Horatio Algerniski

 “The Lehman Trilogy” a play by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power, Guthrie Theater, 2024

This is the story of most of the history of Lehman Brothers, written by an Italian playwright from Firenze. Massini’s play is both an epic tale of inventiveness and hard work and how it all came to naught in 2008. The explanation of that failure is only sketched, involving the early, rapacious trading of a non-Lehman CEO, Lew Glucksman, which led to the firm’s sale to others and its later failure under Dick Fuld. The role of fraudulent, subprime mortgage bonds and credit default swaps is invisible, nor the drama behind the joint decision to tank Lehman. This is because this is really a family story of the original 3 Lehman brothers from Bavaria and their three sons, one of whom became a politician under Roosevelt. When the Lehman family members are dead and gone towards the end, the play loses interest in the firm.

The Brothers & Sons In Turmoil

This is not an anti-capitalist story unless you are already disposed to that view. It is not an expose of Lehman’s failures in 2008. In a way you are cheering for the brother’s success, which implies its own message. Every playgoer will see in it what they will.

The brothers Lehman - Henry (Heyum), Mayer and Emmanuel - first settled in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844 and created the firm name in 1850. Lehman Brothers started as a dry goods and textile store, then morphed into a cotton dealer and broker. Mayer owned 7 slaves and the firm expanded its reach, ultimately contracting with 24 slave plantations for cotton to send to the mills up north. Henry died and Emmanuel moved to New York to be closer to the main center of cotton trading in the city. The Civil War broke out in 1860 and their business was heavily damaged.

After the war Mayer followed his brother to New York and they both invest in the coffee trade, leaving cotton behind. Emmanuel’s son Philip points them to investing in railroads around the same time his father dies. Philip switched the firm from a commodities broker to a financial behemoth, specializing in IPOs and private investment trusts. From then on, under the leadership of Robert Lehman, son of Philip, they specialized in investing in ‘the new thing’ – tobacco, automobiles, oil, movies, military contracts, computers, then pure asset trading – i.e. money>money+. In a way it is the record of U.S. capitalism. Through all this they weathered the stock market crash of 1929, as Robert knew that if they did not join the first wave of bankruptcies, the government would step in. Robert was the last Lehman on the board, dying in 1969. After that the play gets bored with itself and speeds up.

That is the capsule. The play was adapted to use only three male actors in 2018. It is performed by them playing dozens of roles, changing their voice and a bit of clothing, addressing the audience, dying and being reborn as someone else. The cast performance is bravura, given the length of the play, size of the cast and the difficulty of playing so many people. The play lasts 3.5 hours, with two intermissions, so it is a bit of a slog and needs some editing.

The director thinks it is a history. As we know history is not just ‘history.’ It focuses on the Lehman’s Jewish roots in Bavaria where Henry’s father was a businessman, roots that were carried over to the ‘new’ world. In a way it is the Horatio Alger story of immigrants gaining wealth status, though ultimately ending in failure, unknown to the brothers and sons themselves. It reflects changes in U.S. capitalism from closed family firms to anodyne corporations, from mercantile capitalism to finance capitalism, from immigrant success stories to Americanized children, from small businesses to giant international firms, some too big to fail and some not. These developments are not news but they do reflect the increasing dominance of a huge system over individual gumption. The overall sweep and sadness of this play hint at something beyond that – that even gigantic human efforts in our short time on this planet are ultimately failures, as history and time march on. That is probably the humanist point Massini was trying to make.

The audience was mostly retired, with middle-aged people and a smattering of young people. The play is housed in the beautiful confines of the Wuertle thrust stage which does not have a bad seat. The set is simple and changed 3 times in minor ways, always featuring a carpet seemingly of cotton, torn ticker tape or snow. I can’t say much more than that.

The Cultural Marxist / October 16, 2014

Pirates of the Crooked Islands

 “Offshore – Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism” by Brooke Harrington, 2024

This is a book of reporting by a sociologist inspired by C. Wright Mills who joined the world of secretive offshore finance.  After being trained as a wealth manager, Harrington played the ‘dumb’ female outsider and interviewed wealth managers, a fisherman and a debt bounty hunter, who spilled the beans.  Harrington reveals the massive and corrupt nature of ‘offshore’ and onshore money bolt-holes.  Used by billionaires, corporations and millionaires, this archipelago of finance around the world allows them to evade taxes, legal process and publicity, launder money and bribes, and ensure wealth for generations to come. She notes that cash counting machines in the British Virgin Islands broke down due to the suitcases full of banknotes they were required to count, so that tells you something about their money-laundering abilities.

Not surprisingly, these bolt-holes also include Joe Biden’s Delaware, Christie Noem’s South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada and luxury real estate across the country.  The U.S. is now the #1 haven for hidden billions on the 2022 Financial Secrecy Index, not the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas or the British Virgin Islands. Obama rejected U.S. involvement in the Common Reporting Standards, which would have exposed the owners of many of these accounts.  The OECD and the EU Parliament have also failed to restrain these abuses so far.

Harrington is a pro-capitalist supporter of ‘free’ markets, so she is incensed that the big capitalists who use offshore accounts are getting away with financial murder.  By turns she calls this situation ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘zombie colonialism’ and old-guard ‘imperial’ behavior, believing we are generally in a ‘post-imperial’ period. As if capitalist oligarchs and their hangers-on wouldn’t use every method for wealth preservation at their disposal!  After all, the initial wealth comes from ‘on-shore’ – from capitalist exploitation, rent and attendant criminal fraud. Off-shore is just the tail end of the profit cycle. She quotes the Libertarian Hayek on the need for rules, honesty, fairness and transparency under capital.  So she feels this is not capitalism, this is ‘theft’ and ‘cheating.’  Then she condemns these offshore havens for being a Libertarian billionaire’s dream. This only confirms she’s a sociologist, not a political economist.

