Skin Head Loner

 The Harder They Come by T .C. Boyle, 2015

This book is about a particularly American virus. Criminal punks in Costa Rica that get killed by a cruise-boat tourist. A crazed son in the northern California woods. Right-wing sovereign citizens that think not wearing a seat-belt or not updating their car tabs is 'sticking it to the man.' Destructive Mexican cartel marijuana growers in the woods get the blame for worse, but they didn't do it. Fools all.

Boyle is described as 'sardonic' because he makes knowing fun of everyone. If you are to believe your eyes environmentalism sucks, liberalism sucks, right-wingers suck, fuck-ups suck, humans suck. Describing laughable and tragic reality – or perhaps shaping it.

Boyle deals in the cultural milieu, the accurate detail, the current usage, the extreme circumstance nearly all the time. Murder with a current cache. Hip cultural knowledge. Psychological penetration. Ridiculous people. Sad sacks and pathos. Boring normality. Undertones of politics. Product placement. He's a smarter Tom Wolfe.

Here Boyle pokes fun at retired white people, but his depiction of Latinos is not a walk in the park. In this story they're mostly criminal elements – thieves, illegal marijuana growers or an officious cop.

And Boyle must hate reggae because it shows up as some kind of sorry theme. The creepy bus driver in Costa Rica likes it. The ratty stupid dog has dreadlocks. The crazed weed-sucking survivalist is a former lover of Bob Marley. And you know, the Jimmy Cliff riff from the book title – “the harder they fall.” Great wisdom, except everybody 'falls' here – which is not what Jimmy Cliff meant. I'm not a fan of reggae, but really?

SOVEREIGN CITIZENS

The book is mostly about two people who think they don't live in a society with other people. Sten, the 70-year-old retired school principal and former Vietnam vet is both a man of action and a man who does a bit of thinking, unlike many around him, but he's still part of the community. On the other hand is his son Adam, a crazed kid 'mountain man' dreaming of the past fighting 'hostiles' and Sara, an older sovereign citizen who lives in a fantasy world of individualism as she pursues her business. Given their ideas the two of them should really live in the woods and never come into town, but they do because they can't actually live alone. Thievery, drinking and dope, growing opium and carrying out minor acts of rebellion suffice until they don't.

Cliven Bundy - Millionaire Cow Rancher

This story is mixed up with that of John Coulter, a real member of the Lewis & Clark expedition, a trapper and mountain man and his contact with 'hostiles' like the Blackfeet and Crow. So in several ways this is a story of north American 'white' people problems extending back into time. In the warped understanding of these right-wingers, the modern 'hostiles' are 'aliens,' Chinese, Mexicans - or anyone representing the state or anyone bothering them. That includes cops. This book is a fictional reflection of the Ammon and Cliven Bundy's of the U.S., even of the whole reactionary movement that lives saturated in this mythology. Society doesn't exist, only we do. It is not just about one killer kid and his off-slant girlfriend.

If you've ever dealt with sovereign citizens and their cracked legal theories, this is a hoot. What is not funny is the murderous logic of people who still think they live on the frontier, guns and all. Skin-head hard-ass young punks thinking they are in 'Nam when they aren't. In a setting of bewildered, pudgy normal people, this book splays the outliers like gutted fish. The possible horrors hiding in 'normal' or suburban life is a familiar theme of film and books. Here it is again. But it is our reality too.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “When the Killings Done,” “Budding Prospects,” (both by Boyle); “Deadwood,” “Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes,” An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,” “The Heart of Everything That Is,” “”Empire of the Summer Moon,” “Loaded,” “A Fascist Edge,” “This Land – How Cowboys and Capitalism Are Ruining the American West,” “Fascism Today.”

And I got it at the Minneapolis East Lake Street Library, which is open again after being damaged.

The Kulture Kommissar

April 30, 2021

The Cult of Blind Spots

 “The Cult of the Constitution,” by Mary Anne Franks, 2021

This book is written by a woman who grew up among fundamentalist Southern Baptists who took the Bible literally and eventually saw the myriad flaws in the Bible. Here she applies that method to look at the libertarian and fundamentalist views of the Constitution, specifically the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments.  She ignores other flawed or anti-democratic sections of the Constitution, perpetuating the cultish status of that document herself.  Sort of like the Christians who dislike the Old Testament but love the New Testament - while ignoring the bloody book of Revelations in the ‘New’ Testament.  Oops!

Franks retails the well-known history of the creation of the Constitution in 1787, when slaves, women and men without property were relegated to second, third and fourth-hand status in the U.S.  The 3/5ths compromise, fugitive slave laws and continuing importation of slaves were all codified by it.  Women were not allowed to vote.  Voting for poor ‘white’ male farmers and workers was denied by property tests.  She quotes ‘founder’ John Adams rejecting voting rights for women and for ‘white’ men who were “without a farthing.”  Native Americans were not considered. In many states, you had to be a Protestant to vote until much later. In effect, the original Constitution was not a democratic document.  Her main liberal focus on the Constitution is as an expression of “white male supremacy.”  She should have added the word ‘wealthy’ and perhaps even Protestant - but that goes against her class intent.  Elite wealth is the product of capital and the class system; it is also profoundly undemocratic as we have seen.  These are issues she mentions as if they mean little.

