College-Library Browsing #18: The Problem of ‘Stability’

 “Marxism – Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?” by Paul Mattick, 1978/1983

That title got your attention.  He actually answers ‘no.’  Mattick is not a professor, but was a life-long activist in the labor and Marxist movement.  As a youth he was a member of the Spartacus League in Germany, played a role in the 1919 German revolution, joined the KPD/KAPD and was involved in the 1923 German revolution and the fight against the Kapp putsch.  He then emigrated to the U.S. and joined several Marxist formations, then the IWW – even speaking at Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club – and evolved into a council communist.   He later wrote works critical of both Keynes and Marcuse from the left.

I’m only going to look at the last chapter of the book, as the rest is overly familiar and a bit rhetorical.  Mattick held to the ‘state-capitalist’ theory about the Soviet Union and China, insisting that a state-owned economy was exactly the same as a privately-owned one.  He saw Leninism as leading to a replay of this.  I’m not going to debate those ideas, but only reference some of his original points about how bits of Marxism could be useful to capitalists.

The great conundrum of revolutionary Marxism, as opposed to bastardized reformist versions, is the objective conditions it must operate in.  Mattick himself lived through periods of revolutionary upheaval and a return to relative stabilization in the central states. This made a deep impression on him.  To Mattick, revolutionary Marxism “functions today as an ideology in anticipation of such a practice” – that practice being revolutionary implementation by an active workers’ movement.  “It cannot operate under ‘normal’ conditions of capitalist production.”  Hence what he is saying is no mystery – only a long capitalist crisis can bring out revolutionary action guided by class struggle.

Note, he has no transitional approach between reform and revolution, which seems to be a weakness of both reformism and ultra-leftism.  Nor does he see a ‘transitional’ phase of a workers’ dictatorship between capitalism and the withering away of the state towards actual socialism.

“The great mass of workers acclimatize itself to ruling bourgeois ideology…” in this period.  Given both fear and limited security, only conditions will push the great mass of workers to revolutionary action.  Mattick seems to give credence to an automatic ‘final crisis,’ and an ‘objective failure of accumulation.’ He also realizes the end point might be barbarism and world destruction too.  So the role of socialism could be an attempt to ‘save the world.’  Are we reaching that point?  That is another discussion.

In the meantime, how do Marxism and capitalism ‘co-exist?’ Mattick:  “The history of capitalism is also the history of Marxism.”  The grave-diggers trudge along, since graves are still to be dug, though perhaps better paid for a while. The impact of capitalist stabilization has promoted reformism in a Marxist cloak.  It built social-democratic nations and reforms, unionism, the ‘welfare state,’ some freedom for former colonies and demands for social equality.  It turned into ‘evolutionary theory.’

Marxism, having lost hold of most large groups of workers, retreated to the universities and spread among some intellectuals.  It infused sociology, geography, history, psychology, some political science and even, in places, economics.  For instance Keynesianism is a capitalist attempt at incorporating tenants of Marxism – specifically the role of the state and the financial status of ‘consumers’ – i.e. workers.  This is the ‘under-consumption’ thesis some Marxists like the MR school adopted.  A number of radical economists understood the ‘cyclical’ nature of capitalist booms and busts, but never pinpointed the sputtering profit engine as the culprit. Some thinkers understood ‘conspicuous consumption.’ National ‘industrial planning’ also became a thing in mature economies.  State-driven development was adopted in many newly-freed former colonies to jump-start some kind of capital growth and 'modernization.'

To Mattick, capitalist ideology penetrated into the workers’ states as ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ which he sees as a hold-over from the Second International.  The state became ‘capitalist.’ He sees it as veiling labor exploitation using Marxist verbiage.   Even he admits that Marx did not theorize a stage like this.  Far beyond accusations of state exploitation is the economy of China.  It nurtures an actual and massive capitalist sector.  They have a yellow star on their flag celebrating the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie,’ so this is not some new thing.  The idea that Chinese ‘socialism’ is simply the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy has been refuted by many, including Marx.  Mattick would agree.

Another way class struggle and Marxism infuse capital is to push it towards state intervention in the chaotic market; while also pushing it towards gains in productivity to offset labor. This has been a boon to the tech sector, sort of a dialectical dance where the pressure from workers is one thing that makes companies move towards robots, AI and automation.  An analysis of the job losses in the 1980s and 1990s by Kim Moody shows automation was more damaging than Mexico or offshoring. Yet human labor and nature are the source of all value, so this poses a key dilemma for capital.  

On another front, trade unions and forces like social-democracy and Eurocommunism became both sources of strength for labor, but also were integrated into the system and thus served to discipline workers in various ways. This situation is reflective of a sort of general stabilization after WWII.  Mattick in 1978 writes “…at this point the future of Marxism remains extremely vague.” Workers feel organized action is necessary, but they also need to fill their individual and family needs at the same time.  This means class consciousness is ambiguous. He finally writes: “The history of revolutionary Marxism has been the history of its defeats.”

