The Bourgeoisification of Union Leaders

 “Teamsters Metropolis: Not Necessarily a Safe Neighborhood for Workers” by Ryan Patrick Murphy (Ann Arbor, Michigan, $29.95, University of Michigan Press, 2025), 246 pages, paperback

Almost any book about the Teamsters Union is sure to catch the interest of those who follow class struggle and Teamsters Metropolis is no exception. No one any longer disputes the evidence of the Teamsters as a mobbed-up, corrupt organization that enriched those at the top of the union and contributed to the enrichment of the organized criminals with whom those leaders connived. There are two views (with gradients) about whether that corruption benefited the union and members or left a long-term negative legacy that members still struggle to overcome. 

Of course, the image of the corrupt Teamster union corresponds with the popular image of mob life. That is, flashy clothes and cars, protection and gambling rackets, and over the top violence and murder. Generally overlooked in popular culture are the innocent victims of this corruption. Murphy trains a queer eye on this history and presents the Teamsters is a place of cultural struggle. He identifies the place of that struggle as the Teamsters Metropolis. While he doesn’t blindly overlook the harms to workers caused by Teamsters corruption, he does take a generally positive view of this place in the Teamsters Union. There is much to disagree with but the book is worth reading. The point of view interesting as are many of the not well-known parts of the story.

          At the highest level of abstraction, Murphy’s thesis is “the Hoffa-era Teamsters union has much to teach contemporary labor scholars and activists . . . Hoffa’s Teamsters union was a culturally revered, economically impactful social movement because it challenged the embodied experience of life according to the Protestant work ethic.” (184). As he describes it, “unruliness defined this unionism that skirted the boundaries of the law; that blurred the line between workers, owners, activists, and entrepreneurs; and that challenged bourgeois standards for physical comportment.” (12).[1] Ultimately he concludes, referring to public queer spaces, “the commitment to providing gratification for marginal workers who found so little comfort in the mid-twentieth century, is the most enduring contribution of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to the US labor movement.” (198).

          Murphy makes his argument over five chapters and an epilogue, each of which describes a different facet of the Teamsters Metropolis.  Chapter 1 is the story of entrepreneurial cartel unionism in the service sector, particularly in small businesses servicing coin operated vending machines and jukeboxes in the 1950’s. Murphy asserts “that these small businesses and Teamster locals were the primary venue for the cultural struggle over the meaning of suburbanization – and the attendant investment in whiteness and heterosexuality – for the children and grandchildren of Jewish and Catholic ‘new immigrant’ families.’ (25). He claims, with little evidence that Jimmy Hoffa understood this and that it’s why he focused his organizing on that sector. As Murphy describes it, these cartel unions were formed and headed by entrepreneurs who moved up to the higher incomes offered by union organizing from the very types of small businesses they later brought into the union. Often workers in these businesses had no choice about whether they would be union members or which union would provide for their representation. Generally, workers received little or no benefit from their union membership but the businesses, which were considered members of the union (40), got protection from competition enforced by mob based “muscle.” (29). If necessary, the union relied on paid sham pickets, violence, and property damage provided by organized crime to ensure the small businesses agreed to join the unionized cartel. This system, according to Murphy, provided ‘order’ for the industry (36, 36), and sufficient income for both union officials and business owners to join “U.S. middle-class culture” (17).

          The chapter further describes this counterculture, as Murphy labels it (19), by telling the stories of the personalities, businesses, and corrupt union locals involved. He sidesteps the issue of corruption with a claim that “Hoffa motivated rank-and-file workers because he was a countercultural person.” (19), and that ‘Teamster activists’ made economic gains because of the unrestrained culture of the union (51). In accordance with the queer view-point of the book, Murphy frames Teamsters Union membership as providing “a mechanism to eastern and southern European Catholics and Jews to struggle over where they would fit into the city, how they would be white, and if they would be normal sexual subjects.” (25).

          Interesting as is this story, the analysis suffers from some serious flaws. Murphy almost entirely collapses the distinction between workers, owners, and union officials. The lifestyles that form the basis of his conclusions about countercultural living as Teamsters are those of business owners and union officials. Workers are lost here since there is virtually no information about the lifestyles of workers in the service industries he describes. It is therefore impossible to determine whether there was a place for workers in this ‘countercultural’ Teamsters metropolis. Thus, one is left wondering whether the broad cultural claims Murphy makes about Teamsters apply to workers in general, or just some or all Teamster members. Clearly, however the claims, to the extent they are valid, do apply to union officials who lived decadent lifestyles and, as far as we can tell, likely had little or no concern about the welfare of the workers they organized and claimed to represent. (127).

          Also, Murphy doesn’t discuss at all whether there is any connection between the corruption he describes and the current state of the Teamsters. Many current Teamster activists would argue this “counterculture” continues to pervade the union and provides the historical basis for the decadence of current union officials. Whether it’s blurring election and other rules for their own benefit or their excessive salaries, many believe rightfully that these things are the direct result of the historical corruption in the Teamsters union. To such criticism Murphy offers the retort “it is time to move past the paranoid readings of Hoffa the crook.” (19). This is wholly insufficient to those who continue to toil in conditions that could be much better in the absence of the decadence of current union officials.

          This corruption and decadence of union officials did not go unnoticed by the government and it stepped into the fray with the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, the so-called ‘McClellan Committee’ hearings led by Bobby Kennedy as chief counsel. (58). In Chapter 2, Murphy tells the tale of these hearings, which Kennedy ran with the flair of a showman. According to Murphy the purpose of the hearings was to expose “the vulgar culture of the Teamsters metropolis . . .  to regulate the Teamsters’ bodies, tastes, and styles, realigning them with the suburban culture at the center of US Cold war planning.” (67). “Kennedy’s questions were pedagogical, evoking information that taught viewers how to live in the suburbanizing midcentury metropolis: how to consume in a measured manner, how to embody ethnicity while shoring up middle-class whiteness, and how to make a living through hard work rather than via illicit ethnic networks.” (67).

