Labor Culture

 “Working Man,”film by Robert Jury, 2020

It's the standard 'rust belt' town in the north – named 'Orridge' but really Norridge, Illinois – a place that stands in for many other cities decimated by plant closings. Allery is an older, stocky, light-skinned worker who doesn't talk much, eats his lunch alone and works diligently. It's the last day at a plastics factory, (a real closed plant in Norridge, IL) as the owners have an unknown plan in mind and are laying everyone off. Yet they've left parts and raw materials all over the place.

Allery has other plans. The younger folks get their last paychecks at 1:00 P.M. and are paid all day. He continues to work until the old closing time, 4:30 PM. The plant manager hands him his last paycheck. Allery has a long-suffering wife, Iola, he barely talks to. He's obviously depressed, as they lost their older son to suicide. The next day he watches telly and finds nothing on. He seems to have no interests. He goes to the unemployment office and his fellow workers mention its a 2 hour wait for part-time jobs, so he turns around. He takes a walk every night down towards the river and bridges, and you'd swear he's going to jump in.

That's the setup, but what comes next was already hinted at. As a Marxist would say, a factory is not really 'private property' but is really owned by the labor of those who spent years there. Like 'common law' marriage or an uncontested boundary line or road, habit and occupation become ownership. The next day Allery is seen trundling down the street towards the plant in his work clothes, his lunchbox and Stanley thermos. His former compadres look at him from their front porches and wonder 'WTF?' He jimmies open an old back door, gets into the plant, starts his machine but there is no power. He gets out cleaning supplies and begins to clean the whole place. He takes his break with a powdered donut and for lunch a vile liverwurst sandwich on Wonder Bread. (This is an old-fashioned guy.) The co-workers on the porches watch him walk home and are astonished once more. This goes on for several days until the foreman shows up with the police and tells him to leave.

Plastics factories are toxic places to work, but no one here seems to wear breathing protection, just a few fans. There seems to be no union. There are no guards at the plant or preparation for something else. Nor does the movie mention that he could apply for unemployment insurance. That is not this story.

Republic Windows and Doors UE Occupation

Finally a newer worker, a tall dark-skinned brother named Walter, talks to Allery about how he has a door key the company forgot. He goes with Allery to the plant, they get in another door and Allery starts cleaning again. Walter calls the power company and gets the electricity turned on. They begin making parts in their plastic stamping / extrusion machines. Eventually other former workers are curious and show up. It starts as an ebony and ivory 'buddy' picture but becomes an occupation of the closed factory. They intend to stay inside the plant for at least a week to produce on suspended orders.  They invite family too. This is probably based on a real factory occupation in Chicago at Republic Windows and Doors in 2008, led mostly be Latino workers.

The plan, which is Walter's, is to fulfill the orders left undone and put pressure on the company to keep the building open and save the remaining jobs. The factory had 500 workers originally, and is now down to around 50. The company hears about the occupation on the news and is afraid to call the police – at first. The wife, Iola, is suspicious of Walter, him having a beard and being non-white, and refuses to join her husband and the neighbors in the plant.

What happens? The best scenes are in the plant, as this is a real work place, not a set. Anyone whose spent time in one will be at home. Unfortunately Walter has a volcanic temper and a drinking problem, even though he's been portrayed as the brains of the bunch. After being threatened with arrest, and with the power shut off again, most of the workers still agree to stick it out, including Alery. However no outside labor movement shows up for them and only one lonely reporter. The screen-writer / director tanks the film from here, basing everything on a major lie told by Walter, who is still correct as it turns out. The film shows the most radical worker to be manipulative and maybe crazy. They win a larger severance and a production bonus and abandon the plant.

It ends as a tear-jerker buddy picture, a renewed marriage and a liberated Alery and Iola – ultimately a personal story. This film is a product of the wreckage of industrial production by technology, off-shoring, maquiladoras and sending work to the U.S. South. None of this is mentioned, nor is a plan for the factory, its materials or machines, ever clear. It just sits there, which is not realistic.  Nevertheless, the basic premise is all too real.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Striking to Survive,” “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Cruz); “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Autopsy of an Engine,” “Night Shift,” “China On Strike,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Red Baker,” “On the Line.”

Tot Kultur Kommissar

April 22, 2024

The Real Plot

 “Who Killed Kirov – The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery” by Amy Knight, 1999

Forget all those random detective series. Like the assassinations of Olaf Palme, Dag Hammarskjold, Malcolm X, MLK, Paul Wellstone, Huey Long and the Kennedy's, political assassinations actually mean something on a broader scale. The killing of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 is such an event, as it led to the liquidation of the leading elements of the Bolshevik Party. Associates of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and the “Leningrad Center” were first accused of the assassination, after which they lost their position in the Party, and later their heads. It led to the 1930's purge trials, executions and imprisonment of ten's of thousands of top 'Old Bolshevik' cadre, to be replaced by hand-picked supporters of the new Party leadership.

I've been to Kirov's fourth floor apartment museum in the Petrograd District of St. Petersburg tended by some old ladies. It contained his vast collection of books, his hunting gear and guns, his expansive work / dining table and a picture of him, Stalin and Kirov's good friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze on one high wall. Knight used Russian archives that were first made available after 1991. These help reveal who is the most likely candidate for murderer. Knight is no leftist, but she is a reporter and researcher. This is her analysis.

There are several theories on his assassination. #1) Disgruntled, unemployed individual, Leonid Nikolaev. #2) A dastardly plot by the Zinovievites, Kamenev and later Bukharin. This was the Party line at the time. #3) An NKVD assassination orchestrated by Stalin. In 1988 the Soviet Union legally rejected the Zinoviev plot thesis though the murder had been in review since 1955. Re #1, even if it was true, it did not justify the subsequent bloodletting and destruction of the actual Bolshevik Party, turning it into a bureaucratic hierarchy.  Later Soviet commissions zig-zagged over Stalin's responsibility depending on who was in power, with one in 1960 saying Stalin was behind the murder. Knight examines the possible logic behind #3.

Caught in a Vice

Kirov was a self-educated intellectual, tireless worker, a popular speaker and personality. He was assigned to police Leningrad by Stalin against the supporters of Nicolai Bukharin, who wanted to continue the NEP. Bukharin opposed Stalin's plans for forced collectivization, grain requisitions, deportations and breaking the 'scissors' with the peasants, as a 'war on the kulaks' was becoming a war on the peasantry. Kirov himself sympathized with Bukharin's position and went 'easy' on his Leningrad comrades in 1929, which put him in disfavor in Moscow. The Leningrad District lagged far behind other areas in collectivization because Kirov refused to use force. He held to this idea through 1934.

