The Nuclear Nation

 “Black Rain” by Masuji Ibuse, 1969

This is a graphic description of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.  While the aesthete translator of this book, John Bester, thinks this it is “not about the bomb at all” it actually is.  C.P. Snow claims it "...turns Hiroshima into a major work of art."  Yet the text is very matter-of-fact, dry and journalistic.  Ibuse is a native of Hiroshima and knew the city intimately.  It is the story of the Shizuma family - Shigematsu, Shigkeco and their niece Yasuko, who walked through and survived the calamity.  Shigematsu writes down his memories of those days, in detail, which form the heart of the story.

To escape north, the family trudges and crawls around burning buildings, avoiding flying tiles due to wind and explosions, deadly burns, radiation poisoning, downed power lines, broken bridges, crushed buildings and fetid water.  They are surrounded by floating bodies in rivers and canals, splayed humans, injured refugees, burnt soldiers, dead animals, burned bodies.  They breathe heavy smoke, dodging potential injuries and fires, hungry and exhausted, as they head towards a fabric factory on the outskirts of Hiroshima where Shigematsu works.

Through this walk, they realize the extent of the disaster, though they still don’t know about radiation - but it is definitely not just another air raid. For a long time the dark mushroom cloud blackens the sky, causing astonishment as to its nature.  Earlier, a potentially radioactive ‘black rain’ came out of the sky and stuck to Yasuko’s skin, which later made her a dubious engagement prospect and worse.  Of course another kind of 'rain' was the incendiary bombs dropped on many Japanese cities, razing their wooden structures to the ground.

Truman lied when he announced the bombing of Hiroshima as an attack on military facilities, as the bomb landed in the middle of a civilian city.  He said nothing about dropping it to protect U.S. soldiers - but in a chest-pounding announcement declared it an act of revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Criminal acts by Japanese fascism in China, Korea or the Philippines were never mentioned either.

Ibuse writes in an older, somewhat archaic style, with many references to buildings, temples, bridges, train stations and places in Hiroshima, which for someone without a map or unfamiliar with the city is very confusing.  The Shizuma’s own house is only ashes.  It seems that they actually walk towards the center of the city for a while to escape, going against the flow of the walking injured.   Eventually they turn north and reach a working train station, which takes them away to a town on the outskirts where his factory is located.

The Shizumas stay in the factory dormitory, then a detached house.  Every official function is in chaos, so as a civilian Shigematsu is charged by his boss with the job of reading Buddhist prayers over the bodies of the dead.  After his readings pillars of fire come from burning corpses in pits along the river.  Shigematsu is ordered back to the city to find coal, witnessing piles of dead stacked like cordwood in a criss-cross fashion.  He can see across the whole city to the hills surrounding, as it is a burned-out waste.  Flies and the smell of death pervade everything.  Rescue parties that entered the city after the bombing were decimated, and in need of rescue themselves.  Hostility to the Japanese military and the war hovers below the surface among the civilians, but is sometimes corrected as 'defeatism' even if true.

Remembrances of another man is included, specifically about the 'reception centers' in elementary schools chock full of injured, burned and radioactive people dying left and right, of which he was one.  His sufferings from radiation went for months.  The Japanese had no real antidote. All this time Shigematsu's left cheek is burned also and he’s had to change bandages periodically.  As you read, you wonder if the family will get radiation sickness, especially Yasuko.  People who tended the sick, or who spent a lot of time searching for relatives or comrades in the ruins, begin to die or get severely sick.

This story focuses in detail on how humans try to survive a heart-breaking disaster – something regularly occurring now from war, environmental destruction, hunger and poverty.    However, Hiroshima was not a ‘natural’ disaster - it was man-made or imperialist-made - a war crime.  Reading it is an exercise in empathy for U.S. citizens, at the least.

Prior blog reviews related to this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  “Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” “GOT – Where are the Pitchforks?" "Leaving World War Two Behind,” “Silence,” “Seaspiracy.”  

And I got it at May Day’s excellent cut-out and used section!

Red Frog

November 30, 2021      

Civil War, Fascism or the Anaconda?

 “A Confederacy of Dunces?” by Hal Crowther, The Progressive Populist, 12/21

Riffing off the title of a book by John Kennedy Toole about a comedic group of louche characters in New Orleans, whose title itself is based on a line from Jonathan Swift, this article probes the question of whether the U.S. will head into another Civil War.  A topic not quite as humorous as that book.

