges signing off on injunctions (80% of judges are elected - and who do you think is paying for their campaigns?), of political figures calling out police, of maintaining and increasing anti-labor laws, of a national debate where labor's needs are totally absent – would have been limited by a fierce fight in the political arena. Just using the ‘bully pulpit’ of political leadership to denounce anti-union, anti-labor laws will make them that much weaker and easier to break. Now we are relegated to the role of begging Democrats to be nice – a strategy that has clearly failed.

Burns does point out that only two forces recently brought up getting rid of Taft Hartley in a mass way. The first was the Labor Party of the latter 1990s, which involved at least a 1/3rd of the union movement, including Trumka’s UMW – and the second, Ralph Nader, who always mentioned it in his speeches in 2000 and 2004. Burns has stated in talks that you ‘can’t get rid of Taft Hartley’ or engage in independent political activity – but then, the difficulty of ‘reviving the strike’ is equally significant. Somehow promoting one without the other makes little sense.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, July 5, 2011

Another Place is the Space

Just Kids,” by Patti Smith, 2011

This is the story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s not a biography so much as an homage to a time, a place and a relationship. The time is the late sixties and early seventies. The place is New York. The relationship is a friendship/love between a young gay guy and a young punk girl. Although ‘punks’ hadn’t been invented yet. Mapplethorpe is the ultimate ‘gay best friend’ and lover, I guess. Smith writes in a poetic but somewhat childish manner, which fits.

The first thing you notice is that Patti is no slouch. She has read more than most English P.H.D.’s – and is none the worse for that. She drops the ‘Rimbaud” bomb repeatedly (and the Verlaine, Genet, Cockteau, Gide, Baudelaire bombs, along with a wide array of other weapons), then follows up with plain old name-dropping. Allen Ginsburg tried to pick her up in an Automat. Until he saw she wasn’t a boy. But she did get some food out of the deal. See? She even pals around with Sam Sheppard, the playwright, by ... accident. While Patti hangs out in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, Salvador Dali arrives, cape and all, and approves of her hair-cut. (!) If you are a poetry or culture junkie, this book is for you.

At some point, Smith's fascination with French symbolism twice leads her to a trip to France, once to visit Rimbaud’s museum and grave. Her self-education contrasts with a great many of the hippies thronging Washington Square at that time. Smith came from a working-class background in New Jersey, and, if not for finding $32 in an abandoned purse, might not have had the money to buy a bus ticket, escape New Jersey factory life and land in the Big City. She wrote a song, “Piss Factory,” about escaping the factories. Essentially it shows that self-education is many times the route to a creative life. Just as self-education is the route to a political life.

Mapplethorpe is a young artist who looks a bit like Jim Morrison. Patti meets him by accident on the streets, and after he rescues her from some old guy, they move in together. They stay together, for the most part until he dies of AIDS. He’s an adept at three-dimensional constructions and collages, working through a Catholic upbringing. She writes poetry, and together they decide to be artists. Moving from living on the street to dumpy apartment to arty apartment, from junkie-ridden hotel to the Chelsea hotel, and then to a loft across the street from the Chelsea, the two trace slowly improving fortunes. Mapplethorpe has his eyes set on the Andy Warhol crowd in the back room at Max’s Kansas City. He makes friends with a prominent patron, and begins to sell photos to an august group – people like George Plimpton. August as all that.

Patti didn’t know quite what she wanted, but ended up reading poetry backed by a guitar, and the rest is history. She ends up at the Bowery bar CBGB’s with Television and Richard Hell, and the New York punk scene is born. That is, after she cut her hair and got a rooster. She eventually marries Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith of the MC5, after dating one of the members of Blue Oyster Cult. When Bob Dylan visited CBGB’s for a Smith show, she knew that ‘something was happening here.’ Dylan was the reclusive crown prince of the rock and roll scene in the city.

What is fascinating about this book is the sense of the place and time percolating a ‘scene.” Like Laurel Canyon (reviewed below) or the Mississippi Delta (reviewed below), the scene had a dynamic of its own, not determined by some outside influence. Patti, while living at the Chelsea in 1969, listens to Kris Kristofferson sing “Me and Bobbie McGee” to Janis Joplin, and doesn’t know what she just witnessed. The Chelsea is the historic hotel that Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Bob Dylan, Arthur C Clarke and Oscar Wilde stayed in. At one point she goes next door to the Chelsea’s bar, the El Quijote, and in the bar sits Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, and Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, waiting for Woodstock to begin. Slick says ‘hi to you’ – and Patti feels at ‘home.’ If you are a music junkie, this book is also for you.

