Impassable

 “Breaking the Impasse – Electoral Politics, Mass Action and the New Socialist Movement in the United States,” by Kim Moody, 2022

This is a detailed look at the strategy of ‘realigning’ or working for actual change within the Democratic Party – and what Moody thinks will actually succeed in breaking the impasse of U.S. politics.  The former is the method of DSA and Congressional representatives like AOC and ‘the squad,’ which came about after the 2016 democratic-socialist campaign of Bernie Sanders.  Moody is a leftist labor activist and looks at how the centrist, corporate, Democratic Party functions.  The first part of this book is a polemic against the politics of various DSA factions inside the Democrats.  The second part is a polemic dealing with Jane McAlevey and unionism. Given the wealth of information, I’m going to highlight his key insights. 

     1.    First Past the Post / Single Member Districts are not a bar to third parties or a multi-party democracy, as both the UK and Canada attest.    

      2.   The ‘coattail effect’ has declined in value, and is sometimes the opposite.

      3.   Limiting the franchise has been bourgeois policy since the “Progressive” movement of the early 1900s.  This goes far beyond Jim Crow.

      4.   Primaries are a way to undermine popular, democratic and left activism.

      5.   The ‘spoiler effect’ disappears in heavily Democratic urban districts where Republicans don’t run.

      6.   Moody looks at the multiple ways Democratic Party (DP) cooptation works to push dissidents like AOC or Sanders to the center - “upward and rightward.”

      7.   Between 1% and 4% of donations to the Democrats - DCCC, DNC and DSCC - come from labor.  The rest is corporations, lobbyists, lawyers and wealthy individuals.

      8.   Moody takes aim at the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Working Families Party and various AFL-CIO PACs, along with advocates of a ‘party-surrogate’ or a ‘dirty break.’

      9.   No one has looked at prior failed efforts to move the Democrats to the left.  History never happened and a spotless mind is best, even though the modern Democratic Party is more centrally controlled, more professionalized and far wealthier than in the past.  It has no members, no voting by members, no way for a majority to actually change the party.

      10.   “Using the DP ballot line” is not just a technical tactic for ‘dirty breakers.’  Advocates of a ‘dirty break’ from the Democrats have no idea when it will happen or towards what, thus leaving it as more of a phrase.

CAMPAIGNS

Moody goes into a detailed analysis of the 2016 & 2020 Democratic Party electoral campaigns, showing how working-class votes in rural and urban districts, Latino votes and even African-American votes dropped in the Democratic Party column, while increasing in the monied, light-skinned suburbs. He shows how ‘education’ is not a good guide to class, as 60% of small business types, who generally vote Republican, don’t have a college degree.  The Democrats ignore rural areas, even though factory workers make up 10% of the ‘rural’ population, not to mention farm, warehouse and retail workers in small towns.  They also ignore the 77 million mostly proletarian non-voters.  Moody calls the Democrats the leading party of U.S. capital at this point, based on their alt-finance / tech funders and their increasing middle and upper-class voting base, in contrast to the unstable Republicans.  ‘Grownups’ Nancy “Silicon Valley” Pelosi and Chuck “Wall Street” Schumer typify this.

CONFUSION

Moody cites socialist A. Philip Randolph’s work in the labor and civil rights movements.  Randolph was not afraid to organize African-American workers independently due to continuing discrimination within the trade unions from the 1920s into the 1960s.  The Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement and the Panthers also organized factories in this way. Moody hesitantly and sarcastically calls independent organization like this ‘identitarian’ or ‘identity’ politics, when it is nothing of the kind. This in a polemic against social-democrat nostalgists (his word) who adopted Bayard Rustin’s 1965 position advocating cross-class unity, a realignment within the Democratic Party and supposedly ‘universal’ policies that ignore racism.  This coincided with a similar tack by Michael Harrington, founder of DSOC, then DSA.

Moody celebrates Black Lives Matter (BLM), which is led by black activists. However in spite of the massive and widespread attendance of millions in BLM protests, no solid, national, radical BLM organization formed.  Across the U.S. there are a number of BLMs whose politics range from black capitalism, unity with centrist European-American Democrats to radical politics against the police state, like defunding and prison abolition. BLM has no penetration into unions or workplaces.  Moody’s position of ‘mass social movements’ as the answer to the stagnant ‘impasse’ that is U.S. politics did not work in this instance.  Something is missing.

BLM in D.C.

The SOLUTION to the IMPASSE?

Instead of an orientation to the Democrats Moody first suggests a grab-bag of movementism – rank and file caucuses, independent unionism, civil rights organizing and mass upsurges such as against police violence and climate change.   Lastly is a focus on union organizing and creating a strike wave.  All well and good.  Yet not a word yet about socialist hegemony, the building of a Left Front or revolutionary organizations, or even independent mass Labor, Black, Brown, Women’s or Left-Populist parties.  Movements come and go – what needs to happen is the building of a permanent socialist oppositional Front that reaches into every sector. 

Engaging in nostalgia himself, Moody writes a retrospective introduced by a quote from Bob Dylan about how to win.  He looks at how a present social-democratic demand like the Green New Deal (GND) can be passed – using the examples of the New Deal in the 1930s and Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, both sparked by mass social movements.  This is very familiar stuff.  The GND is opposed by all Republicans, the majority of Democratic politicians, the DNC, the AFL-CIO and every corporation in the U.S.  It’s a popular front of reaction against a proposal that does not threaten capital except in its jobs’ section and its direct aim at the carbon industry.  That was enough.

