For Labor Power, Bigger is Better

 “Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 2)

Socialist Views

Marx saw capitalism’s factory in a dialectical sense.  While it was the direct site of the extraction of surplus value and profits from labor while despoiling nature, it could also provide the means to make every worker’s life easier and still protect nature, if the means of production were fully socialized and taken out of capital’s private hands. In short capital was developing technology, machinery and now software which could alleviate backbreaking and monotonous labor, shorten hours and lead to a more pleasant life, while at the same time not being driven to destroy the environment.  A factory could produce more clothing quickly and cheaply than a woman sewing at home for hours, and possibly of better quality.  A water pump beat walking to the well.  A solar panel supplies better light and power than a fire.  And so on. 

Freeman spends time on the strikes and class battles that occurred at the sites of big factories in the U.S. and the U.K.  Many of these are legendary to this day.  He mentions the Luddites, the Chartists, the IWW and CP and Peterloo, Homestead, Little Steel, Fisher Body #1 & 2, Republic Steel and so on. State troops in the U.S. were called out over 500 times from 1875 to 1910 to deal with labor unrest, with hundreds of workers dying in strikes.  1919 was a peak year of labor struggle with tens of thousands out on strike, a reflection of events in Europe. All this happened before the massive upsurge in the 1930s.     

In the early Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky favored ‘modern’ methods of production management.  They endorsed Taylorism due to the low quality of Soviet labor after the decimation of the Civil War. Trotsky said it was efficiency or poverty and starvation in polemics against Party opponents in the Workers’ Opposition.  The WO said workers needed input over the ‘experts’ on how to improve productivity.  I tend to side with the WO on this issue theoretically, as those doing the work have the most intimate ideas on how to improve production.  But given at the time that many new, rural workers were completely inexperienced, it would have to be a collaborative effort – so it depended on what kind of workers and experts were there. I say this as a former 20-year factory worker who has seen my share of lunk heads and incompetence even in ‘modern’ times.

Of interest to socialists is the relation between American capitalists and the first 5 year plan in the USSR in 1929.  Many U.S. architects, experts and companies – even Ford – helped build an industrial base in the Soviet Union, but at breakneck speed. The huge tractor plant in Stalingrad, the massive 32,000 worker truck/auto plant in Gorky and the monstrous Magnitogorsk steel complex east of the Urals were based on U.S. designs and input. New planned cities arose around these facilities. As was to be expected, ex-peasants from small villages had no idea how to work in a factory.  At the tractor plant, initial production was very slow due to ignorance, damage, idleness and lack of good parts and machines.  

Some of these projects were built in the middle of nowhere, a form of industrial adventurism, which required belated attempts at housing and more. The factories employed thousands of prisoners, ex-kulaks and disgraced professionals in forced labor, who lived in terrible conditions in caged camps.  This was a pattern followed by the Stalinist bureaucracy as the Gulag system grew. In the end, a hyper-industrial base was built out of these cruel and bureaucratic methods, while virtually ignoring consumer production. 

REBELLIONS Due to Size

Giantist factories spread to central Europe after WWII, as Soviet methods were used in countries like Poland’s giant Nova Huta steel complex near Krakow and the Hungarian Sztalinvaros steel plant in what is now Dunaujvaros on the Danube.  A new city was built around Nova Huta, with mostly communal planning, to house the tens of thousands of new workers from the countryside.  The plant became a key redoubt of the Solidarnosc union in the 1980s, as Sztalinvaros became a redoubt of the Hungarian Revolution and workers’ councils in 1956.  During the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt, the huge Misr Weaving Company in Mahalla, Egypt provided one of the centers of resistance and inspiration for the overthrow of Mubarak. Yet in Germany the massive Volkswagen complex in Wolfsburg employs 72,000 workers and the 39,000 employees of BASF in Ludwigsafen are not as combative due to social-democratic policies in Germany.  

Factory giantism had the same political effect in the U.S., emboldening labor.  This was shown by the massive strike wave in 1946 after WWII, centered on large employers with big factories.  After this, U.S. corporations started moving away from large plants, dispersing workforces to rural areas and the South, an early harbinger of the ‘Southern Strategy.’  The political point here is that small factories, dispersed or isolated locations and friendly anti-union political climates all impact the siting of new capitalist production facilities.  This is because they know large factories can become hotbeds of class consciousness, unions and labor power.  Capital is allergic to that.

FoxConn factory in Zhengzhou

CHINA & VIETNAM  

The books’ remaining examples of industrial giantism are in China and Vietnam, concentrating on private capital. 4 examples in China are the huge Foxxconn City, owned by a Taiwanese firm; Pegatron, another Taiwanese firm employing 100,000 tech assembly workers in Shanghai; the Huafeng Group, a Chinese textile firm housing 30,000 workers in one building; and Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd., a Taiwanese firm employing 110,000 workers making shoes – the largest textile factory in history.  One factory in Datang made one-third of the world’s socks in the mid-2000s.  In Yiwu, 600 factories produced 60% of the world’s Christmas decorations.  Foxconn itself could turn out 10,000 iPhones a day over 3 shifts. 