However Kirov was also a sometimes Stalinist. He initiated the decimation of the Leningrad Academy of Sciences, which later led to prison sentences and executions – though he might not have expected that. After being assigned to the Politburo he denounced the Bukarinites as 'capitalist restorationists' but still stayed on friendly terms with them. The brutal construction of the Baltic-White Sea Canal with prison labor was also carried out under his watch, though one journalist reported that Kirov was against its use of forced labor. The secret police OPGU was in direct command. In another instance he publicly maintained theft from kolkhozs or cooperative stores should be punished by death, then criticized local police for putting 'half of Russia in jail.' Similarly, while supporting expelling Martem'ium Riutin from the Party in 1932 for his group's Left criticisms of Stalin, in the Politburo he publicly opposed executing him. That, however, was Stalin's proposal. Kirov began to suffer from various physical complaints – heart, fatigue, nerves, etc. due to the conflicted situation in the Party, country and no doubt himself.

So Kirov was someone who 'wobbled' on the issue of brutality. Stalin's method of showing 'comradeship' towards people like Bukharin in 1935 only hid his future plans. This might also have been true of Kirov after he publicly opposed him in the Politburo. Kirov himself heard a tirade by Stalin at a dinner in 1926, where Stalin maintained that what Russia's people wanted was a new 'Tsar,' so he was not clueless about Stalin's goals. Kirov was not the only Party leader who was ambivalent about the 'great leader.'

Many old Bolsheviks wanted Stalin gone, especially at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934. Kirov was their suggested replacement at a private meeting and Stalin found out about it. At the 1934 Seventeenth Congress you will be surprised to learn that actual votes were taken by delegates for members in the Central Committee. Current U.S. 'Marxist-Leninist' groups won't even vote on who will be their coffee mule. However in this case some votes were not counted, negative votes against Stalin disappeared and still Kirov was within one vote of Stalin. At that same Congress Kirov warned about the threat of fascism in Germany and Japan and advocated preparing for invasions. Stalin was mulling a bloc with Hitler, but later endorsed an anti-fascist 'popular' front. So there were many 'rubs' in Stalin's relations with Kirov.

Kirov was actually shot from behind

Questions

In late 1934 Kirov had 9 NKVD bodyguards. On December 1, the day he was killed, all but one guard were downstairs from his third floor office in the Smolny. The last bodyguard, M.D. Borisov, was down the hall when Kirov was supposedly shot by Nikolaev. As Knight notes, facts from official reports and witnesses contrasted and some 'official facts' were inaccurate. There were other people in the hallway and offices, yet the NKVD did not interview witnesses or secure the area. One key person disappeared. Stalin, between the short period of time of hearing of the murder and boarding a train for Leningrad, had time to draft a new penal code procedure. It was: 10 day investigation; charges conveyed to defendant 24 hours before trial; case heard without defendant or his counsel; no clemency appeals allowed; death sentence carried out immediately. So it was a form of summary justice. A convenient ruling. He immediately told witnesses that a 'Zinovievite' was the killer. This murder led to almost 2 million executed or sent to labor camps in the Great Purges.

Leningrad NKVD officers, especially those guarding Kirov, were lightly punished for negligence, including prior times they questioned Nikolaev without searching him - though he had a gun on him. Oddly the 2 bullets and cartridges were not compared to Nicolaev's Nagant revolver. Somehow Nikolaev got past the third floor guard station, which would have required a party card and an employee pass, neither of which he had at the time. Prior to this Kirov had an office right next to the guard desk but his office was moved way down the hall and around a corner. Nor was it known by anyone except the NKVD that Kirov would be in the building that day, which was not a regular work day. Nicolaev was immediately taken by the NKVD after the murder, as he was still alive. He was repeatedly hysterical, then mute, a 5-foot bag of bones dressed in shabby clothing according to witnesses. Yet a possibly fabricated written 'plot' plan was found on him by the NKVD. Not one witness actually saw the death shot, or said they did.

The next day Borisov, held by the NKVD along with the other guards, was told he was going to be interviewed by Stalin and 30 minutes later was returned dead to the NKVD medical unit. The stories vary - some said he was thrown from the van; a doctor said he had two contusions on his skull; another that the driver purposely slammed into a wall; another that it was 'just an accident' even though the guard in the back of the van was not hurt.

The 'Plot' Sickens

From there, people associated with Nikolaev were arrested as part of a terrorist cell called the 'Leningrad Center,' especially if they were Zinovievites or had prior contact with Trotskyists. Nikolaev had been a Party member and had worked in the Peasant's Inspectorate but was thrown out and lost his job. The NKVD used forced confessions with fabrications or torture to patch together a plot. After Stalin's arrival, their plot line changed from 'lone nut' to conspiracy triggerman. An hour after sentencing 14 defendants were shot. Family members were either executed later or sent to labor camps.

Zinoviev prison photo

The dragnet spread to the 'terrorist' “Moscow Center” as Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested and tried in 1935.  At first there was no evidence, but the NKVD got someone to rat, fabricated confessions and suddenly there was a 'case.' The group was accused of “political and moral responsibility for the murder of Kirov.” If this seems laughable, it's not. Stalin considered the group 'White Guards' but only had them jailed for 5-10 years at this point. He then wrote that all left oppositionists had to be put behind bars. The terror had begun.

One Leningrad NKVD officer, Medved, after talking with Stalin, told his brother-in-law that Stalin knew 'Yagoda and Zaporozhets' were behind the killing – both top NKVD officers. The NKVD officers initially 'punished' by prison in Kolyma had it easy – good positions, quarters and were able to bring family - as if their sentencing was for show. Ultimately Knight concludes that what happened in that corridor that day is suspect on many levels – another shooter, the NKVD using Nicolaev and getting him in the corridor, the delay of his guard Borisov, the shabby investigation, missing evidence, dead witnesses. She contends: “The crucial issue is whether Stalin had a reason for ordering the murder of Kirov.” The answer to that question is obvious because of their many political differences – yes.

In late December 1934 books already started appearing lionizing Kirov as a secular saint, serving Stalin's purpose in the purges. Ordzhonikidze, Kirov's good friend, was most shattered by the killing and aftermath. Any opposition to Stalin's opinion was now punishable by death or gulag. He could not help friends caught up in the dragnet. One of his best Party friends committed suicide over the oppression. He followed in 1937 after many disagreements with Stalin's method of executing so-called industrial 'wreckers' and shot himself too. 