UNION STRATEGIES

Focusing on his main area of expertise, union matters, Moody looks at the ideas of Jane McAlevey and her books, among them No Shortcuts. Moody tracks her tried and true methods for organizing:  finding organic leaders within the workplace; mapping the forces within that workplace; escalating collective actions; inoculating members from the barrage of company lies and involving the union organizing crew and members in contract negotiations.  Moody points out that the key person is always the ‘professional staff organizer’ in McAlevey’s narrative.  He knows a true mass movement will have to go far beyond that.  However he does not mention any mass organization(s) that could also provide organic leaders.

McAlevey blames Taft-Hartley and subsequent labor laws; professional union-busting and capitalist globalization as the culprits for the state of the union movement.  What she ignores is the failures of union leaderships according to Moody.  As dialectics would indicate, it is not just ‘external’ things that are relevant – it is ‘internal’ contradictions within unions and the labor movement. Moody instead advocates ‘direct union democracy’ to counter this, not just the ‘representative,’ ‘organizing,’ 'professional' or ‘service’ models of business unionism.  

Moody makes a case again, as he did in his excellent book “On New Terrain,” that outsourcing, off-shoring and importing are not the main cause of job losses.  His statistics show that the major source is automation, lean production, surveillance, labor-management cooperation, increasing labor tempos and resulting productivity increases. Digitization especially has increased labor intensification.  This is why burnout, exhaustion and quits are so prevalent among workers, which is not just the effect of the pandemic.  U.S. productivity is also plunging since May 2021.  Exhaustion like this can be gasoline for a labor upsurge by younger workers - and it seems to already be happening.  

The FUTURE          

The turbulent labor upsurges of the 1930s and 1940s were far from predictable models, in spite of what McAlevey claims.  To Moody, the rolling, bottom-up teacher strikes of 2018-2020 somewhat resembled those methods.  He sees and predicts rising social turbulence throughout the world – economic dislocation, ruling elites losing their legitimacy and extreme political instability. Strikes, including mass and general strikes, have increased world-wide.  He finally addresses the issue of having a mass working class-based party, which he supports, running especially in urban areas where no Republican exists.  He mentions the electoral efforts of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, but not the success of Socialist Alternative in Seattle. This idea of a 'labor party' is part of the Transitional Program.  It challenges capitalist hegemony in the electoral arena, as well as others. 

A useful book, especially in its detail on the Democrats. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “On New Terrain – How Capital is Reshaping the Battlefield of Class War” (Moody); “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Embedded With Organized Labor” and “Save Our Unions” (both by Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming – A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21^st Century,” “The Democrats – A Critical History” (Selfa); “Up From Liberalism,” “Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar,” “The Populists Guide to 2020,” “The Unwelcome Guest,” "On the Clock."    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 8, 2022

Sexual Economics Theory

 “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,”by Kristen R. Ghodsee, 2021

That title got your attention.  This book is based on an editorial Ghodsee wrote for the NYT.  She disentangles the lies and the truths about the former workers’ states, showing how women benefitted greatly from socialized day care, long paid maternity leave, socialized laundries and cafeterias, a guaranteed job when they returned from childbirth and open and free education and health systems.  This resulted in higher independence from men and poverty due to guaranteed employment, with pensions and advancement.  Because of closer equality between the sexes and the removal of economic forces behind relationships, better sex, more frequent sex and more orgasms were the result.

No small matter.  The workers’ states (which she calls by the common oxymoron ‘state socialist’) continued to have problems with women working the ‘double shift’ at home and at work.  Some countries, like Romania and Albania, had absolutely retrograde gender policies, while the USSR pretended it had solved “the woman question” in 1936, only to improve after 1955.  According to Ghodsee, in these countries abortion was the only contraceptive measure; jobs were still somewhat gendered; and a pay gap existed – though wages were not as important as in the U.S. or other capitalist countries because of the increased social wage.

Ghodsee claims adequate sanitary napkins for menstruation were absent, along with sanitary products like deodorants, decent soaps, nylons and other specifically female accoutrements.  

Hungarian dress scholar Katalin Medvedev corrects Ghodsee, pointing out that ‘light industrial’ products like deodorant, tampons, perfumes, blue mascara, sunscreen and somewhat sexy underwear became available in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Hungary, but also across the bloc.  The pill also came into use in this period, as did condoms, according to Medvedev.  However the early pills had too many hormones, a problem also common in the "West." Stalinist anti-abortion policies still continued into the 1950s in places, so back-alley abortions were common.  Prostitution existed, and was sometimes used by the secret police to ensnare Westerners.  Limitations on women’s products were true in the 1950s after WWII.  For instance, a sickeningly sweet, powerful floral perfume called “Red Moscow” was all there was in the perfume arena. It became a joke, though perhaps not in the USSR.  

SEX as a COMMODITY

Ghodsee refers to Scandinavian social-democracies as well as the workers’ states.  The former now have the highest level of social support for women, children and maternity in the world.  It took years for them to approach, but not pass, the high labor force participation rate of women in the workers’ states.  Incidentally the workers’ states had remarkable levels of women in STEM jobs and sports, unlike the West at the time.  Presently the Nordics are in the top level of women’s equality in the world, led by Iceland.  This has pissed off manipulative ‘dating coaches,’ who complain that Danish women see through their bullshit.  After all, if women can live lives without being economically dependent on a man, a man needs more than a bank account and smooth words. 