          The hearings lasted three years and yielded a wealth of evidence of wrongdoing, including violence and corruption. A primary focus was the decadent consumption habits of union leaders supported by skimming dues money. For example, the committee, with apparent dramatic flair, exposed high end consumption by Teamsters President Dave Beck using kickbacks from the union’s lawyer who also represented retailers. (67-71). Murphy attempts to minimize the decadence of it by comparing the $790,000 (in today’s dollars) stolen from workers and funneled to union leader Beck with the costs to taxpayers of some of the infamous corruption schemes of finance capitalists. He suggests that the prices (in today’s dollars) of $1,600 coats and $134 ties are not extraordinary, persisting in his apparent inability to distinguish between lifestyles of union leaders and the workers who made up the membership of those unions. It’s very unlikely that workers currently represented by the Teamsters Union would find either those coats or those ties affordable.

          Chapter 3 opens with Jimmy Hoffa celebrating in “the dining room of the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.” (86). The rooms there cost $805 per night in today’s dollars. (87). The story Murphy tells is of the use of pension fund money to leverage Miami Beach real estate “as a centerpiece of Teamsters’ proworker investing strategy.” (87). Hoffa wasn’t there just to celebrate, however, he was also engaged in an ultimately largely unsuccessful effort to organize public employees in South Florida. (88, 107). An effort that was mostly a failure, at least in part, due to the drain on Hoffa’s energy caused by the need to defend himself against corruption charges. (116). The queer perspective presented here is that “a vacation in Hoffa’s Miami Beach  . . . incited new, sensuous desires that allowed rank-and-file Teamsters to imagine a world beyond work,” (89), as they stayed in “flamboyant resort hotels,” (96), that “clearly transgressed bourgeois taste standards, ” (96), while white middle- and upper-class Miamians “frequented a racially restricted “sexual underground . . . just beyond city limits.” (97). Of course, “while Teamster real estate investments were a source of great enjoyment for some union members, Hoffa often channeled Florida financial deals through his associates in the Jewish and Sicilian underworlds.” (89, emphasis added). Ultimately, Hoffa, who was opposed to investing workers’ pension funds in the stock and bond markets, (100), began investing those funds in second-tier hotels, “vacation homes, and retirement apartments.” (101-102, 108), and “took large, fraudulent commissions.” (111-112).

           Hoffa and his associates stole funds from workers’ pension funds and were ultimately convicted for “fraudulently investing $20 million of worker pension money in real estate in Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama, among other states, and of diverting $1 million for their own use.” (115). One wonders whether that enrichment provided a material basis from which Jimmy Hoffa’s son, James Hoffa, was able to leverage himself into his father’s old job at the top of the Teamsters Union. Murphy doesn’t address such issues but does note that Teamster vacationers “drove back up north to the Teamsters metropolis as more secure members of the white middle-class even as they often disdained bourgeois culture.” (117). And while it may be true that worker members of the Teamsters Union had such disdain, it also seems clear that many in the leadership of that union embraced - and embrace - the most basic bourgeois values and behaviors including stealing from and exploiting the working class.

          Corruption, violence, and Mob ties are the hallmarks of the Teamsters Union in popular culture. Less well known are claims by Teamsters officials, including Jimmy Hoffa, that they have always opposed segregation and embraced minority workers. (80). Those claims are not true, a fact that Kennedy seems to have wanted to avoid during the McClellan hearings but that was, nonetheless, established during questioning of a black truck driver by conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. (80-81). It is racist exploitation by the Teamsters Union that Murphy addresses in Chapter 4. For non-white residents of the US through much, maybe all, of the last century life included poverty, hunger, segregation, racist violence, and Jim Crow. (121). While the Teamsters organized into their metropolis European Jewish and Catholic immigrants (at least those who were small business owners) and “conducted union business in posh downtown hotels,” (121), Teamsters members who were “Black and Brown workers . . . (were forced) . . . to pay union dues while earning minimum wage, receiving not benefits, and working mandatory overtime without pay.” (122). “Teamster locals that sold racist, collusive contracts provided Hoffa with money, with political connections and with muscle, all of which helped him win the union’s presidency in 1957.” (122).

          It is not surprising that the entrepreneurial cartel unionists and the small business owners with whom they colluded were responsible for the contacts that proved “gravely adverse for those who worked under them.” (127). Whatever the benefits of the Teamsters Metropolis, those things were denied to the activists whose stories Murphy tells, particularly Black and Brown women. (152). These denials are part of a pattern in the Teamsters Union that continues. Present day Teamsters officials are silent or support anti-immigration policies and sentiment, for example, and are virtually never heard criticizing police murders of Black and Brown members of our communities. Thus, the lie that the Teamsters Union has always welcomed Black and Brown workers continues.

          In Chapter 5, Murphy pushes “us toward a newer, queerer understanding of labor’s past,” (181) by telling the story of Sylvia Pagano, an entrepreneur and close friend of Jimmy Hoffa and his family, who set up deals and acted as a go-between for Hoffa and organized crime figures. Hers is a story mostly absent from narratives about the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa, despite the wealth of information about her activities gathered surreptitiously and unlawfully by the FBI. (160-161). Pagano was not simply “a powerbroker: a person who made a lot of money, who was unendingly busy, and who was at the center of Jimmy Hoffa’s zealous effort to make the International Brotherhood of Teamsters the largest and powerful union in North America,” (161), she “had the ultimate influence over Hoffa’s financial decisions.” (165). She was a single woman who engaged in affairs with mobsters while being intimately connected to Hoffa’s family, including his wife, Josephine. (170-171). Murphy describes her lifestyle as ‘queer domesticity.’ (169).