Constitutional Cult

Franks does not look at other undemocratic Constitutional aspects:  lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court; the very existence of the Senate (members were appointed originally); the Electoral College; state control over voting; prison slavery and corporate personhood, to name a few.  The archaic nature of the Constitution goes well beyond her limited focus.  She considers the 14^th Amendment’s ‘equal protection clause’ of 1868 to be a lifesaver; the U.S.’s ‘golden rule.’  It took a second U.S. revolution, an uncivil war to create that amendment.  What will it take to actually make the U.S. a real democracy? 

Franks explains the propaganda role of the Constitution as similar to a cultish holy book, beyond reason or challenge.  The right claims the Constitution was inspired by Jesus Christ; the Klan included protecting the U.S. Constitution in their own constitution.  She sees this cult in the fundamentalist libertarian interpretations of both the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments, represented by the organizational poles of the ACLU, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and the NRA.  

The Amendments

Franks essential argument about Constitutional fundamentalism is that the 1^st and 2^nd amendments are now seen as absolute rights: for everyone to carry guns all the time everywhere, and for anyone to say anything, anytime, anywhere.  This ignores the key issue of harm.  In actual practice this means militias and fascists can now threaten their enemies with guns, while right-wing thugs can spew threats on-line. Franks is a lawyer who has opposed on-line threats against women and makes a detailed argument exposing the false image of a ‘free’ internet.  Franks takes the arguments of the NRA in support of guns; ACLU arguments protecting fascist speech and EFF arguments about an unregulated internet to task, in detail, with examples, statistics, legal cases and logic.  She shows how Constitutional absolutism harms minorities and women and enables white supremacy and sexism.  The concept of a gun as another form of ‘speech’ cements the link between the NRA and ACLU. 

In the process Franks’ understanding of the 2^nd Amendment sometimes contradicts what it actually means.  She suggests twice that it means a protection against “government tyranny” – sounding like a rightist NRA member.  The phrase “being necessary to the security of a free state” does not mean opposing tyranny – it means a militia backing up the government. It was a substitute for a standing army, a weapon against the indigenous and used in slave patrols.

The Many Faces of ‘Free Speech’

Besides defending Nazi free-speech ‘rights’ for years, most prominently in 1987 in Skokie, Illinois and now in Charlottesville, the ACLU also supported the Citizens United Supreme Court decision where money became ‘speech.’  Their logic is based on the idealist and neo-liberal concept of the "free marketplace of ideas" – mimicking the concept of capitalist economics without understanding that monopolies and oligopolies are the reality of ‘the marketplace.’  'Competition' in reality is a misnomer.

The ACLU has also blocked with the tobacco industry and Koch Industries, joining with the EFF to defend revenge porn, Nazi websites, cyber-bullying and non-consensual pornography - all as ‘free speech.’  Franks sees their position as very close to the libertarian far right.  This includes the over-wrought hysteria about ‘cancel culture’ on campuses.   The majority of cases were liberal or leftist women or African-American academics who are censored and their cases ignored. On the other hand the few celebrity right-wingers who are shut down are mourned.  She does not go into political issues where left academics have lost tenure or been fired, again part of her narrow focus.

In the most valuable and informative chapter of the book, Franks takes on the EFF, which defends web-hosting companies that handle websites containing child pornography, child prostitution and violent sexism and racism, saying this is ‘free speech.’  Unlike the thinking of techno-utopian libertarians, the fantasy of a ‘free’ internet is only free for some.  Franks explains how big internet content providers are examples of moral hazard, as they have been inoculated from liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, using it as both a shield and sword.  They are not treated as publishers, speakers or even distributors. They are just bystanders making money!  This is similar to how gun manufacturers have super-immunity under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

Franks never deals with the collateral damage against leftist sites when private corporations act against the Right under pressure from civil society or the government.  There is ample evidence that Russia-gate, defense of Venezuela and opposition to U.S. support for jihadis in the civil war in Syria have led to left sites being de-platformed.  She was, after all, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, which explains this omission. 

Reaction to the Hard Right

This book is actually a reaction to the growth of the hard right in the U.S. – it just doesn’t go far enough, and for a reason. Franks does not have a revolutionary perspective on real democracy because she wants to preserve the Constitution like her opponents.  The Constitution is a fundamentally undemocratic document written to protect that early capitalist system, even with its patchwork of progressive amendments. The title of the book is really just a come-on. In an odd way, the modern judicial philosophy of ‘originalism’ pushed by the Republican Party would love to go back to the original without its amendments – slavery and all. This is the continuing political and theological context of U.S. society, which is always being pushed backwards by sections of the capitalist class. 

Marxists have supported the reasonable right to bear arms, which is not actually what the 2^nd Amendment says or meant.  Marxists also oppose 1^st Amendment free speech protections for fascists or violent sexists, given their ‘speech’ is really an incitement to attacks on the proletariat, especially vulnerable parts of the proletariat.  Leftists oppose money becoming speech or the ownership of speech by 6 media corporations, something Franks also never mentions.  Franks understands some of these points, but elides them in her partial opposition to Constitutional fundamentalism in order to ignore the ‘wealthy’ part of intersectionality – to put it academically.  She thinks the only way to deal with these problems is through changing the Constitution by state-approved amendments and court fights, while ignoring the issue of economics embedded in its very nature.  After all, she is a lawyer.