Marx and Engels both understood bourgeois marriage in their time to be the exchange of sex for financial security – i.e. legalized prostitution.  It commodified women’s sexuality into a contract. This still occurs to this day.  A class-based ‘market’ society naturally turns human sexuality into a product, as it does everything else.  Sex is not just used in advertising.  A non-market society based on equality has less material reasons to make sex a transaction.  Simple as that.  In this context, Ghodsee discusses modern ‘sexual economics theory’ which reflects Marxian insights.  It posits a negative link between sexuality, sex markets, a capitalist economy and the status of women.  Just compare modern Vietnam with Thailand to see the difference in the role of sex tourism. 

REASEARCH

Sociological analyses carried out by Russian researchers show the change in sexual relations before the implosion of the USSR in 1989 and after, in 2005. The older generation of Soviets had based marriage on child-rearing.  The later generations moved towards marriages based on love or friendship. This in spite of the lack of privacy, better birth control or erotica.  After the collapse of the USSR, researchers reported ‘gold digger’ classes popping up in Russia, an increase in prostitution, relationships and marriages based on trading sex for money, a thriving ‘bride’ export market, more ‘mistresses’ and a decrease in women’s financial independence.  

East German Nude Beach

Germany itself is a good laboratory, as both sides of ‘the wall’ were similar.  East German researchers surveyed East German woman, who prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall reported more equal relationships that stimulated frequent and better sex. Part of this is that their stress and fatigue levels were lower.  Other East German studies found that young East German women had orgasm 2/3rds of the time, with another 18% usually achieving orgasm.  At the same time women in West Germany were limited from working and at the beck and call of their husbands due to this.  West German women were consistently more unhappy with their sexual lives according to these same researchers.   Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, prostitution, paid pornography, and female unemployment increased substantially, as women were sent back into the home - a phenomenon which Ghodsee calls ‘refamilization’. Orgasm rates were still 80% (E.G.) to 63% (W.G.) for women after reunification. 

In Hungary studies indicate that sex flourished under repressive circumstances.  Private life provided a certain refuge from the social realm, much as it did in other deformed and degenerated workers’ states.  Sex was ‘free’ and unencumbered by material resonance.  Prostitution was the most frowned upon by Hungarian youth, followed by male womanizers, while citizens were supportive of romantic love and single mothers.  Now according to Ghodsee Budapest is reported to be the ‘Bangkok’ of central Europe, as well as a hub for pornography.  She looks at Poland’s sexology studies in the 1970s and 1980s, which undermined capitalist medicalization and profiteering off of sexual problems, instead promoting equality and intimacy in gender relations.  She also looks at the sexual context in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia during this period, which produced similar results.  

The U.S.

Ghodsee understands that the ability to have children damages women in a capitalist context.  Pregnancy results in being discriminated against, earning less, missing promotions, dropping education and jobs, failing to get hired, trapped in bad marriages, being isolated and dependent.  The U.S. has no national paid maternal leave policy for instance, one of only 5 countries in the world.  In the U.S. health care is a commodity, not a public good, so child-bearing medical problems can become expensive. Day care is costly while many school districts do not have free pre-Kindergarten, making that problem even worse.  Now the right of abortion is under threat, and reactionary rumblings against sex education and contraception lie in the background.

Utopian Socialist Flora Tristan

The SOCIALISTS

Ghodsee includes the feminist work of various socialists – utopians Charles Fourier, Flora Tristan and Saint Simon; Social-Democrats August Bebel and Lily Braun; German Marxists Friedrich Engels, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg; Bolsheviks Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai; Bulgarian Communist Anna Pauker.

Ghodsee does not look into the work of the German Communist Wilhelm Reich, who posited that the sexual repression frequent in capitalist societies riven with churches, religion and archaic ideas about women diverted sexual urges into odd, distorted, criminal and fascistic directions. She also has a conservative take on Kollontai, who advocated a light and playful form of ‘friends with benefits.’  Ghodsee’s interpretation of ‘friends with benefits’ omits the friend part, likening it to more like a one night stand.

Ghodsee polemicizes against the ‘Stalin’ or ‘Commie” bogey every time someone like Bernie Sanders brings up an idea that limits capitalism.  She doesn’t gloss over the political or economic problems of these countries – all-encompassing censorship, one-Party rule, limitations on travel, economic backwardness, lack of workers' democracy and worse. Her solutions – other than the obvious - are mild tea:  quotas for women in corporations and political office; getting young Millennials and women to vote; making markets “do good.”  She also somewhat promotes the Sanders’ program for women: Medicare For All, subsidized childcare, paid maternal and paternal leave, limitations on college tuition and an expansion of public employment.

An excellent book by a social-democrat who is against recreating ‘state socialism.’ She is open to understanding how capital, due to its market orientation, oppresses women in many ways, public and personal - as a free or cheap labor force and as a sexual commodity, not as an independent human being.    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Alexandra Kollontai,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “A Socialist Defector,” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Capitalism on Campus – Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (both by Atwood); “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “Godless – 150 Years of Unbelief,” “Love and Information,” “The Bachelor” or the word ‘feminism.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 4, 2022

Old Order Actually

 “New Order / Nuevo Orden" a film by Michel Franco, 2020

This work of speculative fiction is about an upper-class wedding in Mexico interrupted by an uprising of urban poor and workers, which prompts a military dictatorship. The period is in the near future. Its real message is that ‘revolution’ can only be a failure, as it consists of incoherent looting and indiscriminate violence, and will lead to, as Orwell put it, “…a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”  In that, the film is profoundly anti-political and conservative, and as one critic said, nihilistic.