Like most commentaries, the hook is a survey by Bright Line Watch/YouGov (who?) of Republican voters in 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky.  66% of these Republican voters would ostensibly choose secession over compromise with a Democratic administration.  50% was the Republican tally nationwide.  In the same survey, 40% of Democrats agreed to, in Crowther’s words “let them go.”   

Crowther goes on to imagine a new dark age descending on this new Dixie, with millions of non-whites leaving the ‘white’ homeland, while the ‘new new South’ is still left with the worst quality of living metrics it already has – obesity, wages, health, reading, education, poverty, crime.  Right now the South is only leading in gun ownership, abortion restrictions and right-wing Christianity.  Crowther skips the blood-shed issue, as if this division will happen painlessly.  Crowther lives in North Carolina and knows of what he speaks.

Texas would be the center of this new Confederacy, as its oil and gas is the new cotton.  They still remember their Alamo days as an independent slave ‘republic.’ Unfortunately for them, at this point a U.S. military base, Fort Hood, (named after a Confederate general) is the largest employer in the state.  The U.S. military, the North and the Coasts pump more tax money into the South than the South sends out.  The whole region is actually on corporate and military welfare.

IMAGINE

Crowther is against this idiocy, so let’s do a little fictional speculating as he did, but from a socialist, not a Democratic Party direction.

It is pretty obvious that with the adoption of neo-liberalism by the capitalist elite starting in the late 1970s under Carter (a Southern Evangelical peanut farmer), the faction fight between the two capitalist parties has gradually gotten worse – as both support slightly different versions of neo-liberalism.  With the recent advent of a handful of ‘democratic socialists’ or some such thing in the Democratic Party, the John Birch hysteria of calling the Democrats ‘communist’ has reached a crescendo.  Cultural McCarthyism is rampant from Republican politicians, as if the Democrats were actually “cultural Marxists.”   The Reps wouldn’t know a real Marxist from a frog.  The Right's mirror images among ‘moderate’ and leading Democrats also spend time hating on socialism and cradling capitalism to their bosom.  On this issue both parties are joined at the hip.

Little do these poor Republican saps know that the Communist Party, for one, has voted for Democrats since the end of the Henry Wallace campaign in the 1950s.  Even present day right-wing Stalinists and Maoists secretly vote for or back their favorite Democrat in general elections as their way of ‘stopping the right.’  Ssshhhhhh… it’s called ‘the popular front.’

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, political gridlock and anti-democratic riots like January 6^th have now dropped this fake democracy in the rankings internationally.  The ‘Selfie Putsch’ was the capstone. This gargantuan imperialist has become a political embarrassment on the world stage.  The defeat in Afghanistan and the vast increase in economic inequality and debt has only heightened the effect.

REVOLUTION?

How will a revolution take place in the U.S.?  The partially archaic vision of ‘October’ occupies the minds of many leftists still living in the past.  Certainly the guerrilla victory of Castro – who was not a Communist – is impossible in the U.S. Nor is an Eighth Route Army going to thunder across the plains or fields from its hideouts in the Rockies or Appalachians in the context of a world war.  That is because the specter of neo-fascism will rear its ugly head first.  Like the Black Hundreds, the Nazis, the Blackshirts or the Francoist Falange, the U.S. will have its own plethora of actual neo-fascists defending capital. In fact we already do – and as history and the present have shown, they are most closely tied to whatever conservative Party is around.  In our present context, that is the Republican Party.

Now where is capital in all this?  Well, each present party in the ‘two-party system’ represents some of the same capitalists, but also different ones.  Each party also represents a wing of the petit-bourgeois – the middle class.  The Dems have most of the ‘educated’ professional strata in their pocket – the lawyers, doctors, engineers, techies, artists, professors, architects, journalists, etc.  Meanwhile the Reps have most of the managers, small businessmen, farmers, ranchers, landlords and ‘entrepreneurs’ in theirs.  At this particular moment most big capital backs the Democrats, but there is a faction that backs only the Republicans, usually in the carbon, real estate and retail sectors.  The vast majority of the U.S. military brass were clearly wary of Trump’s attempt to become a Francoist caudillo, and rejected his anti-democratic attempt at staying in power.  A careful analysis of donations in the last election cycle in 2020 reveals who was on whose side in that faction fight.  Trumpolini came out on the short end of the stick.