A useful book for those interested in Constitutional issues, which are continually being applied in legal cases, or for those who oppose our bourgeois Constitution.  They will find some ammunition in this book. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Witty Lightweight Attacks Marxism,” “The Second Founding” (Foner); “Loaded” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” (Hartmann); “Is the U.S. an Actual Democracy?”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / SRA Member

April 26, 2021

Les Trois Freres de Sang

 “The Committed,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2021

This is the sequel to “The Sympathizer.” It follows Vo Danh, its nameless hero to Paris, where he chooses to go after spending time in a Vietnamese refugee camp.  He is haunted by two murders he was forced to commit for Vietnamese rightists in California and the rape and torture of a Viet Cong woman in Saigon he couldn’t stop.  Half French, half Vietnamese, this ‘crazy bastard’ ping pongs between his two ethnic identities; his past Communist sympathies and his post-Communist reality; his anti-Communist blood-brother Bon and his masked Communist blood-brother Man; French colonialism and culture and Vietnamese oppression and culture; even the echo of facile Americanisms.  The screw holding the two sides of his head together – me and mine - sometimes shakes loose and falls out, then mysteriously screws back in.  He fits everywhere and nowhere – the universal half-man who sees all sides of everything.  The poor bastard.

Instead of being a Communist under-cover agent who is eventually tortured by his own side, in Paris he falls into a secretive Vietnamese gang running dope, whores, protection and loans.  He is now a ‘gangster’ selling hashish to silly leftist intellectuals and poofy French Vietnamese.  He survives this miasma with cognac, hash and cocaine cures, while at the same time in a bloody struggle with another gang of shabby French colonial victims – the Algerians.  

The times are in the late 1970s in Paris and the Soviets have just intervened in Afghanistan (1979) to support a modernizing Afghan government.  The book, being set in France, name-drops philosophers and left philosophy – Althusser, Sartre, Kristeva, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Césaire, Gramsci.  Even the nameless one’s nickname is Camus, though he’s a stranger to L’Etranger. The Senegalese bouncer at the Heaven whorehouse reads Fanon, Gramsci and Voltaire while watching the Johns.  Strict anarchists, hip Communists, pompous Socialists and talky Maoist PHDs discuss colonialism, racism, capitalism and France.  The nameless one does his best to keep up.

The book is a comedic, political and psychological tour-de-force, but it suffers a bit from the familiarity of its predecessor (The Sympathizer is reviewed below).  The ying-yang man’s constant internal vacillations between ostensible and simple dyads makes you want to shake him and say, “Make up your fucking mind!  Dialectics!”  He does hint at an improved ‘third position’ but that never appears as a settled force until perhaps the last minute.  In practice he seems to be mostly a killer for the Vietnamese right, their accomplice and interrogator, then a drug dealer and gang member … no matter what is going on in his head or his prior role as a Communist informer.

Paris by Night - Vietnamese Version

Nguyen makes delicious fun of everyone, including our anti-heroic hero, set in the beauties and warehouse banlieues of the “City of Light.”  More dyads:  French sophistication and hypocrisy; American simpletons and air conditioning; Vietnamese gambling and his mother, his mama-san, his mére, his mẹ.  This is the book’s juice. The whole planet is full of sad fools evidently, all wearing masks.  Which undermines its political impact, an intention no doubt intentional.

The book ends like a glitzy thug-life melodrama out of Netflix– our stylish but beaten-down ying-yang man driving a large BMW, lots of money stashed under his bed, free champagne and the sexy woman of his dreams returned, all at a campy stage show called 'Fantasia.'  This at the same time as he tries to keep Bon from killing Man, as they are 'da' 3 blood-brothers.  Ultimately Paris and philosophy come together.  We find out what ‘commitment’ really means and ‘which’ commitment is meant.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Sympathizer,” “Tree of Smoke,” “Da 5 Bloods,” “Matterhorn,” “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War,” “The Post,” or the word “Vietnam” for non-fiction books on Vietnam or "Paris" for books about France.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 22, 2021

The Working Class Majority

 “The Sinking Middle Class – A Political History” by David Roediger, 2020

This book is a valuable look at one of the key and problematic issues of class theory – the role of the ‘middle class’ in society and politics.  It is mostly a detailed literature review of how the term ‘middle class’ has been used by sociologists, consultants, politicians, economists, the labor movement and Marxists.   He references everyone from C Wright Mills, Erik Olin Wright, Herman Melville, Herbert Hoover to Dale Carnegie. 

Roediger is a leftish writer specializing in analyzing ‘race’ and ‘whiteness.’  Here he tracks how the term middle class is usually interpreted as ‘white’ and as exceptionally ‘American.’  Pro-capitalist politicians still claim the U.S. is a middle class nation.  At one time they said it was the overwhelming majority – 96% as middle-class, making $250K a year on down to the poverty level - encompassing corporate managers and the janitor that emptied their wastebasket.  Roediger begs to differ and even bourgeois academics and journalists are starting to wonder.