At any rate, let’s see what Harrington has discovered.  The key element in the development of these hiding places is British law and former colonial ‘Commonwealth’ locations and ‘free ports,’ as nearly all of the jurisdictions were originally U.K. linked. The U.K. encouraged their involvement in banking in order to get these mostly poor locations off the British dime.  Secrecy is their main ingredient, allowing shell companies, LLC’s, corporations and individual trusts to hide their ownership, making it very difficult to prosecute the account holders. The British passed the International Business Companies act, which allowed these entities to avoid public audits or bookkeeping too.  Most of them are no-tax or low tax locations to boot, also a U.K. colonial inheritance.  The other aspect is they are based on U.K. ‘common law,’ which allows countries to permit anything not yet forbidden.  Its other benefit is that common law allows an integration of finance across the planet.  Harrington notes that after the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers, which exposed hundreds of thousands of these underground accounts, only a few people were convicted of financial crimes. After all, what most were doing was still legal or impossible to prosecute.

Drone captures British Virgin Island from above

Harrington’s solution is to go after the ranks of wealth managers – tax advisors, private bankers, trustees - who make it possible for the rich to hide their money, and forbid them from working for tax havens.  Their organization is called the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. Exposure and shame is her second weapon. Some jurisdictions have tried this but it hasn’t put a real crimp in the system. She maintains that the 2008 collapse was caused by the failure of 2 hedge funds in the Caymans, so there is also a crisis danger within hidden, unregulated investment hordes. 

In 2022 economists’ estimated that $12T in household wealth was held in these secret accounts across the world.  It is estimated that $110B is lost in taxes per year, and another $500B taxes lost from corporations per year.  21% of rich U.S. citizen’s income goes unreported.  A list of the places that do business outside the U.S. are Nevis, Cyprus, the Cook Islands, the Caymans, Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Panama, Monaco, Jersey Island, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Malta and Gibraltar.  She mostly mentions right-wing billionaires using these lock-boxes – Russian capitalists, Nigerian dictators, Robert Mercer, Oleg Deripaska, Putin himself, Peter Thiel, Queen Elizabeth – some using the cash to fund right-wing candidates like Trump and LePen.  

Due to the lack of tax receipts in these cash-holes by the international monied set, the consequence is that the locals pay the taxes. The second thing that happens is that local democracy is thwarted in the interests of the holders of these secret accounts, resulting in a ‘captured state.’  The third thing that happens is that local crime actually increases due to the government-backed impunity of the rich. Rising inequality across the world is the fourth impact, as it solidifies generations of wealth through ‘perpetual trusts’ which live off of rent and investment income far into the future. This is something even Piketty did not – or could not - include in his books. Harrington especially investigates the social situations in the Cook Islands (‘Crook’ Islands christened by some), Mauritius, Panama and the British Virgin Islands to show how being a finance haven has affected the poverty and powerlessness of the locals and indigenous. Harrington calls this an extension of the ‘resource curse’ – it is the ‘finance curse.’  As part of this whistle-blowers, journalists and investigators have been intimidated, jailed, deported or in a case in Gibraltar, done away with.

Colonial theory might allow one to cheer on the looting of the metropolises by these tiny countries, but the benefits go to an international capitalist elite, not to the local working-class, farmers or small shop keepers.  This ‘revenge of the colonized’ is bogus. So what is the real solution?  Clearly the majority of capitalist politicians in hock to their owners will not put a significant dent in international rules around secrecy, money-laundering, estate perpetuity, tax avoidance or legal impunity.  The present capitalist legal system does not function on an international scale, though their economic system does.  So there is a contradiction here.  The capitalist nation-state is still their main operative political and legal vehicle and it is not possible that capital can escape that situation.  The nation-state has to be transcended by the international working-classes in practice, through political power on the local, then national, then international level, with the U.S. being one battleground. In these local jurisdictions some livelihoods are based on secret banking, so that will be a battle there too.  Harrington’s micro-reformist solution cannot grasp the width of the problem.  Blocking wealth advisors might help, but that will force part of the profession underground, as there is still ‘money to be made.’ 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wealth Hoarders,” “Ozark,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “Yesterday’s Man,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger” (Kuhn); “Black Sails,” “Trade Wars are Class Wars.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 13, 2024

Afro-Pessimist Art?

 “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

This is an art show at the Weisman Museum on the U of Minnesota campus that consists of 15 large-scale prints made by artist Kara Walker. The method is to silkscreen dark, contorted and clichéd figures over the original woodcut prints done by Harper’s Magazine.  Walker has created ‘annotated’ contrasting pieces trying to make a point about the racism of the Union armies for the most part, at least according to the texts accompanying the works. It is difficult to understand the what the picture is about without the text.

Kara Walker - 'Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta'

Along with them are original reproductions of works by Winslow Homer, who depicted the war in painstaking detail through precise black and white drawings of Union and some Confederate soldiers in battle and behind the lines.