Loyal servants wait under Martial Law

The wedding is attended by a privileged crowd of over-drinking twits, engaged in quiet deals, upper-class solidarity and ‘partying’ in a luxurious modern home.  Servants reluctantly serve the guests, while drivers stand at the entrance to the home waiting for their bosses to leave.  A money safe plays a key role. Yet ‘outside’ the wedding party things are not so happy.  Green paint is splashed on cars by looters, streets are blocked, a hospital is taken over by protesters, and a bathroom water tap runs green for a bit, spooking the lady of the house.   

A former servant, Rollando, comes to the entrance, begging for money for his wife’s serious surgery.  The most sympathetic character, the ‘bride-to-be,’ Marianne, failing to open the safe, leaves her own wedding party to help pay the private clinic.  This is because only a bit of ‘pocket money’ had been collected from some guests for the surgery. 

The party is eventually invaded by looters, who shoot several indiscriminately.  Servants begin taking the silverware; rich wedding guests are forced to wire money to some account; the safe is opened under gunpoint, watches and other valuables are taken; the rioters abuse the guests, large, beautiful paintings are spray-painted.  This latter seems to indicate how ‘uncultured’ the protesters are.  In Mexico, there was a controversy because the rioters were darker-skinned and the guests lighter-skinned.  Given how brutal the rioters were, this had both Left and Right upset.  It was supposed to reflect the color line in Mexican society, but fails in that.

In response to the uprising, the army declares martial law, massacres crowds, detains many, holding Marianne hostage for a ransom along with others.  Prisoners are raped and tortured while waiting for cash to be delivered. Martial law involves work permits, ID badges, street blockades, curfews and shooting.  Eventually the military leadership collects enough ransom money and kills those carrying out their hostage orders, along with the hostages themselves, to cover their tracks.  This including Marianne, a comely blonde in a red dress. 

The final scene is of capitalist Mexican political and military leaders attending a patriotic execution, where three are hung, including a loyal servant women who is blamed for Marianne’s kidnapping.  Inequality has retained power and the ‘boot’ continues to stomp. 

Class uprisings do involve looting, but they do not center around it.  Looting is inevitable in a class-stratified situation, as we saw once again here in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd. Yet this film pictures class struggle only as a very large flash mob stealing everything.  No organization, no politics, no leadership, no goal, no plan, just vengeful chaos.

The director, Franco, has received awards from the Venice, Cannes and Chicago film festivals.  He is best at looking at the Mexican rich, but fails to understand proletarian subjects which this film illustrates. In fact, if you can sit through this shit show without being upset or irritated, you’d be lucky.

The Kultur Kommissar

June 1, 2022

Re-Fashioned Failure

 “Fashionopolis – the Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes” by Dana Thomas, 2019

This book includes a short history of the clothing industry, from its beginnings in 1771 in Manchester, England – ‘Cottonpolis’ as it was called then – to its spread to New York’s lower East Side and Garment District; and from there across the world, mostly to Asia. The ‘ready to wear’ industry was enabled first by slavery, machinery and colonialism, then by cheap labor, Quick-Response manufacturing, NAFTA, the WTO, the World Bank and China. Liz Claiborne and Zara were ‘trend setters.’ It results in landfills full of clothes, excessive water use, dye pollution, carbon production, lost jobs and grinding labor exploitation, mostly of women. What’s not to like?

This is a very familiar capitalist story. I’m going to look at this book to see if Thomas has any specific solution that is out of the ordinary, other than the now commercially appropriated plea for ‘sustainability.’ Unless we stop treating clothing as a commodity, and greatly reduce our production and consumption of clothing, that solution alone is bogus. Her supposed focus is on ‘fast fashion’ too, so she might have an answer.

SWEATSHOPS

As a journalist, Thomas visits Bangladesh to look at conditions after the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement, which took off after the horrific 2013 Rana Plaza collapse which killed 1,134 and injured 2,500. Now she says some Bangladeshi factories are pristine, while others are still dangerous sweatshops. She says little about unions, which are opposed by the Bangladeshi government. Then she details sweatshops in Los Angeles employing Latino women, which is now the textile capital of the U.S.

DENIM

Jeans are made of cotton. It is estimated that at least half of everyone on the planet is wearing jeans at any moment. I doubt that, but it suggests how ubiquitous they are. I’m wearing a worn pair now. Thomas tells the story of Levi Strauss and another about organic cotton that grows green, brown and blue to avoid toxic dyes. She also interviews people growing indigo as a natural dye for denim, which has been adopted by Patagonia, but still 99% of clothing uses analine dyes, which are synthetic and cancer-causing. She has a long section on Southern small business owners in Florence, AL and Nashville, TN who create small-batch mail-order clothing and socks, mostly using organic cotton – one vertically grown in their own cotton fields. Many of the garments are expensive, as the words ‘bespoke,’ ‘boutique,’ 'selvedge,' 'made to order' and ‘artisanal’ suggest.

Thomas quotes an entrepreneur happy to move from LA to Nashville because the wages are so cheap in the open-shop South. Clearly Thomas is a pro-capitalist who finds cheap wages endearing if they come with a ‘local,’ ‘slow fashion’ and maybe an ‘organic’ label. Words like ‘union’ and ‘co-operative’ never cross her word processor in this context. She has written for Vogue, NY Times Style section, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast and others – so of course.