Kirov's wife received condolences from Bukharin. Yet Bukharin followed many others' fates in 1938 by being executed after a fake trial. The rest of the book discusses the reaction of the workers in Leningrad, their disbelief in the official story, and Stalin's war on Leningrad as a nest of subversives, arresting or exiling 90,000 people. Many of Kirov's Leningrad Party allies were demoted, then denounced as enemies. Knight reports that later Bukharin realized Stalin was behind the murder, retailed in conversations in Paris with an exiled friend.  When his name was associated with the 'plotters' and Trotsky as the master-string puller, he knew where things were headed.  NKVD Chief Yagoda was also executed along with Bukarin, Rykov and others for being part of a "Zinovievite-Trotskyite" terrorist group.

A true and riveting tale only sketched here. If all these facts remind you of other political assassinations, congratulations. A patsy, bad police work, missing facts, a government's suspicious narrative, a captive press, witness killings, a moved office, corrupt cops, a useful outcome – its all there.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Wellstone, Huey Long, Olaf Palme or “Petrograd District – Monday,” “Radek,” “Fear” (Rybakov); “Beethoven and Shostakovich” (Woods); “Lenin's Last Struggle” (Lewin); “The Struggle for Power” (Vilkova); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “Dear Comrades,” “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (Zizek); “October” (Mieville).

May Day Books as many volumes on the USSR.

And I got it at the Public Library!

Red Frog / April 19, 2024

Let Them Eat Cake!

 “Price Wars – How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World” by Rupert Russell, 2022

This is Russell's version of chaos theory – that beneath seemingly disconnected events is a pattern. He links the Arab Spring, mass migrations, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, Venezuela and terror groups to the 'butterfly' effect of raw commodity prices. It's both a materialist theory and against post-modern ideas of confusing chaos. Feedback loops amplify small incidents, setting off a bigger, 'criticality' chain reaction, a 'phase' transition, a boiling point, a 'breaking of the camel's back.' In this case, commodity markets created human storms, much as added grains of sand create a landslide. Or in dialectics when quantity turns into quality. Let's see where he goes with this theory.

Arab Spring

In 2008 meteoric food price rises created riots in 48 countries on every continent. In 2010 the same thing happened. In Tunisia in 2010 what people wanted from the revolution against the corrupt Ben Ali government was a stable economy and affordable food, clothing and shelter. Afterwards they got nothing.  The Tunisian revolt spilled over into Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Syria and Kuwait, first about wheat and bread prices. The food price rises triggered all the other issues of dictatorial bourgeois governments in these countries. Price was the most important 'grain of sand.'

Bread and wheat are the main ingredients of diets in the Middle East. Prices are mostly set by commodity exchanges in Chicago, New York and London. If there is no social / state control of prices, then any increase goes straight into the market price. The IMF had fought state price controls in the 1970s, killing or limiting them in exchange for loans. In 2010-2011 regimes with oil wealth survived - except for Libya due to NATO's violent intervention. As he notes, there was no connection between supply and demand at this time as there was plenty of grain. In the 2008 financial crisis a broad range of commodity prices shot up in various countries too, among them wheat, cotton, coffee, oil, nickel and natural gas. Why?

Commodity Exchanges

Russell found out that firms poured money into commodity index funds on futures that pushed up prices across 20 different sectors, no matter their real world price. Other commodity trading tactics - price 'trend following' and price 'contrarians' who short – were supposed to cancel each other out. They don't, leading to price booms and busts or worse. He details the familiar stories of Greenspan's libertarian '90s advocacy of getting rid of Glass-Steagall and instituting the Commodity Futures Modernization Act during the Clinton years – which succeeded. The former exposes the whole banking system to speculation; the latter deregulated derivatives and increased betting on commodity futures and prices. The collapse of Hayek/Friedman's Efficient Market Hypothesis in 2008, which postulated 'perfect information,' also died when the mortgage, CDO and credit default swap markets collapsed. Instability in prices is 'priced in' for all commodities due to they're being dominated by capitalist financial markets.

Daesh, Brexit, Trump, Green Gold

Russell surveys the rubble and ruins of Mosul, Iraq after Daesh (ISIS) was driven out of the city. Daesh was funded by its capture of the small Syrian oil fields and recruited out of the food riots. To Russell, those food price hikes led to this civil war, leading to further 2014 spikes in the oil price - a perfect feedback loop. Traders told him that speculators had piled into the oil market at that moment, though Daesh had no real control of significant oil fields. It was not an issue of 'supply and demand' but of price betting by trend followers. Russell goes into how stories, social games, cult behavior and algorithms drive bubbles and market prices, not rational evaluation of perfect information. DJT - Truth Social stock - is just the worst example.  This nonsense holds the world hostage.

Russell looks at 2016's Brexit vote and notes that the 'Leave' vote was centered in specific working class and middle-class areas where house prices were rising higher than incomes, or where prices were falling. The petro-dollars from speculation over the wars in the Middle-East boomeranged into higher property prices in London and across the country, leaving some areas depressed. Government austerity also contributed. As he puts it, house prices are like a thermometer for economic health in an advanced bourgeois society, even for renters and HOA residents. It is a key part of the bourgeois 'social contract.' A similar situation was noted prior to the 2016 election in the U.S. for house prices in the U.S. Finance capital speculators were buying up homes across the nation, raising prices in some areas and making prices in other areas tank. According to the chart, those with the worst price situations voted Trump. Another kind of land grab was going on across the world, as 'green gold' – agricultural and mineral land and infrastructure - became targets of finance, sovereign wealth funds and the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, also driving up local prices.

Resource Curses

Russell finds himself traveling in the Donetsk 'People's' Republic after 2014. He is driven through the bombed-out ruins of Donetsk City, almost as bad as Mosul. He thinks the 1989 fall of the USSR was due to weak Soviet grain harvests, falling oil/gas prices and heavy loan debts to western banks and the IMF, all of which undermined Gorbachev's state. He suggests that the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Putin was spurred by the discovery of a vast trillion-cubic meter gas reserve in the Black Sea off of Crimea and southern Ukraine – on Ukraine's side of the sea border. He does not mention the existence of valuable wheat and coal land in eastern Ukraine. Among other things this gas field would give Ukraine energy independence from Russian gas. He notes that oil speculation has floated the Russian economy for years. Russell cites charts that show a parallel between rising gas prices and the increasing odds a petro-state will resort to some kind of military action. Boom!

