Machines of Communism

 “Democracy, Planning, Big Data” by Kees Van Der Pijl, 4/2020 Monthly Review

If you’ve run into some old codger leftists who distain computers, this article might be a shock for them.  While citing Ned Ludd constantly, their understanding is usually based on a deep misunderstanding of this early 1800s movement.  Luddism was not 'anti-technology.’  Machine-breaking was a tactic, not the end in itself.  Luddism wanted a minimum wage; the right to trade unions; against the super-exploitation of women and children and most pointedly jobs for those put out of work by machines.

This article reveals what many leftists have already said about computers and data – they will make planning far easier and timely than relying on delayed end-point results.  Capital already partly uses these methods, in corporate isolation, but for a completely different aim - profits.  

As a prior example of the socialist movement using computers, computer design started in Kiev in the 1940s, when the Ukraine was part of the USSR.  A colonel engineer, Anatoliy I. Kitov, wrote Electronic Digital Machines from this work.  After Stalin’s death and his ideological proscriptions against cypernetics, research increased.  Khrushchev proposed factory automation in 1956, not just for use in weapons’ systems.  In 1961 computers were called ‘machines of communism.’  Victor Glushkov, director of the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Ukraine was tasked by Alexei Kosygin with creating a digitized planning system.  Leonoid Brezhnev killed the idea and instead opted for ‘greater enterprise autonomy.’  It seems never to have been revived even under Gorbachev.  As past analyses of the collapse of these workers' states has shown, it was exactly this 'greater enterprise autonomy' that helped lead the majority of the bureaucracy back to privatization, counter-revolution and capitalism.

In the 1960s the Soviets worked in the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a joint effort with Europe.  The IIASA worked on issues like raw material use and atmospheric and oceanic pollution.  Environmental science took off in the USSR from this and prior efforts.  Working with Carl Sagan in the 1980s the Soviets looked at nuclear winter and systemic changes in the biosphere.  The author contends that these systemic planning methods were aided by ‘big data’ - which ‘discovers’ outcomes – it does not dictate outcomes. 

Marx wrote in the 1857-1861 Grundrisse that the future economy would be “an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.”  Pijl thinks the engineer-controllers of these digital systems will replace the capitalists in production, reorienting production strategy from profit to human and environmental needs.  Here he makes no mention of democratic input or control … echoing an idea of people like Antionio Negri who promote communist cyber-techies as the key strata.

Pijl claims the Left should demand public control of the data systems in IT oligopolies.  Which seems like a demand for public control and ownership of Big Tech, but the way he frames it, it is not, as he sees this as part of ‘democratic self-regulation’ – whatever that is.  

Digital regulation would require these steps, per Pijl:  1. Understanding the desired outcome. 2.  Real-time measurement. 3.  Algorithms that adjust based on new data.  4.  Periodic analysis of the accuracy of the algorithms.   Pijl thinks a digitally planned economy is no longer a utopian idea.  The present digital infrastructure is a “democracy waiting to be turned into a functioning social order.”  Pijl writes that this heralds a new stage of socialism, rising above “labor socialism.”  Digital socialism will transcend the present oligarchic, repressive and proto-fascistic uses of technology, using what labor, nature, education and capital have built for human survival and needs, not commodity profits.  Pijl makes no mention of China, which would seem to be an obvious place to look regarding digital planning.

It is quite obvious that much of the corporate world is already highly planned, using technology, data and a massive infrastructure.  Wal-Mart and Amazon are obvious examples of that, but it extends to every single large corporation in the world.  The internet has linked the whole world in a quite direct, immediate way, which echoes the idea of computers being ‘machines of communism’ – though its present public content is dominated by commercialism, propaganda, surveillance and much intentional idiocy, in the context of the anarchy of the market.  Nevertheless…    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  Monthly Review or "The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “New Dark Age,” “Zombie Capitalism,” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “In Letters of Fire & Blood” (Caffentzis); “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Cypherpunks” (Assange); “China – the Bubble That Never Pops.”

And I got it for free from our excellent periodicals section, which has many past and present issues of Monthly Review for sale.

Red Frog

October 31, 2021

Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls

“After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News,” by Marcus Gilroy-Ware, 2020

Not sure what to say about this book.  Filled with somewhat common insights, it’s best on conspiracy theories.  Gilroy-Ware seems to be a leftist of some sort, exposing the various myths around journalism, the internet and the bi-partisan nature of a shallow understanding, centering on misinformation and disinformation as a regular part of capitalism.  We live in a disinformation society, so the concept of ‘fake news’ is not an aberration – except in how the phrase is now used as a way to ignore accurate reporting.