Just In Time methods, as well as harsh labor conditions in these factories, eliminated inventory and provided a flood of products quickly, using software communications and data, air-freight, container ships and ports to make world-wide distribution easier and faster.  These techniques were essential to the basic strategy of mass labor.

Freeman notes the back and forth struggle in China between ‘politics being in command’ and production being in command in the period after the 1949 socialist revolution.  This was reflected in both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as the Maoist ideal of incorporating workers and communities into production was carried out by what can only be called primitive or ultra-left means.  This definitively ended after Mao’s death and the triumph of the adherents of ‘production only’ under Deng Xiaoping. 

The leading faction continues this policy to today, expanding it to allow a huge sector of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the growth of huge private Chinese companies.  Strikes were made illegal in 1978 and ‘special economic zones’ were set up in Guangdong and Fujian provinces for FDI. Decollectivization and later, privatization in the countryside pushed rural workers into the low-tier hukou system to flood into these factories.  As under Stalin, peasants in China became the chief losers in industrialization, but perhaps not quite as brutally.  The ‘market’ had won.  Freeman notes this ‘liberalization’ process also took place in Vietnam under Doi Moi. 

Strikes still occur regularly in China over pay, benefits, pensions, dormitories, the work load, long hours, cruel supervisors, injuries, food, fines, useless unions and foreign exploitation.  The state attempts to reconcile strikes until they become too large and disruptive, after which repression is used.  Factories are secretive, guarded compounds filled with plain buildings, alongside regimented worker dormitories.  The dorms are reminiscent of early English mills and Lowell’s textile towns. Inside the big box plants semi-military discipline is used.  At the same time Foxconn has a large number of amenities on their ‘campuses’ like libraries, hospitals and sport facilities, so it might be more pleasant than an isolated and poor village. Chinese vocational schools require students to work at low pay for 6-12 months at a factory, providing another source of cheap labor. And yet industrialization has eliminated acute poverty in China, unlike fully capitalist India.

In Vietnam there are more strikes percentage-wise, as strikes are legal there and fining workers is forbidden.  Strikes against Nike, Adidas and other brands took place in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2015.  The famous 2011 strike against Yue Yuen involved tactics similar to the Luddites, with scores of factories destroyed or damaged around Ho Chi Minh City by an angry Vietnamese working-class.  

CONCLUSION   

In his conclusion Freeman notes that capitalism and ‘socialism’ both use industrial technology.  The question is what is produced; how are the workers treated; how much power do they have in the plant; what happens to the profits; what damage is caused to nature; what tech is appropriate; how are factories designed; where are they built and more.  He notes that many old, large factories are no longer functioning or are severely shrunken.  River Rouge still as a small amount of production going on.  Capitalist boom and bust cycles, tech changes and most prominently the class struggle actually determine how long factories will last. 

Large factories still exist across the world outside China, Vietnam and Germany.  A private Chinese company, Huajian Shoes, opened a giant factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2010 at a $30 a month wage, as the average monthly wage in China is $560.  This shows the Chinese private sector is now using ‘low cost sourcing,’ exploiting African, Asian and South American labor in the process of wage arbitrage, just like every other capitalist entity.

Instead of production facilities, Freeman notes that ‘sophisticated’ capitalist money is now invested in rentier profiteering or financialization. For instance The Vanguard Group owns the second largest shares of stock in Foxconn’s owner, Hon Hai Precision Industry.  Vanguard is the third-largest shareholder in Pegaron Corporation, and the ninth-largest holder of Yue Yuen shares.  The present version of Chinese ‘internationalism’ is to allow U.S. private equity to own big chunks of Chinese production to this day.  How that bodes for the new cold war against China is another matter.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “factory,” “USSR,” “China,” “peasant,' "Cultural Revolution."    

And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 8, 2025

Factories Create Modernity

 “Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 1 Review)

A factory isn’t just a building.  Though it is that, but designed in specific ways, some quite impressive, and in this book, quite large.  It is also a center of consumer culture; a locus of class struggle; a social force impacting communities; a site of surplus value; a building riven by class; a cultural icon; a signifier of modernism; a church of technology and skills; a place to get injured or sick, a temple of discrimination; a life history.  In short, the factory created the modern world.

Freeman takes up all these aspects as he narrates the stories of the first silk and cotton mills on the rivers of Great Britain; the textile mills in Lowell Massachusetts; the giant steel plants in the U.S.; the even bigger automobile plants in Detroit; the huge heavy industry factories in the USSR; their spread into central Europe after the war and the Foxconn & Co. assembly complexes in China. He is interested in the issue of ‘size’ and why factories grew large.  For instance Ford’s River Rouge complex was the biggest one ever built in the U.S.  It was more like a city with over 100,000+ workers at its height in 1929.

Freeman makes fun of the ridiculous notion that we live in a ‘post-industrial society,’ as claimed by people like Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell in the 1960s.  We are still absolutely surrounded by things made in factories, mills and plants. Just look around. Yet ‘factory life’ is the last thing on hip people’s minds, immersed in their computers while visiting malls and living in housing developments that were built over former factory land.  But factories are still here – all over the world and even in the U.S.

Why Factories?