The printed descriptions next to the works are Afro-pessimist, intentionally ignoring the key thrust of the Civil War.  Were there northern soldiers who were racist?  Were there depredations of escaping slaves?  Did some profit off cotton trading?  All yes.  What it ignores are the 186,097 black men in the Union army.  What it ignores is the Emancipation Proclamation.  What it ignores is ’40 acres and a mule’ promulgated by Sherman, African-American leaders and abolitionist generals in Savannah.  What it ignores is the key role freedmen and women played in helping Union armies behind the lines, bolstering the war effort.  What it ignores is the steady stream of escaping slaves that went to Union lines or followed the armies.  What it ignores is the ‘white’ soldiers and ‘black’ soldiers who, in practice, smashed slavery, and were injured or died for it.  The absence of context undermines this artistic critique and makes it ring false. 

The Text

The text accompanying the prints makes incorrect or misleading statements about the War.

*One text alleged that union officers “re-enslaved” escaping freedmen.  It thinks the word ‘contraband’ means this.  This purposely misunderstands the term ‘contraband’ – an early legal formulation that allowed Union armies not to return slaves to plantation owners.

*Sherman’s March to the Sea is described as ‘infamous’ – sounding like a Confederate description.

*Union armies in Louisiana seized already picked cotton and sold it in order to fund the war effort.  The text implies that this was just the continuation of slavery.

*The text claims that many African-American women were raped by Union soldiers.  No citations, of course.  Sherman, for instance, made it a point to heavily punish any soldier who raped anyone.  That was U.S. military policy across the board.

*The text highlights several Southern cities that caught fire or were burned… echoing Lost Cause grievances.

*The text maintains there is one ‘dominant’ narrative about the Civil War.  Actually there are two main narratives – one of which contends the Confederacy was a fight for states’ rights, not for slavery.

The impact of the text is something a neo-Confederate might cradle to his heart. This is odd considering the artist is an anti-racist and should appreciate context. Her point is to illustrate the added effects the war had on African Americans.  The text was probably prepared by either the New Britain Museum of American Art or The Museum Box, who originated the show.  There is no attribution as to who wrote the text, though it could also have been Walker.  Ameriprise Financial was one of the sponsors of the show, along with the HRK Foundation and the KHR McNeely Family Fund. This show continues until December 29, 2024.

The Weisman has other art, including left-wing works by the WPA, several pictures by modernist Marsden Hartley, the weird sound-hotel installation and some by other African-American artists.  An outstanding series is one of paintings of missing parents, children, wives and husbands sold into slavery, based on ads in St. Paul’s “The Appeal’ looking for them after the end of the Civil War.  The Weisman is free and open Wednesday-Sunday.  Its flying silver exterior was designed by Frank Ghery and it’s on the East Bank of the Mississippi River on Washington Avenue. 

Prior blogspot reviews, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” “Art Museum,” “Sherman.”

The Cultural Marxist / October 10, 2024

Martial Law

 “The Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, 2023

This is a fiction story about martial law in Ireland, mostly in Dublin.  It’s not exactly political, as there is no identified class behind the crack-down on unions, draft objectors, disloyal employees and protesters.  There are evidently right-wing ‘Party’ men from the National Alliance who have taken over the government and the Oireachtas Eireann (the parliament) lock, stock and gun barrel.  There is no other organized forces evident except a large teacher’s union, which is quickly cowed. The Irish courts, the schools, the secret police, the media, the military, the corporations – all march to the National Alliance Party’s jail-house drummer. But a vague insurrection is happening as a response, led by southern rebels coming closer to Dublin.   

At the center is a family story, of course, of a mother, Eilish, trying to hold together her 4 children, elderly father and husband in the middle of this evolving whirlpool.  It is similar to many movies about middle-class suburbanites whose whole world disintegrates after a disaster, a plague, a war, a monster, a murder.  She loses her Ph.D biology job and passport, she is shunned at the butcher, there are food and power shortages, police and military road blocks and curfews, thugs attack her car and house, her union husband is disappeared and her 17- year old son joins the resistance.  All the while she keeps thinking ‘all this will pass.’ Her addled, elderly father actually understands what is going on better than her.  She is most intent on protecting ‘normality’ and her children and there’s the rub.   

A word about the writing style.  It is almost unreadable.  There are no paragraphs but plenty of long, run-on sentences.  Dialog and description are not separated by anything so you can get lost in the text. There are attempts at lyrical passages, but their flow is disjointed and pretentious. The third person view focuses on the emotions of the mother and it’s endless. The writer poses as the brooding genius on the back cover, enjoying his Booker Prize.  But the format is no match for the story as it is.  A hint of this is in the very title Prophet Song, fronted by a quote from Ecclesiastes about ‘nothing new under the sun.’ Lynch is no Dublin Joyce, so there is that too.

As a factual story about martial law, an emergency regime or a right-wing coup, the book is excellent, as it shows what happens on a developing granular, personal level. What is left of the family hides in their house while the battles edge closer until the rebels arrive, evidently victorious.  Her suburbia returns to semi-normality, like some surreal storm has passed and it’s just a matter of clean-up and bicycles.  Eilish then tells her father that the rebels are “just as bad as the regime” so the book shows her having no clue about politics whatsoever. In a sense this is the saga of an apolitical middle-class woman - an irritating viewpoint at best.  Perhaps this is the intended demographic for this book?

The government counter-attacks with bombs and shelling of the city while the rebels pull back.  Eilish has chosen not to escape to Toronto, Canada where her sister lives with the rest of her family by using forged passports, as she is still expecting her husband and son to return.  That is her mistake. The two sides split the city and even their home is no longer safe.  They live in the developing ruins, as Dublin becomes Gaza. Eventually what remains of the family become vulnerable refugees crossing the Northern Ireland / English border and the Irish Sea, as conditions outside Ireland have oddly remained the same.