          According to Murphy, Pagano recognized that “she lived far outside the box that society had made for her in the 1950s and early 1960s . . . a lonely place to be.” Those who investigated her and wrote of her unfortunately failed to recognize her as having significance beyond being a sex object or possible mistress of Jimmy Hoffa. (172). Her story is one of the most interesting in the book. That story, however, does further show Murphy’s lack of insight into the distinction between the lifestyles of union officials and workers. The Teamsters Metropolis is a place reserved for Teamsters officials. Workers seem to be absent from this place.

          Murphy wraps things up in his Epilogue where he asserts that “the Teamster movement fought for a different embodied experience, one demanding access to both the consumer comforts of suburbia and the unrestrained indulgence of the old neighborhoods of the central city.” (185). He supports this assertion by collapsing the distinction between the mob and the Teamsters, and, essentially, crediting the Teamsters culturally for the mob’s ownership of gay bars and bath houses. (196-197). To his credit, Murphy recognizes that Teamster membership declined continuously from 1968 until the end of the 20^th century, (188), and that Hoffa’s legal exposure on account of his corruption “led him to settle for smaller pay increases” and accept employer demands resulted in truckers, who formed the backbone of the Teamsters union, to suffer when the promises of the National Master Freight Agreement went unmet. Ultimately therefore the corruption and rebelliousness of Teamsters leaders of the so-called “Metropolis” hurt workers and weakened their movement.

          “Teamsters Metropolis” is worth reading. The lesson Murphy wants us to learn from his telling, that the success of the Teamsters union was the result the urge to resist cultural norms in a place somewhere between suburbia and the city has merit but seems of little use for current working class struggle. Ultimately the stories told illuminate the importance of recognizing the difference between union leaders (and bureaucrats) and workers. The union leaders, whose stories Murphy tells, enjoy lifestyles that are materially different from the workers they claim to represent. The stories of these labor aristocrats are not therefore the stories of workers. No amount of cultural mystique can conceal that. Ultimately a true telling of labor history would include the stories of the workers and their struggles against both Capital and the labor aristocrats whose corruption has hindered their progress. Murphy’s book helps us to see that. Give it a read.

April 3, 2026

Bob Kolstad

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[1] Murphy cites here: David Witwer, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 78-85.

Take This Job and ...

 Goodbye For Now

The Red Frog, Cultural Marxist, Cranky Yankee, Kultur Kommissar and whomever else will be taking a long break from the May Day Books Blog. Or perhaps a final break. This is in order to help C.G. Gibbs concentrate on finishing a speculative fiction book, his third, about a coming revolution in the U.S., presently titled 'The Book of Revolution.' It is also to help in finally publishing a second book about white and blue collar class struggle that has been done for a long while, called 'Selling Away.'  A first fiction book called 'Factory Days' has already been published.

 

They have been remiss on both, with the Blog Borg sucking up time and energy.  Not to mention the fact that fewer and fewer interesting left-ward books are being published. They all seem to repeat what is pretty well known. The present and evolving Trump police state gives a writer more materiel to make a credible, factual fictional finish to a book on a U.S. revolution, which is half done at the moment. 

The Blog has been going for 19 years.  Others publish things on the Blog occasionally, but no one is lined up yet to do it as a focus. We have made frequent requests to various people to put their thoughts about a book, political event, film, play, art installation, streaming series, magazine article, news story, announcement or plain commentary into coherent words.  Only a few have taken us up on it. If you would like to write something from the left, contact me or the bookstore. 

However, the archive of 100s of reviews will stay open for perusing.  Just use the search box, upper left.

The Red Frog, Cultural Marxist, Cranky Yankee, Kultur Kommissar and others.  September 2, 2025

Communes, Co-ops and Collective Farms - 2

 “Communes in Socialist Construction”– Monthly Review Double Issue, July-August 2025 (Part 2)

“Charting a Communal-Ecological Path,” Brian Napoletano – This is a partial polemic with Marxist Kohei Saito over the term ‘degrowth.’ ‘Degrowth’ is not a grounded political term, and can mean any number of things. “Don’t grow what?” you might ask. “Grow nothing?” you might also ask. As a rhetorical arrow aimed at the capitalist concept of constant GDP ‘growth,’ no matter what kind, it makes a person think.  But then come the questions.  Some useless production will have to be stopped, while lacks will have to be filled - all based on human needs, not commercialized ‘wants.’

Napoletano contrasts ‘ecomodernism,’ degrowth and ecosocialism, considering the first two to be antagonistic or ambiguous regarding socialism.   He calls ecomodernism (which I suspect is capitalist ‘green’ tech attempts) a marketing ploy - “neoclassical economics in a green wrapping.”  He also indicts “the ossification and closed systemization of the dialectics of nature in Soviet Marxism under Joseph Stalin” for ignoring Marx’s ecological insights. 

Capital is neither ‘exclusively destructive’ or ‘purely progressive’ to nature or the working class according to Napoletano.  But when ‘growth’ becomes an ideology, as it has, the destruction of nature, animals, waste, obsolescence, militarism, stupid work and the production of useless, unnecessary or dangerous junk runs out of control.  As he puts it: “…an increasing volume of waste is needed to mitigate problems of overaccumulation and prevent the potential abundance made possible by the unprecedented development of the productive forces … from undermining the scarcity rationale.”  Capital grows but not use values corresponding to human needs.

Napoletano says ecosocialist degrowth should be called deaccumulation, a tricky academic substitution.  Following Lefebvre, he does not believe there is a dilemma between local, national and international economic planning.  Yet this remained a stubborn problem in actually existing socialized economies. He mentions Yugoslavia’s ‘self-management’ as a valuable example for Venezuela.  Self-management as practiced in Yugoslavia also helped that country ‘fly apart.’  Evidence from the USSR and Poland indicate a pro-capitalist trajectory in isolated production.  He supports a global, uninterrupted revolution to implement ‘autogestion’ (workers’ control of an enterprise) in the face of these problems.