Freeman quotes Charles Babbage and other early English writers as to why factory ‘size’ mattered.  The reasons were economy of scale; the ability to supervise; higher productivity, attracting workers and increasing output due to the growth of colonial exports and domestic markets.  The large domestic market was especially true in the U.S. for textiles. The factory is really the physical embodiment of arriving capitalism, and some were bigger than churches in England, which astounded locals.  The first English plants became tourist sites. River Rouge itself hosted 2 hour tours every half hour.

The textile mills of England were the first signs of this new society, a model which was then copied across the world.  Steel mills like the huge Carnegie’s Homestead plant were the handmaidens to the railroads, which vastly improved transportation. Ford’s acres-large Highland Park plant developed the Model T, the assembly line and efficiency studies, and the car culture took off.  “Fordism,” partly a Keynesian idea that pays labor enough to buy their own products, was experimented with – and dropped. Soviet factories later helped repel the Nazis, and U.S. plants were quickly converted to war production too.  Foxconn’s plants have helped put the internet in almost everyone’s pocket across the world.

The factory changed communities – it made former farmers and irregular or home workers into clock watchers, fined for tardiness or absence.  It created cities and depopulated rural areas. Manchester grew into a crowded, polluted slum due to coal and poverty after the mills moved from horse power, then water power to steam. Coal and later gas and electricity were required to power these factories, so those extractive industries thrived as a result. Early English and U.S. textile companies hired young women and children, who they thought could do detail work needed with their ‘tiny’ hands.  Companies built new cities around their facilities. Some industrialists built housing next to the factories, part of a company town where they tried to control and surveil the morality of their workers.  Religion, abstinence from alcohol, cleanliness and chastity were the hallmarks.  This was especially true for new immigrants at Ford and the rural girls in Lowell and Lawrence. Yet Ford had huge problems with turnover – 370% in 1913 – until it introduced the $5 a day wage and profit-sharing.   

Politically in bourgeois thinking, factories were seen as harbingers of ‘modernism’ – a project of social uplift, wealth generation and consumer society.  They spread the idea of ‘joint stock’ companies and vertical integration.  They were celebrated in industrial exhibitions.  They were the wellspring of a new world, a new capitalist social system, praised as such until the dark side revealed itself.  Pollution, long hours, drudgery, injuries, low pay, exploitation, sexual and physical abuse and child labor made it more akin to slavery, especially as seen by reformers, unionists and Marxists. This is where we get the notion of wage slavery.  Freeman quotes Engels frequently, who helped run a textile plant in Manchester, to illustrate the Left side of the equation.

CULTURE

Freeman hits cultural notes too, as factories and industrialism impacted culture, as would be expected.  He spends time on the great Detroit Art Museum murals by Diego Rivera based on scenes Rivera observed at River Rouge.  He describes Charlie Chaplain’s social-comedic film Modern Times and mentions of Ford in Dos Passos U.S.A. series volume, The Big Money about the Detroit auto strikes.  He dwells on Blake’s invocation of the ‘dark Satanic mills,’ Charlotte Bronte’s attack on the Luddites in the novel Shirley; the descriptions of factories in Dicken’s Hard Times and Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong.  He discusses Dziga Vertov’s film about Ukrainian factories called Enthusiasm; Margaret-Bourke White’s photos of auto plants; Alexander Rodchenko’s constructivist photo montages of industrial facilities and many more. (END of Part 1)

Note: Freeman is a history prof in NYC specializing in labor and comes from a working-class background.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “factory,” “textile,” “steel,” “Fordism.” ”Engels.”   

And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 5, 2025

A Two-Summer Read

 “A Perfect Spy” by John Le Carré, 1986

This is a sprawling, gargantuan story, quite unlike the tight, plot-driven spy books of Le Carre’s prime.  It is his Infinite Jest, his wander, his cornucopian novel that explains the long makings of a ‘perfect spy.’ It is hard to read actually, as it is a slog at almost 600 pages.  In time, it zips back and forth.  It is filled with hundreds of characters.  It is tongue-in-cheek satire to the highest degree.  It is a psychological portrait most of all.  It looks at the impact on a son of a father who is a hypocritical liar and con man.  It has manipulative spies working on the same gullible 17 year old student. It pictures a boy and later, a man with no particular skills except deception and weak adherence to “Britain.”  It makes fun of an apolitical but kind ‘liberal’ who can be on both sides of every story and has more feelings that brains.  It highlights a weak ‘yes’ man – or so you may think.  Yet even yes-men eventually say no.

Pym is the spy in question, who eventually either goes rogue with Czech intelligence or didn’t or did.  The story is not really about tradecraft, a plot with a point, skullduggery or political murder.  It is a long joke about Britain – its classes, its ridiculous characters, its clichés, its tired architecture and rundown edges – an empire that once was. Le Carre makes fun of U.K. politicians, spies, business men, the ‘special relationship,’ petty criminals, military men, voting rubes, chauvinism, royal titles, silly names and village life.  At the end Le Carré makes fun of the whole spy business and the cold war itself.