Cheery, aye?  Mattick, like every organized and conscious Marxist in countries with growing economies, has had to negotiate between this ‘stability’ and a seemingly unrealistic goal.  However world capital at present, like it always does, is changing again.  Bourgeois neo-liberalism is not just opposed by theocracies, military dictatorships, autocracies and oligarchies, but by various forms of ‘illiberal’ authoritarianism, as the ‘center’ is failing to hold.  This is because capital itself is coming up against various limitations.  Profit rates, the environment,  national structures, military conflict, debt and more are impeding the smooth flow of a stable world capitalism.

We are in a new period which may open up revolutionary possibilities in the center and ‘peripheral’ countries both. In the terminology, it’s called a ‘conjuncture.’  In fact, given the development of capital across the world, this simple meta-geographic understanding about 'center' and 'periphery' should also change.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “council communism,” “German Revolution,” ‘Marx,’ "Dill Pickle."    

May Day has many Left theory and semi-theory books – anarchist, council communist, Marxist, social-democratic, ‘Marxist-Leninist.’  I got this one at the college library!

Red Frog / April 2, 2025

No More 'Broadening Minds"?

 Tourism’s Decline is Coming

I’ve been out of the U.S. 49 times. I’ve visited all but one state. I’ve driven 6,000 miles on one trip in North America and hit 1,000+ miles in one day on 2 other trips.  I’ve traveled to a good number of countries in the world, every continent but one, seeing Canada, Mexico and Europe the most. I’m a dual citizen and was born in Europe, so I think like a ‘citizen of the world.’  It’s a cliché but there it is.  It also relates to politics.   What I see is tourism won’t be continuing in the future like it has in the past.   The latest, of course, is the tourist boycott of the U.S. because of Trump's vicious nationalist bullying.

In 10/2024 51% of U.S. citizens had passports, which means 49% have never been out of the country or want to go.  This is probably a major chunk of the working-class.  Some people have not been out of their state or even zip code.  Insularity and parochialism are common, but there has been an increase in passport applications each year, mostly coming from young people.  These figures show that for many the U.S. lives on a psychic island, not just a physical continent or a political anomaly.  It is reflected in politics 9 times over.    

Over-tourism is one reason fewer will be traveling.  Sites like Barcelona, Venice, Machu Picchu and Dubrovnik are putting limitations on short-term rentals like AirBnB, cruise ships, visitors and more.  Tourists have been pushing out working-class locals who live in these towns, as gentrification by cash takes their housing.  The doors are beginning to close or narrow.  Additionally, some tourists don’t like crowds either, and are avoiding certain places or not going at all.

Global warming is another.  Fires, smoke and heat waves, typhoons and hurricanes, wind, dust storms and tornadoes, floods, snows and heavy rains - all block roads, shut down transport including airports and ships, damage towns, crush nature and cause travel chaos.  Some damage, like from Acapulco's two hurricanes, never gets fixed. And then there is the issue of fuel.

Pandemics are a third.  We’ve seen what CoVid did to travel.  Given we live in ‘Pangea’ – a virtual continent that covers most of the world – isolation now is almost impossible.  CoVid won’t be the last epidemic.

War is a fourth.  No one travels to a war zone or to a failed state.  These are increasing and unless you are a journalist, work there, live there or are a thrill seeker, you are not going. 

Civil strife is fifth.  The class struggle is heightening in many countries in the world, so strikes, demonstrations, occupations, guerilla actions and more will continue and grow.  These interrupt the ‘free’ flow of tourism.  At present, for instance, there is a travel advisory for certain roads in Peru due to protests.  Last year the whole country was a 'warning zone' as campesinos, workers and the indigenous protested against the reactionary government.

Poverty is another.  Civil strife is caused by exploitation, poverty and inequality, with the ‘palliative’ of dictatorships of various kinds only increasing the turmoil.  Additionally, travel is more expensive as time goes on.  Add crime to this and voilá.  Tourists become targets as they are seen as rich and foreign, from pick pockets to gouging to kidnapping.

Airports are near the last.  Airports are the crowded, stressed, controlled bus stations of the present age.  Add possible problems in the air – technical, staffing, maintenance, air traffic control, security – and you might have fewer people wanting to even go near one.

Driving is the end.  Traffic jams, accidents, construction, trucks, huge cities and volume all dissuade people from getting in their cars.  Then add weather. 

Humans have always traveled.  Now budget jumbo-jets and huge cruise ships bring thousands to places that are barely able to handle the influx.  Even certain little villages in the Cotswold’s get flooded with selfie-snapping hordes brought by buses.  Tourist dollars, yuan, euros, pounds, rupees or dinars create tourist economies, jobs and structures, plus plenty of over-drinking and eating.  These economies will begin to dry up unless they are oriented to the very wealthy.  Tourism will become a grosser mirror image of the inequality that stretches across the world.

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  "Mark Twain," 'travel,' 'traveling.'    

Kultur Kommissar / March 30, 2025

"I'm goin' down to the levee ..."

 “The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records – A Great Migration Story” by Scott Blackwood, 2023

Jack White, a fan of the blues, once put out the whole Paramount catalog in a fancy wooden box containing 6 reddish LPs and a memory stick. The company's metal eagle and globe symbol was on the outside.  The box was to pay homage to the best early blues label in the U.S., run by a stumbling Wisconsin furniture company as a ploy to sell console record players.  That box is also a story of the migration of black musicians from the South, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and later, Grafton, Wisconsin, a small town north of Milwaukee. 