“Land, Cooperation and Socialism,” interview with Joao Pedro Stedile – Stedile is a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Stedile discusses agro-industrial cooperatives formed when rural landless take over unused or underutilized land and run it cooperatively.  The MST does not limit land takeovers to just giving out individual plots.  Families do farm them but cannot sell them, as the state formally owns the property.  An ‘assentamento’ (settlement) like this is recognized by the state.  It also involves collective / communal decision-making, collective production facilities for products, a fight against inequality, agroecology and education. The MST found cooperative ag. work does not always function, as different campesinos have various ways and times of doing things.  But the cooperative buys farm machinery and commercializes ag. goods, i.e. processing milk and building cold storage. Like cooperatives in many capitalist countries, they produce for the market. 

The MST oppose monocultures, GMO seeds, intensive mechanization and use of chemical / gas-based fertilizers and pesticides. Stedile says “…above all, the aim is healthy food for the entire population.” They use reforestation, safeguard biodiversity and protect the water around them.  Stedile makes the point that “a paradigm centered on campesino forces is not enough.” The MST understands that the majority of the working-class in Brazil and other countries are now in and around cities.  The MST is aware that Lula’s Workers’ Party governs in league with a section of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to block the far-right.  They work with urban forces and also have an international focus, having ‘brigades’ in other countries and have worked with Latin American groups to defeat the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“Popular Power in Brazil,” Roberta Traspadini – This article is representative of how academic collections stray from the topic.  This is about how black, or in the Brazilian term the Quilombolo, people ‘struggle for ‘self-determination’ and land.  In Brazil today dark-skinned residents are still 70% of the prison population. There is nothing concrete about communes, cooperatives, collective farms or anything of the sort in this contribution. 

MST farm invasion - Pitchforks!

“Socioecological Contraditions in the Development of Socialist Collective Farming: Drawing from the USSR and Hungarian Histories,” Savatore Engel-DiMauro – Engel-DiMauro is a traditional CP academic interested in the intersection of collective farming and various kinds of soil and soil health.  While admitting a lack of data, he suggests that soil health in the USSR and Hungary was better than capitalist countries until the use of chemical fertilizers and mechanization in the 1960s became widespread, which degraded the soil.  His focus skips over communes and cooperatives to state farms / kolkhoz run by plan and worked by agricultural proletarians.  He brings an environmental slant to productionist logic, which preserves production in the long run.

His detailed look at soil types in the USSR and the Hungarian Plain, the effect of wind and water erosion, along with soil compaction, the use of fallowing, cover crops, limited tillage, reforestation, shelter belts, agroforestry, the weight of equipment and the use of chemicals is probably unique on the left. He references biomes, soil groups and sub-groups, chernozems and anthromes in his discussion.  For instance by the 1980s 29% of Hungarian land was degraded due to farming techniques, though not all of this was collective farmland.  EU loans to Hungary were paid off through importing agro-chemicals.  And there was the rub.

While scientific experts helped the collective farms in both countries, he makes the factless statement that “The ecological implications of building socialism have never been lost on Communist Party leaders.”  After you get done laughing, many examples could be cited, from the air pollution in ‘steel’ cities, the water decimation of the Aral Sea, the pollution of the Danube to the oil damage in Baku or the Urals to contradict this misplaced enthusiasm about ‘leaders.’

Engel-DiMauro cites Walter Rodney’s warning not to confuse pre-colonial communalism with socialism.  As a traditional CPer, he thinks some of the old collective efforts cited by Marx, Foster and others still contained inequalities and contradictions.  The Russian ‘mir’ was patriarchal and enabled better tax collection for the Czar.  The Haudenosaunee Confederation featured a gendered division of labor and brutal hostility to other tribes.  Liberian communal farming also is sex and age centered.  The East African ujamma system under the Nyerere government refused to share anything outside their locale, resisting redistribution of a surplus to the wider society. Cooperatives can exist within capitalist society for years, such as in the U.S., but gradually erode due to political power, profit, class and negative environmental effects.

“Making Every Yard a Farm and Every Garage a Factory; The Theory and Practice of Cooperation Jackson (CJ),” Kali Akuno – This seems to be a neo-Maoist take, mentioning ‘peasants’ in Mississippi and an ostensible ‘black belt’ in the South. There is even a touch of the ‘Great Leap Forward” in the title. This version of CJ wants ‘people’s assemblies,’ an independent electoral vehicle and ‘socializing the means of production’ towards ecosocialism as part of … ‘revolutionary nationalism?’ Right now CJ is a network of worker-owned cooperatives in and around Jackson, Mississippi in housing, work, recycling, catering, farming and production.  A ‘free market’ for mutual exchange also exists, though it presently works more like a charity. Trucking, grocery and coffee-house / library co-ops are planned.  One community assembly was organized, but was held during CoVid and became a super-spreader event.

Choke Lumumba, their possible political figurehead as mayor, lost the Democratic Party Primary in April 2025 after 8 years, 3-1.  Instead of an independent political vehicle, the majority of Cooperation Jackson, which seems to be a coalition, chose to embed in the Dems, not run as independents.  Lumumba did not endorse all of the aspects of CJ and the municipality did not provide direct aid or incorporate the solidarity aims of CJ.

The rest of the article is how Akuno’s group reacts to these setbacks, principally by organizing “The People’s Network for Land and Liberation” which seeks to “build ecosocialism from below in real time.”  Cooperatives have been organized by necessity before by ‘associated producers’ and workers world-wide, but have never resulted in socialism. There is no mention of the horrendous water situation in Jackson, when the municipal water system failed repeatedly. The state starved the city of funds to fix it and this probably led to Lumumba’s defeat.  