The writing is heavily detailed and ornate with a mysterious “I” occasionally appearing.  The ‘I’ might be Pym writing his own autobiography for his son, interspersed with a dominant third-person narrator.  Every individual is described a bit and then made fun of.  It’s a picture of the various cultural tribes of Britain.  It is a patchwork, ‘kitchen sink’ bildungsroman, but in a good way.  And yes, Pym is as middle-class as they come.  In fact he’s from his mother’s side of titled English gentry, if he says so himself.

Pym spies on young Communists at Oxford.  He betrays a new friend in Bern, Switzerland with a suspicious origin and no papers.  He shuts down a woman whose inheritance was stolen by Pym’s father. He saw Pym Sr. badly treat his mother, and he alternately hates and sucks up to his dad.   He cannot form a real relationship with a woman – it is only sex or as a cover. He’s finally recruited to His Majesty’s Service as the ‘natural’ he is and sent to Vienna.

The ‘spy’ dimension in the book is focused on the Czech Communist intelligence network and M6’s Austrian Station.  What Le Carre emphasizes is that much spy work is detail-oriented regarding personal emotional issues and micro-surveillance.  Pym becomes an apparently ‘good’ spymaster by accident and his psychology becomes key after he disappears.  Reflecting on his own time in Intelligence, Le Carre nails the various types of people he worked with – only a few of whom are actually perceptive.  Who knew spying involved genteel British boobs?  They might remind us of boardroom types at the top of a corporate ladder.

Pym gets his start in Austria watching the Russians across the border, handling ‘never-wozzers’ according to Le Carre.  Then he strikes seeming gold because of an old relationship, and it’s all downhill – or uphill - from there.  Pym becomes a 30-year agent for both sides in the cold war and the global class war, a double-agent and ‘middle-man’ representing just a tiny country inhabited by two buddies who happen to be spies. In a way the book belittles the whole, long intrigue between the two blocs.  As successful spies they make it to ‘America’ and are promoted to the big time to continue spying until they are caught.  And that, evidently, is perfection. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “spy,” “Le Carre,” “Le Carré,” “CIA.”

And I got this at the Library!  May Day Books itself has a significant amount of books on espionage by the U.S. government, CIA and others.

Kultur Kommissar / July 2, 2025  

A Culture of Murder

 “Killers of the Flower Moon – The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” book by David Grann, 2017

(Spoilers ahead.) 

This is a penetrating look into the continued attack on indigenous people in the U.S. in the 1920s.  The murders are framed by discriminatory federal policies applied to reservations; private property created on reservation land; paternalistic control of Osage wealth; plain old violent racism and the power of money to corrupt legal systems, lawyers and individuals.  The book is valuable because much of this is still true.  As a key organizer of the murders, a large rancher and businessmen in Osage County said he was confident his wealth and power would acquit him.  Sound familiar?

After several years of incompetent investigations, the FBI took the lead.  If you are uncomfortable seeing the FBI as the decent prosecutors of some of these murders, it doesn’t change the fact that J. Edgar Hoover also created a punitive political surveillance apparatus aimed at the Left. Back in the 1920s, Hoover ‘modernized’ national policing by using scientific techniques to catch criminals, like finger prints, mug shots, written reports and hand writing analysis, which had not be used before by the sloppy and brutal local police of the day.  Amateurish ‘inquests’ were the police rule in Oklahoma, for instance.  Of course Hoover hid the FBI’s bungling and mistakes in this matter too in order to jump-start the myth of the perfect FBI. 

This is an extraordinary and bloody tale.  Native oil wealth had turned Osage County into one of the richest pieces of real estate in the U.S. The reservation lands were hilly grass prairie, filled with rocks and desolate when the Osage were forced to move in the 1870s from southern Kansas to northern Oklahoma.  The joke on the white folks was under the soil, the ‘underground reservation.’  A clever Osage attorney had included land trust oil and mineral rights in the tribal legal documents, which went undiscovered until too late.  To recoup that wealth, a white rancher, his prominent compatriots and local thugs used poison, explosives and executions in their successful attempts at taking over some oil-rich tribal lands in Oklahoma, which had made many Osage wealthy.

A Real CONSPIRACY

The book is a picture of a large conspiracy which only a powerful and monied person or group could organize. At least 24 people officially died in various ways – Osage, witnesses, accomplices, enemies, lawyers. It was later called a ‘reign of terror.’  Any class-conscious detective would immediately see who could be behind such a large local conspiracy.  The first step was to overlook the false façades of friendliness towards the Osage by certain ‘upstanding fellows.’  Lies, threats, murder, bribes and disinformation were the methods of power used by the conspirators to avoid being caught or convicted.  Sound familiar?

Behind the whole situation was Federal law, which allowed these crimes to commence.  The structural racism against the indigenous included land allotments. This was a widespread Federal policy to privatize parts of the reservation so as to have them sold later to people outside the tribe. The oil and mineral rights would be included in these ‘headrights.’  In addition, a murder on that land could be held in the prejudiced and corrupt state courts instead of a better federal court. 

Another key aspect of Federal “Indian” law at that time was that all full-blood Osage were declared ‘incompetent’ to handle their financial affairs.  Light-skinned men were put in guardianship of their assets and were able to steal their money, misdirect it, with-hold it, invest it as they chose and more.  If you were white and married an Osage woman, you could inherit her money if she died.  So even ‘romance’ and marriage was bloody suspect.  The racism was so thick around this situation that one white man married to an Osage woman knew who was killing her relatives and only later confessed.