Blackwood paints a picture of a furniture company run by white owners who had no understanding of the blues, quality recording-making or the African-American artists that they got to record for them. They were canny engineers and businessmen who seized the moment when the style went national in 1920 with the success of “Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith on Okeh Records.  They had ties to a network of music store owners who also sold 78s. They ran ads in publications like the Chicago Defender and New York’s Amsterdam News for blues songs pitched to black audiences. They were the first to develop a mail-order business. Lots of firsts.

Paramount used a recording studio in Chicago for the most part. They manufactured 78s in Grafton at an old chair factory using the worst materials – “crushed limestone, pipe clay, silica, lamp black, shellac and cotton flock,” yielding a lack of durability and poor sound quality.  The company thought the whole ‘blues’ thing was a fad you see.  Yet as Blackwood says about the management of Paramount:  “…the foolish, profane and ephemeral might only be masks worn by the transcendent.”

It was women blues singers, fresh off the minstrel and vaudeville show trail who led the way in ‘race music.’  Blackwood profiles the ones who recorded for Paramount and its many sub-labels:   Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Ma Rainey.  Rainey, a rootsy blues shouter, outsold every Paramount musician but Blind Lemon Jefferson.  This all came out of the ferment in the music scene in Chicago’s “Black Metropolis.”  It had places like Dreamland where N’Orlins’ own King Oliver, a young Bix Beiderbecke and the famous Al Jolson waited for Alberta to come on stage.   

Blackwood profiles Mayo Williams, a black middle-class recording executive who found artists for Paramount starting in 1923, even though he appreciated opera more.   He recruited people like Ida Cox, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy and King Oliver.  He used a network of Pullman porters and talent scouts spread across the South, as well as his connections in Chi Town.  He earned a portion of the publishing and recording sales, so he was never an ‘employee’ but more like a contractor.  Williams set up an office at 3126 South State Street, hired Tommy Dorsey as Paramount’s music arranger, and built a quality session band led by a woman, Lovie Austin, called the Blues Serenaders.   Arrangers were needed as many musicians couldn’t read music, so they had to write the notes down for accompanists and for royalties.

Many artists didn’t understand royalties, so they’d sign away ownership of their song for a small payment just for recording it. Later this was called both theft and ‘intellectual property.’  Williams later admitted he claimed royalties for other’s songs and said he was “better than 50% honest” – a figure ahead of the industry.  For one, Alberta Hunter never made real money off of her Paramount hit “Down Hearted Blues.” Some studios never paid promised royalties to artists at all.  Some artists signed with several labels and the labels had to sue each other or recover the money from the musicians.  Williams left Paramount in 1927 for Vocalion Records after turning Chicago into a rival to New York’s recording industry. 

H.C. Spier took his place.  He was a blues fan from the Mississippi hill country and toured the South and Mississippi Delta for talent.  Spier finally found Charlie Patton with help from Paramount exec Art Laibly.  He also signed, while working for other labels besides Paramount: Willie Brown, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Jimmy Rogers and … though not for Paramount, Robert Johnson.  If you don’t know who all these people are, well it’s significant.

Blackwood touches on the invention of the horizontal record and player; the seminal role of minstrel shows and vaudeville and the lesbian proclivities of female blues singers.  He sprinkles in quotes from Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor just to let you know he’s literate and ‘southern.’  He goes through the haunting lyrics of various songs. He sketches employees of Paramount, and those whose influence extended to other labels. Blackwood tracks their efforts to branch into ‘hillbilly,’ ‘old time’ and gospel music too, as they had an almost open door. This included the monster song “Casey Jones.”  

Blackwood touches on the poor quality of Chicago’s Marsh Laboratories, where Paramount first recorded.  The sessions at Marsh were pre-electric and sited next to a screeching El train track which disrupted sessions. These problems made Paramount go electric in 1929 and build their own studio in Grafton.  Blackwood describes a visit by Patton, Eddie ‘Son’ House and Willie Brown to that studio the following year.  Blind Lemon Jefferson’s last visit to Paramount’s headquarters, as a famous and rich black man, still disturbed the white office workers.

Blackwood profiles the true genius of New Orleans jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, who was insulted by a shabby bio written by Alan Lomax.  He tells the story of New Orleans cornet improviser Joe “King” Oliver, an inspiration to Louis Armstrong who joined Oliver in Chicago. He describes the quiet band leader Fletcher Henderson, who developed swing.  Switching gears, Paramount recorded a Texas bottleneck guitarist, Blind Lemon Jefferson, bringing the guitar into focus for the first time. Country blues guitarist Josh White also knew Jefferson and became part of the Paramount session band.  Blackwood considers Jefferson to be the key early blues guitar player over all others.  Another Paramount guitarist, Blind Blake, recorded and made his gi-tar sound like 7 other instruments, then hit the boogie-woogie.  There was the seminal, poly-rhythmic Delta blues of the shape-shifting Charlie Patton, the raging preach from Son House and the high country lonesome of Skip James.  James was one of the first to record a short guitar solo / break in a blues song.