RIGHT-SHORING

Thomas' next stories are about 'right-shoring' – a patriotic hipster word for returning manufacturing to the U.S. and England. This doesn't necessarily involve organic or raw materials – as one English person says it will resemble the 'imperial model' of textile production. Now above 10% of U.S. clothing is made in the U.S., up from 3%. The Chinese are partly behind this increase, as they have restarted plants in the Carolinas helped by revenue bonds, tax credits and infrastructure grants – all typical corporate welfare. She neutrally profiles one U.S. entreprenuer that believes the 'buy less, use less' strategy is “not scalable” and “not a realistic approach to climate change.” This one wants to be the new Zara. Her firm does attempt to use solar power and much less water in production, so Thomas includes her.

WTF?

FINISHING

Another new concept behind making denim softer or actually 'distressed' - called 'finishing' - is something called the 3-step 'Jeanlogia' process – which is highly automated, using far less water and labor. According to Thomas, automation is the route for new production. Stone washing and hand-work softening or creating holes in jeans with sanders and power drills are highly toxic methods to the environment and the workers, as well as wrecking the fabric. However, Thomas does not address why jeans have to be softened at all, thus contradicting her point about making clothes last longer. Most 'softened' jeans quickly rip at the knees. So those wearing jeans for work or practical purposes find 'finishing' to be absurd. Those people running around trying to make a 'fashion statement' with ripped or paper-thin jeans are advertising the fact they don't use jeans for any practical purpose, wasting fabric at the same time.

CONSCIOUS FASHION

Thomas celebrates Stellla McCartney's high-end fashion, which uses wool from a sustainable sheep farm in New Zealand, viscose and rayon from from Swedish and Canadian certified lumber forests, organic cotton grown in Egypt, and oil-based pleather. No fur or leather, which have a highly-destructive and anti-ecological animal sources. She includes almost nothing about McCartney's labor standards. McCartney eliminated ubiquitous and toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from her clothing, recycling plastic ocean waste, stopped using virgin Mongolian cashmere, while using animal-free, bio-fermented leather and silk, along with mushroom leather. Thomas uses the cretinous stereotype “brown-clad, crunchy-granola set” to describe what is now seen as green, “conscious fashion.” It seems the hippies were right again...in spite of the insults. McCartney's firm also uses an “environmental profit and loss” accounting system. The problem of course is that none of us are wearing Stella McCartney.

Thomas mentions various methods of greenwashing and bluewashing by capitalist clothing companies. She highlights firms that recycle cotton T-shirts into new fiber, as part of a 'circular' economy in textiles. She supports long-lasting garments, not junk that deteriorates, including learning the art of sewing to repair and make clothes. One of her entrepreneur's rejected using Spandex, which is oil-based and doesn't break down, and discovered a bio-substitute. Another created a substitute for oil-based polyester. Others are finding ways to break clothing down into their original components, like nylon, or separating polyester and cotton, then recreating them individually instead of sending them to a landfill. Some firms (Patagonia again) run 'repair' operations for older clothing, or buy second-hand from their customers. Others promote 'made to order' or sample pre-orders to reduce overproduction. Even washing clothes less frequently will greatly extend their life.

ROBOTS

For the future-future, Thomas blows hot on home-based clothing 3D printers - a modern sewing machine according to her. This seems odd for someone interested in sustainability, as the ingredients are nearly all polyamide powder, nylon, acrylics and polyurethane rubber. Robots and sewbots (“zero direct labor”) are also coming to garment manufacturing. Yet capital has no plan for those who lose their jobs. Digital sales are now huge, though 'brick and mortar' shopping is still real. Amazon's own line of clothing, Prime Wardrobe, bought a clothing factory for pre-orders to reduce waste.

In the final chapter called “To Buy or Not to Buy” she lays her cards on the table. After her endless celebration of various clothing methods and brands, she mentions – once – to buy less. That is not the line of this book at all. It is a detailed look at new methods in creating more sustainable clothing, a gold-mine of new environmental methods that are being used by small firms and fashion 'start-ups' creating mostly expensive, high quality clothes. But it fails in envisioning a real 'refashioning' of fashion from an anti-capitalist point of view – instead proposing a “kinder, gentler capitalism.” Good luck with that...

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Stiched-Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion,” “Shopping World,” “Worn – A People's History of Clothing,” “Inconspicuous Consumption,” “Hippie Modernism – the Struggle for Utopia.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 28, 2022

The Village of Leopards

 “How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue, 2022

This is the fictional story of an African village standing up to a Western oil company, Pexton, which is poisoning their land, air and water, leading to the deaths of many children.  It reminds one of the actual situation on the Niger Delta, where Royal Dutch Shell, Elf, Chevron and others have ruined the wetlands with constant spills and explosions, oppressing the Ogoni people in the process.  This was also the situation in Ecuador, where Chevron did the same thing in the Amazonian jungle; and in Peru, where Repsol did the extraction destruction.

Mbue herself is from Cameroon, which is just south of Nigeria.  There is an actual French/Anglo oil company in Cameroon, Perenco. China’s Sinopec oil company bought control of a former Shell company, Pecten Cameroon Company, in that same country.  So ‘Pexton’ could be based on several of these outfits.    

The African story is told from the point of view of one child, Thula, other children, Thula’s uncle Bongo, her mother Sahel, her grandmother Yaya, her little brother Juba.  It starts in the 1980s.  It is a very slow-moving and somewhat lyrical village and family story set in a formerly Edenic bush community of thatched huts, small farming, hunting and fishing named Kosawa. Now the children die mysteriously after drinking the water; the farms cannot produce good crops; the air is toxic from flares, leading to coughing and slow death; the river runs green and clotted; the pipelines leak oil. 