A Culture of Killing

Grann goes on to describe how Hoover used this case to propagandize for the FBI. Grann reports on the later life of Tom White, the organized and civil lead investigator on some of the Osage murder cases, though many were never brought to trial by the FBI.  Grann visits the Osage Nation several times to dig into loose ends.  He finds the local oil boomtowns are abandoned ruins or shrunken hulks. 10,000 derricks rust or pump a dozen gallons a day, as the oil curse is over.  But the Osage Nation now has 20,000 members, revived from 3-4 thousand at the time of the killings and the bison are back.

Oklahoma Tribal Nations

The head of the central conspiracy, Hale, received a life sentence, but was paroled after 20 years.  Grann meets with relatives of one of the principals during the terror, Mollie Burkhart, who was a full-blood Osage at the time.  He visits the graves of Mollie and her 4 murdered relatives. He investigates the unsolved murder of a lawyer who was thrown off a moving train because he knew details of the conspiracy. Archived grand jury, news and financial documents located by Grann indicate a County banker named Burt was the most likely murderer of that lawyer and another Osage, the latter via poison. Both were his wards.  The banker was never indicted, though he was close friends with Hale.

Grann is told that many more Osage people died during the terror than just 24.  He investigates another shooting and concludes, while not connected directly to Hale, it was part of a plot to inherit money by a wife and future husband.  There was no indictment there either.  He concludes that while Hale’s murder spree went for 5 years, there were ‘headright’ killings from 1919 to 1931.  In the guardianship logs Grann found in the archives, he notes prominent white guardians in the County had a high number of dead wards, into the 100s.  Many ‘mysterious deaths’ were registered by the corrupt coroner to the point where nearly every Osage family was affected.  The death rate was far higher than it should have been.  So it was not just one conspiracy, it was a racist financial situation that resulted in ‘a killing culture.’

The FBI tied up some murders in a nice bow, but the spree went far beyond Hale’s crew.  Hoover didn’t care about that. The real cause of all these murders was private property and private wealth, this time in the hands of the ‘wrong people.’  The injunction to ‘follow the money’ is usually correct.  Crime is a function of first class and then cash. As long as those exist, crimes will follow – even without the Osage.

Like the KKK in the South, the conspiracy to kill Osage stake-holders was led by the most prominent people in the County according to Grann – cops, doctors, judges, businessmen, undertakers, coroners, lawyers, bankers, ranchers and politicians.  It was a middle-class conspiracy. They gave the orders to the criminal thugs and weaklings to do their dirty-work. Some non-tribal people were aware of what was going on.  Some were afraid to say anything.

The story is another reminder of continued exploitation of Native land and peoples long after settlement. Incidentally, this will never change. Native reservations should be considered areas for social revolution, as their land is still partly socialized and partly under tribal law.  They are also becoming areas with their own working-class.  They are rural bastions of some social change, especially on environmental issues, and as such should be considered allies by urban workers.  They are a progressive base in the countryside, and perhaps someday, a military base too. Though as it is, every reservation leadership is not oppositional and some have been bought by carbon companies, as we saw in the Line 3 struggle here in Minnesota in regards to the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa. 

A work of solid reporting which formed the basis for the film of the same name, with Robert DeNiro as the leader of the killers, but it goes beyond that film as do so many books.  It also beats all those fake murder 'entertainment' series on streaming because it is real and it is political.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Native American,” “indigenous,” “oil” “FBI,” “murder,” “conspiracy.” 

And I got at May Day Books’ excellent used/cutout book section!

Red Frog / June 29, 2025

Literary Summer

 “The Great Gatsby”by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

The Great Gatsby might be the most famous fictional view of class from a liberal point of view in the U.S.  It was given free to soldiers during WWII in pocket books, and then became required reading in high school English classes.  It seemingly still is. Modern writers like Tom Wolf were inspired by its social perceptions and ribbing of the rich. He even borrowed a hit-and-run from this book for his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities.” “The Wolf of Wall Street” film echoes Gatsby’s glitz, which seems to be the only thing that has stuck in popular culture. Fitzgerald died virtually penniless in Hollywood at the age of 44, a heavy alcoholic, so he never joined the elite fraternity that he always admired. His class consciousness never led to class antagonism - but perhaps it should have.  

Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself. Many of the experiences in the book happened to the author. Nick is a middle-class ‘mid-westerner’ and Yalie, now aspiring to be a Wall Street bond man.  On nouveau riche Long Island he is accidentally close to the mansions of the wealthy – multi-millionaire Gatsby’s and Tom & Daisy’s, the latter who he has known from Chicago. Tom’s a racist, muscular jock with money who is having an affair; Daisy is an effervescent child-woman, but also mother of a 3 year old girl.  They are both ‘careless people.’  Her friend Jordan Baker is a familiar of ‘the sporting life’ in well-heeled towns around the U.S., a lover of parties and gossip.