Roediger deals with the bourgeois definitions of middle class – as an aspiration and ‘dream,’ as an educational level, an income level, as salaried versus wage-earner or as a cultural trope.  Few except dialectical materialists look at it as the job and role in production a person has.  He looks at the growth of some sections of the middle classes and the shrinking of others as capitalism developed. 

The most valuable section to me is on Marxist theory related to the middle class, which Marx called the petit-bourgeoisie.  This started with mentions in the Communist Manifesto.  This class was usually seen as splitting - siding with the right or as falling into the proletariat.  The petit-bourgeois have changed since Marx and Engels wrote, but the materialist method continues.  Modern Marxists, especially in the U.S. and Germany, have kept pace in looking at the changes, especially the role of the middle class in the development of fascism in the 1920s, on up to now.  Roediger only hints at his own definition of middle-class and working class, sometimes borrowing from accepted definitions in this book.  But he believes the working class is at least 2/3rds of the workforce in the U.S., based on work by Michael Zweig.  This encompasses blue and white collar workers, service workers and precarious gig jobs.

The Modern Middle Class

The vast group of small farmers and peasants have shrunk in developed capitalist economies, while jobs that might have been considered ‘middle class’ at one time – clerks, admins, teachers and nurses – have become proletarianized, leading to concepts like the ‘white collar proletariat.’  A large proletarian ‘service sector’ exploited for its labor has also grown. The professional PHD strata has grown – professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects, journalists and corporate managers.  this is a strata of the middle-class. Many in this strata own parts or all of businesses, real estate or significant market holdings, so they make money through methods other than work.  Yet everyone with a PHD does not work as one.  Even within these groupings there are proletarianized strata - assistant professors on 1 year contracts making $20+K a year; public defenders making low salaries; architects that are basically software clerks; software coders laboring on programs for cheap.

The small business / shopkeeper / entrepreneur / landlord / farmer groups remain petit-bourgeois/MC, and mostly serve as a prop to the Republican Party.  This while the majority of small businesses still fail or are feeder ramps to large capital.  The self-employed / contractor categories have also grown. Many ‘independent contractors’ are really workers without benefits. Some ‘self-employed’ contractors or businessmen have no employees and exploit themselves, even if they own their own truck or car. Others are ‘peddlers’ – trying to sell their handicrafts, art, jewelry, music, website, produce and writing for a pittance at fairs or on-line.  This category sometimes shares class roles.

Marx had categories of productive and unproductive workers and this still applies.  Most of those employed in security, sales, law or the markets create nothing - they enable capital or protect it.  Even the many health-care paper-pushers would depart in a sane socialist society.   

Stanly Greenberg Selling the Dream

GREENBERG

Roediger pays special attention to Stanley Greenberg, a former professor who wrote approvingly of Marxism, supported the anti-Apartheid struggle and unions, but then became a center-right consultant to the DLC, DCCC and various rightist governments.  Greenberg’s initial start in research was a focus on Macomb County, Michigan, near Detroit, the prototypical ‘Reagan Democrat” territory, doing research for the UAW.  In the 1980s Greenberg interviewed mostly white older men and housewives who voted for Reagan to gain insight into how the Democrats could win, writing a book called “Middle Class Dreams.”  Greenberg still works with James Carville in a consultancy.

Using this ‘data’ Greenberg advised Joe Lieberman, Clinton, Obama and ‘Middle Class Joe’ Biden, among others, telling them to emphasize ‘the middle class.’  Famously, Clinton became the Democrat’s Reagan. To this day union style-sheets, union consultants and union leaders still use the term ‘middle class,’ occasionally the phrase ‘working families,’ but never ‘working class.’  This muddled verbiage arose in the red scare of the 1950s to combat working-class consciousness and socialism, peaked in the 1970s and continued on a plateau in parallel with the development of neo-liberalism.   It is not effective any more, as more and more people now identify as working class … even union members!

SAVING the MIDDLE-CLASS?

Roediger asks if we have to ‘save the middle class’ as so many corporate politicians claim.  In the process he details the misery involved for the real middle classes – the high levels of overwork, debt and stress of ‘salaried’ jobs.  Many of these jobs run long hours, up to 24/7.  Many are burdened with auto, mortgage, educational, credit card and medical debt.  They suffer burnout, personality control, business failures and at-will employment. He contends ‘middle class’ life has become increasingly impossible – the detached house, two cars, full health care, 2 week vacation, money in the bank, a comfortable retirement and college for the kids.  This is why he uses ‘sinking’ in the title of the book.  This misery certainly seems less than the actual working-class but it does show how stagnant and predatory capital is, even impacting ‘white’ suburbanites.

As labor activist Bill Onasch points out, the middle class is becoming as immortal and real as the Holy Ghost.

Roediger argues that use of the term ‘middle class’ actually benefits Republicans more than Democrats … though Trump and Brexit used both phrases in a very smart move.

The actual working class

WWC?