This scene closely parallels the eruption of creativity that occurred in Paris, involving surrealists, symbolists, existentialists, and others in the 20s and 30s, which ended with the start of World War II. The earlier sequential development fed into the later one in the U.S., as transmitted by Patti Smith and others. The real question is if bourgeois culture has another spark of creativity within its ‘bohemian/beatnik/hippie/punk/alternative’ impulse, or if those counter-cultural impulses have finally been commercialized and made harmless by corporate capital. In other words, is rebellion now a commodity? Quoting Thomas Frank, I think for the most part, it is. So the real question is to make a 'culture' that cannot be bought.

And I bought it at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
Red Frong, July 4, 2011

Have you Forgotten Your Roots?

"In and Out of the Working Class," Michael D Yates, 2009

Yates is a well-known left economist in the U.S., one of only two Marxists to hold that position in the professoriate, according to him. Which shows you the complete control capitalist economics has in this ‘free’ country. He’s from a working-class background, and this background formed a touchstone for him through-out his life. Unlike some ‘working class boys done good,’ he did not betray his roots.

Yates grew up in a factory town centered around Pittsburgh Plate & Glass, not far from the mining town where he was born, and where his family lived for many years in Pennsylvania. This book is a collection of essays and fiction he wrote which revolve around the issue of class - the dirtiest secret in America. He is one of those increasingly rare people who basically jumped classes via education, or, in his description, went to the top of the 'aristocracy of labor.' Yates eventually got a PHD, worked as a professor for 32 years, taught working-class people at labor extension services and at union educationals, even prisoners at a local lock-up. However, he never himself worked in the factory or a mine, leaving that to his father, who worked at PP&G, and got emphysema from silica and asbestos dust.

Yates tries his hand at fiction in this collection, and several chapters are fictional situations that closely parallel his real life. In the real world, Yates tried to organize a union for professors, and further discovers the absolute personal politics inherent in academe; helps with organizing a union for college staff; ponders over the best way to teach Marxist economics against the religion of bourgeois ‘macro-economics;” teaches bored middle-class children from the Pittsburgh suburbs about surplus value; confronts the racism in his home town; talks about his time in a strict and robotized Catholic college; and eventually retires from teaching after a nervous breakdown. For a left academic, this book is a must-read. Let me quote one paragraph which shows what Yates was up against regarding his students:

“The enthusiastic first-generation college students we once taught disappeared with the mills. We replaced them with mediocre and uninterested youngsters from the middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh. These students were not my cup of tea. They saw college as a place to party and a way-station in between high school and the real world. They expected to get a degree, and the better job and money that went with it, simply because they had purchased their place in our classrooms. If they didn’t do well with minimum effort, it wasn’t their fault. The ‘product’ … must be defective. They resented learning and made their disdain obvious.”

Yates enjoyed teaching working class people in his labor-education service classes, or even mostly black prisoners, because they actually understood the world and theory better than the careerist students he normally met. Surplus value is not so complicated when you realize the owners of your corporation are getting paid many times over what a normal 40 hours would bring, even at the best pay. Class is not a foreign concept when you cannot afford a car.

Yates worked for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (UFW), and this chapter is the oddest of the book – but true. Yates was on the UFW staff as a professor, working on education, legal and labor issues for the union, and living in a broken-down ranch in California where the union headquarters was. However, there were complaints about the way Chavez ran the union, including from Yates. It was basically a personalist bastion, with no democracy. Chavez’s relatives and children held power with Chavez. One day the union staff had a meeting, and Chavez accused several complainers of being company spies, and threw them out. No facts, no due process, no nothing. Yates was not dismissed or arrested, but his innocent friend was, and Yates left the next day in sympathy. To this day, the UFW is a shadow of its former self, destroyed by Cesar's fame.