Gilroy-Ware’s focus is on events like Brexit, the Trump election, global warming, the Iraq war and various corporate disinformation campaigns – tobacco, oil, plastics, pollution, pesticides, insider trading, etc. His key insight is that in a “market-driven society” the truth becomes elusive.  The existence of omnipresent, slick advertising in a capitalist society should tip one off that the sales effort is all around us – and it includes news, politics and economics.  Even the Mount Perlin society would be astounded at how commercialized everything has become, in our shiny, “exciting capitalist lifestyle.”

The author won’t touch the Vietnam War and Kennedy and MLK assassinations as real conspiracies.  These started to broadly unwind the post-WW2 consensus about what was true in the U.S.  Mark Fisher’s "capitalist realism" became further unglued in the 2008 financial collapse and the Iraq War, which again revealed the hollow heart of bourgeois social reality.  Brexit, the environmental crisis, the rise of China and Trump’s election accelerated the whole process.  So, here are some points made by Gilroy-Ware:

1.            He argues against technology being the decisive element in society or social progress or regression.

2.           Software like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, You Tube are all monetized for advertisers and data-firms.  Money is made, no matter how accurate anything on the platforms is.

3.           Mis and disinformation have always been a part of politics, so the idea that software platforms created this diversion from the ‘center’ is untrue.  "Echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" have always existed.  Social media may have accelerated it due to its ability to link so many people.  From my perspective, much of the distress is coming from the ‘reasonable' centrists who see their control over the narrative coming apart.  As was said by Yeats in 1919, “The center cannot hold.”

4.           In a fake democracy like the U.S., fake news is no deviant brand.

5.           “Hoaxes, propaganda, myth, conspiracy theory, deceptive liberalism, complacent, crappy journalism and digital platforms” all exploit this democracy with magical thinking according to Gilroy-Ware.

6.           Government and corporations are almost twins.

7.           “The free exchange of ideas,” the “free marketplace of ideas” and the "public sphere" are examples of simplistic utopianism, as no such thing actually exists or has ever existed.

8.           The dominant ideas of any society are the ideas of its ruling class, an idea cribbed from Marx.  Fakeness is promoted to hide actual social relations.

9.           Literacy, including numerical literacy, in the U.S. or the U.K. – the ability to read, to understand what you read, as well as the ability to decipher fraud or untruths or bad math – is very weak.  Long texts are rejected as too difficult.  Education and knowledge is for commercial usefulness, not social usefulness.

10.           Gilroy-Ware cites the Dunning-Kruger effect as to people assuming they know more than they do.  Anyone who has watched Jay Leno or You Tube interviews of the ‘man on the street’ know what I’m talking about.

11.           Emotions and feelings, hedonia and pleasure, are valued over actual understanding or other forms of intelligence.

12.           The ruling class in both parties hides their power and wealth behind culture war histrionics, obscuring what class really is.

13.           In his best chapter, Gilroy-Ware understands there are real conspiracies, as well as conspiracy theories that have little to no basis.  The signs of a conspiracy theory, no matter who is spouting it, are:  A. Suspicion first, facts last. B. Nothing happens by accident. C. Nothing is as it seems.  D.  Everything is a hoax or ‘false flag.’  E. Selective empiricism. I.E. one fact, many flaws.

14.           His collection of rootless conspiracy theories:  Flat earth; 5G hysteria; chemtrails; climate change opposition; staged school shootings; Qanon; the granddaddy of them all, the Protocols of Zion; China-created Covid 19; extraterrestrials living among us; new age medicine quackery; anti-vaccine theories; 9/11 as a controlled explosion; holocaust denial, the staged moon landing, UFOs, etc. He does not include some Democratic Party conspiracy theories like Russia-Gate, pee-tapes, the Syria gas attack.  He gives Russia-gate less than a page, referencing Cambridge Analytica much more.  As another example, right now in Minneapolis the centrist Democrats are running ads that straight-out lie about a ballot question they claim will 'get rid of police.'  It doesn't.    

15.           Even some leftists have conspiracy theories, as if the ruling class has total control over everything, no one else has agency and the bosses don’t take advantage of events.  This vastly overestimates ruling-class power.

16.           He accounts for beliefs in conspiracy theories as a reflection of alienation, a “politics of suspicion” and a sad attempt at knowledge agency. 

     17.   Journalistic objectivity has always been a fantasy, like the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus or ... God.

     18.   Liberalism is based on a shallow positivist political belief in order, meritocracy and ‘reason’ that prop up the status quo and oppose inconvenience.  Gilroy-Ware cites MLK’s point that his white liberal ‘allies’ were actual opponents of the black freedom struggle through their commitment to order, resulting in "do-nothingism." He calls their approach "shallow understanding."                                       

     19.               Steven Pinker is a hyper-empiricist taking small facts, while ignoring context, to make an overly-large point.