Greenberg’s experiment connects to the myth of the ‘white working class’ – as if African Americans, Latinos and Asians were not working class and in proportionally greater numbers.  The ‘white working class’ usage is a phrasing that only a Brownshirt could love - Roediger cites white supremacist Tom Metzger as one of the first to use it.  But it borrows from the prior idealized image of the middle class created by Greenberg.  Given the media wasn’t aware a working-class existed; or of something outside skin color, gender, nationality or sexual identity, this new phraseology is suspect.  I see it as another ploy to split the whole working-class. 

Roediger does too.  He targets a 2016 book by professor Joan Williams called “White Working Class” as representative of all that is wrong with the analysis. It serves as a fractured response to the Democratic Party’s rampant identity politics, but what I would call using the class analysis of fools.  Greenberg himself now talks about "average Americans," (who?) "real working class" and "blue-collar middle class" – all blurring and making a hash of the actual nature of class.  This in practice accentuates the most backward sections of the class as electoral targets of the Democratic and Republican parties.  It also leads in practice to opposing social-democratic policies like immigration reform, Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, as shown in proposals by ‘white working class’ theorist Ruy Teixeira.

Roediger’s book mostly concerns how the term ‘middle class’ plays in electoral politics.  His real view is that electoral politics is not what the left should focus on – so he has an abstentionist / left-syndicalist position.  As such it is odd why he even wrote this book.  But it is valuable nevertheless for rounding up the discussion on the important meaning of the term middle class, perhaps even perfecting your understanding of the term.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Understanding Class” (Eric Olin Wright); “White Trash,” “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Class Lives,” “Chavs,” “Caste,” “The Worker Elite,” “Rich People Things,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “The Precariat,” “In & Out of the Working Class.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 17, 2021     

From Industrial Chains to Blockchains II

 “From Factory to Metropolis,” Essays (1996 to 2018) Vol.2 by Antonio Negri, 2018

(Continued. Part II of the review.)

Negri softens his absolutist assertions on the dominant role of ‘immaterial’ city-based white collar work in these later essays.  He understands Fordism (assembly-line methods) still exists parallel with ‘the beehive metropolis’ - but claims that the latter dominates in the OCED countries. The OCED includes U.S., Canada, all of Europe, but also Mexico and Chile, along with wealthy countries in Asia – Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. Facts like Amazon being the biggest employer in the U.S. might have made an impression.  Amazon’s fulfillment centers are nearly all ‘Fordist’ except its headquarters in Seattle. Or that Bill Gates is now the largest owner of agricultural land in the U.S.  Or that countries outside the OCED exist!

I think this is still a reach, even in these countries.  I see the world capitalist work-force in more of a pyramidal structure – a white collar top, a precarian, peddler and blue collar ‘middle,’ an agricultural / marine base.  All create value and profits in different ways. World-wide most people now live in a city or in urban sprawl, which is a first in history and should refine left tactics.  

THESIS

Negri’s main contention is that the site of ‘post-modern’ profitability has moved from factories to the city-based metropolis, replacing the ‘old’ working class with a ‘post-modern’ multitude in the city.  The web of rents and physical commodity production; unpaid and paid labor within the home; real estate speculation, utility costs, intellectual property, loans and debt; service, government, education and health work; urban farming, transport, criminal activities and mercantile profiteering off precarian, blue collar and white collar workers in the metropolis makes it the new center of capitalist profit.  Whether the city has always played this role is not addressed.  This switch is happening as the ‘old’ industrial economy of physical commodity production and mining stagnates in the OCED … and is relocated. 

This complexity is why Negri cannot estimate metropolitan profitability, forms of value and even has trouble being more concrete.  He says that ‘cognitive labor’ predominates all these forms in the metropolis, playing an organizing role. Because of this he does not think rents and gentrification will primarily inhabit the cities.

Negri’s contention is that this development actually weakens the capitalist class, as they no longer can discipline or control intellectual labor power, which is autonomous and cooperative within the metropolis. It reflects Marx's concept of a rising 'general intellect' that capital now requires to function profitably.  As part of this he rejects the phrases ‘intellectual capital’ and ‘the creative class,’ though his reasons are not clear.  But certainly his rejections are justified.

NEGRI’S TERMS

One aspect of theory is terminology.  Marxist terminology has been relatively clear for years.  While somewhat basing himself on Marx, Negri in this book is an ideologue of high-end white collar labor, taking what might be understood as a left syndicalist approach, a self-described ‘humanist communist’ approach.  To me some of his terms are nonsensical, repetitive or needlessly abstract, while others are useful.

Negri’s terminological definitions or points, some based on ideas from Michel Foucault: 

Bio-politics – A term that would seem to indicate a connection between biology and politics, but instead is a quasi-biological term used to describe the State’s ‘social and political power over life.’  Which of course makes no sense as a separate term, as politics already includes that.  Also related:  ‘Bio-power.’

Post-modernism – A thoroughly negative term that used to mean opposition to any systemic thinking.  Now re-christened by him to mean anything after ‘modern’ – usage of which is an empty negative.

Multitude – Used to mean many people, now means to him ‘all the people or denizens of the metropolis.’  Substitutes for working class, which almost disappears. 

Right to the City – A ‘right’ of the dwellers in a city to control it. Negri disagrees with Harvey’s theory, which he sees as old-fashioned.  He thinks it substitutes a ‘rights’ argument for seeing the city as a complex production site for capital.  Later he praises Harvey for seeing the city as a site of capital reproduction too.