Evidently the Biblical ‘prophet’s song’ is about coming death or destruction for individual humans while the world still turns.  Deep stuff, that.  A book that hides history, politics, organization, social struggle and more, it fits the profile of aesthetic and dystopian family books.  If this sounds like your cup of Irish tea, drink up.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Ireland,” “American War” (Akkad); “Civil War” (Garland); “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “James Joyce,” “New Order / Nuevo Orden” “Democracy in Chains,” “How It Ends” (Rosenthal); “No Nobels,” “Polar Star” (MC Smith);”Parable of the Sower” (Butler). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 7, 2024   

Death to the Turds!

 “SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas (1967); Forward by Michelle Tea; Afterword by Freddie Bauer (2013)

This milestone of anarcho-feminism, performance writing, anger and humor has been a steady seller for years.  It is a reflection of a brutalized life of a woman who was subjected to sexual and physical abuse by fathers and step-fathers and left Catholic school at 15.  She lived on the streets, became a prostitute, a lesbian and an asexual, got rejected by Andy Warhol, was incarcerated, spent time in several mental institutions and eventually died of drug addiction complications.  Earlier she had attended the University of Minnesota, doing graduate work in psychology!  Yeah...  Some have compared the Manifesto to Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” for its over-the-top suggestions about how to rein in male chauvinism and men themselves.

First It was a Handout

SCUM stands for 'Society for Cutting Up Men.”  It's not a real organization of course, just a state of mind.  She claimed it wasn’t her, though she attempted to kill 3 men with her semi-auto .32, including Warhol, basically over a contract dispute.  At the time she was a minor cultural celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village – being interviewed in the Village Voice, by a local TV Talk show, given money by a publisher for her writing, penning several porn novels, performing in two Warhol films and demanding money for a script she wrote, ‘Up Your Ass,’ from Warhol.  He had lost the script and there was no other copy.  Eventually after getting out of prison after the shootings, she demanded $20K and more movie roles from Warhol, and for him to get her on Johnny Carson.  Essentially she was a failed cultural careerist, an attention-seeking individual with a unique niche she tried to exploit.  I say this to put the material foundation of her life in perspective.

You might call her a lumpen-feminist, an extreme lesbian-feminist, but she also had an anarchist side.  She called for an end to the money-work economy, full and instant automation to free women, an end to censorship, multiple work sabotage strategies, the overthrow of the government and a ‘women’s strike’ of sorts separating them from men, as men have turned the world into a ‘shitpile.’  SCUM had a criminal outlook, not a civil disobedience outlook according to her.  She especially disliked men who were in advertising, the military, corporate CEOs, ‘great’ artists, politicians, religious leaders, landlords, psychologists and so on.  The ‘feminist’ side of Solanas advocated a ‘SCUM Auxiliary’ for men who agreed with SCUM and would grovel at women’s feet.  She said that suicide centers would be established for men to kill themselves.  She advocated individual terror – to “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM,” using stealth and silent murder.  Remaining men after the purge would become slaves to women. Later artificial sperm banks would replace men, and only women would be born from then on, while babies and death would also eventually be abolished.    

In the SCUM Manifesto, men were boring, half-dead, sex-crazed incomplete females with ‘pussy envy.’  Yet if you think she liked women, think again.  Against the SCUM women who were “dominant, secure. self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females” who were ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ were the “Daddy’s Girls” – de-brained female assholes who were passive and insecure.  Her words, not mine.  She hated most women too. 

As is clear, every radical progressive movement also expresses morbid symptoms.  Solanas reflects in her fun-house mirror the women’s strike against war in the play Lysistrata; the right of women’s self-defense against rapists and killers; reversing Freud’s absurd idea of penis envy; anti-capitalism and women’s abused and exploited role in societies across the world.  She even parodied AA sessions.  Instead of saying, “I’m Dave and I’m an alcoholic” she would have self-criticism sessions saying “I’m a man and I am a turd.”  

Yet the real impact of this Manifesto is sadness for almost any reader. You can kinda laugh at the dark humor, but ultimately it’s more a reflection on what sexual abuse and violent trauma can do to a person, especially a young woman.  Certainly in the 1960s male chauvinism was legally well insulated and protected by capitalist society, yet the 1950s ‘male head of household’ ideology was beginning to crumble too. This Manifesto is a weird reflection of that period.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Marxism and Women’s Liberation,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” and “Red Valkyries” (both by Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.” 

 And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 4, 2024

A Martyr for Socialism

 “Rosa Luxemburg – the Incendiary Spark,” by Michael Lowy, 2024

This is an excellent look at the political activities of Rosa Luxemburg, concentrating on her ideas as they relate to historical events.  Lowy, though not explicitly, tries to make a case that there is a ‘Luxemburgist’ perspective.  Because of the complex intertwining of errors and brilliance in her thought, that prospect seems difficult. But many of her ideas are now routine among Marxists.

Luxemburg was formed by the tumultuous experiences of the increasingly bureaucratized Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a deep understanding of colonialism and the First World War, the Bolshevik victory in 1917 Russia and the revolutionary wave in Germany which involved the 1919 Spartacus League insurrection.  She was executed by the Freicorps on orders of the SPD government for her role in that insurrection, which involved strikes, the formation of workers’ councils and a Bavarian Soviet.     

Lowy highlights the important contributions or highlights she made to Marxist theory and practice. 