People's Commune in China

“Communal Governance and Production in Rural China Today,” S. Tsui & L.K. Chi – No issue of MR would be possible without a nod to China, as MR is a large tent of soft Maoists, Stalinoids and neo-Stalinists, Xiists, Khrushchevites, Bukharinites, independent Marxists and even an occasional Trotskyist, though they won’t admit it. This contribution highlights the large rural People’s Communes that existed for about 20 years in China, starting around 1958. This also coincided with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the Cultural Revolution.  The Dengists ended them in favor of an agrarian ‘Home Responsibility System’ (HRS) in 1978, and legally liquidated them in 1983.  Three small still-existing commune and cooperatives are investigated in this article, one containing 12,000 people, one 4,500, one 3,500.  One calls itself the only commune left.   

The first People’s Communes where huge, covered almost all rural land in China and were involved in small production too.  They were collectively owned and worked, with members paid by time credits.  Later small private plots for subsistence were allowed. Initially they were organized from the top-down by the CCP.  This created obvious productivity problems, though productivity did rise. Problems like extreme surplus extraction, lying about results, hunger and disasters were apparent.  The subsequent HRS involves family-worked plots for home use and the market.  Now more than a third of Chinese rural property, 38%, has been ‘land contracted’ out to others for a fee, a process legalized in 1988.  The land is still technically owned by the state, similar to Mexico, but in the U.S. we call it land leasing.  They also report that land was ‘sold’ by one commune to a near-by municipality for a real estate venture, so this indicates a further level of privatization.

The three communes and cooperative are Zhoujiazhuang, Yakou and Zhanqui.  They either voted to follow the old system by refusing to divide up the land, or, after seeing the pollution and profiteering of the ‘new days,’ went back to more collective, environmental and agro-ecologic methods. They all profitably lease much land to private or public enterprises and run many production and educational facilities along with growing crops.  Some are also involved in logistics, storage, ecommerce, handicrafts and ecotourism.  In one commune housing has been erected where commune members live for free.  It also provides health facilities, schools and pension supplements for the elderly.  In 1978 the state withdrew support from health or education in rural areas after the HRS was set up, so communities had to rely on themselves.

The authors make a point of explaining that the agricultural sector was used by the CCP to extract ‘primitive accumulation’ in order to build industrialism, similar to what happened in the USSR. This was done through unequal exchange, ag. prices versus finished goods prices, free peasant work on infrastructure projects and low wages.  Over 60 years, one economist estimated that peasants provided RMB 13.7 trillion ‘surplus value’ to the state and society. In U.S. dollars that is around $1.92T.  While Xi’s CCP has recently made noises about ‘rural collectivity’ it has not gone back to any widespread communal approach.

End of Part 2

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Monthly Review,” “Saito,” “commune,” “Brazil,” “CCP,” “Brazil,” “China.”

And I bought it at May Day’s periodicals section! 

This will be the last review for the foreseeable future.  Red Frog / August 29, 2025

The Communes are Coming - 1

“Communes in Socialist Construction”– Monthly Review Double Issue, July-August 2025 (Part 1)

This is a mostly excellent discussion of the role of communes in the transition to socialism, barring Bukharinite slips and off-the-topic contributions.  The ‘commune’ – to me sometimes taking the form of a Soviet, council, cooperative, collective or assembly – is the most democratic and proletarian political and economic form.  They can lead to a classless society if actually pursued.  It is the replacement for the travesty of bourgeois ‘democracy’ in all its twisted forms and private ownership of the means of production. The bourgeoisie waved ‘parliaments’ in the face of the royalists; the commune-ists wave the ‘commune’ in their face as a higher form of democracy.

This is a collection of essays on the issue, which are relevant when people ask ‘what’s really next?’  It is no pipe dream, as early communes existed throughout the world, along with their persistence into Marx’s time.  The Paris Commune, Soviets in the USSR and central Europe, revolutionary councils in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Italy, communes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, workers’ councils in the 1960s in Europe and the present widespread communes in Venezuela tell us they are not revolutionary mirages but have been born before and still exist today.

This thick issue of MR consists of 8 pieces and two interviews.  I’ll focus on issues of theoretical or factual interest.  The present communes in Venezuela seem to be the modern inspiration.

Interview with Venezuela’s Minister of Communes, Angel Prado:  A factual look at the status of communes in Venezuela. They are not in the Constitution yet, and have no regular financial dispensation from the government unlike local governments.  However $10K was recently awarded by the government to each commune with a project.  The communes “legislate, administer resources and manage their own means of production” according to Prado. There are communal councils at the base of the commune, with a communal bank, parliament and various committees on different issues like sports or the economy.  Property in the commune varies from communal, public, family and private. The investment or reinvestment of the surplus is a key issue. They are also armed.

Prado compares Chavismo to Peronism in its ‘diversity.’  The Communard Union which he heads brings together 80 communes and is in ‘every barrio’ in the country. The immediate goal is to bring communes up to equal status with other branches of the government, in financial and political power.  They are trying to reform the Venezuelan Constitution this year to give communes that power. Prado points out that other ‘anti-imperialist’ and nationalist movements, absent communes, ended up “…becoming another reformist state, with a so-called progressive government that fails to transform existing state structures.”  Any look at Latin or Central American history will confirm this observation.  To my mind, all this reflects Venezuela as a ‘transitional’ state, still dominated by capital, but with organized structures of proletarian and peasant power existing.

“Socialist Communes and Anti-Imperialism,” Chris Gilbert – This article concentrates on the communes in Venezuela and secondarily, Bolivia.  It notes that anti-imperialism is not separate from anti-capitalism.  This should be news to the legions of anti-socialist geo-political analysts found on progressive websites.  The Venezuelan and Bolivian communes both came into being in the context of anti-imperialist struggle. In Bolivia the MAS, (which just lost an election after 20 years) was relying on indigenous cooperative ‘allyus’ to use as a base for socialism. In Brazil the peasant-based MST pushes for ‘peoples agrarian reform’ when it occupies under-utilized or unused land. Gilbert makes no claim as to the construction of communes in Brazil, only of collective management of land after occupations.