     20.              Journalism is not neutrality, a debate, giving credence to both sides or opinions.   It is supposed to accurately reflect reality as much as possible.  In most countries it is a for-profit business.  He goes into many examples of how most established papers, websites and journals, including the liberal Guardian, lean to the right.  The Guardian’s obsession with Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ is one example.  The BBC comes in for particular ire, not for their public television entertainment pablum but their political slant.  For instance it stopped portraying climate change as an ‘opinion’ only in 2018.

    21.               Clicks and impressions drive digital advertising, a $330B business in 2019 based on software like AdSense, DoubleClick and others, while far-right websites like Alex Jones sell health product quackery.  The internet is based on affective and emotional links, so ‘sensations’ can be monetized far easier than anything else.  Which is why Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix and Google (FAANG) sector profits are so high.

    22.               Gilroy-Ware suggests public ownership of the FAANG sector, but then does not pursue that.    

     This list is only a reflection of the general text and can’t encompass everything.  Buy the book and see! 

P.S. - Thom Hartmann's article on Q-Anon's theo-fascist conspiracy status:  https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/qanon-doomsday-cult/

 Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive using these terms:  “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Paper / Novine,” “The Post,” “No Longer Newsworthy,” “Manufacturing Consent,” “Doublespeak,” “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges); “American Exceptionalism” (Haiphong); “Propaganda” (Bernays); “Turning Off NPR,” “Advertising Shits in Your Head,” “Keywords,” “All Art is Propaganda” (Orwell); “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 26, 2021

Space Truckin'

 “Dune”Part 1, film by Denis Villenueve, 2021

Dune is based on the 1965 book by Frank Herbert.  Watching this version switches you back to other sci-fi films, until you realize Herbert wrote this before all of them, and the director Villenueve watched all of those!

Fremen and heroes in their still-suits, which recirculate body fluids.

At first it seems like you are in another Star Wars film.  There is ‘the Empire,’ the space-ships, the black-armored soldiers and warfare, the creepy large interiors, the ‘family’ story.  It is based on exploiting the magic ‘spice’ of the planet of Arrakis, mining it out from under the oppressed inhabitants, the Fremen.  This is an exact rip-off of Avatar’s cruel colonial mining operation – but it’s not.  It’s the other way around. Then the ‘Houses’ come into play – the Atreides, the Harkonnen and various other royal outfits, reminding one of Game of Thrones’ seven kingdoms, while the Fremen play the role of GoT’s Wildlings.  Even Black Panther gets its due, as the key character has to kill someone to prove his royalty in Dune, just as happened in Black Panther’s Wakonda.   Or the powerful magic women in Wheel of Time copied off the Bene Gesserit.  Most humorously, the giant Dune sandworms are a lot bigger than their Arizona counter-parts in Tremors.  Dune, the book, seems like it inspired parts of all of these later films.

Herbert wrote a seminal text of U.S. science fiction.  It is the ‘ur’ version of a medieval social structure piled atop a high-tech, even magical, exploitative economic world – an anti-democratic fantasy that appeals to geeks and reactionaries yet with an anti-colonialist rebellion. Hey, you even have cool, creaky helicopters that lift off using the metal equivalent of dragonfly wings.  It also has a heavy dose of well-known desert religions.  This is ‘the future’ according to scribes imbued with unequal ideas.  It reflects the nostalgia for royalty within capitalist society.  As a parable of society in the 1960s, Dune replicates the ‘good capitalist / bad capitalist’ comparison between the enlightened but still colonial House Atreides and the uber-fascistic House Harkonnen.  Over them all is the Imperium.  Both 'parties' have their problems. Notice the Germanic slant of the last one.  Harkonnen's leader is a 'baron' named Vladimir, which might remind us of something else.

The spice mélange allows pilots to accurately find their way in space travel, and so is immensely valuable.  It reminds one of oil or copper or coltan or water or coffee or any other valuable here on earth.  Drill, baby, drill.

Filmed partly in Abu Dubai

Paul Atreides, the young and handsome son of the family, has been trained by a secret society – the Bene Gesserit, reminding one of the Jedi in Star Wars -  “to bend time and space with his mind” or some such triumphalist hokum.  He is or will be the ‘Mahdi’ – an Arabic term for a savior who will lead his followers to paradise.   Shades of the Christ or Mohammed figure. Of course Paul is European and he goes native with the blue-eyed and robed Arabic Fremen like some star-struck and magical Lawrence of Arabia.  In this film, many of the Fremen are dark-skinned, which should ring some identity and exploitation bells.  But they have a Euro-savior to lead them against the criminal Empire.

Visually, this film does not rise above other ‘space operas,’ even on the big screen.  It's full of emptiness, bad lighting and whispered, incomprehensible dialog. As sci-fi Blade Runner 2049 was actually far more visual and beautiful, done by the same director.  Politically it might jog some people’s understanding of the oppression of people in the global south subject to various capitalist mining, oil grabs or ‘empires,’ but don’t bet on it.  The original predates several invasions of the Middle-East, home to oil and Arabs. That is why Dune is safely medieval and magical – to distance the viewer from all that reality.