    1. “Primitive accumulation” by capital continues to this day.

    2. “Primitive communism’ and indigenous struggle can aid any struggle for modern communism, linking two periods of history.

    3. Opposition to ‘socialism from above.’

    4. An outlook of ‘socialist democracy’ as essential to the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of a party, a revolutionary elite, a central committee or a leader.

    5. The most important idea she first clearly promulgated, based on Engels and the Communist Manifesto, is that socialism is not inevitable.  This was expressed in the Junius Pamphlet in 1915 as ‘socialism or barbarism.’  One aspect of barbarism is a world war.  Lowy said this was “a true turn in the history of Marxist thought.”

6. Marxism is a theory of praxis – practice, consciousness, organization and action.  No ‘crisis’ or automatic process can create a social revolution.

7. Revolutionary consciousness comes out of the proletariat’s experience.

8. The mass strike is a transitional method.

9. “Parliamentary cretinism” – in other words an exclusive strategy of winning a majority in Congress - will lead to pure reformism.

10.     She supported workers councils as opposed to the ‘democracy’ of a bourgeois parliament. The former are far more democratic.

11.     A completely hostile attitude towards nationalism and militarism, along with colonialism and imperialism, support of which she saw as ‘social patriotism.’ 

12.     She supported the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin and Trotsky's leadership.

Luxemburg had problems with the Bolsheviks however, as she opposed both the ‘right of self-determination of nations’ and ‘land to the tiller.’  This hints at a somewhat ultra-left tack, ignoring the support of the peasants or national minorities in the success of any revolution. Lowy points out that she even ignored the anti-Semitism question, though she was born Jewish.  She also opposed the dispersal of the out-of-date Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks at first, but later came to understand that soviets were a better democratic answer. 

Luxemburg’s main beef with Lenin was that she intuited that the Leninist form of a party could become a dictatorship in itself. That is what actually happened after the ruin of the Civil War and the isolation of the revolution.  This is similar to the young Trotsky’s opinion until he joined the Bolshevik party.  Against Stalin, he eventually called for a ‘workers’ democracy’ that would block counter-revolutionary and bourgeois political forces but allow all proletarian, peasant and radical forces.  

Luxemburg supported, after the revolution, ‘general elections, freedom of the press and assembly, a free exchange of opinions’ as her form of workers’ rule, otherwise “only the bureaucracy remains the active element.”  She had seen this in the German SPD in a pre-revolutionary form.     

Luxemburg’s idea of ‘spontaneity’ is that organizations would form in the context of the struggle.  However in actual practice the Spartacus League was a mini-Bolshevik Party, born out of the SPD’s long history.  The Spartacists did not call for a Constituent Assembly or bourgeois-democratic rights, and even she recognized the difficulty in Russia in 1918 of doing this.  Obviously class organization, the historical conjuncture, democracy and proletarian spontaneity are intertwined.

The West Advocates Drugs in the Chinese Opium Wars

Against Colonialism

Luxemburg paid special attention to the old agrarian communist patterns that still existed around the world or in history that she knew about – Incan communism in Peru; the German ‘mark,’ the Russian ‘mir,’ American Indian communal villages, Algerian collectives, African ‘kabyls’ / kebelles and Hindu communes. She called this ‘the natural economy,’ ‘ancient economic organization’ and ‘communist village communities.’  The German SPD instead said that colonialism helped ‘create jobs.’  Where have we heard this before?  She shares this attitude towards indigenous collectivity with Marxist thinkers like Mariátegui in Peru. She saw colonialism and imperialism as crushing any of these forms through private property and military force, dispossessing the indigenous from land, animals and water, trying to turn them into workers, slaves or migrants. 

In this context, Luxemburg wrote against the Opium War in China, colonialism in Madagascar, the Antilles, India, South-West Africa and the Philippines, proving herself a hard opponent of capital’s expansion.  Her economic analysis led her to conclude that eventually this expansion would reach its limits, severely damaging capital in the process. Is that happening now?

Luxemburg and Her Comrades

In the last parts of the book Lowy discusses Luxemburg’s ideas and those of Georges Haupt, an expert on the Second International; Leon Trotsky and Gyorgy Lukács.  He also compares her outlook to SPD revisionists like Bernstein and Kautsky. Haupt noted, as did Luxemburg, that some struggles for ‘national self-determination’ were ridiculous, yet she combined Poland’s struggle for self-determination with Alsace-Lorraine’s and Bohemia’s as all ‘petit-bourgeois radicalism.’  In her debates inside the SPD, she examined the leadership’s fondness for parliamentism, but also their support of positivism, scientism, rationalism, Darwinist evolutionism and neo-Kantism.    

Lowy compares Luxemburg and Trotsky’s opposition to the two different kinds of Party bureaucratism that they encountered – before and after a revolution.  He also points out that both had premonitions of what could happen to a Leninist Party.  Both were murdered by their political opponents for these insights. Luxemburg proposed the strategy of “the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry” at the 1909 RSDLP convention in London, which was endorsed.  Later Lenin temporarily came up with an odd form of it, “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”  Stalin accused Luxemburg of supporting the permanent revolution in 1931, just as Lenin was accused of Trotskyism by Kamenev in April 1917.  Both Luxemburg and Trotsky worked together at times, with Trotsky later defending Luxemburg over Stalin’s lie that she had not broken with Kautsky soon enough. 