Russian peasant Mir commune

Gilbert, like many others in this magazine, brings up Marx’s research into the communal peasant Russian mir, Arab and Berber communal property relations, Peruvian allyus, Indian peasant communities, Mexican collective settlements, the Iroquois Confederation and more.  Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich and his Ethnographic Notebooks bear out the contention that these older forms could be used to advance modern socialism.  Marx made this explicit regarding a Russian revolution. He made it clear that the collective obchshina still had to use modern technology and be linked together.  Marx was not calling for pure ‘self-management,’ isolated agrarian outposts or some anarcho-romantic throwback not linked to a national and even international plan. Chavez also called for the unity of communes in some sort of ‘communal state.’   

Gilbert clearly counters people like degrowth’s Kohei Saito who contends Marx only came to this understanding of early communal forms much later.  Gilbert links Marx’s later insights to earlier works like the Grundrisse and Capital. Oddly, Gilbert gives credit for this communal understanding to 1980s-‘90s Bolivian Marxist Alyaro Linera and not to Jose Carlos Mariategui.  Peruvian Marxist Mariategui discussed the value of the allyu back in the 1920s. 

“The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today,” P Patnaik & U Patnaik – This article focuses on India, which still has a large peasant population, unlike the U.S., Europe and other countries.  They cite Engels and Lenin in an ‘uninterrupted revolution’ – not a stagist one – going from a democratic revolution led by proletarian elements involving the peasantry and petit-bourgeoisie to a socialist one.  The Patnaiks argue that, unlike Stalin’s practice in the USSR, upper-bracket rich peasants (kulaks) must not be purged.  Nor should cooperatives or collective farms be forced on farmers.  They contend that the key re ‘kulaks’ is that they ‘will not bring back capital in the countryside’ because mere partial involvement in the market is not commodity production, nor is trading labor or goods with others, nor is ‘personal’ trading or sales.  When there is a conflict between different peasant strata, they theorize that the revolutionary state should intervene on behalf of poorer peasants in ‘mediations.’  I imagine a rich farmer might go beyond these parameters after awhile. 

They recognize that the national bourgeoisie in India is integrated with capitalists in other nations, including the top imperialists.  They contend that all ‘third world’ nations have a peasantry which is ‘the most sizeable force’ against neo-liberal capital or dictatorship.  They have no statistics on this assertion.  The caste system in India creates divisions among farmers.  The farmers still led a year-long struggle against 3 farm laws that would remove support pricing, along with opposing international firms getting involved in contract farming with Indian farmers. 

Cooperative farm in India

The authors stand up for individual rights, as without them, ‘outcasts’ cannot actually join a collective.  So a real community requires individual rights too.  They have an excellent section on the 6 benefits of cooperative farming as opposed to individual farming:  1, no boundary waste; 2, pooled resources; 3, better land use due to more land being available; 4, crops needing minimal cultivation allow work on other plots; 5, machinery collectively owned; 6, de-centralized decision-making. 

On that last one, #6, the authors again come up to the conundrum in a number of these articles that de-link agrarian work from the rest of a socialized economy, hinting at an isolated village commune instead. This problem also revolves around the phrase ‘self-management’ used by others. 

“Marx and Communal Society,” J.B. Foster – Foster goes deeply into Marx’s research into early communal forms, and his embrace of the Paris Commune as an example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ when the majority of plebeians and workers held power, not the rich, the nobles or the capitalists. These included common tillage in India; the Mark system of common tenure and collective production in Germany; the clan communes in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador called allyus; Greek communal property alongside private property, and the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) use of long-houses holding multiple families.  Marx studied Morgan, Phear, Maine and Lubbock to understand these early communistic traditions.  Engels collected his insights and used them in writing “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.” Rosa Luxemburg later followed this same line of investigation in her studies of colonialism's impact on collectivity in occupied countries.

Marx himself started his journalistic career defending peasants’ right to collect dead wood from private forests.  Of most interest is Foster’s points that Marx didn’t use the term ‘primitive’ communism, or theorize Greece and Rome as a ‘slave societies,’ or use ‘Asiatic’ mode of production other than to mean village communities in India and Java.  This contradicts what was theorized or generalized by later Marxists.  Italian urban communes were run by guilds of merchants, forming the seed of the bourgeoisie, but they had to overcome their original collective nature. To this day the formal name of most Italian towns is ‘Communa di…’

The 1789 French Revolution was known as the “Paris Commune” too.  According to Foster the second 1871 Paris Commune “abolished the death penalty, child labor, and conscription while eliminating debts.  The workers were organized into cooperative societies to run the factories, with plans to organize the cooperatives into one big union.  A women’s union was created, as well as a system of universal secular education.” Instant recall, universal male suffrage and wages for officials at a workers’ wage were also instituted.  All of this was groundbreaking.

End of Part 1

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  "Monthly Review,"“Paris Commune,” “allyu,” “Mariategui,” "Meszaros," “workers’ councils,” “Saito,” “commune,” ‘council,’ ‘obchshina,’ ‘mir,’ “Foster.”

And I bought it at May Day’s periodicals section!

Red Frog / August 26, 2025

From 'Ripen' to Rotten

 The “American Communist Party” (ACP) 

If you are familiar with ‘leftists’ that sometimes sound like right-wingers, this outfit is the epitome of that, i.e. Trumpist ‘Marxist-Leninists.”  You know, that guy who thinks abortion is racist.  Like the Brownshirts in Germany or the Lyndon Larouche sect’s ‘Workers’ Party,’ the ACP parades as leftist in some of its pronouncements and program, while leaning to the right.  This is meant to confuse and disorganize an actual left. 