Story-wise many viewers will already be familiar with the plot line.  I read the book many years ago and saw the boring earlier 1984 version by David Lynch.  This one is filled with familiar actors – Stellan Skarsgaard, Charlotte Rampling, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Zendaya and Jason Momoa – but the star power doesn’t seem to help much.  The heart-throb kid at the center - Timothee Chalamet - seems to be a dull light-weight overwhelmed by being in this film.  He's supposed to grow into his role as leader, but it's not convincing.  Remember to say that with the authority of ‘the voice,’ as he can’t.  He unaccountably defeats a far more experienced dark-skinned Fremen in a quick duel – evidently with some kind of Mahdi magic. 

The mainstream critics on Rotten Tomatoes wet their pants over this one, especially the wooden characters.  What?!  Many die.  Worth taking in but not getting taken.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive using these terms:  “Blade Runner,” Game of Thrones,” “Black Panther,” “The Road”(McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin); “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (Dick); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Furious Feminisms,” “War For the Planet of the Apes” or the word ‘dystopia.”  

The Cultural Marxist

October 23, 2021

Professor Bites the PMC

 “Virtue Hoarders – the Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class,” by Catherine Liu, 2021

This is a book that could have used more economics and more humorous insults.  Liu is mad at the class she is a part of (she’s a professor of course) while being a member of the DSA – Democratic Socialists of America – and dwells mostly on the cultural world of the “PMC” - professional managerial class.  The title is a riff off of virtue signaling – you know, those people in some neighborhoods who love everyone and have a sign in their yard or store to prove it.

Liu covers the obsessive parenting of upscale liberals; meritocratic and privatizing ‘education reform’ as practiced by Clinton, Bush and Obama; the PMC's ostensible ‘professionalism’ - even their sexual attitudes.  Not a word about their incomes, wealth, neighborhoods, national or ethnic identity or networks.  The PMC is made up of professionals – doctors, dentists, professors, journalists, corporate managers, engineers, lawyers, architects, scientists, etc.  Not every layer of this strata however is wealthy - some are proletarianized. Then there are those who imagine they are part of the PMC, like people with MA’s who never quite made it. You know, those people who think everyone who disagrees with them is ‘stupid.’

But Liu is wrong that they are a ‘class’ – they are a part of a strata close to the petit-bourgeoisie, or the upper middle-class in U.S. terms, but with links below.  The petit-bourgeois class is business people – owners, farmers, ranchers, landlords, real estate contractors, ‘entrepreneurs,’ independent contractors, etc. Both fractions of this strata or class usually ally with a different capitalist party – either the Democrats for the PMC or the Republicans for the business types.

Which is the rub for Liu, as the PMC - part of the 9.9%-20% - of millionaires, sub-millionaires and the comfortable - are the key group blocking DSA’s work within the Democrats and DSA’s support for Bernie Sanders.  She rarely mentions the PMC’s big daddy – the top sector of capitalists who run the Democrats, many from the FIRE, Hollywood or FAANG tech sectors.  The PMC forms the hard voting base for the centrist/corporate wing of the Democrats who dominate the organization - the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, Schiffs, etc. Hence the rage.  Oh, the rage!

I certainly sympathize with a professor surrounded by timid but monied academics, incompetent deans and provosts and a corporatized Board of Regents, in departments full of personal in-fighting and politics. But you chose to work with these people!  Was it the money?

Liu mostly follows fellow DSA’er Barbara Ehrenreich’s original analysis of this strata of the middle-class, who claimed it all started with the hippies!  (A tired conservative trope, that… where soc-dems and reactionaries meet evidently.) She looks at Alan Sokal’s pranking of Social Text’s ideological crap-fest of post-modernism, which she calls post-structuralism.  She has a section on the hallowed role of To Kill a Mockingbird and Atticus Finch in the PMC’s cultural views, in spite of the honest correction offered by Harper Lee in Go Set a Watchman.  (Hint:  Finch was an educated bigot.)  She analyzes the PMC’s adoration of Obama as the shining example of American meritocracy, even while he sank millions of black homeowners into the mud.  She praises the concept of the ‘good enough mother’ who needs help from the whole community, not a battalion of prosperous ‘tiger moms.’ There is even a bright analysis of the love of 'detective' films, which are a predictable simulacrum of real mysteries.  Worst is a weird, narrow section on how the women’s movement of the 1970s was just for PMC women, and how sexual violence on campuses is over-drawn, based on the moralistic outrage of the PMC.  All covered with a hatred of the generation of revolutionary 1968 – which was light-years ahead of Liu or the PMC.  