Layout of the 1st Civil War

Will anti-fascism be our version of a civil war?  At this point, the majority of capitalists don’t need open fascism, open white supremacy or anti-science nonsense to save their system.  In the future they may.  The support of a faction of liberal capitalists for the Democrats may wilt away, much as happened in Weimar Germany or pre-Mussolini Italy, as a strong socialist or working-class movement pushes up against their profit margins and power due to an inevitable and deepening capitalist crisis.

What happened in Brazil shows how the Brazilian (and U.S.) capitalists reacted to the Workers Party in power – the WP being far to the left of the Democrats.  Jair Bolsonaro was their answer, a politician who openly advocates a military dictatorship against ‘communism.’  But right now the bosses know the Democrats are no social-Democrats or laborites, even with ‘the Squad.’  The Democrats are no real threat to them.  So until a real working-class movement of the left or labor party arises, the top international capitalists won’t need fascism - unless their whole economic system crashes or becomes a zombie.  These billionaires, many of whom are part of the transnational capitalist class, or intimately connected to it,  run this system, as ultimate power is in their hands.

In a way, a second 'civil' war will really be through fighting fascism - that is how a civil conflict will take place.  The KKK, formed out of elements of the defeated Confederate Army, were the inheritors of that earlier war - and we certainly have our present versions.  Right now there is more a danger of a ‘premature’ civil war, where the crypto-fascists get ahead of themselves, a taste of right-wing adventurism, with little backing from the biggest international and sophisticated sectors of capital. It has already started to happen – look at Kenosha, cities on the West Coast, Charlottesville, Jan. 6 or the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor... though the latter has been revealed to be an FBI setup.  A real ‘civil war,’ if it actually arises, would not involve whole states in the South anyway.  It will involve mostly exurbs, far suburbs and rural areas against inner suburbs and cities.  Not all small towns and cities will be on the right, but may split.  Atlanta and Houston aren’t going anywhere near a new Dixie, for instance.  Its geography would be a patchwork - although the original civil war was a patchwork within the South too.  (See prior reviews on the opposition to the Confederacy within the South.)

ECONOMICS

Unlike the 1860 economic base of cotton and sugarcane, which knit the planters of the South together, the present South does not have a common economic base.  The rightist libertarian Elon Musk’s Tesla will be slinging electric cars in Austin at the Republican oil barons of Dallas.  The nuclear/coal/oil/gas cretins of Georgia’s Southern Company will be facing off against Atlanta corporations like UPS, Delta and Coca-Cola.  And so on.  Cheap labor, exploitable resources and a lack of social benefits are their common themes, and these are their points of unity.  These are common themes throughout the U.S. business classes, but especially in the South.

The retail segment is a key element to the southern profit-machine. A company like Atlanta’s Home Depot, supplying goods to car-bound suburbia, relies on cheap, non-union labor to make a profit for its Trump-lovin’ owner.  The super-budget Dollar Tree pays little more than $8 an hour, while being headquartered in Virginia.  The food chain Publix is based in Florida, owned by Trumpers.  They all rely on low to no taxes, cheap products and cheap labor locally and internationally. They follow retail monsters like Arkansas’ Wal-Mart and California’s McDonalds, who also need cheap wages, cheap meat and low taxes to make profits for their billionaire owners.

The South has produced many fast-food and retail chains that rely on cheap labor, as the newer South developed out of the 1950s car culture too. The brutal Southern chicken industry is a feeder ramp to the fast-food chains.  Now tech-based Amazon has superseded Wal-Mart as the country's biggest employer, paying better wages and benefits under pressure from labor and Fight For $15.  While fake noises are being made about ‘regulating’ Amazon by the Democrats, Obama’s foundation got $100M from Jeff Bezos.  So even retail is changing under the whip of technology, and they are not all on the same side of the faction fight.

Until a serious depression or war, the development of a mass socialist or Labor-Populist Party in the U.S. or large revolutionary forces - actual fascism and civil war will not be in the cards as a total response by capital, especially its international sectors… though part of one, more national, capitalist faction is organizing for it right now. More likely it will be a creeping rightist authoritarianism – on the streets, in the legal system, the Government, the police, the schools and universities, in jobs, in the media, on the internet – until the whole society is in a reactionary straight-jacket.  I call it the Anaconda plan.  It will reflect the increasing arteriosclerosis of capital – its productivity, its profits, its botched vision of ‘democracy,’ its losing confrontation with nature, its limits, its wars.  This is all happening now… the frogs in the pot are slowly boiling.