Blackwood mentions less well known players for Paramount like Jimmy O’Bryant, Johnnie Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Roosevelt Graves, Geeshie Wiley, Elvie Thomas, Ishmon Bracey, Blind Joe Taggert, Blind Willie Davis, Clarence Williams and more - ghosts from the past.  Some of these musicians, like Morton and Oliver, died, as the cliché goes, penniless, or they disappeared whole.  Because clichés are sometimes true, just like R. Crumb sketches. 

By 1923 Paramount was at the top; by 1933 during the Depression, Paramount declared bankruptcy.  The last workers congregated on the roof of the Grafton plant, drank what they had until dark and spun records and metal masters into the Milwaukee River.  They were the victims of a chaotic capitalist economy and sadly, musical ignorance.  This book is not just a story of Paramount Records, but of a group of musicians that broke true ground. We will not see their like again.  If you are a blues, jazz or music fan, it’s great stuff. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Ma Rainey,” “jazz,” “blues.”  

May Day has several shelves of blues, rock, folk, punk and more music books.  But I got this at the Library! 

Red Frog / March 27, 2025

College Library Browsing #17: Excuse Marcuse?

 “The Philosophy of Praxis – Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School” by Andrew Feenberg, 2014

The reason I picked up this book is to see Feenberg’s analysis of the Frankfurt School. Feenberg is a Canadian prof and philosopher who studied under Marcuse and participated in May-June 1968 in France.  The Frankfurt School (FS) were a group of mostly German cultural and political theorists –Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Horkheimer, Marcuse and so on.  They are sometimes grouped under the title of ‘critical theory,’ which seems rather bland.  I’m going to focus on several chapters, not the book as a whole.  Praxis is a fancy name for practice and action in the application of a theory.  It is the bridge between understanding and political implementation. Every skill is a product of ‘praxis,’ from carpentry to ice skating to revolution.

Praxis involves going beyond philosophy.  Marx contended that social change would change ideas – hence ‘philosophizing’ in the abstract would eventually end.  Since ideas are imminent in society, nature, labor and the human body, resolving the contradiction between capital and labor would empty present society of much nonsense.  Just as the demise of religion is not the work of argument so much as the work of social and economic change.

Feenberg says that the FS was inspired by Marx and Lukács, especially on the topics of nature and reification.  Reification means turning a relation or human into a thing, and, conversely, a thing into an active subject.  Lukács saw this as a result of commodification and a form of alienation.  Feenberg uses it perhaps too frequently.

These Marxist thinkers are all marked by their time in history.  In the aftermath of WWII, the FS became pessimistic, seeing a failure of praxis and certainly rationalism in the light of Nazi crimes.  They ignored the anti-colonial revolutions, the ‘state socialism’ of east and central Europe and the semi-proletarian victory in China after the war. Hence their focus was on bourgeois cultures of consent; hegemony; ideology; false consciousness; commodity fetishism; reification; consumerism and art.  Most avoided political engagement in any practical manner.  Angela Davis was told by Adorno to stay away from 1960s radical movements as they were unworthy of intellectuals.  Lukács made fun of the FS as living in ‘the Grand Hotel Abyss,’ an ivory tower on the edge of a vast hole.  Marcuse was the only one that took a more involved tack with the New Left.

Feenberg is not that fond of classical Marxism and makes some stereotypical asides about Marx.  He does not see revolution on the agenda anywhere.   He embraces Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man,” which was popular with early elements of SDS in the U.S.  Marcuse insisted that capitalist technology and science would, if continued, be oppressive unless it was completely redirected towards human ends under socialism.  I don’t think many, even Marx, would disagree. Feenberg comments that Marcuse missed technical fixes already implicit in society, like disability ramps and curbs, when he denounced nearly all current science or technique as exploitative.  Marcuse thought the main problem with tech and science is not quantification or method but its purpose for profit, i.e. ‘valorization.’  

Regarding nature, in 1972 Marcuse pointed out that nature has a value beyond capital or even labor.  This, as anyone who has studied Marx’s environmentalism, would not upset the old man either.  Nature has its own right to exist, and this is not romanticism but a simple reduction in alienation and an embrace of cohabitation.  A mountain in New Zealand, Mt. Taranaki Maunga, now has ‘personhood,’ so it is already happening on the legal front.  Marcuse might have gone further to a form of aestheticism about nature - yet as anyone knows, nature can also turn ugly.

Feenberg thinks, while revolutionary organizing and even transitional organizing is not on the table, what can work is:  “That dimension is the horizontal work of establishing the framework of meaning within which activity goes on.”   Perhaps you can guess what that tortured formulation means, but it reminds me of ‘the old mole,’ patiently digging lateral tunnels underground until the time is riper.  Yet do moles always know what is happening above ground?  Will they meet other moles?  Certainly the ground under capital is becoming shakier and shakier perhaps because of all this isolated digging.

Feenberg sums up by saying that the ‘philosophy of praxis’ negates idealism – i.e. religion, bourgeois philosophy and ideas; scientism and the like.  Idealism sublimates concrete social realities, attempting to hide them from sight. A successful class struggle reconciles idealism’s false antimonies – opposites - and weakens or overthrows reified institutions, which in Feenberg’s meaning are markets, bureaucracies and technologies.  Abstract reason is transformed into dialectical rationality by this ‘metacritique’ of philosophy, as it is dissolved by praxis / practice / change in the real world.