Russell visits Venezuela and depicts the dire poverty he sees as oil prices crashed in 2014 – the other side of the resource curse. He acknowledges that the 2017 sanctions embargo on Venezuela by the U.S., which sequestered millions in government' funds and everything else, was a final nail in its cross of poverty. Venezuela never escaped a major reliance on oil even though Chavez had wanted to end it. He claims that much of the early oil money went to shoring up support among the middle-classes, not the workers and peasants, but there are figures that show the opposite. 400,000 deaths, mass poverty and 5 million people migrating is the result of this oil price drop and sanctions.

Kibera, Nairobi

Climate Shocks

Russell visits a tribe in Kenya defending their shrinking cattle-land from another tribe with AK-47s. He visits Nairobi which contains the biggest shanty-town in Africa, Kibera, full of climate migrants where a small price rise in corn flour creates huge problems. He shows a graph that tracks conflict to periods of too much water (flooding) or too little (drought). Russell rejects a neo-Malthusian approach, as a lack of food, housing or clothing is not the problem – in fact there are massive amounts available. The real issue is the market 'price' problem and the 'wage' price problem, the latter which he mentions only tangentially. He does not understand that labor power is 'priced' and a commodity too.  Nor does he look at how commodity markets run small U.S. farmers out of business.

Russell interviews a major institute that forecasts harvests of many different foods through satellite data and AI. They tell him that, oddly, what buyers, brokerages, commodity traders and finance firms want is what the government report will say about harvests, not about the actual harvest. This is because government reports move markets, not facts on the ground. 75-80% of commodity futures trading is now done with computer program algorithms, while real producers are dropping out, so the market is now data vs. data. The other price he talks about are those of external costs to the environment, which are never included in capitalist market calculations.

Russell speculates that heavy climate shocks will be able to sink the whole world financial system, making Mad Max a reality. In his visit to Mogadishu he finds out that warlords and groups like Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and others attract poverty stricken locals with food, housing and a small 'wage.' Al-Shabaab uses food as a weapon by ambushing relief convoys, taxing travelers and confiscating cows. They also make money smuggling charcoal and sugar into Kenya without import fees. It's an arbitrage business he concludes. In Guatemala coffee prices crashed due to hedge funds shorting coffee futures. This created empty villages and migrants heading north as coffee rust, the price of fungicide and excessive rain killed their crops. The crisis on the U.S. southern border is mostly a price crisis according to Russell. It is certainly blow-back!

He finishes the book with a mini-history on the role of prices in various crises, starting with Louis XVI in the late 1700s who followed the advice of an early libertarian named Turgot and allowing bread prices to 'freely' operate. We know how that turned out in 1793. The hedge fund masters and private equity pooh-bahs know a massive 'black swan' event they engineer will put their own heads at risk too.

Louis XVI after letting bread prices 'free.'  

A Working Class Solution

The socialist solution is a near fixed or low price for the necessities of life – transport, food, healthcare, clothing, housing, education, etc. Another is adjusting the social wage price and the labor wage price. Russell has no solutions, content to journalistically describe the world as it comes apart at the seams. His reductionist, one-size-fits-all narrative is limited, especially just focusing on finance capital, but it does reveal something fundamental. The narrative indicts capitalist markets as a creator of chaos, as capital is a violent, disruptive and unstable force. Stability is what people most want in their lives – not disruption, leaving their homes, unemployment, poverty, crime, war, starvation or climate extremes.

The Marxist idea of prices under capitalism is that they reflect the socially necessary labor time involved in the exchange value for all commodities, not just the work involved in getting raw materials like oil, grains, copper, hogs, etc. The price includes surplus value robbed from the worker and from nature. However Russell is concerned mostly with raw materials. Speculation and 'the market' make the commodity price, the 'money-form,' variable, tradable, pliable and almost imaginary. It is not a straight expression of value or price or labor or nature, as one day a barrel of oil is worth $50 and the next $100. Russell would agree that this is one of the roots of chaos.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen,” “Deep Survival,” "Can History Predict the Future?" “The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution” (Prashad); “Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution,” “Saudi Arabia Uncovered,” “Capitalism in the 21^st Century,” “How Will Capitalism End?” “Debt, Prices and Credit,” “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Venezuela,” “Central America,” “What is the War on Terror,” God is Not Great.”

May Day Books has many volumes on economics from a Left perspective.

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 16, 2024

The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie

 “A Fever in the Heartland – the Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them” by Timothy Egan, 2023

This is the story of the 1920s Klan in Indiana, which became the biggest section of the national organization under the leadership of a drunken, violent and charismatic greed-bag named David C. Stephenson. At the time most of Indiana was known as 'north Dixie' due to its proximity to the real Jim Crow Dixie, along with it's rural and very Aryan population. Segregation was practiced there and hatred extended beyond 'people of color' to Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Finns and 'Bolsheviks.'  The “New” 1915 Klan was a continuation of the Know-Nothings, the 1860s old Klan and the White Leagues. They were forerunners to the Black Legion, Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, the John Birch Society and now the Trump MAGA movement. It's obvious from the book that these movements are all connected by ideology, methods and class leadership, having existed for much of U.S. history.

What Stephenson tried to do was to link midnight terror with political power and a moderate image of a Rotary-style civic club. This book makes it clear the leadership of this Klan was a 'higher' class of leading citizens – lawyers, shopkeepers, businessmen, dentists, bank presidents, civil servants, prosecutors, judges and salesmen. Stephenson himself lived in a mansion near Indianapolis, had many automobiles, a summer home, a yacht, a plane and the rest. He was a hypocrite who drank heavily but endorsed Prohibition, brutalized his wife and women as a 'family values' kind of guy and bribed many Protestant ministers to spread the Klan's message. Stephenson ran drunken bacchanals at his mansion and repeatedly sexually assaulted women. Yet he turned a legal Indiana horse thief patrol into a morality police. They punished sexual 'deviance' like necking, parties, drinking, dancing, divorce, abortion and any illicit contact with 'real Americans' and the rest. The Klan formed an alliance with a female temperance leader and the Anti-Saloon League, which led to a ladies Klan auxiliary. The Klan shut down shops run by Jews or Catholics and promoted 'white's only' shops while attacking dark-skinned folks trying to live in the 'wrong' neighborhood.

Stephenson was part of a coup that deposed the original leader of the Klan in Atlanta and he became it's exalted national Grand Dragon. Stephenson's innovation in Klan policy was to get the judges, politicians from both Parties, newspapers, preachers, businessmen and cops to back him in a bid for political office in Indiana, then the U.S. Presidency. He was probably the most powerful person in the state for awhile, as his word was 'law.' The stage was set.