At some point, this straight-jacket will produce a mass left reaction among the population who have had enough, whose situation will be dire.  We will then see the jack-boots come out on a national level, backed by generalized capital, and an appropriate anti-fascist and revolutionary response from the Left, the ethnic communities, the Labor movement, many rank-and-file Democrats and some Republicans ranks, along with an occasional Democratic Party politician. That is my prediction anyway.

The Progressive Populist is sold at May Day, along with many other publications.

P.S. - 12/18/21 - 3 retired generals warn of a split in the military in 2024 when the winner, if it is a Democrat, is challenged.  However the actual facts the generals' mention fall far short of a major split in the military at present.  On 12/20/21 a CIA 'advisory' panel said the risk of civil war had grown to 'pre-insurgency' status, whatever that is.  In November, a Swedish think-tank called the U.S. a 'backsliding democracy,'  which has been true for years.  

P.P.S. - Commentary in the Guardian indicates many answers to polls are forms of trolling.  It mentions that the 'insurrection' at the Capitol was not really one, something reported on this blog on 1/7/2021.  The use of the term 'insurrection' is an insult to the language, something indulged in by newspapers, liberals and Amy Goodman.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/no-america-is-not-on-the-cusp-of-a-civil-war

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  "It Was Predictable,"“Drivin’ Dixie Down,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx); “American War,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court,” “Loaded”(Dunbar-Ortiz); “Southern Cultural Nationalism and Southern Liberals,” “The Bloody Shirt,” “The Potlikker Papers,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Struggle & Progress,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “Lincoln,” “Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands,” “Guerillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front,” “The Free State of Jones,” “Andersonville Prison,”

Red Frog

November 27, 2021 

The Anarchist Bats

 “Nazaré” by J.J. Amaworo Wilson, 2021

This is a novel about a magical realist revolution in the Village With No Name and a land called Balaal that is perhaps in South America, but is really the whole global south.  An international stew of polyglot languages, peoples, words, places, animals and things reflect a desperate area angry at the bloody and repressive Matanza family – matanza meaning ‘slaughter’ in Spanish.

Words, Words

Word are important in this book.  Nazaré is a city in Portugal known for the biggest surfing waves in the world.  A large ocean wave named Nazaré saves the lead character, a boy named Kin, when he is trapped on a small island by thugs who are drowned.  Kin should remind one of the phrase ‘kith and kin’ – perhaps a relative.  One of the groups in Balaal is named the "Bouazizi" after the fruit vendor who set himself on fire in Tunisia to start the Arab Spring.  Barbudos, meaning 'bearded revolutionaries,' live in African-style circular huts called rondavels, similar to yurts or hogans.  

The dictator’s full name is Porfirio Fulgencio Melgarejo Trujillo Matanza, which brings up Porfirio Diaz, the former dictator of Mexico before the Mexican revolution; Fulgencio Batista, the former dictator of Cuba before Castro and Che; Mariano Melgarejo, a former dictator of Bolivia who was also overthrown; Rafael Trujillo, the bloody dictator of the Dominican Republic who died by assassination.  The thugs employed by Matanza are the Tonto Macoute – an obvious reference to the Tonton Macoutes – a death squad associated with the dictator Jean Claude Duvalier of Haiti.  

Bible Boy

Biblical hints abound as well.  Balaal should remind us of Baal – a top Canaanite deity in the Bible, a word that also means lord or owner. One of the honest fishermen is named Shadrak – harking back to Shadrach, a friend of Daniel’s who survived an inferno.  Nazaré even hints at the town of Nazareth.  An ancient turtle is named Abacaxi, a Brazilian pineapple but perhaps also riffing off the word ‘abraxas’ –a Gnostic mystical word.  Kin goes to the desert and lives in a cave called Zugarramurdi, which is really a place where occult witch trials once took place in Spain.  He starves for 10 days in the cave, similar to many occasions in Biblical lore or Hindu practice. 