A contingent of villagers go to the local capitol, Bézam, to try to get help and never return, including Thula’s father Malabo.  There is a kidnapping motivated by the local ‘crazy’ man Konga, a massacre by soldiers in which 14 are killed, a village chief who benefits from covering for the oil company but then switches sides and 4 villagers hung in a legal trial by ‘His Excellency’s” government. 

Another village group locates a journalist in Bézam who tells their story to a U.S. newspaper in the ‘Great City’ of the U.S.  This stimulates some Americans to form the “Restoration Movement” that gets them a bit of money from Pexton for their misery, while investigating the disappearance of the local men and subsequent jailings. 

The cheery side is that Thula eventually goes to the 'promised-land' in the U.S. to school, helped by the Restoration Movement. Mbue now lives in the U.S., so Thula could be based on the author.  In the story, especially Yaya’s, there are echoes of slavery snatchers, missionaries condemning everyone to hell, forced rubber labor on plantations – all echoes of colonialism.

Cameroon pipeline through jungle.  Familiar?

Thula discovers that the U.S. has its own problems with leaking oil pipelines, poisoned water and air and flooding due to carbon-based climate change.  She understands the problem is bigger than her village.  Even the Pexton laborers are dying or being injured, while other villages have ‘oil’ problems too.  She writes back to Kosawa that they should use sabotage against Pexton, thus countering the failed NGO reform perspective of the Restoration Movement.  She realizes the real problem is the government of ‘His Excellency,’ which allowed this all to happen. The book covers years of patience and impatience, the lies of Pexton and even the Restoration Movement, fruitless meetings, magic, the buying and using of guns, talk of a peaceful revolution, an endless lawsuit, all in the context of extraordinary naiveté by the villagers.

Eventually Thula declares a peaceful ‘Day of Liberation” against the dictatorial ‘His Excellency.’  Evidently there is only one activist village in a whole country, with a simple program of getting rid of the dictator and his corporate cronies, led by one childless woman.  This is more fictional than anything else.  This book is really a liberal story about people who try to do good, not actually a revolutionary novel.  It does show the bind people are in when dealing with a violent state, a useless legal system, a powerful and rich corporation.  Like so many middle-class books its true focus is the village family, though how much interest a reader might have in them is questionable.

Does the ‘revolution’ succeed?  Will Pexton and the government be brought to heel?  Or will the misery for Kosawa and the nation continue?  You can guess.

P.S. - 6/1/22 Guardian covers oil misery in Niger delta:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/jun/01/oil-pollution-spill-nigeria-shell-lawsuit

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Famished Road” (Okri); “Last Train to Zona Verde” (Theroux); “Black Panther,” “The Convert,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “Monsters of the Market”(McNally); “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Secret History of the American Empire” (Perkins); “Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom,” “The Race for What’s Left” (Klare); “Armed Madhouse” and “Vultures’ Picnic” (both by Palast); “Party’s Over” (Heinberg); “Oil” (Sinclair); “Tar Sands.”

And I bought it at May Day Books fiction section!

The Kultur Kommissar

May 24, 2022

Lawyers, lawyers everywhere ...

 “The Lincoln Lawyer” Meets “Goliath”

Streaming culture is beginning to congeal, as the drop in Netflix customers reflects.  Amazon and Netflix have huge amounts of mediocre entertainment in genres like crime, thriller, comedy, romances, sci-fi/fantasy and ‘dramas.’ This lack of quality is obvious to anyone with a subscription…or at least I hope it is.  The pandemic is also lessening, which is reducing time in front of the screen.  However another aspect is that successful streaming series are being duplicated in different forms – a common movie or TV method.   This may bore viewers, although perhaps I’m being too optimistic here. 

Car culture continues in court.

Take these two better lawyer series:  Goliath’s 4 streaming seasons were first on deck - now the Lincoln Lawyer borrows almost every aspect of Goliath in its first season.   Or at least that is the way it seems… 

To whit:

Both are set in Los Angeles and are about ‘edgy’ dissident lawyers – one who does torts against large corrupt corporations and the other a defense attorney who represents semi-innocent criminals or marginal violators. 

Both lawyers are intuitive and gutsy ‘geniuses’ in their field. 

Both attorneys have either an alcohol or a drug problem.

Both are divorced and have ex-wives they still ‘work’ with in odd ways.  They both have daughters who they are trying to reconcile with. (Problematic teenage daughters is a trope that extends into many crime shows…)

They both drive vintage cars – Goliath a convertible Mustang, the LL lawyer a vintage convertible Lincoln.  (He also has a Navigator© and a Town Car©.)

Both are closely assisted by attractive blondes – a sharp, real estate attorney and a diminutive go-getter who is thinking of going back to law school.  Both have a private investigator.  One is an old, experienced ex-lawyer living in a trailer like Rockford and the other is an ex-bike gang member who susses out the situation on his Harley.  Each lawyer has a conflicted ally in the FBI or police, naturally.  Both lawyers have helpful prostitutes they can call on, naturally.

They both get beat up occasionally and are threatened with death, naturally. Both frequently do their ‘officing’ out of the office – in a bar, in a car. 

Both show judges to be by turns upright citizens or crooked.  The same goes for cops.  The law is ultimately shown as fair, intricate and wonderful in its own way.  This is certainly not the experience of most.  In the end, sociopathic corporate criminals (the Goliaths), and sociopathic billionaires, the criminals - the real ‘bad guys’ - get theirs.    