Lukács was inspired by Luxemburg in his ‘road to Marx’ according to Lowy. Later he developed differences over the Party issue, and sometimes combined both Leninist and Luxemburg perspectives. He was especially struck by the idea that unlimited capitalist accumulation was impossible.  Both held ideas about the inevitability of socialism based on the line of the SPD, which believed in passively waiting for the fall.  Both later rejected that perspective, acknowledging the role of politics and revolutionary will.  He wrote the introduction to her pamphlet Mass Strikes published in 1906 in Hungarian and discussed her in parts of his book History and Class Consciousness (reviewed below). Much of the discussion revolves around a failed KPD insurrection in March 1921, though Lukács could have said much more about the Budapest and Hungarian Commune of 1919 that he participated in.

Lastly is Lowy’s analysis of Luxemburg’s criticisms of Bernstein and Kautsky.  Bernstein favored ‘ethical socialism’ much like the social-democrats of today.  They believed that there was a firm line between Marxism and the social sciences, as the latter were ‘objective’ while the former is a class ideology.  Neither side wanted to address issues like cosmology or nature – the hard sciences - though Lenin, Marx and Engels had. Luxemburg said nothing on environmentalism, for instance. Kautsky claimed that the “materialist conception of history is in no way linked to the proletariat.” (!)  The social-democratic idea of ‘scientism’ is that science always rises above all ideology or social pressures.  They argued for an abstract morality that had no relation to economics or class society.  They believed in socialism being the end point of an evolution, much like Darwinism as applied to nature.

All of this was not really Marxism, materialism or dialectics, even though they wrapped themselves in that banner. Regarding history, Marx and Luxemburg both recognized that class struggle would be an outmoded form of thinking upon the arrival of communism. But they also applied this to capital’s historicity, taking the long view that it too could end.  After all, as Luxemburg pointed out, the regressive Catholic ‘dark ages’ finally ended too.  Though a new dark ages is also possible, as she made quite clear.

All in all an invigorating read and only 132 pages that will give you a real insight into Luxemburg’s ideas and actions and how they relate to today. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács): “All Power to the Councils!” “Radek,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “A Socialist Defector,” “The Brown Plague” (Guerin); “Fighting Fascism” (Zetkin); “Living in the End Times’ (Zizek); “Hothouse Utopia,” “Socialism or Barbarism” (Mésáros); “Red Valkyries” (Ghodsee), “The German Communist Resistance," "An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui," "In the Red Corner." 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 30, 2024       

 

The Radical Liberals Are Coming!

 “A How-To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism – A Tribute to Michael Brooks” by Matthew McManus, 2023

If you don't know what 'cosmopolitan' socialism is or who Michael Brooks is, join the club.  There is a review of Brooks' book “Against the Web” on this blog down below.  The book is a product of podcasting polemics against right-wingers.  Among other things, Brooks was against hyper-woke capitalist nonsense, which he called 'militant particularism.'  He also used the phrase 'cosmopolitan socialism.’  The word “cosmopolitan” sounds suspiciously upscale in this context, even though the Greek root is “cosmos” meaning the world, universe or cosmos and 'polites' means the urban citizen.  Almost literally it means 'citizens of the world.'  It is another name for internationalism and I'm not sure why McManus or this group of DSA'ers favors it.  Too many Cosmos?

In spite of the title, three-quarters of the book is a history of internationalism among various writers and bits of history, usually in the context of attempts at international laws or ethics.  There is no 'how-to' in these pages.  The last quarter is ostensibly about how to try to apply internationalism in the present situation.  It's how to 'think globally ...while acting locally,' which is such a tired and limited cliché I'm sorry to even repeat it. “Cosmopolitan socialism ... seeks to empower and democratize many of the international institutions developed in partnership with liberal internationalists, while moving them in a progressive direction.”  That means the U.N., the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the EU and others.  This looks like a social-democratic project similar to their plan to slowly take over the U.S. government, a Reverse Project 2025.

The Philosophers Speak

First the history.  McManus traces the idea of cosmopolitanism from the Greek philosopher Diogenes, the Roman Stoic Seneca and politician Cicero, the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka and the 'just war' theories of the Catholic philosopher St. Augustine.  All of them realized that a polity shouldn't be able to do anything it wanted in regards to outsiders, enemies and the rest, as all had a shared humanity. Toleration, compassion and dialog with 'outsiders' was preferred to butchery.  Augustine went further and tried to define a just war, as opposed to an unjust one.  This is the beginning of international law.  Whether all these people were hypocrites or not is not the issue, though McManus points out they failed to follow their own precepts at times. After all the Roman republic and empire both believed they were bringing civilization to the barbarians, an idea similar to early colonialists infused with Catholicism and Protestantism.  That was their ‘internationalism.’  Now we have 'humanitarian interventions' based on the same logic.

This cosmopolitanism is attempting to be humanist and universal, which McManus thinks leads it towards socialism … and liberalism.  He discusses the liberalism of Grotius, Hobbes and Locke.  Grotius fought for religious toleration and Hobbes insisted on a strong national state to restrain the population's 'nasty and brutish' lives.  Locke perfected the doctrine of 'possessive individualism,' i.e. protecting the property fruits of an individual's labor as the role for the state. All these liberals rationalized the development of capitalist society and the nation-state out of feudalism.  Immanuel Kant went a step further and denied that reason could ever understand the universe, 'God's will' or the meaning of existence.  Kant wrote in 1795 that Hobbesian states would still war against each other, moving the 'ware of all against all' up a notch.  Kant advocated republics, a federation of states and the elimination of armies and warfare for a 'perpetual peace.'  He backed refugee rights and became more critical of colonialism.  McManus christens this internationalism the beginnings of 'democratic peace theory' - whatever that is.