Yates ends the book with a cheery fictional cliff-hanger about a new union activist who gets fired, but who wins a 40 to 1 shot at the horse track, and with it thinks he will be able to defeat the company, and continue in the union, perhaps even running for its presidency. But the overall tone of the book is somber – being a Marxist in America is like being an Eskimo in Dallas, and it takes a personal toll on Yates. Better to just think of food and drink, entertainment or family, because that is all the system hopes to leave us with. Yates now drives around the U.S. in an RV, and is a full time associate editor at Monthly Review. So there is life after work.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

June 19, 2011

The Poverty of Philosophy

Film: “Tree of Life” – Terrence Malick, 2011

Malick is one of these American film auteurs that is somewhat of a hidden legend, like JD Salinger or Marlene Dietrich. His first film, ‘Badlands,’ was a re-creation of the Charlie Starkweather mass murder spree in Kansas in the late 1950s, starring Martin Sheen and Sissie Spacek as young actors. The film is one of the great American movies. Malick followed with ‘Days of Heaven,’’The Thin Red Line’ and a few others that degraded in quality from his first.

Nevertheless, many critics and film-goers eagerly awaited Malick’s new film, “Tree of Life.” It won the Palm D’Or in Cannes, and film reviewers have written turgid, confusing descriptions of this film that make it out to be some cross between the Bible, ‘Texasville’ and ‘Solaris.’

Well, it’s really a very simple film. The film, based partly on Malick’s own childhood in Waco, Texas, is a meditation on the death of a son and brother. It essentially poses the problem of death / evil, and asks ‘God’ why this happened to such a young, innocent person. The two forces of the film are ‘grace’ and nature. Nature took the son, and now the parents (one in particular) and the brothers (one in particular) search for ‘grace’ to accept the death. In the process we see nature in all its ferocious beauty and power through time; and childhood in all its rosy hues and memories – and crises. In that childhood, the father, played by Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pitt) is a dictatorial parent, who eventually apologizes for his behavior (achieving ‘grace’ himself). And in the end, the film also ‘accepts’ the death of the son and brother. As the magic mother says, and I paraphrase, “I give him to you” while two angel-like women hover around her.

So, evidently, two forces of evil in the world – ‘human nature’ and death – are overcome by love and acceptance.

History plays a minor role in this film. The father and one son attempt careers – the son, played as an older man by Sean Penn (yes, that Sean Penn) succeeds, while the father eventually fails. At the end, the family is evicted from their Eden-like house in Waco due to his job loss. The children play in DDT fumes. The father and brothers visit black folks grilling food, which reminds you that 1950s Waco was segregated. Scenes of corporate American board-rooms remind you how life goes on now. But history is relegated to the sidelines. History is ignored, actually. And since no one lives in a time ‘outside history,’ this is a calculated deception. Even the father’s authoritarian style is actually straight out of the 50s.

History is irrelevant to the main thrust of the film, which is the images. And the images stand in for the beauty of life. Images of evolving ‘outer space,’ underwater life, volcanic eruptions, dinosaurs on beaches and along rivers, desert formations, star fields, cloud patterns and volcanic plains are interspersed with the gauzy, impressionistic family story evolving in Waco. Malick succeeds in evoking childhood quite well. The film is beautiful in a somewhat labored way, and it reminds every viewer that what we see, hear, smell, feel and touch every day are wonderful delights that should never be forgotten; moments that we should actually immerse ourselves in. For they may never return.

But as a philosophic film it fails. The massed classical choirs accompanying the evolving universe should be a tip off. Quotes from the Book of Job, phrases of ‘Why, God”, “Amens’ and southern Texas religiosity bathe the film throughout. The philosophic answer is actually a Christian message, diluted as it is. “God” is forgiven. His natural world is beautiful. Say “Grace.” Amen. As if the death of this boy was part of God’s ‘plan’ in the first place; as if God was actually involved in a specific drowning or death in Vietnam. This is a reactionary fantasy. So this film rates as a ‘deep thinker’ film for bourgeois critics, but when you look at what it is saying, there is much less than meets the eye. Sort of like the ‘meaning’ of the obelisk in “2001-A Space Odyssey.” Nada.

Current debates among film critics over ‘low’ versus ‘high’ culture (with this film in the “high” culture category…) ignore the fact that some so-called low culture is actually more progressive and emancipating than some so-called ‘high culture.’ Which, given the a-political bent of most film critics, is a completely confusing dialectic to them.

And I saw it in Uptown,
Red Frog, 6/11/2011