Immaterial labor – Which seems to indicate that this kind of labor actually doesn’t exist.  Negri defines it as intellectual / emotional / social / artistic labor, where knowledge is a commodity.  Related are:  ‘cognitive capitalism,’ ‘post-industrial,’ ‘cognitariat,’ ‘collective intelligence,’ etc.  He contends he was ‘mocked’ for this phrase 20 years ago, but now ‘everyone’ recognizes it.  He links this to the idea that capital must capture workers’ subjectivity in order to control them.  Simple discipline is not enough.

Metropolitan social unionism – A description of a way to organize workers in the metropolis across traditional boundaries. 

Abstract strike - What seems to happen when white collar knowledge workers either plan to slowly take over production or withdraw their labor like blue collar ‘material’ workers.  The word ‘abstract’ is abstract.

Reappropriation of fixed capital – It means that intellectual workers now are owning their own means of production in a limited way.  Especially if they work from home or because they are relatively ‘autonomous’ and work together outside of capitalist control.  He mentions algorithms created by programmers as an example.  This phrase seems to ignore most of actual fixed capital.

Poor – First defined as the working poor, then includes all white-collar knowledge workers. Typical of his playing with terminology.

Urban entrepreneuriat – Peddlers? Small businessmen?  Also related to: Public entrepreneurship and political entrepreneurship – which might mean the privatization of the state.  He seems to put a neutral or positive spin on these terms, which is odd.

Accelerationist – Negri uses this term in a Manifesto, unaware that nihilist right-wingers in the U.S. believe in ‘accelerating’ the collapse of society and are called ‘accelerationists’ for it.  His use of it is vague and undefined.

IT Workers - the Bosses Don't Know What They Know

Negri once mentions the presence of a large group of upper middle class managers, profiteers and business owners - and even ruling-class figures - in the cities, considering them marginal.  They are not.  That is why a social and geographic ‘metropolis’ is actually a cross-class geography.  Who is to prevent these groups from weighing in as part of the metropolitan beehive?

SOLUTIONS

Negri’s main transitional demand in these conditions is a universal basic income (UBI) applied to everyone in the metropolis.  Even in the banlieues, the favelas, the ‘ghettos,’ the shanty-towns, the working class suburbs full of the precariat, the unpaid, the unemployed, the peddler, the migrant and the ‘poor’ - all still work and produce some kind of value.  He links this demand to the Marxist feminist demand for ‘wages for housework’ and care-work.   

He also pays attention, at least verbally, to the issue of organization, advocating an ‘assemblage’ of ‘hyper-segmented’ groups working together for the post-capitalist future.  This seems to piggy-back off of current spontaneous and multiple forms of organizations – so it’s not a new idea.  No mention of revolutionary organizations or united fronts, mass organizations except abstractly, anti-fascism, unions, demands beyond UBI or democratic proletarian power in the form of assemblies, councils or ‘soviets.’  All are evidently old fashioned.  He once mentions the city as a ‘commune’ (in Italy they are still called communes…) but gives it no content.

Negri’s constant and needy repetition of concepts; opposition to some Marxist ideas like the dictatorship of the proletariat or the reserve army of the unemployed; conceptual over-abstractness, contradictions, renaming and terminological spaghetti seems a sign of philosophic desperation.  He is too eager to be some kind of new Marx.  Even he has a phrase for it: “an excessive abstraction from reality.” Whoever his audience is (academics, other French philosophers and sociologists...), many white collar tech workers would be confused by this. 

I think he has a major point on the role of the city as a bigger and bigger site of key capital formation and production, especially with the development of financialization and the reliance on 'fictitious capital.'  The growing power of ‘knowledge’ workers and the leading role of computerization are also significant points.  But this does not wipe out prior concepts at all – it just enhances them.  After all financialization, rent, labor power and intellectual property are not that new.  Changing terminology to a ‘new capitalism’ does not actually change the basic character of capital and class society.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “From Factory to Metropolis” (Part 1); “The Unseen” (forward by Negri);  “Wageless Life,” “In Letters of Fire and Blood,” “The Precariat” (Standing), “Rebel Cities” (Harvey). 

And I did not get it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 14, 2021

Ocean? What Ocean?

 “Seaspiracy,” Documentary directed by Ali Tabrizi, produced by Kip Anderson, 2021

A man worried about the state of the oceans begins to pick up plastic garbage on the beach.  Plastic is his main concern.  What he doesn’t know is that his anger at plastic will be the red thread that pulls him into a darker truth of what is going on in the oceans. Plastic straws are the least of it.

He also cares about whales and dolphins, which he’s seen as a kid.  He makes a trip to “The Cove” in Taiji, southern Japan, where dolphins are clubbed and cut to death.  Some are sold to aquarium zoos, helping destroy pods but providing profits for the entertainment industry. Heavy police security tries to keep anyone from filming, but he gets shots.  The reason most dolphins are being killed is that they compete with the fisherman for … fish.  Over-fishing rears its head ... as there are no longer enough fish in the sea.