The preface makes claims that every teenager would identify with Gatsby, and gush over his romance with Daisy, as if all kids are on the threshold of the American dream, as if all were millionaires in waiting.  In my farm-college town in Minnesota, that was far from the case.  I doubt anywhere in the country it was true except in upscale precincts.  These imaginary types were odd airheads to the rest of us. Or as Fitzgerald puts it “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”    This is not an unusual sentiment - unless you’ve never met one or someone aspiring to be one.  Many have not because they stay hidden. 

One stand-out character in the narrative are the large mansions and their many rooms; the huge gardens; the beaches, boats and exotic cars.  These are all a stage at Gatsby’s for the champagne, the gin, the dancing and the tented parties; the endless foodstuffs; the hot band; the Roaring, Riviera excess. This is what we gawk at. It would work as an over-the-top episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and the dream of every lazy, louche money-grubber.  In popular culture it is this flashy detritus that stays with us.  It is the golden toilet.

Gatsby pays for all this.  He is rumored to be descended from royalty. He tells Nick that he came from money and went to Oxford for a short time, and used to dabble in oil and drugs, or at least drug-stores.  His wealth actually comes from bootlegging at those drug stores according to Tom.  He’s friends with the police commissioner and closely associates with Manhattan crooks who sometimes provide him with staff.  One conversation reveals that some money might come from bond forgeries or theft.  He smacks of the lumpen bourgeoisie.  Gatsby becomes a moveable stand-in for every ambitious rich person you’ve ever heard of. He actually came from poor farm stock in North Dakota, a truly benighted place in the view of New Yorkers. He got a cash stake after working for a rich man in Minnesota.   This is really a rags to riches story, the most common kind of Horatio Alger mush but with a dark, romantic twist.

Fitzgerald’s mission is to humanize the man.  And so we witness his adolescent love affair with a former teenage Daisy who he met 5 years ago, and now lives across a large pond from him, married to a terrible husband.  Gatsby’s lonely and obsessed with her. So we get to like this love-struck man fatally living in the past.  The old cliché of ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’ or ‘money doesn’t buy love’ ring in the ears of the reader, even if they are not written down.  We are to pity the rich fool, even as he sadly dies a martyr to love.  This muddled view of class is then christened ‘The Great American Novel.’

The Party is on on Long Island

Daisy, Gatsby’s love, supposedly has a voice that ‘sounds like money.’  Fitzgerald describes her as ‘the golden girl and ‘the King’s daughter.’  She’s upper-class from Louisville, Kentucky, a southern belle and yes, careless.  If you are a certain male reader you might have a class crush on her too, just as Fitzgerald himself had on a real upper-class beauty from Montgomery, Alabama.  And the cliché that “you can marry a rich girl as easily as a poor one” pops into the reader’s mind.  Though that is not true either.

“The Great Gatsby” replicates the particularly ‘American’ fascination and yearning for wealth that the whole culture radiates - even if that wealth has a dark side.  It is why the rich run the Democratic Party of liberals and centrists.  It is why the rich dominate the Republican Party of conservatives and hard reactionaries. It is why the capitalist money system hides in the shadows, even though it dominates every moment of our lives, including our culture.  The book is part of a temporary time of cultural excitement in the ‘roaring 20s’ when fun and money were one.  It is an endless, romantic summer without war – though both Fitzgerald and Gatsby had been in the military in WWI.  But that war has no impact on this book, and the sad ending has no impact on the summer.

In 1925, socialism was growing across the world, revolutions and insurrections had occurred, a Depression and an even bigger war were brewing, fascism was making strides and surrealism and modernism had become world-wide cultural movements.  At this moment in history good ‘ol Scott was only vaguely touched by all this.  There are plenty of writers like him even now.  So you can choose – upper class aspiration, class awareness or class antagonism. Fitzgerald choose 1 and 2, which is sometimes more than most. Time for #3. 

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

May Day Books has a large section of left-wing fiction.   

The Cultural Marxist / June 26, 2025

A Geo-Fix?

“Category Five – Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” by Porter Fox, 2024

This is a romantic and terrifying story of the power of the world’s oceans as they respond to global warming. The oceans that cover most of the earth, combined with the sun’s flares and the turning of the globe, provide the main forces behind the wind, rain, drought and severity of the world’s weather.  And yet much more is spent on Martian-type space research than ocean research, a typical ‘head in the clouds’ move, now compounded by Trump’s defunding of NOAA.  Fox describes individual super-storms, hurricanes, typhoons, supercells and cyclones to make his points.  They are nature unleashed in all its fury, resulting in damaging effects, especially to landlocked and coast-dwelling humans and any poor souls in its watery path. While this book mostly focuses on northern and central American oceans and seas, it references events in the Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans too.   

It is told through the eyes of Fox, who spent a lot of salt time on the Atlantic even as a youngster.  It is also an homage to his father, who built an advanced boat in his Maine garage, and started a boat business which later failed.  It includes an extremely experienced storm sailor; a dogged English mariner who logged old written storm data into a valuable book; a U.K. researcher organizing the inputting of hand-written data from the 1800s into a digital database; a private inventor of a sea drone gathering electronic ocean data; NOAA oceanographers working on current buoys, datasets and software and a world-wide ocean emergency crew leader describing the disasters he has seen.