Problems in Paradise

In opposition, an Irish anti-fascist from Chicago named Patrick O'Donnell organized an anti-Klan front and rallied in Indianapolis, a hotbed of Klan power. They outed Klan members, doxing them by stealing their secret membership lists, which included a leader of the Republican Party in the state and a number of state officials. A newspaper editor in Muncie repeatedly denounced the Klan and was ruined for it. An NAACP official in Indianapolis organized against them. Elderly Union Civil War vets who had fought the Confederacy publicly opposed the Klan. Students at Catholic Notre Dame defeated the Klan in a pitched battle on the streets of South Bend, which is where the name 'Fighting Irish” actually comes from. And the Klan still grew in Indiana and Northern states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon where European immigrants or dark-skinned Southerners were moving for work.

1925 Klan Parade in D.C. of 100s of Thousands

Stephenson's next idea was to take over Valparaiso University, which was almost broke, and create a white nationalist KKK school to challenge Harvard. He never graduated from high school, though he claimed he had gone to college. The rest of his self-serving biography about being rich, a war hero and having no family was a fraud. The Klan's Grand Wizard in Atlanta vetoed the move, and this made Stephenson plan a break with the national Klan. In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed a restrictive immigration bill that the Klan applauded, stopping those from southern Europe, Africa, Jews, Chinese and others from entering the country. Among those stopped was the family of Anne Frank. The Klan promoted eugenics and sterilization, along with segregation in housing, work and federal jobs and were successful. In public schools they pushed teaching the Bible and banning evolution.

In the elections of 1924 the NAACP broke with Indiana's Klan Republicans and voted Democratic, signaling a nation-wide trend. Nevertheless the Klan's candidates won the 1924 Indiana election from Senator and Governor on down. Their national high point was the massive 1925 march in Washington, D.C. attended by 100s of thousands of Klan members and a good number of members of Congress.

Trials & Tribulations

But Stephenson's flaws were becoming worse. A brutalized and raped young woman Madge Oberholtzer, who died by her own hand, was able to narrate her story for a legal Affidavit before succumbing. The crime became public through many witnesses and landed Stephenson in jail and court. Other women came out to tell their stories of being drunkenly raped or attacked by him and 500 women in Indianapolis demonstrated outside his jail cell. The 'family man' was exposed and expelled from the national Klan as part of their faction fight. Nevertheless he expected that the local Klan-backed Indiana judges, media and politicians would free him. They cut funds to the prosecutor's office, threatened the prosecutor's life, began purchasing witnesses and eventually chose the jury – middle-aged white farmers, 3 of whom were Klan members and 2 of whom they tried to bribe. Yet the Judge allowed Oberholtzer's dying declaration into evidence. The defense resorted to victim-blaming, painting the dead woman as a loose floozy and a depressed suicide. The jury saw through the deception and sent Stephenson to prison for second-degree murder. He filed 40 appeals, all rejected, and served his long sentence.

Madge Oberholtzer & Stephenson

As to the book's title, it's an exaggeration, as the national “Invisible” Empire continued for many years after that, though in a shrunken state. Nor is Indiana in the middle of the West - Midwest – it's in the North and was during the Civil War. The story is a paean to the U.S. justice system, something we know is not always true at all, but sometimes it works. A cascade of legal trials after this trial convicted Klansmen in a number of states of sexual attacks, bribery, racist violence and perjury, with national Klan numbers dropping by 90% according to Egan. Their last lynching in 1930 in Indiana went unpunished however.

This book has color, with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Malcolm X, Clarence Darrow and John Mellencamp getting mentioned. The 1921 massacre of African-Americans in Tulsa, OK was in a city with a very large Klan presence. Woodrow Wilson actually segregated the federal workforce, partly under Klan influence. An Indiana law for forced sterilization of various 'undesirables' was put into place by Klan politicians and that law was imitated across the country and by the Nazis. Even Prohibition was partly their work.

This is a riveting story of a certain reactionary lumpen-bourgeois type that we all know. If the history sounds familiar, it's because the author is aware of the similarities between Trump and the MAGA movement, along with every other right-wing monster to stride across the U.S. stage. Trump has been a reactionary, life-long fraud who has escaped a reckoning so far. Will Stormy Daniel's be his Madge?  Instead of a white hood his allies wear fatigue militia caps. I suspect that in order to defend ourselves from Trump and his militias we will need a new Anti-Fascist Front come November - no matter who wins. Be prepared!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Worst Hard Time” and “The Immortal Irishman” (both by Egan); “Fascism Today – What It is and How to Fight It,” “A Confederacy of Dunces?” “Struggle & Progress,” “BlacKKKlansman” (S Lee); “Drivin' Dixie Down,” “Monument – the Untold Story of Stone Mountain,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or 'Jim Crow.'

May Day has many anti-fascist books.  Be prepared!

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 13, 2024

Climate Fatalism

 “An Inconvenient Apocalypse – Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity” by W. Jackson & R. Jensen, 2022

What else can be said about this issue? Most people following the topic have seen, heard or read about it so much they are already 'up to here.' Real solutions on the ground are the thing lacking. I'll try to parse anything new the book contributes, while pointing out it's predictable errors. These two seem more like socio-biologists than anything else and are basically middle-class climate fatalists.

The authors (J&J) verge on deep ecology, as they start off with a discussion of how to limit the world's population to 3 billion a la Malthus and Ehrlich. It's at around 8 billion now. They put the blame for the present environmental crisis on the development of agriculture thousands of years ago – humanity's original sin. They want us to do away with cities, nations or large social bodies and go back to living in small communities of about 150 people – perhaps becoming hunter-gatherers again. They suggest forming these communities now. If this doesn't point to deep ecology anarchism, I don't know what does. J&J predict a world apocalypse based on scientific facts, not one based on the nonsense in Revelation. It's too late to stop these 10 horsemen, so they recommend adaptation. Consumerism is a big enemy. Speed is of the essence. All of that is true.

To them, the overwhelming cascade of complex and dangerous problems is key. Here is their list: 1, over-population; 2, decline of resources like water; 3, mass extinctions; 4, global warming; 5, pollution by chemicals; 6, food insecurity and nutritional deficiency; 7, nuclear arms; 8, pandemics; 9, uncontrolled technologies; 10, national and global political failures. No mention of massive migration, failed states, starvation and war, though those might be related to #10 or #6.