Behind some standard Left rhetoric, they are also anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-environmental, pro 'general' tax cuts and pro-MAGA. They promote ‘social patriotism.’ You will notice the hammer and sickle superimposed over the stripes of the U.S. flag in their logo.  They are Russophiles, no matter the class character of that country right now, as Russia is supposedly the leading 'anti-imperialist.'  They are heavily pro-Stalin and close to the CP of the Russian Federation (KPRF).  They support the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the hilt.  They are also Sinophiles, backing China and ‘Xi-Jinping Thought.’ They claim they came out of the U.S. Communist Party (CP) in 2024 but two of the founders, Hinkle and Al-Din, were never in the CP according to the CP.

They have praised the reactionary theocrat Khomeini as a great anti-imperialist, and formed a block with the Patriotic Party in Turkey, which is pro-Erdogan, a capitalist Turkish ultra-nationalist. Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian nationalist, praised them for being allies of Tucker Carlson and Trump by opposing U.S. liberalism.  Of course there are other ways to oppose liberalism from the actual left. The CP, Alexander Ross, Yanis Varoufakis and others correctly identify the ACP as influenced by Russian National-Bolshevism, seeking ‘red-brown ‘unity.'  So they are a current, almost darkly comic version of anti-communist Strasserism.  It is a conservative and nationalistic ‘socialism,' i.e. national socialism.  And we know how that goes...

Their leadership is vitriolic, their rhetoric vile and their stance thuggish.  They blame George Soros, as Victor Orban the right-wing leader of Hungary does, for being behind bad, ‘woke’ communism.  That is a funny one. They wanted pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters, yearn to institute ‘patriotic’ education, call gays pedophiles and want to ban ANTIFA demonstrations. There is more but why go on?

The ACP is the logical end-rot at the heart of Stalinoid conservatism and authoritarian thinking, an affliction affecting some so-called U.S. leftists.  They could also be a police or paid front. They should be walled off from the Left. 

A crib mostly from Wikipedia.  I have no reason to doubt it in this case.

P.S. - In a book on FBI infiltration of the left, Aaron Leonard and Connor Gallagher note that the FBI set up a fake Marxist Leninist organization in Chicago in the late 1960s / early 1970s - claiming to be a faction of the CP.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Trumpen Left,’ “National Bolshevism,” “Strasser,” “brownshirt,” “Rohm,” “3^rd Position.”

Red Frog / August 23, 2025      

Chomping Chomsky

 “Who Rules the World” by Noam Chomsky, 2016

This title might have you reflect on prior books that analyze the transnational capitalist class, the holdings of various private equity and banking firms, their world-spanning political and economic organizations, their military arms, even their hold on culture. Books in that line have been written about the U.S. too.  But Chomsky doesn’t go there.  Here he engages in his consistent method of looking at history, current political events, journalistic malpractice and linguistic tricks to illustrate the U.S.’s long record of hypocrisy and military intervention.  While alluding to shadowy groups of wealthy people and bankrolling corporations, he keeps it almost purely on the political plane. 

This is a problem exhibited by certain anarchists and left-liberals who downgrade and ignore capitalist economics in their ‘hot takes.’  As if a military and journalistic establishment doesn’t have an economic base.  He does have a chapter on the sorry state of the domestic union movement, but this will remind you that everything in this book has been written about by dozens of others before and after 2016.  He has a chapter on the mis-directions of the top ruling-class paper, the New York Times, an investigation which has been done to death too. If this is all new to you, be my guest and buy the book.  For the rest of us?  

While the problem here might be the 'age' of the book, yes, it's view is basically inaccurate.  Chomsky implies that the U.S. ‘rules the world’ as a nation-state, even though he says that rule peaked after WWII, 71 years earlier, now 80 years ago. He doesn’t think the collapse of the USSR, the U.S.’s main class opponent, made any difference.  This might be because he identifies every state as ‘state-capitalist,’ including the USSR and China.  By identifying a ‘nation’ as the ruler, he hides the capitalist class ruling that nation. This is a common activist framing, but for a professor, it’s a bit short in the pants. Class is not his thing.

At the very end of the book Chomsky admits in a brief aside that while it is ‘conventional’ to view world politics through a national lens, the real ‘masters of mankind’ are the merchants and industrialists that control states. Yet his book remains exclusively focused on the conventional.   

What is horrifying about this collection of essays – which is the style Chomsky writes in now – is that every problem discussed in the book has only gotten worse since 2016.  Israel and Palestine, Gaza, Iran, nuclear confrontation, refugees, the Republican Party, evangelical Christianity, the weak Democrats, climate change and the military conflict with Russia were all here 9 years ago.  It ends with an afterward about the Trump election in 2016, framing it as the triumph of a Republican Party that is now a ‘radical insurgency’ not a regular party, and which threatens the future of mankind due to its position on global warming.  As if capitalist oil, plastics, retail, military, meat and now computer tech companies have nothing to do with their politics.   

The book catalogs – like many others do – the prior coups, assassinations, cover-ups and wars carried out by the U.S. for overt claims of ‘humanism,’ fighting terrorism or communism, for ‘freedom’ or just plain because the U.S. is the chosen nation, bringing the light of its archaic democracy to the world.  None of this nonsense is unfamiliar to leftist readers. It’s like a very large and verbose collection of predictable Facebook posts. What is Chomsky’s solution to his dire warnings? He mentions ‘opportunities for change,’ as “popular mobilization and activism, properly organized and conducted, can make a large difference.”  Chomsky has no program except the vaguest and most well-worn leftish cliché.

This book was on the NYT best-seller list when it appeared.  Capitalism is barely mentioned.  Economics is nearly always hidden.  It acts as if pointing out history and hypocrisy in an intellectual way will somehow sway society.  It’s like he’s a lawyer. His bit on the two groups of intellectuals – those who orient to social issues and those who serve in technical capacities – reveals that even the former, as he styles himself, have severe limitations.  As one of the most prominent ‘public’ intellectuals in the U.S. it is quite a disappointment.  He’s no J.P. Sartre or any number of ‘intellectual’ Marxists. Chomsky is a doorway to a more profound analysis, and just that.   