This method was not really followed until after World War II when Nuremberg, the U.N. and its various declarations, along with the world-wide anti-fascist struggle, the mass anti-colonial battles and socialist internationalism, broke the exclusive hold of the capitalist nation-state as the sole legal framework.  McManus cites the 1948 Genocide Convention; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the 1960s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

McManus recognizes that imperialism was the method used by some of these 'cosmopolitans.' The military side of this continues to this day – an invasion of Ukraine; a genocidal attack on Gaza and now Lebanon; a fueled conflict in Sudan; the repeated use of military attacks across national borders.  Libertarianism was another response.  It arose to combat state-led development in the 'third' world, the USSR and its allies, social-democratic welfare state practices in Europe and 'big government' in any country, especially world-wide.  Its first experiment was the bloody coup in Chile.  This developed into neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, the twins of bourgeois international policy.  The international 'war on terror' and 'clash of civilizations' is still going on, but now has turtled back into regressive nationalism given war, immigration, environmental damage, pogroms and starvation. McManus calls this 'post-modern conservatism and nationalism.' International institutions have become the target again, and are oft ignored... much as the John Birch Society once crusaded against the 'One World Govt' of the U.N. The situation in Gaza is indicative, as is the undemocratic structure of the Security Council.  What are the prospects of 'cosmopolitanism' now?

U.N. Security Council - Veto This!

How To?

I'll repeat that McManus wants to gradually takeover international institutions as his key 'how to.'  He does not explain how that would be done. He also embraces Brooks' position against 'essentialism' – i.e. against hyper-identity politics and separate struggle perspectives which break the needed unity against capital.  In that vein McManus includes class as another identity, vociferously attacking those Marxists who think it heavily influences each identity's role in social and class life - so he gets to have it both ways.  Brooks' hero was Cornel West, a “Christian revolutionary intellectual,” who is now running as a candidate for president alone.

McManus repeatedly links 'radical liberals' and 'emergent socialists' as twins in his text, which reflects his social-democratic organizational outlook. J.S. Mill even gets to be called a “often-praiseworthy liberal socialist”!  In his summation McManus excoriates some Marxists for being too hostile to liberal ideology.  I guess the Marxists are waiting for the liberals to stop red-baiting and drop their anti-communism... which isn't going to happen. McManus sees that reform demands sometimes overlap between the Left and liberals, yet misses the class interest at bottom of each perspective. 'Radical' liberals may break from capital, but that is not the question here.

McManus criticizes some Marxists for being 'teleological Marxists' … without naming names or using quotes, failing to prove these people actually exist. (And 'teleological'? Could you come up with a more abstract nomenclature?) This analysis is part of 'eschewing elements of the Marxist tradition.'  Another thing to get rid of is 'class reductionism' - and again, no names, no quotes, nothing.  Another thing to 'chuck'?  “Marx's theory of history” which he interprets as guaranteeing a socialist outcome, a rather odd conclusion.  As if all Marxists were Karl Kautsky!  Another is vanguardism, i.e. probably Lenin's concept of a revolutionary party and not its butchered variants.  Again, no names, no quotes, nothing.  Another is some Marxists' dereliction of 'morality,' and his wish to return to 'equal moral worth' as a standard – as if being for the elimination of classes and social equality doesn't already guarantee that.  Here McManus just echoes Bernstein's attack on class struggle as key to socialism. He also wants to link to liberal Christians and the “spiritual side of human nature” - also left undefined.  Ah, our morals and theirs. Yet he reverts to political economy by wanting “global material conditions” to make it easier to recognize the equal worth of all humans.  I guess it's not all about identity.

McManus doesn't directly come out against other aspects of Marxism with more vague allegations, but he certainly could.  His conception quite clearly leads to the gradual conquest of the capitalist state, transforming it towards a gentle kind of semi-socialism.  The implication is that the whole world can slowly become Norway.  This has been the strategy of social-democracy since it began as a separate tendency in its bid to construct a capitalism with a human face.

McManus' unnamed targets are a large collection of world-wide Marxist intellectuals, academics and Marxist organizations who resist, or have resisted, reformism.  He ignores international Marxist groups and labor internationals that try to make labor internationalism concrete. He ignores the social gains of prior socialist revolutions. He doesn't even mention other international formations like the World Social Forum or the 'New International.'  His only focus is on existing trans-national institutions. Hence the need to rechristen internationalism, with its hint of Marxism, as cosmopolitanism. 

DSA here has a large stable of podcasters, writers, academics, publications and organizations.  McManus is part of this intellectual ecosystem. McManus himself has published on 'liberal socialism' and is a lecturer at the U of Michigan.  DSA has become a semi-acceptable form of pick-and-choose buffet Marxism, which allows them to get close to liberal ecosystems of power like the Democratic Party.  Given the conservatism and anti-communism embedded in U.S. culture and politics, this gives them breathing space and room to maneuver a bit. Within DSA there are working class and more radical tendencies, so there is that. I actually give plaudits to their efforts, along with Sanders, as they are clearing the way for even more radical forces.  The failed long march of their predecessor, DSOC, through the Democratic Party resulted in their host's turn to neo-liberalism.  Where will this long march end?  Certainly not with actual cosmopolitanism - perhaps only to increased drinking.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Against the Web” (Brooks); “Jacobin,” “Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism” (Harvey); “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social-Democracy,” “The Democrats – A Critical History” (Selfa); “Bernie Sanders,” “The Panthers Can't Save Us Now” (Johnson).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 27, 2024

The Dreaded Food Question

 “You Are What You Eat” a documentary by Louis Psihoyos, 2024

This documentary is ostensibly about an identical twins-study of 21 pairs of twins on two diets – an omnivore diet and a vegan diet. Both are to be accompanied by a robust exercise routine and are normally healthy people in their 20s-40s. The highlighted twins in the documentary are two somewhat overweight Filipino women, two young, in-shape African-American men; two chubby South-African women and two tall Euro-American male cheese eaters. The 8 are all subjected to very detailed before-and-after tests of their blood, body mass, fat locations, mental acuity, microbiome, biological age and for the women, sexual arousal.