For the FS the bureaucratized USSR or China had little relation to the Paris Commune or the Shanghai Communes.  Their pessimism concluded that the proletariat was not able to achieve power, even after 1968 in France.  Adorno descended into dystopian despair while Marcuse was inspired by the New Left’s cultural politics and began to advocate a ‘technological transformation.’  By the way we might be seeing this in the current rise of some green tech.  Feenberg constructed a simplified and partly erroneous chart showing Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse’s attitudes towards practice, history, dialectics, finitude and the unity of theory and practice.  I personally don’t see the point of this chart, except as a student exercise. 

Herbert Marcuse

Feenberg calls for the “democratic transformation of technology.”  His suggestions for the Marxist movement are somewhat vague, but quotes Lukács as to the ‘dialectical method’ being the key to Marxism, not specific facts.  In that context he argues that in various fields within capitalism now – in the media, in medical, internet and environmental arenas for instance – the ‘enlargement of the public sphere’ and the human dimension is contesting with the profit and alienation dimension.  He asserts that the road to revolution no longer runs just through the factory, but through these ‘cognitive’ areas. It’s not clear if he’s abandoned the former all together or not. He calls this ‘praxis’ “democratic rationalization.”  He has a point.  Seeing the development of socialist tendencies within capital is essential to understanding development, including after any social revolution.  It is similar to the fact that WalMart, Ford or Microsoft are fully planned internally, while the external ‘market’ economy is still chaotic.   

Feenberg makes the error of thinking that the FS somehow invented Marxist environmentalism.  It did not. He does agree that their focus on aesthetics is narrow … “but suggestive.”  Ahh, yes.  He makes a plea for a “totalizing critique” in the horizontal dimension… meaning a contest for state power is as yet far away in ‘developed’ capitalist countries presumably.  Feenberg has no practical suggestion on how this horizontal work of knitting below-ground oppositional elements together will actually happen.  Suggestions for independent labor candidates, for a labor party, for a faction within the NDP, for college, military, community, indigenous or work networks and committees, or a Left, united or anti-fascist front are missing, as is anything else more tangible.  It seems that various single-issue, oppositional organizations working in their fields will somehow, in some way, unite.  They won’t.  These particular moles are blind.

Feenberg defends Marcuse’s aesthetic slogan of “The Great Refusal” in the face of bourgeois co-optation and the social-democratic one of “A Long March Through the Institutions.” So how has that ‘long march’ turned out?  This reminds me of Samir Amin’s point that it would take ‘centuries’ for socialism to be established.  We don't have that long.  Feenberg insists, in 2014, that this ‘long march’ is the only method of ‘mediation’ and praxis for the Marxist movement. He calls this work ‘radical reformism,’ a language we have heard from the U.S. DSA too.  I’m not sure how radical these contestations are, as none have achieved actual power.  So Feenberg is essentially still a Marcusian, even after the demise of the New Left. 

Feenberg mentions the alternative of ‘repression and recession’ once, which now seems to be the direction capital is going, even in ‘central’ capitalist countries.  If they succeed, there will be no institutions left to ‘march through.’      

To find prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Lukacs,” “Marcuse,” “Frankfurt School,” “praxis,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “Benjamin.” 

May Day has shelves of Marxist analysis and philosophy.  This I got it at a college library!

Red Frog / March 24, 2025

Remember Me to My Memoir

 “Class – A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger and Higher Education,” by Stephanie Land, 2023

This is technically a follow-up to her book and 2021 streaming series “Maid.”  (Reviewed below.)  Your first thought as a reader, if you know this, is what happened to the money she earned from that film and book?  Well, it’s not here because she evidently wrote Maid after going to the U of Montana / Missoula for writing, which is the subject of this memoir.  Here she’s still the struggling single mother, juggling her child, school, work, dates, money issues, car problems, isolation, divorce and ex-husband in a hair-raising reality that never quits.  If you’ve lived through all or parts of this – like having a child, fashioning an impossible schedule or worrying about money all the time – it will exhaust you in the telling, just as it exhausts her in the doing.

I’m not a fan of memoirs and this book hints at one reason.  Believe it or not, you are not the only one who has gone through this, or varieties of this.  But Land is pursuing a writing degree and in some sweet and unnecessary day, an MFA, so this was evidently part of her process.  For those blissfully unaware of single motherhood and divorce in poverty, this book will fill you in. For others, it might provide comfort, knowing others have the same problems you do.  For the rest – ah, reads like a mundane story about class, or a boring one about an ordinary life.  It’s not quite ‘The Jungle’ or ‘Native Son,’ but it touches on that feeling in a modern, feminist, 2023 way.  You could call it ‘poverty lite.’ 