Kin is not religious, nor are his allies, but muezzin call from towers in Balaal and 3 pigeons are christened ‘The Magi.’ A ‘water walker’ lives in the village.  The gold mine is called Bocadelin – the ‘mouth of hell.’  3 wise men bring gifts to Kin. Like Lord of the Rings’ Ents and eagles, nature is also on his side - mostly. The boy will lead the revolution with the barbudos, the bearded revolutionaries, and perhaps at some point with more help from Nazaré.  Biblical references usually attempt to give a book gravitas – such is the method of authors like Cormac McCarthy too.

The fishermen are Japanese, West Indian, Somali, Guyanese, Indonesian and Pacific Islanders.  The female revolutionary Jesa (Jesus?) escapes the Tonto Macoute on a camel.  The legal system is criminal and arbitrary.  The rulers confiscate everything of value from the people.  Prisons are filled.  Homeless boys live on the beach in shipping containers accidentally dropped off of cargo ships.  

To organize this anarchist revolution, Kin and Jesa recruit desperadoes from different groups:  desert-dwelling revolutionaries strapped with bullet belts like Zapata; a criminal gang loaded with explosives led by the King of the Rats, Bashir; ‘travelers’ who bring with them knives and a tiger; a group of stoic monks skilled in swordplay; giant gold miners led by a man named Cienfuegos, the name of a leader in the Cuban revolution. 

They are joined by a semi-armed and somewhat ridiculous procession of ragged civilians, atheistic nuns, suited knights and fishermen from the Village With No Name, another outcast village and Balaal. They have two ancient cannons, a fire-breathing metal dragon, a hot-air balloon and tear gas.  There is also poison. Unlike the Bolsheviks or the 26^th of July Movement, the groups converge on the central square in Balaal first of all.  These semi-fantastical assemblages might remind one of the organizations and masses that would need to cohere in order to have a revolution in the U.S.

This book is a modern form of magical realism, but perhaps more coherent and focused.  Magical realism was first developed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who used it for somewhat buried political purposes.  Now it is usually used as a wing of the apolitical fantasy universe, given the neo-liberal and post-modernist grease on the slides of modern literature. Wilson, however, returns it to its origins.   

Does Matanza’s army of 500 win? Are the Tonto Macoute defeated too?  Does nature tip the balance - which rarely happens in the real world?  Do they succeed in removing the curse of the international Matanza dictatorship?  And if they win, what anarchist or magical democratic republic will replace Matanza?  Will nature help or hinder?  Will one thug revolutionary, like Bashir the basher, try to gain power for himself?  You will have to read this delightful book…

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, with these terms:  “Damnificados” (Wilson); “Child of God,” “The Road,” “All the Pretty Horses” and “Suttree” (all 4 by McCarthy); “Famished Road” (Okri); “The Dream of the Celt” (Llosa); “Camino Real” (Williams); “The Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Building the Commune,” “The Diary of Che Guevara,” "Viva Zapata,"“An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui.”

The Kultur Kommissar

November 23, 2021

Brand of Brothers

 “Leaving World War Two Behind,” by David Swanson, 2020

This is a book that shows in detail how WWII was no accident, but was caused by war profiteering, imperial competition between the great powers, anti-communism and commonplace colonial and racist ideas.  In other words WWII was embedded in the pre-war capitalist social structure.  Swanson comes at it from a moralistic and pacifist place, but the result is the same.  WWII has been endlessly depicted by the corporate media as ‘the good war’ – in the process hiding how it didn’t have to happen at all.   It was the bloodiest war in history – between 70-85 million died during WWII across the world, the vast majority civilians.

Swanson first takes up the issue of ‘the Jews’ – as if WWII was about saving the Jews.  It wasn’t.  Prior to the war, not one country accepted, even over many years, Jewish refugees from Germany, as anti-Semitism was widespread, including in the U.S.  Suggestions by Hitler they be shipped to various marginal countries were turned down.  Not until the very end of the war did the U.S. military act on long-held information that death camps were operating – not even when Hungary’s Jewry were transported to the Auschwitz-Bikenau death camp starting in May 1944.

Two is the issue of the Versailles Treaty.  Even a retrograde capitalist like Churchill knew the draconian conditions imposed on Germany in 1919 by France, England, the U.S. and others would lead to another war.  Many called Versailles ‘an armistice,’ not a peace treaty.   