Liu never mentions the support the 'other' wing of the petit-bourgeoisie in the Republican party gives to capital - small businessmen  - to the point of them calling the Democrats 'Communists' AND 'fascists' at the same time.  Liu ends with a screed against snobbish PMC neo-liberalism, whose well-modulated superiority she despises.  She writes:  “In calling out capitalism as the enemy of the people, we must also name our enemy’s most assiduous courtier and sycophant:  the professional managerial class.” 

P.S. - David Brooks brought up a similar idea in 2000 of the 'Bobos' - Bohemians who were also yuppies.  Relying heavily on Republican cultural tropes, he ignored the fact that the basis of this group was economic, not their attitude towards gay marriage or abortion.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive using these search terms:  “Fashionable Nonsense” (Sokol / Bricmont); “Got Set a Watchman” (Harper Lee); “Monroeville, Alabama,” “The Sinking Middle-Class,” “Class Lives,” “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “Rich People Things,” “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “Toward Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (Reed); “Really?  Rape?  Still?” “Missoula,” “What is Behind Rape, Assault, and Harassment,” “Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class,” “Death of the Liberal Class”(Hedges); “Listen, Liberal” (Frank). 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Kultur Kommissar

October 19, 2021 

       

People's Democracy?

  “Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! – The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia,” 1969-1979, Ian Scott Horst

This is a detailed book on the development and divisions within the former student left in Ethiopia before, during and after the overthrow of the feudal regime of King Haile Selassie in 1974.  It concentrates on the main Maoist / Marxist currents, one centered in Europe, one in Algeria, involving students in the U.S.  This led to some later supporting the military Derg and the Soviet Union (the organization Meison was the first); others opposing the military or engaging in guerilla war for independence from the Amhara-dominant government in Addis Ababa. (the EPLO/EPRP)  Through a profusion of names and organizations, this book tracks the debates over the right of self-determination, guerilla warfare and focoism, the real nature of socialism and democracy, the land question, the role of intellectuals, peasants and the military which roiled Ethiopia – questions which still occur today.

The February-September 1974 revolution in Ethiopia involved strikes by bus drivers, teachers, soldiers and students; a takeover of a city, Jimma, by its citizens; women and Muslims taking to the streets demanding equal rights; the conservative labor federation finally declaring a general strike. The urban movement predated any peasant mobilizations or rural guerilla warfare, which the Maoist students were assuming would come first.  Eventually junior officers in the military, led by Haile Miriam Mengistu of the Derg, deposed Selassie on September 12th and took power.

In November the Derg executed former allies of Selassie, as well as their own political opponents, including some leftists.  Under influence of the “Marxist-Leninist” whisperers like Senay Likke and Haile Fida, they declared ‘Ethiopian Socialism,’ nationalizing the banks and large industry and concerns.  They sent students into the countryside for a year in a move similar to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and announced opposition to the Eritrean independence struggle. Later they nationalized land and authorized peasant kebelles (councils), many of which were first initiated by the students in the countryside. 

The forces that would become the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party (EPRP) in 1975, which had come out of the Algerian student center, questioned ‘what kind of socialism’ was it that was run by one military Committee? The EPRP quoted Lenin in 1916 when he wrote “Socialism is impossible without democracy…” They stated of the Derg that:  “a group that does not practice internal democracy of its own, cannot fulfill the wishes of the people.”  The EPRP was trying not to talk about bourgeois democracy, where capitalist parties trade time in power, or where propaganda networks and laws are owned or written by capitalists – but installing workers and peasants in power instead.  Their actual demand was for a ‘peoples’ provisional government,’ which is itself a vague formulation, borrowed from the popular front concept of ‘new democracy.’  They also saw it as a demand for representative elections, freedom of speech and the press, the right to organize political parties – not a council democracy but an enlightened bourgeois democracy.   

What is notable about the events is the usages of 'Marxist-Leninist' and Maoist rhetoric by all sides - the Derg; their 'left' supporters in Meison and the EPRP.  All three sides actually supported a 'people's government' of some kind, at least verbally.

The Heroes of the Past ...

Horst is clearly supportive of the EPRP and he’s somewhat aware of the pitfalls of traditional ‘Marxist-Leninist’ clichés, but not of all Maoist ones.  He quotes members of the EPLO/EPRP in a women’s organization calling the Derg ‘fascist,’ and worse than feudalism or Selassie.  But then he has a discussion about whether this was the proper use of the term.  The pro-Derg Meison grouping accused the EPRP of counter-revolution, fascism, anarchism, Trotskyism, being in the pay of the CIA and the like. The EPRP was able to expel the AFL-CIA from the Ethiopian labor federation and make it a progressive force, which was an advance.  