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Chomsky,” “Trump,” “NATO,” “nuclear,” “environment,” "Who Rules the World?"   

And I bought it at May Day Books, which carries other books by Chomsky.

Red Frog / August 19, 2025  

"...something is happening here..."

 “United States: Lessons From the DSA Convention”by Paul Le Blanc, 8/16/25

Paul Le Blanc attended the recent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention in Chicago, August 8-10 and wrote a report on it.  I’ve attended some joint meetings involving DSA as one component, been in their environmental caucus for awhile and attended a DSA study group, but their orientation towards the Democrats has always put me off.  That is a class compromise I cannot make.  On the other hand the whole Republican Party and the leaders of the Democratic Party (DP) consider it ‘Communist’ or ultra-left, and seek to blunt, diminish or stop it.  Trump has even threatened to invade NYC if Mamdani is elected.

DSA Convention in Chicago in August 2025

As Le Blanc points out, DSA is growing again, it has a democratic internal life involving a number of caucuses and it is moving to the left.  At one point they had 100K members during the Sanders’ years, then shrunk to 50K, now are back up to 80K given the Trump police state and the Mamdani win in the Democrat primary in NYC.  They see 100K in the near future.  As Le Blanc points out, this is dues-paying members, and not all those are paid up.  1,229 of the conference attendees were delegates at the Convention, with the rest of the 1,500 attendees observers of some kind.  Nationally, actual active members of DSA are a smaller minority. He estimates that around 8-10K are active members, which still makes DSA the largest group on the Left by far.   

Le Blanc considered the overly-procedural convention to still be democratic.  He divides the groupings into 3 main caucuses, with overlap and political fluidity quite obvious, while some groups are outside the 3.  In the process he names the caucuses.  As he notes in his own Pittsburgh branch, most people are not in a caucus.  The general groupings are: 1) a ‘moderate’ wing, taking after Michael Harrington’s legacy, very inclined to ‘progressives’ and liberals in the DP.  2) A ‘far-left’ wing made up of Palestinian activists and ‘campists’ who cheer for anyone opposed to the U.S.  3) A Marxist center-left wing oriented to the eventual establishment of an independent socialist party, while being presently oriented towards the labor movement.  

Le Blanc names the various explicit caucuses, so if you want a roadmap, read his article in the link down below.  All 3 groupings have one-third of the national committee, and he contends they do not want a split.

Le Blanc lists the main resolutions passed, including one for an ‘anti-Zionist DSA’ and for BDS, along with various pro-labor plans.  The form of ‘anti-fascism’ that passed is limited to actively opposing ICE and Trump.  Tenant organizing was also a key resolution.  He notes that convention discussions focused heavily on class views, not identity politics, so a general ‘Marxist’ tone was kept.  A key resolution was that DSA electoral endorsements had to be on the basis of open ‘democratic-socialism,’ not just some mealy-mouthed progressive claim.

However the class view stopped at the borders of the U.S., with a resolution opposing ‘campism’ being voted down by 43% to 56%. This reformist perspective basically obliterates internationalist working-class organizing, reflected a nationalist blindness. It represents a kind of classless ‘anti-imperialism.’  It jibes with reformist groupings outside DSA like various Maoid / Stalinoid / ‘third world’ tacks.  There were some international speakers, but as you can see two of these parties are running capitalist states.  Speeches by the Brazilian PT (running Brazil) and PSOL, Belgium’s Workers Party, La France Insoumise, the Mexican Morena (running Mexico), Puerto Rico’s Socialista and Japan’s Socialists were given, along with some unions, rank-and-file orgs in unions, the Sunrise Movement, BDS, the Palestinian Youth Movement and Democrat office-holder Rashida Tailib.

DSA is heavily oriented towards 2028 according to Le Blanc, which coincides with the next national electoral cycle.  They have also advocated a large buildup to the 2026 May Day demonstrations.

Le Blanc ends by saying he is convinced that now is the time for more orthodox Marxists like himself to be involved in DSA, given its left-ward trajectory, democratic functioning and sizeable impact. I’ve been a supporter of a united front of the Left for a long time, and certainly within DSA there is a ‘united front’ of various tendencies, proving it can be done.  But given that front extends to bourgeois elements that have not broken with capital, it is really a popular front.  Certainly DSA’s efforts dwarf those of the pro-China, Trotskyist, neo-Marcyite or Maoid / Stalinoid groups outside DSA, which is inevitable in the U.S. as young generations partly break from bourgeois thinking in various areas once again.

Le Blanc had expected the moderate wing of DSA to lord it over the Convention, but that was not the case.  He was encouraged by the youth, the diverse proletarian jobs and ethnic backgrounds, the left-ward trajectory, the size of the organization and perhaps, its ‘prospects.’  I see DSA as playing a role in the socialist movement similar to the 1960s SDS.  The best outcome out of DSA is the birth of a new, mass socialist front or party based on the trade unions, taking the best of working-class Democrats and working-class Republicans with it.  Whether that will happen also depends on the activity of left forces outside DSA, internal union activity and the historical ‘conjuncture’ – which is sharpening everywhere in the world.  The endgame of capital seems to be playing out once again, and this is reflected by the growth of DSA. 

To all those 'educated' DP liberals still chattering about how some mainstream Democrat will save them and oblivious to DSA, I have this lyric from "Ballad of a Thin Man:"  

"Because something is happening here,  But you don't know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones?"

Le Blanc’s essay is on the International Journal of Socialist Renewal LINKS:  Le Blanc on DSA Convention.  

P.S. - The state "Democratic Farmer-Labor" party just rescinded the mayoral endorsement of Omar Fateh in Minneapolis, who was endorsed at the convention.  Fateh claims to be a democratic socialist.   This is how the Dems really roll.  Shades of good 'ol Hubert and his purge of the Farmer-Labor left in 1936.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “DSA,” “Le Blanc,” ‘social-democracy.’

Red Frog / August 16, 2025