J&J don't believe in a Goreite techno-utopian capitalist solution - like solar, wind, EVs and batteries.  They don't support survivalism, growth in any area, a commodity economy or the efficacy of individual efforts to deal with climate change. They advocate a future of necessities only and call the future 'gritty and grim.' 

They ignore the 'great acceleration' hockey-stick of world carbon rates and the car economy that shot upward after WWII. They seem not to have heard of the severe drop in birth rates in countries like Japan, South Korea and China and the low rates in many other center countries. This is due to higher economic development, abandonment of religion, women's liberation and contraception. They understand modern agriculture as using massive chemical and carbon inputs but don't focus on organic, veganic or agro-ecologic methods - though they hint in that direction. They generally tip-toe around the overwhelming arc of carbon capital in so many economic sectors, afraid to take it head on with a social revolution. They talk about a future steady-state economy but ignore the word 'socialism,' mentioning eco-socialism once. 

They endorse Jared Diamond's analysis of 'collapse' related to social over-complexity and environmental weakness. They propose that we focus on a 'remnant' that will be left after the collapse. Yet they want to forestall being called 'preppers' and are not buying canned food and bullets. Maybe they should.

J&J's idea of preparing for the future is 'envisioning' what is going to happen, a passive method if there ever was one. They see a frugal and low energy future that will affect agriculture, communication, social spaces, transport and which distinguishes real needs from unnecessary consumerist wants. They make the point that the consumerism of 'high-energy' stuff is at an end, or should be. They claim to be deeply Christian and secular at the same time, which accounts for their Christian references and touchy-feely approach, even rattling on about the patriarchy. Perhaps the frugality of a community of monks is their real attraction. They end by rejecting hope and making a plea for love. Really?

Reading this stuff shows the limitations of basically hard-liberal but comfortable environmentalists who realize the game is up but have no clue as how to weather this storm. Not a word about socializing the carbon companies, their banking allies or the Federal Reserve. Not a word about a mass movement or organizations of any kind. Not a word about political action, internationalism or a total overturn of erroneous capitalist 'growth.' Not a word about capital's very recent carbon drive, which is not just associated with agriculture or industrialism, but spiked to incredible levels as capital covered the globe after 1945. All of this is ignored, so put your head in the sand, find some friends, get quiet and start growing your vegetables.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Collapse” (Diamond); “Tar Sands,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planning Green Growth,” “Robbery of Nature,” “Marx and the Earth,” “Marx's Ecology,” “Against Doomsday Scenarios” (all 4 by JB Foster); “Oneness vs. the 1%” (Shiva); “Vanishing Face of Gaia”(Lovelock) “Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism,” “The Ministry for the Future” (KS Robinson); “The Insect Crisis,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Tragedy of the Worker,” “A People's Green New Deal,” “Catastrophism,” “On Fire – The Burning Case for a Green New Deal,” “This Changes Everything” (both by Klein), “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov), “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); “Rally Against Enbridge and Line 3.”

May Day Books has many left-wing takes on the environmental crisis

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / April 10, 2024

College Library Browsing #14: Ragtime Theory

 “Ragged Revolutionaries – The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression Era-Literature” by Nathaniel Mills, 2017

This is an academic look at 3 left-wing writers – Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Margaret Walker - centered on their work in the 1930s at the height of Communist Party (CP) influence in various movements. Mills claims that these 3 extended Marxism by incorporating the 'lumpen-proletariat' into the revolutionary forces, similar to what they think Frantz Fanon and the Black Panther Party (BPP) did later. Walker was a member of the CP for a time; Wright was close to the CP until he broke with them, and Ellison was in CP literary front groups until he joined the mainstream literary crowd.

The thesis is that Marx and Engel's distaste for the lumpen-proletariat was due to their negative role in the 1848 revolutions when they allied with the ruling powers or did nothing. Mills points out that this is an historical evaluation, not a theoretical one. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that this strata was a victim of capital; but at other times they wrote that they would sell out, prey on the proletariat or be useless in a struggle. I think the problem is centered in the description of 'who' is in the actual lumpen-proletariat, and this extends to Mills himself. Everyone outside the stable production system – hobos or prostitutes in his usage - or ruined by the production system – beggars - is not a necessarily a lumpen. Hobos actually work occasionally and you can make a case that prostitutes are exploited sex workers. All 'poor' people are not lumpen as many have jobs, as do homeless people and drug addicts, though some have been ruined by addiction. The categories of lumpen used by Wills are flawed and confuse marginal workers with criminals.

On the other hand the BPP and Mills both celebrate criminals as 'having agency' – a sort of romantic embrace that does not detail the real role of, for instance, gangs in social life. You can make a Marxist case that actual gangs are just illegal capitalist businesses and that illegal drug and gun dealers are providing a service like any businessman. These people are not exclusively 'Robin Hoods' robbing the rich or banks, nor are they moonshiners or weed dealers. Many criminals shoot, rob, rape or target poor people around them; cyber criminals take advantage of the vulnerable; white collar criminals effortlessly steal money. A historical study of the role of 'blue collar' gangs in social struggle would be useful in this estimation and perhaps you could start with the Haitian gangs presently fighting in Port Au Prince. Castro quickly got rid of the lumpen-bourgeois Mafia in Cuba, as, besides their criminality, they were in league with Batista and the U.S. This book ignores the historical role of actual criminals though.

The Texts

Figures like Wright's Bigger Thomas from Native Son, or Twain's Huckleberry Finn from his self-named Adventures are alleged to be representative of the progressive possibilities of lumpens. Huckleberry was a teenager, 13 to 14 years old. He's a teenage runaway helping Jim, and neither teenagers nor runaways are lumpens. His is a heroic act, as white folks in other parts of the slave South were executed for helping runaways or in rebellions and luckily, that did not happen to Huck.

Bigger Thomas in Native Son was a composite of 4 different people that Wright knew, as he made clear in 1940s How Bigger Was Born – a bully, a scammer, a criminal and an unemployed man – all alienated from society and very angry in some way, but not all 'lumpen.' In Wright's 1941 book The Man Who Lived Underground a similar person to Bigger is represented. He worked precariat odd jobs until the police chose to patsy and abuse him. In Native Son, being a bully doesn't mean not working – in fact they are usually 'successful' people. Being unemployed fits into Marx's strata of the reserve army of the unemployed. Bigger himself worked as a servant. Scammers and even pimps mimic regular business culture – their jobs are part of the lumpen petit-bourgeoisie. Is poverty a creature of class society? Yes. Are these characters on the edge of the official production system? Yes. Are criminals part of the 'circulation of capital'? Actually yes, as a significant chunk of the banking flow in the world comes from crime, especially drugs and white-collar fraud. Ask HSBC or any Swiss bank.