Horst tracks how the EPRP descended into sectarian fights within the organization as repression grew.  One of the triggers was the EPRP's flawed decision to start 'urban guerilla warfare.' Ultimately the war of words turned bloody.  The EPRP formed urban and rural guerilla defense / offense teams in response.  

Finally the Derg under Mengistu carried out a massive, violent slaughter of the EPRP, killing and jailing tens of thousands starting in February-March 1977 after a coup within the Derg that eliminated his opponents.  Massacres of thousands took place around May Day of that year. The author asks, "What kind of socialist regime kills tens of thousands of civilian leftists?" This, of course, was not the first time this has happened. The EPRP claimed that East German and Cuban intelligence aided the Derg.  The EPRP continued their political assassinations, but lost hundreds of members.  They eventually turned to their small guerilla army in the mountains of Tigray, the EPRA.  And eventually the Derg even turned on their allies in Meison after gaining Soviet support.

This book provides a fascinating and detailed read on the struggles within the Ethiopian revolution during this time period.  It provides a good background to the present neo-liberal government in Addis Ababa and its war on Tigray, as well as the bloody flaws of the endless national and tribal rifts in Ethiopia.

You might ask, what happened to this marvelous anti-royalist revolution? Certainly, in 1974 the Ethiopian proletariat was not strong enough, the peasantry disorganized, the left weak.  It was not able to achieve proletarian political and economic power in spite of all the significant reforms, the left rhetoric and guerillaism. In hind-sight, the Ethiopian revolution became another African state-led attempt at capitalist 'modernization.'  This book might help you see why it happened that way.  It might also hint at the prospect for a different result in the future. 

Link to podcast on this book: https://soundcloud.com/explodingappendixpodcast/podcast-29-like-ho-chi-minh-like-che-guevara-revolutionary-left-in-ethiopia-w-ian-scott-horst 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “Ethiopia in Theory (2 reviews); “History and Class Consciousness,” (Lukacs) “The Law of World-Wide Value” (Amin); “Amiable With Big Teeth,”(McKay) “Land Grabbing,” “Slave States,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Comrade Harry McAllister,” “Dirty Wars” (Scahill).

And I got it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 16, 2021

Car Cultured

 The Trials of Traffic

And no, not the band.  I just drove from Minneapolis in the North-Central part of the U.S. to Georgia, in the Southeast, then up along the Appalachian mountain chain - the Smokies, the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont… and back to Minnesota via Chicago.  For years I was able to commute by bicycle, train or bus to work, avoiding the crush of commuting.  I had previously driven to work 45 minutes each way in a 13-year stint in Chicago and gotten cornered and angry in traffic jams.  I still am, a form of driver PTSD that is only satisfied by lots of swearing ... or perhaps the radio.

FREEWAYS and TOLL-ROADS

I don’t know how the semi-truckers do it.  On some freeways – let’s say between Champaign-Urbana in Illinois to Atlanta, Georgia – the trucks are more like a ‘train’ on the right-lane of the highway, except when they make their slow-mo attempts to pass. It is, I think, the most numerous blue-collar job in the U.S.  There are still some truckers who think they are in a race, or are due to tight time schedules.  Having one bearing down on your rear in the left lane reminds one of truck horror films like Joyride or Duel.  You do not mess with these guys, hemorrhoids and all.

The fastest cars on the freeways?  Hands-down, the white male in his beefed-up monster pickup, without a scratch on the bed or a bit of rust around the wheel-wells.  These are guys that wear baseball caps inside their cabs.  They race by everyone on a very consistent basis in state after state.  Macho!  Not actually a good vehicle to drive long-distance, but they’re probably all locals. 

I encountered 3 massive traffic jams, one due to road construction and two due to cities. I got off immediately at a blocked freeway, chatted with a fellow driver at a gas station, found an alternate route and saved my sanity in Scranton, PA.  In Cleveland, I found an easy workaround to the two-lane dogleg of pain driving through that city.  In Chicago I could not escape the city or the construction or the tolls since I was heading to the northern suburbs.  No wonder people are leaving Illinois – the city is too big.  Why would people drive into downtown Chicago on a Saturday?  Even for the marathon?  The only satisfaction was seeing the 3 mile backup on the southbound Dan Ryan on the other side of the road.  Those poor fuckers.

There is so much construction going on all over the East and central U.S. you wonder why we need an infrastructure bill that focuses on highways.  Construction reduces freeways and tollways to single lanes lined with orange, time after time, for stretches of 1 mile to dozens.  Cones, blinking arrows, crews of construction workers, heavy equipment are everywhere. I only saw one freeway that really needed a fix in southern New York. Just focusing on this kind of infrastructure really beefs up the car culture some more.  Federal and state gas taxes already pay for highways and bridges.