He gets shots of sharks being butchered for their fins, then their bodies dumped.  Shark fin soup is a tasteless and statusy ‘delicacy’ in places like Hong Kong and China.  30,000 sharks are killed per hour across the world, according to his interviewees.  He finds out the blue-fin tuna catch, endangered and most expensive of all, is funded partly by Mitsubishi.  But also by criminal gangs like the Yakuza. 

The man realizes it is perhaps fishing that is damaging the ocean environment more than plastic, as he learns about ‘by-catch’ – the millions of sea turtles, dolphins, sharks, whales, etc. that get entangled in drag nets and are thrown away. Whole layers of life are being wiped out through industrial fishing.

BLUE-WASHING

He wonders about the ‘do-good’ organizations that claim to protect the oceans.  They put their labels on ‘sustainable seafood’ and are paid to do so.  One of the biggest is the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  But they won’t talk to him because of his question about sustainability.  He gets an interview with the head of the Earth Island Institute which plays a role in promoting ‘sustainable’ fishing practices too.  They put ‘Dolphin Safe’ labels on seafood.  The head of the EII admits they can’t guarantee dolphins aren’t killed in seafood harvests, because their few investigators can’t be everywhere.  They still apply their labels, on the word of the seafood businesses.  The MSC and EII are paid for putting their labels on cans.  One gets funding from Unilever, a company that profits from industrial fishing.

The man finds out that 46% of the Pacific plastic gyre is actually fishing nets, and a good chunk of the rest of it is more fishing gear – buoys, etc. – not plastic bottles and bags from individuals.  He realizes the sole emphasis on individual use of plastic straws and the like by the various ‘environmental’ groups is to protect the massive industrial-level fishing industry.  These are not the little boats with a jaunty captain like some Gortons TV ad – these are floating slaughterhouses with trawling nets the size of buildings that rake the seabed floor.  A comparison to industrial farming comes to mind - beef feedlots, massive mono-cropping and processed food, but on water.

CARBON SINK

Wiping out top predators, whales, dolphins, layers of fish, crustaceans, marine plants, etc. damages the health of the ocean.  One of the reasons the coral reefs are dying is not just warming oceans due to climate change – it is the missing species that used to live there.  The man finds out the oceans are actually the biggest carbon sink on the planet – 93% - bigger than jungles and forests.  By removing the fish and crustaceans which mix the waters; wrecking the mangroves with shrimp farms (and tourist hotels); bulldozing the sea-floors with trawling, this reduces the amount of carbon that can be held by the ocean.  1% of the ocean is supposedly under ‘marine protection’ - yet not from oil drilling or industrial fishing but from sea kayaks!   No one is actually minding the oceans except countries that patrol their coasts.  For instance Japan and Russia repeatedly ignore whaling restrictions.

He begins to wonder if there is really such a thing as ‘sustainable seafood’ as that little wallet card put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium claims. He realizes there is not.  Every expert he talks to has stopped eating fish.  The phrase ‘sustainable seafood’ at this point is a misnomer, a ‘feel-good’ fraud.  It is blue-washing.

MURDER

The man finds out that observers on fishing boats have been murdered, sometimes in high numbers.  He is told that governments subsidize the fishing industry to the tune of $35B each year.  Much of the sea catch is now taking place, not off the shore of a developed country, but by illegal or huge trawlers emptying the oceans around Africa and other poor countries, destroying the livelihood of the small fisherman that live along the coasts. This leads locals to resort to killing bushmeat, which led to things like Ebola.  The effects of imperialism. 

He joins Sea Shepherd and an African coast guard to patrol the waters, trying to catch illegal fishing boats. They catch several, one being a Chinese fishing boat.

But the story gets worse.  Thailand has 51K shrimp and fishing boats, many using slaves.  He interviews several slaves in Bangkok who were held for 6 and 10 years on boats, but has to end the interviews when he receives word the police are coming.  The slaves saw fisherman thrown overboard and shot who complained.  Dead bodies were in the storage holds of boats.  The same criminal gangs that smuggle drugs or guns or migrants also organize this slavery.  They are protected by bribed local authorities.

Fishermen have one of the highest levels of injuries of any job, not just from murder. 

Then he wonders about ‘farmed fish,’ which avoids many of the problems of so-called ‘wild caught.’ He finds out that the fish waste generated in ocean pens is huge, bigger than nearby human populations.  Many farmed fish are infected by diseases like sea lice, to the point where 50% of the population has to be thrown away as ‘garbage.’  The sea-farmed fish are fed fish meal (and antibiotics), with the meal possibly coming from ocean fish. One interviewee called the scam of farmed fish “bio-nonsense.”

Thai Shrimp Boat

NO MORE FISH

Lastly he goes to the Faroe Islands to watch another whaling hunt, which is quite similar to the Japanese one.  The small whales are herded into a fjord by high-powered boats, then clubbed and cut to death and pulled onto the beach. The man finds out that marine life feels pain, fear, has a full set of senses and is collective – though this should not be a secret to him.  He is told that the valuable ‘fish oil’ Omega 3 promoted by health authorities actually doesn’t come from the fish, but from the algae they eat – from plants.  Instead of eating fish saturated in industrial pollutants like mercury, they suggest cutting out ‘the middleman.’  He interviews a company making plant-based fish substitutes with Omega-3 from algae.