What is most emotionally telling is that each twin who was assigned to eat vegan food felt like they were being punished. One high-school boy in an interview said it best – “I just like to eat what tastes good.” He reflects what the majority thinks, even though tastes change, what tastes good can be toxic, while some foods are addictive such as the ‘high’ linked to cheese.

But the documentary is also an advertisement for veganism and vegan businesses, hosting plant-based meat companies like Impossible; cheese and butter substitute companies like Miyokos and starter plant-based meat businesses hot-housed at UC Berkeley. It features anti-CAFO and anti-farm raised fish and anti-industrial fishing advocates, along with testimonials by Eric Adams and Cory Booker. It visits Detroit vegetable farmers who have changed that city, along with a former North Carolina chicken grower who is now a mushroom farmer. One sequence is the fraught conversion of a top NYC restaurant Eleven Madison Park to vegan food, which regained its 3 Michelin stars eventually, though after a barrage of hostility. The documentary shows common fecal contamination of chicken; interviews with scientists, environmentalists, health advocates, vegan athletes and bodybuilders - and lots of negative information about cows. Every burger you eat kills a tree in the Amazon!

One of the most startling claims is that African-Americans are the biggest growth group for veganism in the U.S. This is perhaps because of the dire legacy of poverty, food deserts, fast food and unhealthy versions of ‘soul’ food in that community.

The documentary was attacked for making too-broad or vague claims and for being funded by vegans, so there is that. Much of the attacks were centered on the health claims, not the environmental, animal or social claims. This documentary was based on a Stanford University Medicine study. Opponents seem to confuse the Stanford study with the one in the documentary, which is more extensive for just these 4 couples, though the documentary includes both. At least that is how I saw it, but the extra tests might have applied to everyone. At the end it is surprising to see an auditorium full of 21 twins, while the results are read out. Obviously this kind of thing is controversial in the present food empire controlled by unsustainable corporate agriculture, a captured USDA and fast food / ultra-high processed food (UPF) dominance.

The study lasted for only 8 weeks: for the first 4 weeks the food was provided, for the second 4 the participants chose the food for their diet. Nor is one study deliberative. The other issue is that the omnivore diet provided was healthier than many real ones.

Scientists who have looked at the results in the Stanford study confirm that the LDL bad cholesterol did go down for vegans, as did weight levels and fasting insulin levels. The documentary itself reported – I think just for their sample? - that mental acuity did not change. For the vegans bad cholesterol LDL and TMAO (inflammation) levels dropped, while the microbiome improved, biological age dropped and sexual response was way up. Regarding fat and muscle, ‘bad fat’ around the organs went down for vegans, which is good, but so did overall muscle, which is not good. The 8 individual participants all reduced the amount of red meat, cheese and animal products in their diet after the study.

Welcome to the Farm

Substitutes for Meat and Dairy

It is clear more twin’s studies are needed. Nearly every larger study not based on twins according to science advocates like YouTuber Mic the Vegan, shows that vegan diets are healthier in almost every aspect. Vegans have to take B12 supplements daily, along with possible needs for other minerals like zinc, iron or vegan algae Omega, based on exactly what kind of vegan diet is being pursued. Yet as the documentary points out, the food issue is not limited to individual health by any means.

Mic reports that millions in corporate money is flowing into non-animal food production. Biological bio-mass creation of edible proteins, fats and vitamins, called precision fermentation using microbes, could replace animal sources. Insulin, formerly from animal sources, is now produced through precise fermentation. Rennet for cheese is now made from this fermentation, when originally it was directly from animals too. Honey, silk, palm oil, ice cream, whey and casein are now also being produced this way. Precision fermentation uses far less water, energy, drugs, chemicals and insecticides for all of these products, while having a minimal impact on the environment, such as no shit lagoons, slaughter houses, CAFOs, deforestation or methane-burping cows. Production facilities look like brewpubs or breweries full of large, stainless steel vats. These vats seem to be the solar panels, batteries and wind energy of the food future. Cultivated meat and fermented foods like these could replace the dairy and meat industries in 10 years according to him, so the Big Ag lobbies are going bonkers. Of course, there is no plan for a just transition, as this is still capitalism. (Source: Mic the Vegan - Fermentation)

Mic the Vegan has covered the follow-up to this Twins study, which was even more detailed, especially on epigenetic biological age. Epigenetic means that gene effects can be altered based in environmental influences. Biology is not always destiny: Twins FU - Mic

Prior blogspot reviews, use blog search box, upper left, to search our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Vegan Freak,” “The September 21 March and Actions in USA on the Environment,” “Hunger,” “The Potlikker Papers,” “John Oliver – Meatpacking,” “The Playbook,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Seaspiracy,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk.”

The Cultural Marxist / September 24, 2024