The only apparent difference is that Billy Bob Thornton – our David – is a light-skinned gringo living in a shabby California-style motel room in Santa Monica while Manuel Garcia-Rulfo – the Lincoln Lawyer - is a light-skinned Latino living in the Hollywood Hills in a modern glass-view mansion.  Garcia-Rulfo is driven around in his Lincolns by a dark-skinned ex-junkie, while Billy Bob does his own Mustang driving.  The Lincoln lawyer lectures her about how he practices law, as befitting a 'legal drama' for the uninformed.  Billy Bob lectures no one. 

And … drum roll… both series were ‘created’ and written by David E. Kelly – who has done many legal TV shows starting with L.A. Law in 1986, and streaming series like Big Little Lies.

Lawyers - yay!

However …

The Lincoln Lawyer was a book first published in 2008 and a film in 2011 starring the doubtful Mathew McConaughey.  Goliath premiered in 2015 as a series.  So the first Lincoln Lawyer book and film might be the template for Goliath.  Only Kelly knows...  The Lincoln Lawyer premiered as a streaming series this year in 2022.  Both borrow from The Big Lebowski, Inherent Vice, Chinatown, LA noir and everything that came before.  The mystique of Los Angeles penetrates both series, much like movies set in New York used to do about that city, until New York exhausted itself and everyone else.  Yes, places are characters and LA is the star of both these shows. 

But now lawyers are the heroes, not PIs.  It seems the professional strata within the middle-class is having its cinematic day over the grubby, street-level PIs, as would be expected in a society enamored with its upper ranks.  The U.S. is also one of the most litigious societies on the globe due to the enormous amounts of money involved, as well as the inability to resolve contradictions any other way.  So the lawyers and their courts play the role of constant referee and judge. Lawyers are over-represented in Congress and politics, so they 'legislate' there too. In the Lincoln Lawyer the duty is to represent and 'win' for the guilty, which is the ostensible heart of the system.  Though as we know the overwhelming majority of proletarian criminal cases are pled-out and do not involve high-priced attorneys.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Goliath,” “Hollywood,” “Hail Cesar,” “A Time to Kill,” “Gray Mountain” and “The Appeal” (all 3 by Grisham); “The Trial Before the Trial” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Eric Holder,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops,” “Prison Strike,” “Los Angeles Stories” (Cooder); “The Latino Question,” “Camino Real,” “Three Days in the Jury Pool,” “In Praise of Barbarians” (Davis) "Professional Degrees in Democratic Party Politics," "With Liberty and Justice For Some" (Greenwald); "The Divide" (Taibbi) or the word ‘streaming.’ 

The Cultural Marxist

May 21, 2022

A Post-Technology World?

 “Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World” by Jonathan Crary, 2022

This is a train-full of quotes about the non-sustainable environmental nature of the internet matrix.  Then it flips over into familiar rhetoric about exploitative 24/7 time, terminal capitalism, the subverted role of science and the role of WWII in the triumph of U.S. technology and power – among other things.  It is written by a professor from Columbia in New York, who seems to be close to a form of anarcho-socialism.  He's inspired by utopian socialism, the 1960s counter-culture, workers' councils and multiple and various intellectuals.  In a 124 page book, he has 122 quotes, and that does not include the unquoted mentions, from Hannah Arendt to Simone Weil.

Crary has a familiar style – extravagant, ultimast language glorying in its own brilliance, pursuing a wandering argument.  I'm somewhat tired of this style, like every academic wants to be Zizek.  He denounces the internet, urbanism, corporate technology and science from a left point of view – but says almost nothing to explain what comes next.  Is the internet to be destroyed? Are cities to be dismantled?  Is technology and science to be ignored?  The Left is well-aware of the corporate/military misuse of technology and science. This is a tenured professor from New York City and seemingly is anti-technology too.  In his paeans to rurality he probably hasn't smelled manure in a life-time.

Finally on page 83, Crary says:  “...existing technical capabilities could be creatively redeployed by local and regional communities to meet human and environmental needs, rather than exclusively serving the requirements of capital and empire.”

Duh...

His main focus is on opposing techno-modernism and biocide. But there is also the usual psychological and cultural twist. He insists the internet complex is “the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory and social disintegration.”  It is introducing a world of homogenization at “the level of consciousness.”  This is how all propaganda systems work, but in this case ‘the medium really is the message’ because it now penetrates everything, unlike earlier attempts at totalizing systems. 

Of especial interest to Crary is the vast mining push worldwide, especially for 'rare' earths and not so rare ones – copper. This is the source of the title – Scorched Earth. This rush for minerals is now centered on 'green' technology – batteries, server farms, cables, satellites, solar panels and wind turbines, smart homes, electric vehicles, along with the massive electrical and cooling demands created by a 24/7 streaming internet.  None of this will be sustainable and is already leading to more environmental destruction, inter-capitalist competition and war. 

Largest Copper Mine in World in Peru

The 'good' and bloodiest capitalist war in history – WWII – was the moment when the U.S. version of carbon capitalism became ascendant worldwide, along with the development of the early military 'internet.'  This newest iteration – the 4^th Industrial Revolution / digital / green capitalism - ignores the destructive and primary role of the commodity in the capital system.  Like the folks at 350.Org regarding carbon, he wants to leave the minerals in the ground – unlike 350.Org.  However, Crary has no plan for what comes next if this is done.