All the experts interviewed say industrial fishing has to be stopped and the oceans allowed to recover, or the oceans will be destroyed.  Their main weapon is the consumer who refuses to eat seafood anymore.  No one questions the profit motive itself or the capitalist governments that support these methods.

This is another documentary like “What the Health,” “The Cove” and “Cowspiracy.”  They all look at an environmental problem and come up against the fact that animal food produced by modern capitalist methods is the real source of the mayhem. 

P.S. - biggest butchery of dolphins in Faroe Islands just happened, documented by Sea Shepard, as 'part' of whale hunt and Faroe 'culture':  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/outcry-over-killing-of-almost-1500-dolphins-on-faroe-islands

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Vegan Freak,” “Grocery Activism,” “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “The Jungle,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “Green is the New Red,” “When the Killing’s Done,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “Archaic Thanksgiving,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Consider the Lobster,” “Blood and Earth,” “Polar Star,” “Bali.”

The Cultural Marxist

April 11, 2021

3fer on the Environment

 IT’S DARK AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL  

The damaging reign of Trump is over and some kind of a focus on climate change with the Biden administration is in the wind. Republicans – or should we call them neo-Trumpers – have already attacked efforts to deal with the climate crisis, with Fox flunkies like Larry Kudlow mocking  what he calls “the Green New Socialist Deal” and Texas politicians blaming renewable energy for their abject failure to protect their deregulated energy grid.

Two 2019 books evoke the climate disasters to come in vivid language. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells and Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal.” They build on many other previous books like the Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” and proto-ecologist Rachel Carson’s lyrical warnings in “Silent Spring.” Klein and Wallace-Wells’ books have been eclipsed in popularity by oligarch writers like Bill Gates, who has just released “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.” It is already in the top ten NYT best-seller list. The hot question we face is - is it too late and have we passed the “tipping point?”

WALLACE-WELLS

Wallace-Wells paints a satanic picture of earth in its death cycle. He points out that that the planet is 75% water but with only 2% fresh water available now for earth’s 7 billion people by the end of the century this will shrink to less than 1%. As much as 80% of water is used for food production. He cites the history of the earth 250 million years ago when the planet warmed 5 degrees, releasing methane that obliterated most life on the planet. It is puzzling how so many climate deniers cannot grasp the simple fact that climate change involves the displacement of cold arctic air by warmer air. In the case of arctic warming, the melting of the tundra is already releasing methane gases which are deadlier than CO2’s effects.

Currently, the earth’s atmosphere has 1/3 more carbon than in the previous hundreds and even thousands of years. Even if the U.S. and others follow the Paris accords, which the U.S. has rejoined, their goal of holding the climate temperature increase to 1.5 degrees is still a recipe for disaster. Wallace-Wells catalogs the effects of a few degrees of change: heat deaths, drought, famine and salt water flooding in from a dying ocean. This has already led to massive migrations due to conflicts on a local and global scale. According to Wallace-Wells, the entire economic and social system will fail no matter what political ideas dominate it. Wallace-Wells sees no long term solution on the horizon.

NAOMI KLEIN

Naomi Klein, a prominent Canadian activist, is the most politically conscious of the writers, supporting the Green New Deal and analyzing the detrimental effects of a capitalist consumer economy. She has been fighting on the climate issues for more than a decade and the book references her history with environmental groups. Klein sees the dangers of climate change to also involve damage to humans from air-born particulates which have massively increased due to drought and forest fires.

Klein has followed the climate change deniers’ propaganda trail and has secretly attended right-wing conferences like those of the Heartland Institute, which is funded by the Koch brothers and many entrepreneurs and financial heavyweights in the capitalist class. Not dealt with in these books is the possibility of an unlikely natural event like a vast volcanic eruption or meteorite strike, which could change the climate to a worldwide winter as happened in the past. Klein sees the Green New Deal agenda as having few drawbacks even with its massive cost, which she says will boost the economy and open up millions of new jobs as well as mitigate climate dangers. Klein does not discuss the efficacy of nuclear power.

BILL GATES

On the other hand Bill Gates has funded “compact nuclear reactors” with his TerraPower company, along with other technological “fixes”. Gates advocates many technocratic and social solutions which involve large governmental and individual commitments, but no changes beyond that.  One geo-engineering fix Gates is leery of is injecting gasses into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. In that vein a recent “perturbation” balloon launch was deflated by criticism as a Swedish attempt to test this theory of blocking sunlight was cancelled.  But the most dangerous gas right now is the false claims bloviating from the climate deniers in industry and politics, who still hold power.  It is even worse than the methane belching of cows.

“On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal” is available at May Day Books, as is “The Sixth Extinction.”

Other prior book reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “No is Not Enough,” “This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. The Climate,” “The Shock Doctrine,” (all 3 by Klein); “Planet of the Humans,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” (Lovelock); “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Collapse of Western Civilization,” “Catastrophism,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” etc. Or books on Marx and the environment by John Bellamy Foster…”Marx and the Earth,” “The Robbery of Nature,” “The Ecological Revolution”(all by JB Foster).

Guest Reviewer:  

AvatardeuX

April 8, 2021