MOUNTAINS

Driving mountain roads is like staying on a highway that winds around hills and mountain-tops, through ravines and ‘hollars,’ up and down, around 15 mph hair-pin bends, no edge, no rails and you better hope your brakes hold.  Some people don’t know how to drive mountain roads and use their brakes constantly, or don’t have a car – stick or automatic – that will brake for them.  Smell the burn!  How do you pass, you might add?  You don’t.  It is like taking a ride on a spaghetti strap and you’re trapped. 

The views and nature are breathtaking and that is why tourists drive or camp in mountains, but after a while it is wearying.  You can only see so much fog, rushing creeks and rivers, rock walls and mountain-sides full of green or colorful trees.  In the Green Mountains in Vermont, I asked myself if I wanted to continue into the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then the curling mountain roads of Maine to Bar Harbor on the Atlantic.  I couldn’t do it. Mountain and rural roads take a ‘toll’ that is not necessarily paid with a credit card or cash.  Keep it simple.

CARS, CARS EVERYWHERE

While we all intellectually know certain things, the existential fact of traveling the eastern U.S. causes something to hit you.  A simple thing. There are people everywhere – in farms, houses, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, trailer parks, shacks and lonely country crossroads.  It is like an invasion of the body-matchers. And every one of them has a vehicle or two. It is not the same driving the U.S. inter-mountain west or the northern woods, central plains or prairie or the south-eastern deserts.  If you want to see the ‘car culture’ in action, the U.S. East will smack you across the face with vehicles.  Too many vehicles.  Cars and trucks everywhere.  An enormous car junkyard is a frightening spectacle.  Don’t even go near New York or the worst city to drive in – Boston!  It is all a bit traumatizing.

I took in the Blue Ridge Parkway, mountainous North Carolina, New York and Vermont, rural Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont.  On the way I saw Civil War battlefields at New Market, Virginia; Harpers’ Ferry, West Virginia; Antietam, Maryland and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Battlefields are really peaceful and bucolic places – much like cemeteries for the living and the dead. The John Brown Farm in North Alba, New York was the most peaceful – surrounded by hills, trees, paths, fields and a creepy ski jump looming.  I camped in the Adirondacks near a rushing waterfall, in the fog, another time in the Alleghanies.  The message is you have to get off the road and walk – THAT is the real antidote to road-rage and a dying and toxic car culture.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive:  “Motorcyclist Rant,” “Local Rich Suburbanite Runs Over Local Thai Cook With Mercedes SUV,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court,” “Spring is Here and the Time is Right for Riding in the Streets, Oh,” “Florida Will Sink.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 12, 2021

Horatia Alger

 "Maid,"2021 Streaming Series

This limited series follows a theme in recent films and television productions – the working-class servant. Ah, house-keeper or maid or driver or gardener or nanny or cook or ... It is based on a book sourced from reality, written by Stephanie Land.  Alex, a young woman with a child, Maddie, is emotionally abused by an alcoholic and controlling boyfriend, Sean. She bails from their trailer in the woods with Maddie. The rest of the story concerns their struggle to survive – without skills, without a car, without money. It seems the real proletariat is finally getting some screen-time.

Haulin' the Dyson

The series hits all the snags – complex and massive government paperwork for SNAP, Section 8, housing programs, legal forms, vouchers, child care. Going to confusing law courts. Homelessness, living in cars, on a ferry, a domestic violence shelter. Trying to get transportation, asking for rides, trying to get a car (one which is totaled) so that Alex can get to work … or not. Tough and nasty bosses; thieving co-workers, phone minutes running out, high ferry tolls (she lives in Washington state...), bumming a few dollars, lack of cash, cash, cash.

Alex finally gets a job cleaning rich and middle-class people's houses and runs into hoarders, yappers, rich bitches, bad marriages – the human gamut. She finally has a topic to write about and begins to keep a journal. She wanted to go to Montana to a writers' program and had received a scholarship and never went. The reason is never revealed.

The people that help her are co-workers sometimes, women in the shelter, an upper-middle class guy who is trying to get her into a relationship, and the aforementioned rich woman who becomes human after having a baby. Her family consists of her over-the-top hippie artist mother, who can barely take care of herself; her seldom-seen father, who abused her mother too; and Sean, who attempts and fails to control his drinking or temper. Her mother is played by Andie McDowell, in a self-centered, scene-crushing role.

A Night on the Ferry to Fisher Island

Alex makes naive mistakes, almost on schedule. She suffers from a form of PTSD, which I guess is one reason why her open-mouthed grin / deer-in-the-headlights look is so frequent. But she's a hard worker, taking the nastiest cleaning jobs. The series never lets those gigs become distant background, to its credit.