Ah, POLITICS?

The book is not political in the sense that Fox thinks that only ‘money and data’ are the things stopping an understanding of global warming and attendant climate change action.  Right. He has no concept of politics, which is especially relevant after global warming denialists have been put in charge of the U.S. government.  With the defunding of NOAA and the ending of any climate change initiatives and policies in other parts of the federal government to benefit the carbon capitalists, the situation is dire. It is not just the carbon firms or banks that stand in the way, now the government is openly in the way.  Stories, first person interviews and data won’t change this.

As a landlubber whose contact with water and weather is through freshwater canoes, kayaks, a 10-horse motor on a rowboat, a small sailboat and occasional piloting of a pontoon or speedboat, I can say this book is very exotic stuff.  The ocean is another beast entirely. These folks are fascinated by the ocean in all its moods, but mostly hellish and difficult turns of weather.  They can pilot sailboats with ease, or at least competency, in the face of storms and towering seas.  Winds howl and waves are stories tall.  At 8 pounds per gallon of water this adds up to tons in a wave crashing on a deck. The experienced ‘rough seas’ sailor took a group of trainees straight through a near hurricane and they did not sink, with only one man being injured. 

But this is not just some adventure story.  The sailors, as amateur oceanic scientists, noticed the increases in waves, rain and wind years before the IPCC, Al Gore, the Paris Accord or 350.org. They saw these changes picking up speed and becoming more extreme.  The ‘ocean-atmosphere flux’ is a key ‘border’ location that moves CO2 in an ocean conveyer belt up, down and sideways.  This interface between air and water was, unsurprisingly, first measured by Exxon in the 1970s as it was trying to estimate the impact of burning fossil fuels.  The data was not good for Exxon and they hid the results.  As Fox emphasizes, ocean data is the missing piece of the environmental picture.  Unfortunately an un-manned surface sea drone discovered several years ago that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica was now emitting carbon, not storing it.  This is a telling fact if true.

Rescue outfits that arrive after hurricane storm damage report complete devastation in areas.  The Ninth Ward in New Orleans is still 25% of what it was before 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.  Especially in the Caribbean, many island nations encumbered by poverty and hit by cyclones have never recovered. Even in the U.S., after the headlines move on, the people left behind are forgotten and devastated for years.  Yet people are still moving to Florida and the Gulf Coast - though that ‘tide’ seems to be shifting, partly due to the bean-counting exigencies of the U.S. insurance industry.

Fox has a vision of an apocalyptic storm that directly hits New York City in 2100, powered by warm ocean water, salt content, a sinking eastern coast, prior sea level rise and horrendous 200 mph winds, all combining to overwhelm the massive newly-built ‘gates’ to New York harbor, flooding Manhattan. It is no little Superstorm Sandy. Buildings collapse on Manhattan Island and for 48 hours the slow-moving storm ravages the city and its boroughs.  What is left is uninhabitable.  This is no movie, it is the future for every city on the coasts of the world until something drastic is done.  And it might happen long before 2100.

Saved by the Ocean?

A Geo SOLUTION?

Fox’s solutions? It is a technical one, at least to him. He sails his father’s first boat far down the Hudson from its moorage, then around Manhattan, up the East River and into Long Island Sound to Woods Hole, Rhode Island. It is an extremely weather-impacted trip to find out the rumored geo-solution. He has to face one of his greatest fears in Long Island Sound – a storm that he cannot handle if he is to reach his destination. For the first time his level of confidence in his training and his father’s boat give him relative peace, with this storm at least.

Fox meets two oceanographers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  They think the solution to reducing climate carbon is in the deep ocean and the multiple life forms hidden there, almost unmapped by science. This lightless area is called ‘the twilight zone.’  According to Fox, they are in a race against the brutal industrial fishing industry, which will destroy many of these life forms using miles-long nets.  Because no one owns the ocean, it is still the ‘wild west,’ a lawless bonanza.  So here it is.  The biological carbon sink of the deep ocean via various forms of plankton up to giant whales sequesters far more carbon than some high-electrical engineering fix, or land-locked soil, trees, mangrove swamps, bamboo or hemp.  It sequesters 15-20 times as much. And it is mainly through fish ‘poop,’ or as it’s scientifically called “marine snow.”  Fox details how the ocean has prevented the worst effects of global warming – so far.

Woods Hole maps this ‘twilight-zone’ of zooplankton, fish larvae, gelatinous organisms, tons of microorganisms, along with organic waste and detritus at the bottom of the ocean through submersible drones, robots, cameras and sensors.  As Fox puts it, they are ‘following the CO2’ into the ocean, which even the IPCC hasn’t done.  So here are their preliminary findings:  the deep ocean contains 10 times more organic life than originally thought.  In 2014 a study of this mesopelagic zone estimated 10-20 billion tons of fish, shellfish and microorganisms exist there, which is far more than on land. Here is where climate change and diet connect once again.  Capitalist commercial plans to drag and harvest everything in the ocean like this could drop these numbers to the point where this carbon sink is … sunk.  But thank you sushi!