Mills mentions the larger universe of proletarian and 'bottom dog' literature. He discusses Claude MaKay's vision of rootless precarians, including sailors in Marseilles, in Banjo; Mike Gold's Jews Without Money that depicts a New York slum youth breaking with his criminal buddies; CP'er Nelson Algren's descriptions in A Lumpen and Somebody in Boots of transient white men in Chicago who can't grasp black-white unity or collective struggle. Edward Dahlberg, author of numerous books like Bottom Dogs came closer to what Mills' is talking about.

Romantic figures like gamblers, hustlers, blues men, hobos, ragpickers and Stagolee people the imagination of the lovers of the itinerant sub-proletariat – yet who are no longer as romantic or numerous. If you hear some folk singer yowling about this archaic stuff, you'll see the contradiction. Yeah, people don't want to work, its alienated trouble, sure, and that's most of us. But these legendary roles are semi-working class except Stagolee and fraudsters who live off opportunity, mobility and chance. The Stagolee of legend, Lee Shelton, was a pimp, gang leader and murdered a competitor – very few people's role model. Modern criminal anti-heroes are served up to us on TV frequently, with assassins the pinnacle. It is tired ideological propaganda for bloody individualism and do-it-yourself capitalism. This ain't cutting edge - it's nowhere near an emancipatory blade.

In Native Son Bigger is associated with Lenin and, while abhorring waged work, he finally moves towards the CP for subjective reasons. Wright's point is that revolution contains more than just 8-hour-a-day workers - not news in the poverty-stricken 1930s. Mills repeatedly emphasizes that Bigger was extremely alienated from society and wanted to 'be seen' and his 'story told' and to 'have agency' – to not be invisible. Is this truly revolutionary? It can certainly lead many to joining socialist groups. But in a capitalist context it also means the invisibility of dark-skinned semi-proletarians will be supplanted by the visibility of middle-class people of color – which is what has actually happened. On a similar subject, is any kind of violence by the oppressed laudable 'agency?' Mills hero Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice that the serial raping of 'white' women was somehow revolutionary – though he practiced on 'black' women.

Mills does an in-depth study of Ellison's unpublished left-wing 1930's stories – Tillman and Tackhead and Slick - which focus on marginal workers and down and outs. It's very clear that Jim Crow and the Depression were the biggest social influences on these 1930s writers. Ellison shows multi-ethnic unity and the complexity of social groups within class society, especially the turbulent African-American side of Oklahoma City. This 'chaos' and complexity continues to exist today, which is why a simple-minded class analysis fails to understand the twisting variations of social and economic roles and how that relates to revolution. Mills attributes Ellison's position, like Wright's, to understanding the influence of what he romantically calls 'lumpen-folk' culture – something still seen today.

Lastly Mills analyzes Walker's 1930s unpublished book Goose Island and poems from her book For My People, which focus on capitalist poverty creating crime. These are Chicago versions of Les Miserables, as Goose Island's lead characters are 'juvenile delinquents' and prostitutes. Walker goes further down the line of lionizing rebellious criminals like Stagolee as agents of liberation. Mills concludes that she replaced the proletariat with the semi-proletariat and lumpen as the real agents of change. In1966 Walker published Jubilee, a somewhat traditional historical novel covering slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of people of color.

Algeria Independent 1962

Marxism as Method

Marx never alleged that the only people who could rebel in an emancipatory direction were those in the direct productive sphere. It is well-known that housewives would aid in strikes, for instance. Marginal semi-labor strata are created by capital's class system and poverty after all. Marxists know that full-time workers have more power and organization, as they are stationed at the heart of the profit system. This is why they were 'bought off' in the central capitalist countries, as the BPP's Cleaver wrote. They are too valuable to ignore and too strong to ignore. Does this mitigate their revolutionary potential? Of course, but that doesn't change their centrality, especially when the bribe money starts running out, which it is doing now. Some Left academics are always looking for a substitute to the “boring, stupid, complacent” working class and are more excited by criminals and culture. This book has a touch of that.

Mills makes it clear that these dark-skinned writers did not reject Marxism as some 'European white' thing – they, like the BPP and Fanon, adopted it and revised it to highlight marginal populations. Fanon's masses of immiserated people living in the crowded casbahs, favelas, barrios and slums of the colonies are not the same as Marx's 1848 Parisian underclass. This reveals that Marxism is a factual method, not 'Bible' study. The national oppression that Fanon addressed is an added burden to class oppression and this is significant in the U.S. too. A study of the Algerian national liberation struggle's class makeup, a struggle Fanon supported, would be useful. It certainly did not involve many people with full-time jobs and dental care! Street peddlers, shop owners, youth, street urchins, displaced rural peasants, day laborers, ex-soldiers, intellectuals, the poverty stricken and some criminals probably formed the core of the FLN military struggle. It was a national struggle after all, an angle Mills does not deal with. Of note, in Algiers the FLN actually executed criminals to take control of the Casbah. This should give Mills pause.

A modern Marxist view of the lumpen-proletariat centers around crime and fraud, not around rootlessness, precarity, poverty or invisibility. At moments of uprising many marginal workers will join a struggle. Another strata are people who are too damaged, addicted or mentally unstable to get their lives together, let alone work with a revolutionary movement. Nearly all criminals on the other hand? No. Lumpen individuals and gangs would only help in a rebellion if they see something in it for themselves, like profit, or get bribed by the wealthy. The Spanish film Gun City about a real anarchist revolt in 1922 Barcelona showed just that. In the 2020 George Floyd rebellion in Minneapolis-St. Paul, criminals took advantage of the turmoil to rob stores and banks or just burn buildings.

Crime has now grown as an industry spanning continents. It not just some jewelry heist in Boston's Beacon Hill carried out by cool future radical Malcolm X - now it's cartels, help from governments and banks and millions of dollars in riches. Crime is globalized and oligopolized. There are 4 main '1%' criminal motorcycle gangs left in the world for instance.  Noticeably the IRA told the Angels to get out of Ireland - and they did for awhile.  None of this is romantic - it's business. As Al Capone said: “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”

This is why the tortured academic definition of criminals as having some kind of emancipatory 'agency,' opposed to 'the system' and representing 'revolution' is nonsense, even in black-face. Without a conversion experience (the book Monster or Autobiography of Malcolm X or Native Son) or confronting a stronger people's organization, they are not going to become socialists or revolutionaries. What this book basically is is a mediation on the effect structural racism has on the economy of dark-skinned people, separating them from fully-employed life and pushing so many to the edges, making them invisible drones who hate alienated work. These writers chose to focus on them. Does this strata have revolutionary potential? Sometimes yes - provided the proletariat shows up too. Alone they can only act partially and episodically. Considering them human and having positive potential is the insight that 'bottom dog' literature provides, which is what this book is really about.