Crary makes a plea for 'face to face' contact and human interaction, in place of the alienated and individualized methods of the internet. He has a bit about tech billionaires trying to forestall death with cryogenics, drugs and freezing.  But as Marx might say, death proves dialectics. Crary ends the book with an odd chapter on bio-metrics and its 'focus' on the eye and iris, as computers attempt to analyze the eye in order to quantify human behavior and psychology, in a further attempt to read and colonize the human psyche. 

Overall this book is a familiar one, and probably a waste of your time. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Secondhand Time” (Alexievich); “The New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “Value Chains,” “Bit Tyrants,” “The New New Thing” (Lewis); “Strategy of Deception” (Virilio); “The Race for What's Left” (Klare); “A People's Green New Deal,” “On Fire:  The Burning Case For a Green New Deal” (Klein); "Planet of the Humans," "Black Panther."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 18, 2022

Post-Crow

 The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives” by Adolph L. Reed, Jr., 2022

This is a genial remembrance of a youth spent in Jim Crow New Orleans and the Arkansas Delta and then times living and working in North Carolina after the fall of that legal system in the South.  It includes historical events of the day. Reed wanted to write before the actual memories and subtleties of his ‘boomer’ generation as that South fades into the history books.

Reed contradicts some easy anti-racist clichés in the process. He avoids jargon, theorizing and rhetoric and settles for simple stories. He insists that it is Jim Crow that impacts the ‘modern’ South more than slavery. He doesn’t believe that ‘The New Jim Crow’ is an accurate depiction of the situation for the whole African-American population now. He discusses passing – passant blanc as it was called in New Orleans - and its decreasing relevance, as well as its real non-moralistic, practical significance under Jim Crow. He opposes the idea that ‘races’ are real, biologic categories – a concept tied to eugenics. He approves of the removal of the memorials to the Confederacy and the White Leagues in New Orleans. He knocks the Black Panther Party’s unreal and ultra-left rhetoric, and also to a “doctrinaire sectarian group” organizing soldiers – probably RU/RCP. Reed discounts the triumph of a separate ‘black’ economy in the U.S. proffered by forces like the NOI or other black capitalists.

Reed notes the necessary link of white supremacy with exploitation. He views Jim Crow as an assault on working-class ‘whites,’ but in a different way. Finally, he says that race has become many times a stand-in for class in the South.

Reed grew up in a middle-class family below “the cotton curtain.” As a child he visited segregated cafes to get the wonderful French treat, a beignet or a great po’ boy sandwich. He discusses Jews and Italians in the context of the color line, along with white flight. He notes the disparate treatment middle-class ‘blacks’ are now given in the South, which was true even under Jim Crow. As a professional he is usually treated with respect by modern Southerners, even police, but he notes the signs of that old paternalistic, dominant attitude when it comes to proletarian African-Americans. In his old home town, New Orleans, a well-integrated elite now presides over one of the most unequal cities in the U.S. – again because of the continuation of color caste poverty.

Quotes:

Middle-class black professionals and businessmen “were better able than others to shield themselves from the both the everyday indignities and the atrocities of the Jim Crow world.”

“Continuity and change seem indistinguishably linked…”

“Abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism and most recently an eternal White Supremacy … tell us nothing about how the order operated, how its’ official and unofficial protocols organized people’s lives.”

Adolph Reed, Jr.

“News that eggplants, satsumas, Creole tomatoes, crayfish or mirlitons had appeared in markets announcing their season’s arrival was information much too vital to be blocked by the color line.”

Boss … “is a derivative of ‘baas,’ the Dutch term for master.”

Poverty… “was the point of the system, after all.”

Under Jim Crow Lumbee Indians … “Delta Chinese, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Arabs and South Asians commonly strove to distance themselves from identification as black.”

“Racial identity is willful or imposed, or both; it has no foundation outside of social experience.”

“Race has no biologic foundation.”

Huey P. Long’s brother remarked, related to the purity of the ‘white race’ – “it was possible to feed all the truly white people in south Louisiana off one plate of red beans and rice.”

He describes the neo-Confederates defending statues of P.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis in New Orleans as having “professional-wrestling-cum-Red-Dawn cosplay fantasies.”

“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites and to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas, as well as to suppress blacks.”

Regarding being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood: “…race is a visible shorthand for class.”

“Allegory may be rhetorically powerful, but it is not adequate as analysis or explanation.”

Segregation… “…wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power…”

“…the core of the Jim Crow system was a class system rooted in employment and production relations…” “…that victory (of the Civil Rights Movement) left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms, affirmed it.”

My only real beef with this wonderful book is that Reed gives credence to ‘race’ as a non-biologic category by repeatedly using the terms ‘bi-racial,’ ‘multi-racial’ etc. without quotes. He does make fun of the term ‘race relations’ but never comes to the conclusion that more scientifically accurate terms are called for, especially due to his assertion that race is a social construct. The U.S. government, the Census, identity politicians, many professors and every Tom, Dick and Harriet media person use it as a biologic fact referring to different humans.   

In 1950 the U.N. and the overwhelming majority of biologists and anthropologists declared that there was biologically only one race, the human race.  Multiple races are a reflection of early scientific racism in the U.S. pushed by those justifying slavery and Jim Crow.  Some attempted to create a taxonomy of human races, sometimes running into the 100s.  All nonsense. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Rising Tide – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927” “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Selma,” “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright); “In Search of the Blues,” “Tremé,” “How to Kill a City,” “Caste – the Origin of our Discontents” (Wilkerson); “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Sycamore Row”(Grisham); “Monroeville, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Slavery by Another Name” (Blackmon).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 14, 2022