To increase the amount of carbon sequestration given the amount of fluctuation in different geographies, one scientist wants to use iron fertilization in the ocean, which increases the amount of CO2 making it to the deep, dark ocean floor.  Seaweed is another method, though how that works is left unexplained. These are ‘geo’ solutions and no one in the book mentions if scattering iron in salt water has blowback effects.  That is Fox’s fix.

A tidbit from this somewhat lyrical book reminds us that Ernest Hemingway wrote a story for the New Masses called “Who Murdered the Vets?” It was about war veteran construction workers left on an island in the Florida Keys that died after a vicious 1935 hurricane hit.  The story led to a scandal, and later, federal legislation under F.D. Roosevelt to establish the National Hurricane Center.  So socialists even had a role in that. 

I got this book at the library.  However May Day Books has a good selection of books on climate change and science from a left-wing environmentalist point of view.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “global warming,” “climate change,” “science.”

Red Frog / June 22, 2025

The Permanent Rent Strike

 “Abolish Rent – How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis” by T. Rosenthal & L. Vilchis, 2024

This short book by two Los Angeles rent activists who helped form the LA Tenants Union (LATU) has revolutionary undertones and lots of facts and examples to buttress its case.  LA is one of several places in the U.S. that are ‘ground zero’ for high housing costs, which especially affect minority communities, so their experience is valuable.  Every tenant’s rights advocate should read it. 

There is plenty of familiar rhetoric here, so I’m not going to belabor that.  Generally, the business of cities is real estate.  City councils are the caretakers of this private land casino, usually run by Democrats.  They work closely with developers and landlords, while laws are written to protect private real estate ownership.  The LATU says “the real estate state” is waging “a war on tenants” along with private industry.  As Mike Davis put it, LA was a “rent plantation.” 

Here are the facts and points they make about the exploitative and racist rental industry in the U.S., and how they organize against it: 

     1.   “Half of the 100 million tenants spend more than a third of their income on rent.”

     2.   “In LA alone, 600K people spend fully 90 % of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads.”

     3.   “Every minute of every day, landlords file 7 evictions – totaling 3.6 million evictions a year.”

     4.   “In 2019 alone, rent payments totaled $512.4 billion.” 

     5.   “This is a transfer of wealth from over 100 million tenants to just over 11 million landlords.”  They do not include a profit rate.

6.   Large corporate and private equity landlords are more likely to evict, raise rents and gouge with fees and fines.  They are increasingly buying homes, farms, trailer parks and apartment buildings.

7.   The state’s physical force - the police and sheriff - back up landlords.

8.   Developers and landlords do not want to build or own real ‘affordable housing,’ no matter what they say. Right now …“There are 33 homes for every 100 families living in poverty.”

9.   New housing development, the so-called savior according to the market clowns, slows down rent increases but it does not stop them.  Engels pointed out that there is always a ‘housing shortage’ in a capitalist society - on purpose. 

10.       “68% of the world’s wealth is held in real estate.”  Most is in personal housing.

11.       Empty apartments and buildings sit alongside homeless encampments. “A $100 increase in rent means a 9% rise in homelessness.”

12.       The LATU supports public housing.  A long line of U.S. anti-communists have denounced public housing as ‘socialism.’  The neo-liberal Clinton administration destroyed thousands of public housing units in the 1990s. 

13.       The authors advocate an eventual ‘permanent rent strike’ to squeeze out landlords.

14.       They retail a classic and excellent story of a year-long rent strike in Boyle Heights in 2017by Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos against the gentrification of their building.  Stories of other LA tenant struggles across the city are also told.

15.       The LATU helped the Boyle Heights struggle, and advocates tenants’ associations in buildings or neighborhoods.  The point is to build tenant power not by the rules of non-profits, certain council persons, state housing departments or establishment lawyers.  (They do use sympathetic lawyers.)

16.       A tenants union or association is a vehicle of class struggle. The key to building a union is “building community” and breaking out of isolation.

17.       Their union has “won collective bargaining agreements; reversed illegal lock-outs; canceled rent debt; secured building-wide repairs; lowered rents and built tenant dignity.” 

18.       Eviction is personal, so one unit of the LATU specializes in “naming landlords, publicizing their neglect, visiting their houses and disrupting their social lives.” 

19.       Organizing buildings reclaims local space and the commons.  They note that a rent strike is similar to an occupation.  This is all linked to the struggle for land.  One thing they advocate are tenant gardens, for instance.

20.       The capitalist state and its politicians answer tenant political and social demands with privatization schemes, gentrification and unaffordable public/private projects.

This book has the details that any tenant, tenant organizer, tenant lawyer or socialist needs to know.  One caveat:  The authors seem to think that everyone who owns a home is exempt from housing problems.  Rising mortgages, taxes, fees, repairs, utilities, insurance and weather play a negative role for ‘home owners.’  Also 1/3rd of the houses in the U.S. are now rentals, thanks to private equity buyouts.  These are links with the problems of apartment tenants, which at some point could forge a united front between the two.  The LATU’s ultimate aim is “a world without landlords and a world without rents.”  That is a socialist goal I think. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “eviction,” “rent,” “gentrification,” “housing.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a good selection of books on housing.

Red Frog / June 19, 2025  - Celebrate Juneteenth!