As was noted in the review of Maid, this is a Horatia Alger story about pulling yourself along by your bootstraps.  Land is not a leftist and rarely theorizes about anything in her life.  Land has moved from Seattle to Missoula, Montana to go to university. Her daughter Emilia is finally getting into kindergarten, so now Land only has to cover Emilia’s child care on weekends, after school and evenings.  Still no small feat. The exe is repeatedly missing in action, grudging about child support, toxic to talk to and now he’s 100s of miles away.  Land’s still doing cleaning jobs and getting freebies.   She’s rock climbing and hiking, counting nickels, food stamps and filling every moment with capitalist survivalism and budgets.  As she notes, she’s spent hours convincing government aid programs she wasn’t a secret millionaire or fraud.  She delights in a court judgement forcing her exe to come up with $700 a month in child support, but this involves a further court battle.

Dating is problematic – time-consuming and chancey - while indirectly involving her daughter.  If you find her love life interesting, so be it.  I don’t. But she seems to and here’s another memoir rub.  As has been said about them, memoirs are the literary style of neo-liberalism. It’s all about me!  The problem here is the level of unnecessary and personal hum-drum detail.  I don't care what she ate for lunch at school. Her somewhat dysfunctional love life leads to pregnancy, then thoughts of an abortion.  She does not exactly know who the father is to boot.

Land’s struggles at the U of Montana are another arduous stretch.  On her arrival she’s categorized as ‘out-state.’ So she has to take out huge loans to pay the freight, and later more loans to cover costs. Her own white-collar parents, a therapist and project manager, had no interest in her going to college, claiming they couldn’t afford it.  So she’s fallen in class status by being a proletarian single mother and maid, and her father still won’t help.   Land wants to rectify this fall, and become a college professor eventually, to ascend to the professional middle class.  Knowing what we know today about the few actual tenured and high-paying positions in universities, this seems like a dicey proposition.  But that goal buttresses the ‘Horatia” side of this story.

For her pregnancy, Land visits a Missoula ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’ that discourages abortion and decides to go through with the childbirth.  At the same time she receives a reduction in SNAP food stamps.   She then receives WIC food benefits for pregnant mothers that limits their food intake severely and she has to go to food banks.  Her exe challenges the divorce court increase in child support and bad-mouths her in front of Emilia.  Her ex-boyfriend is angry at her about the pregnancy.  Her daughter is having behavior problems at school.  Emilia is regularly late for school, and is starting to resist her mother.  Land has applied for her beloved MFA.  She has to juggle cleaning and a nanny job, class times, being sick and pregnancy visits too. She has to appear in court on the child support appeal, is ruled against and settles for less.  It’s a chaotic life and she has chosen some of it.

Land eventually graduates with a B.A. and has a baby girl soon after.  Emilia is happy to have a baby sister.  Before she graduated, one of her longest essays in her senior independent study in writing is “Confessions of the Housekeeper,” which is probably a foreshadowing of Maid.  The prof liked it and I do too, which is why you should watch the Maid series or read the book.  Because this one, in contrast, is a slog - unless slogs are your kind of thing.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Maid,” “Horatio Alger,” “poverty.”

May Day has shelves of class stories and analysis.  But I got this at the public library!

The Cultural Marxist / March 20, 2025

College Library Browsing #16: Bolivar & Marx

 “Marx and Latin America” by José Aricó, 1980

This short analysis is a classic of independent Latin American Marxism.  It is an inquiry into Marx’s – and by extension the Marxist movement’s – mistakes concerning Latin America’s specific social reality - up to around 1926. Aricó’s analysis is erudite and detailed and he ends up explaining how Marx got it wrong, why it happened, and how he began to get it right.  Aricó challenges the notions of Marx’s Eurocentrism, the idea that every society has to go through capitalism and that developments in the colonial or oppressed world are irrelevant to the class struggle in the ‘center’ countries. In fact it is the reverse.  He indirectly challenges the old idea that the indigenous have little role to play in the fight for socialism.  

If Marx making a mistake and later beginning to correct it shocks those dogmatic ‘lefties’ who think everything is set in stone – well, then, you are not living in a real, changing world.  That is precisely what Marx grasped after the European revolutions of 1848.  Marx’s theory developed as he observed the benefits colonialism accrued to capital, reviving its fortunes, and the subsequent weakening of the proletarian movements in Europe. Aricó especially cites Marx’s writings on Ireland’s key role in the English social revolution – regarding Irish workers in England and the Irish national struggle against English colonialism. It was also expressed in Marx’s positive appraisal of the Russian peasant commune – obshchina or mir – aiding the development of socialism in Russia.  It was still an agrarian country with very little capitalism in 1875 at the time he wrote this. 

Regarding Latin America, this relates to the ‘national’ question in developing societies as they emerged in the 1800s from tribalism, tributism, so-called ‘Asiatic’ features, feudalism, colonialism and the consequent building of socialist movements in Latin America.  Argentina, Brazil and Peru all had sections associated with the Socialist 2^nd International, so a good material grasp of social reality directly related to their strategies.  Aricó’s touchstones are Gramsci, Mariategui and Luxemburg, all original thinkers and not associated with Soviet Marxism.  This work is surrounded by 1 essay, 2 prefaces, 1 introduction, 9 appendixes and an epilogue, as befitting a work of academia, but in itself it is only 53 close-packed pages. 