The theme of how families repeat abuse, and how abusers get second and third and fourth chances is obvious. Custody is contested twice, but Maddie gets Sean to agree, perhaps an unlikely outcome. At times a money calculator appears on screen to watch in real time how her funds diminish, or rarely increase. She sometimes imagines things or attempts to remember traumatic events. As she puts it in her journal – 9 moves, 338 toilets, 7 government programs and 1 year in the life of her charming 3-year-old. This kid almost never cries, nor awakens even when constantly hugged by Alex like some kind of Teddy Bear.  I don't believe it myself.  

The real theme is that with grit and determination, you too can climb out of the hole you and others have dug. It is a familiar American story. Some do. Many don't. Here the writer sold her personal experience to Netflix, so the assumption is that she suceeded.  And with some key help from rich people - don't forget them.  At least this series does not hide many of the real problems faced by working-class people, whether they are single mothers or not.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive: “Parasite,” “The Servant Economy,” “White Lotus,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,” “White Tiger,” “Covideo Nation,” “Caste – the Origins of our Discontents.”

The Kulture Kommissar

October 6, 2021

A Unique Life

 "Georg Lukacs – Record of a Life,” edited and interviewed by Istvan Eorsi, 1983

This small volume is a series of interviews based on jotted biographical notes by Lukacs, the Hungarian revolutionary whose zig-zag politics extended from the 1919 Hungarian Soviet to the 1968 Soviet intervention into Czechoslovakia. Lukacs was the culture commissar under the Hungarian Council Republic, joining the Communist Party in Dec. 1919. He gave back his party card in 1967, and in 1968 voiced pessimism as to the failure of the 1917 revolution. In between he was a member of 3 other European CPs, detained in the USSR, then a member of the Hungarian Workers Party, then jailed and exiled after backing the insurrectionary 1956 Nagy government, then returned to the Party fold after a number of years. He died in 1971. At that point he was working for a reform of 'actually existing' Marxism re democratic communism.

Lukacs charted an independent path that put himself at times outside Stalinism and always outside what he understood as Trotskyism. He supported Stalin on several small matters, on the Hitler/Stalin pact and the Poplar Front, with a 'dodgy' position on the Moscow trials. He was helped by Bukharin at a critical time, which he claims probably saved his life during the purge trials. He was arrested in 1941 as a 'Trotskyist' and Hungarian police agent, but only detained for several months, getting help from Dimitrov. He sums himself up as being 'lucky' – though perhaps being a soft Stalinist at the time helped. In Hungary he made obsequious self-criticisms for his 'errors' in order to maintain his standing in the Hungarian CP, so he was all his political life an 'in/out' player in traditional CP politics.

Lukacs wrote a famous theses - the Blum Theses - supporting “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” and a 'people's democracy' - and was roundly criticized. Regarding the first notion, a similar phrasing was used by Lenin for a short time but then abandoned. Lukac's take on philosophy was as a battle between rationalism and irrationalism, not materialism versus idealism. He supported the 'high' bourgeois novels as the highest forms of literature so far, no matter their variable politics.

The PERSONAL

Lukacs came from a wealthy atheist Jewish family in Budapest. His father was a banker. He 'fell' into the 1919 revolutionary Commune in Hungary after being a left bourgeois culture critic, and was recruited by Bela Kun to be the Culture Commissar. He put artists in charge of the arts, while trying to provide a living to everyone on the Artists' List, even if they sold no art. He also served in the Hungarian Red Army for 6 weeks, attempting to stem retreats while getting good food and letters to the troops, and ordering the execution of 6 deserters. He got out of being drafted in the First World War due to his father's influence, while escaping Hungary after the rightist dictator Horthy took over because of bribes.

In his fascinating remembrances, Lukacs discusses his personal relationships with many people, mostly Hungarians little known in the West. But also well-known Hungarians and Europeans - Max Weber, Karl Polyani, Bela Kun, Bertold Brecht, Bela Bartok, Thomas Mann, Matras Rakosi, Imre Nagy and various Soviets. He discusses many of the faction fights long forgotten, individuals he liked or disliked, his life in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Tashkent, Romania, his lectures and various writings. He rejects two of his best-known books – “History and Class Consciousness” and “Theory of the Novel.”

He returned to Hungary after the World War II and describes the factional struggles among the CP'ers, the concurrent Hungarian purge trials and his lectures and role supporting the 1956 Hungarian insurrection and later support for Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The book contains Lukac's own bio-notes, as well as an interview in New Left Review. All told certain snapshots of the Left in Europe during and after the two World Wars, remembered by a man who led a curious and opinionated political life.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive: “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukacs); “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “Hungary Heads Into the Horthyite Past,” “Latest Developments in Hungary,” “The Structural Crisis of Capitalism”(Meszaros); “Hungary Continues on Horthyite Path,” “Hungary Today,” “The Ghost of Stalin”(Sartre); “The Red Atlantis,” “A Statue of Limitations,” “The Queen's Gambit,” “Demonstration for Democratic Rights,” “Prague – A Novel.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 2, 2021