While marred by a flawed thesis, the book highlights long-neglected proletarian literature of the 1930s and stands for Marxism in its own way. This is a rarity in English studies and is certainly worth reading.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “How Bigger Was Born” and “The Man Who Lived Underground” (both by Wright); “ “The Outlaws,” “ Amiable With Big Teeth” (McKay); “Drug War Capitalism,” “Central America's Forgotten History,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Gun City,” “How to Rob an Armored Car,” “Kill the Assassins!” Marx Dead and Alive” (Merrifield); “Ozark,” “We Own This City,” “American Made,” “Athena,” “The Committed” (Nguyen), “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “L'Assommoir” (Zola); “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Cruz), 'proletarian fiction.'

And I got at the the UGA Library.

May Day Books has many books on racism and poverty and volumes of left-wing fiction.

Red Frog / April 7, 2024

Alien-Ate the Future

 “3 Body Problem”- 1^st Season Netflix Series created by Benioff, Weiss & Woo, 2024 (There be spoilers)

This is an adaptation of a science fiction trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin called Remembrance of Earth's Past, citing Proust. A 'three body' problem is the supposed impossibility of determining the movement and gravitation of 3 masses - in this case 3 suns around a single planet. The result is unpredictable weather and chaotic stability, making that planet uninhabitable. So the denizens of that planet have to move. Where do they go?

Clarence 'Da' Shi - the sane Intel Operative

Patch that premise together with 1966 scenes from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, as Red Guards denounce the Big Bang theory that implies the origin of the universe is God's work. A dissenting professor supporting the theory is beaten to death and his educated daughter sent off to work in a huge logging operation. Above the project on a low mountain is a massive radio telescope sending signals into outer space. The daughter eventually gets off the logging crew and becomes part of the 'Red Coast' telescope staff sending signals. She contacts a civilization in a distant galaxy even though she is warned by one of the aliens – a self-identified pacifist - not to do it. She does it because she thinks the world is a failure and needs help. This is her solution.

Then it's 2024 in Oxford and London, England, not China. What follows is a typical alien invasion story concerning a group of multi-culty scientific friends and a number of dying cosmologists, physicists and scientists. The original book characters were Chinese so this has been colored for the 'western' market. Add a naive and sinister group of humans who organize to help the San-ti aliens who will arrive on earth in 400 years! The group uses a slick VR gaming headset to choose who they will recruit. They have an ocean ship called 'Judgment Day' and talk to the San-ti on a shipboard radio transmitter. The boss man calls the monotonic female San-ti voice “Lord.” Cult killers claim 'the Lord has a better way.' This might remind you of dozens of cults like Jehovah's Witnesses, Heaven's Gate or Scientology awaiting another kind of rapture. It might also remind you of libertarian tech billionaires on ocean-based 'free' islands escaping society, as the Judgment Day cult is founded by an energy billionaire. Some have called him an 'environmentalist' but that's a ridiculous stretch.

After a number of murders by the cult, the effort is on to defeat the future San-ti invasion and their allies. The San-ti decide humans are really 'bugs' and can't be trusted, which includes nearly all their earth allies. These technologically advanced beings seem to endorse bloodshed and extermination – so their social structure is not much beyond modern capitalism, though their technology is light-years ahead. This is typical of bourgeois science fiction which cannot imagine anything beyond the present social structure except dystopia. On their planet the San-ti's civilizations have been destroyed time and time again by the 3 suns, yet somehow they have had time to develop incredible tech. It's not really materially feasible but you are to suspend disbelief. There will be no communist utopias or sophisticated societies interacting with us, just killers. At least that is the expectation here, as I have not read the books or know what future seasons hold.

What to make of this series? Is it relevant to anything or just a diverting entertainment brought to you by the show-runners and some of the actors from Game of Thrones? There are hints of environmental destruction – Silent Spring and clear-cutting of trees play a role. The San-ti might be repurposed space doppelgangers for the fear of immigrants coming to the U.K. All the micro-particle hadron supercolliders around the world, including the big one at CERN, have shut down because their results are incomprehensible and useless. Is this a nod to the present failure of the real colliders to solve cosmological and physics problems? Riots break out after the San-ti threaten humanity. This reflects how irrational and doomed humans can be – as riots solve nothing. Bloodshed is not spared in the war on the Judgment Day ship traversing the Panama Canal, so the humans will meet fire with fire. None of this connects to any overarching theme except perhaps more fuck-up-ed-ness and war.

1966 Cultural Revolution 'Struggle' Session

The opening scene depicting a 'struggle session' in the Cultural Revolution will insult the present leadership of the CCP. They disowned the Cultural Revolution long ago, as their conservative political tendency was denounced as 'capitalist roaders' by the Red Guards, but they still want to keep it under wraps. The scene is a hard depiction of how crude and violent it sometimes was. It was an ultra-left version of an anti-bureaucratic struggle and became part of a faction fight that Mao ultimately torpedoed when vast peasant and working-class communes arose independent of the Party. The student Red Guards in the scene are actually correct in seeing the Big Bang theory as a religious origin story but their handling of the professors is idiotic and cruel.

3 Body Problem is a pastiche – an entertainment diversion with nods to reality to give it grounding. The standard reviews from the NYT, NPR, The Guardian and the Hollywood Reporter are similarly empty. At this point the first season is a fascinating but thin shell, the spectacle of a false future. Angry aliens from another planet are not a real problem or opportunity, not even as a metaphor. Even Game of Thrones had more relevance to the human present and that was set in some imaginary past.

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Red Planets – Marxism and Science Fiction,” "Game of Thrones," “Squid Game,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “People's Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “Handmaid's Tale” (both by Atwood); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Matrix,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick); “Planet of the Apes” (3 movies); “The Road” (McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness” (Le Guin); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “The Ministry for the Future” (K.S. Robinson); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “World War Z,” “American War, “R.U.R. And the Insect Play” (Capek), “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Dune – the Movie,” “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution,” “China's New Red Guards,” “Hard Like Water” (Lianke).   

Tot Kultur Kommissar / April 4, 2024