The problems Latin American Marxists saw were based on what Marx wrote.  Marx fervently disliked Bolivar and politically compared him to Napoleon III, as a caudillo with no connection to the population.  This came out especially in an encyclopedia essay penned by Marx about Bolivar in 1858.  Marx also wrote in 1848 that the U.S. invasion of Mexico was a plus, supposedly bringing capital to underdeveloped agrarian lands. Of course that is not all it brought!  Marx hinted that Latin America’s social structure was raw and its leaders irrational, to the point that Bolivar’s ‘war of independence’ reminded him of Hegel’s concept of a ‘non-historic people’ operating in a social vacuum.  No one uses this concept now, even though in 1951 W.Z. Foster endorsed it.  Foster’s comments reflected the ‘scientific’ and dogmatic style of the CPs, who unquestioningly accepted everything from the USSR.  Aricó points out Marx’s attitude towards Bolivar was also perhaps part of a political battle with bourgeois historians who treated Bolivar well or as a one-sided hero. 

Another concept involved is a somewhat obscure one - that a ‘state’ is created by a real nation according to Hegel. Hegel believed that without a state of some sort a ‘national’ people do not exist for all practical purposes.  This seems to be a reactionary idea, as some nations like the Palestinians or Kurds are without an official state and yet exist. Marx opposed Hegel on this and denied that only the state produced civil society.   Which is why he looked askance at the weak, subservient states produced by early upper-class, creole Latin American leaders.  Specifically, Bolivar’s top-down dictatorial state in actual fact became a place of chaotic military rule, unable to organize production or much of society.  Bolivar himself was no Zapata, Hugo Blanco, Che Guevara or Tupac Amaru, but an educated militarist from the upper class.  Watch one episode of the dull series on him and you’ll get an idea. As Aricó notes:  “Bolivar … saw the masses as having more capacity for destruction than construction.”  Bolivar’s weaknesses were not individual, but expressed the conditions from which he arose.

This hints at one cause, up to the 1990s, of why so many Latin American countries were run by caudillos or military dictatorships - though in my mind that probably had more to do with the Cold War and the global class war.  Aricó himself escaped Argentina for Mexico, running from Argentina’s anti-communist dictatorship and murderous ‘dirty war.’ Aricó himself seems to note some truth to this view of the weaknesses in Latin America.  He also discusses Marx and Engels’ notion of national battles that advance proletarian agendas or retard them. 

Aricó faults Marx for his narrow view of Latin American history, including ignoring information on class struggles involving peasants, indigenous and workers against the colonialists, landlord patron class and creole city rulers. Latin America was clearly not a place of ‘non-historic’ peoples.  Bolivar wanted independence from colonialism, but also realized the necessity for a Latin American Union – an LAU similar to the EU.  Today this level of continental coordination and integration is still unachieved, even on a bourgeois level.  This is probably due to the role of U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere.  Even the embrace of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ by the Venezuelan government and Socialist Party has not seen a breakthrough.

Aricó attacks claims that Marx was ‘Eurocentric’ thusly:  “The result (of these claims – ed.) has been a fragmentation of left-wing thought, divided between accepting authoritarianism as an inevitable cost of any process of mass democratization, or else seeing elitist liberalism as the only possible means of bringing about a new society…”  Aricó ends the essay by clearly pointing to the crisis of Marxism as a failing ‘state philosophy’ which his work is intended to counter.  Aricó wrote this in 1980, so he’s referring to Soviet Marxism.

Marx in the 1860s noted the progress of proletarianization in Turkey, India, Poland and Russia.  Today – 2025 - capital has injected itself into almost every social and economic relation across the world, even though pre-capitalist forms still exist, along with post-capitalist ones.  This is an example of combined and uneven development.  Pre-capitalist ones like debt or virtual slavery are used to accrue profits anyway.  Subsistence farming sustains peasants who sometimes contribute to the labor economy.  Criminal gangs inject their cash into the capitalist banking system.  And dominant state ownership funds private enterprise, such as in China. 

While formal independence has been declared in nearly every country, with exceptions like the Western Sahara and certain oppressed nationalities, who can actually identify a country that is truly ‘independent’ in the economic or even political sense anymore?  No one. The world is instead working as a ‘division of labor.’  A world economy, a world proletariat, a world social structure, a world environment has more and more come into existence with the spread of imperialist capital.  This was the prediction of Karl Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and communists since then. So the colonial debate about Marx in the 1800s is really moot, except to certain enduring anti-communists, even those dressed in anti-colonialist colors.  This book will be ammunition in their face.

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Latin America,” “Peru,” “Bolivar,” “Mexico” “Mariategui.”

May Day has several shelves of Latino politics.  I got this at a college library!

Red Frog / March 17, 2025

Anti-Fascist Series #16: General Eco

 “How to Spot a Fascist” by Umberto Eco, 1997

This famous essay was referenced by Chris Hedges in his work “American Fascists,” a book about U.S. Christian Dominionism.  Eco’s analysis is popular with left liberals as a take on the present Trump movement.  Eco, the Italian author of “Name of the Rose” and “Foucault’s Pendulum,” grew up as a boy under Mussolini and remembers the day that Mussolini was overthrown in 1945. His description of ‘Ur-Fascism’ intentionally avoids a specific historical or economic frame and sounds like later cultural and intellectual descriptions of ‘general’ fascism. Eco is not a Marxist, though he recognizes the leading role of the PCI in the armed Resistance in Italy and seems somewhat irritated by it.

These are the 14 culturo-political points Eco thinks identify a fascist movement, though they could also identify conservatives of various stripes.  That is a weakness here, though these points are based on his observations of ideas found in real Italian, Spanish and German fascism.  It is obvious that these fascisms sought to ‘improve’ on conservatism, even though their ideologies were not identical.  Yet Eco’s 14 points ignore a very significant reality.  That is classic fascism’s role as a violent and dictatorial bulwark against the working-class, unions and the Left in support of the profits of the capitalist system.  That key point is missing.  He does not even include Mussolini’s simplistic point about ‘corporatism’ as fascism.  I guess these are not ‘Ur’ enough for him.

This is his Ur-Fascism: 

     1.   Traditionalism.  It is born out of a Catholic reaction to rationalism and the French Revolution, as interpreted by fascist 'theoretician' Julius Evola in Italy.  Truth already exists, so further searching is unnecessary.  The past holds everything. (This method is actually a link to post-modernism and AI too.)

     2.   A rejection of modernism.  The European Enlightenment and the ‘age of Reason’ are both rejected ideologically.  While technology is embraced, science is not, which is an obvious contradiction.  

     3.   Irrationalism.  Action is preferred over thought, leading to anti-intellectualism.

     4.   Dissent as betrayal.  Critical thinking and dissent are opposed. Distinctions only impede ‘clarity’ so simple binary thinking is preferred.

     5.   Difference.  The opposition to ‘intruders’ and ‘others’ is across the board.

     6.   Appeal to the frustrated middle classes. This is the point where Eco finally touches on class, as he observed that these Italian classes, when in economic trouble, moved towards fascism.  Marxists also observed this phenomena.  Note, his use of the term 'middle class' means the petit-bourgeois business, professional and farmer strata, not the working class.  The working class actually exists below the middle-class.

     7.   Xenophobia.  For those without an identity, the ‘nation’ provides one.  Eco links this to an obsession with conspiracies as a substitute for actual knowledge.

     8.   The Enemy.  The needed and chosen enemy is both extremely strong and full of weaklings.

     9.   War.  Life is permanent war. Eco hints that this eventually leads to Armageddon.

     10.               Elitism.  The poor, the sick, the laborer, the weak, etc. are all inferior.  This translates to a hardy embrace of the class system and a leadership cult.  He, however, does not mention the issue of a leader explicitly.

     11.               Death cult.  This is the cult of the military hero.

     12.               Machismo.  Women, gays, lesbians and non-conformists are all inferior.

     13.               Populism.  Individualism is denied, and only ‘The People’ exist.  Eco makes the point that ‘The People’ in this case are a ‘theatrical pretense,’ as the leader or nation dominates.  So Ur-Fascism opposes “rotten parliamentary governments’ in the name of ‘The People.’

     14.               Newspeak.  Eco borrows Orwell’s concept of words that slowly mean nothing, or become whatever power chooses them to mean.  As Eco puts it, “poor vocabulary and elementary syntax” are part of the method.  As you can see he’s a writer.     

Mussolini and Co. Caught by Partisans

The implication of this list is that the humanitarian “left” must be the mirror opposite of all these ideas.  For instance #9 implies that pacifism will answer fascism’s drive to war and violence.  Yet pacifism did not stop fascism in Italy.  This is relevant to some other points as well.

Eco, like Zizek, is a defender of the Enlightenment and the EU idea, the idea that nations should not wage war and instead work together and combine.  The EU itself came about due to the constant wars that wracked Europe.  This contradicts the pretensions of conservatism, the Right and Ur-Fascism which seek to destroy the EU and a misnamed ‘globalism.’  Eco understands that racism and hostility to ‘non-EU citizens’ is still rampant in Europe, but this falls short of tariffs, sanctions, fascism or war.  This thin volume adds two Eco essays - one on forms of censorship as either silence or noisy nonsense – and another on the ‘European’ idea of a 'humanist' but capitalist form of internationalism.

Given liberals and many impressionist leftists are now calling Trump or the Republicans ‘fascists,’ Eco’s Ur description might warm their hearts.  Certainly many of these 14 points show up in Trumpism.  However the bloody dictatorship of capital is not yet upon us in the U.S., so in a way this description minimizes what classic fascism was, or can be. A Marxist analysis of fascism can be found using prompts below. 

P.S. – Kash Patel, Trump’s new FBI Director, is a clone of J. Edgar Hoover.  He’s coming hard after BLM, Palestinian activists, anti-fascists like Antifa and Left organizations, while ignoring domestic fascist violence.  You may simplistically think every FBI director is exactly the same - but that lack of subtly could be your undoing.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Anti-fascist series #,” “Chris Hedges,” “Zizek,” “Orwell,” “Evola,” “Zetkin,” “Trotsky.”  

And I got it at May Day Books used/cutout section!

Red Frog / March 14, 2025