Three, Hitler and the Nazi Party got many of their racist ideas and plans for Jews, Romani, the disabled, homosexuals and others from the U.S. eugenics movement, immigration blocks, sterilization laws, Native American reservations, segregation and Jim Crow.  Zyklon B was first used in the U.S. in 1924 to execute criminals.  The U.S. pledge of allegiance first involved that ‘one-armed salute’ we know so well from Nazi imagery.  

Four, ‘lebensraum’ – living space – was something Hitler, inspired by the conquering of the U.S. West by white Europeans, advocated - except this time the slogan for Germans was “go East, young man.”  Slavs in Poland, Russia, Ukraine etc. were simply another kind of Indian.  Germany itself had practiced colonial killing of the indigenous in South-West Africa prior to this, as had so many other colonial nations.

Five, U.S. companies like IBM, Dupont, ITT, Chase and National City banks, GM and Ford funded, produced and worked in Germany and Vichy France before, during and after the war, promoting Hitler as a savior of capitalism in a world-wide crusade against the USSR and domestic communism, while also making hay as war profiteers.  GM owned Opel, which was a prime German producer of military tanks, while IG Farben worked with Dupont and U.S. companies and directors to gain an advantage in rubber production – not to mention Zyklon gas.  Albert Speer mentioned how useful U.S. corporate development of synthetic oil was to the Nazi war effort. The International Chamber of Commerce, led by an American, even had a large, celebratory meeting in Berlin in 1936.  After this its leader went on to Italy to meet Mussolini.  All told 150 U.S. companies did business with Nazi Germany but were untouched by the U.S. government due to their power and influence.

Six, Swanson covers the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet nature of the Nazi / Blackshirt war, embedded in the capitalist need to protect large private property.  It was the Soviet Army and the Chinese Communist revolutionary army that took on the vast bulk of fighting against Germany and Japan, while the ‘Allies’ nibbled around the edges, not invading France until June 1944.  The open liberal capitalist strategy was to let each side destroy each other, than pick up the pieces.

Most partisan units in various countries were led by leftists, especially in Yugoslavia, in France, in Greece, in Italy.  Countries like the USSR had to defend themselves from the fascist onslaught, so Swanson’s ‘pacifism’ and ‘non-violence’ – which he directly advocates for those who were invaded - would have been a failed and absurd response.  Gandhi himself advocated non-resistance.  Amazingly, after the military defeat of Germany Churchill, Patton, the German Admiral Donitz and the Dulles brothers advocated continuing the war by militarily attacking the USSR.

Seven, Swanson covers the goods embargo, asset freeze and halt of oil delivery to Japan prior to Pearl Harbor, which was a provocation that acted as an economic act of war. For years prior to that an earlier ‘Asian pivot' had the U.S. constructing military bases in islands all over the Pacific, while building navy ships and conducting maneuvers specifically against Japan.  The government knew Japan would attack Pearl Harbor or the Philippines in a surprise attack – and perhaps even knew of the fleet steaming towards Hawaii.  The U.S. gave Chiang Kai-shek millions in aid, planes and weapons to fight the cruel Japanese occupation of China, backing them as opposed to the more effective Chinese Red armies.  Japan offered to withdraw from parts of China and the offer was rejected by the U.S.  Swanson considers the preparations part of a plan to start or ‘trigger’ a war, which would allow the U.S. to control the whole Pacific basin and defeat their Japanese competitor.

Eight, the U.S. later ignored Japanese negotiations and pleas for surrender in order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Truman’s vengeful lie that these civilian cities were military targets.  The bombings were really a threat against the USSR, not a military necessity to ‘save soldier’s lives.’

Nine, after the war the U.S. took in or protected Nazis, including scientists and military figures in Operation Paperclip, while leaving nearly all Nazis alone in post-war West Germany – even promoting one to head West German intelligence.  The Nuremberg Trials only dealt with the very top fascists.  There is still a statue to Nazi scientist Werner von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama which hasn’t been removed yet, an enduring tribute to the OSS / CIA’s Operation Paperclip.

Victory!

Swanson does not focus on the WWII issue of inter-capitalist rivalry for the re-division of the world – the benefits of colonies in raw materials and cheap labor; competition between capitals in various countries – which provided economic fuel for WWII.  He doesn’t want to go near a full-blown Marxist economic perspective.  The word ‘capitalism’ is never used.  Nor does he highlight the fact that getting rid of small Jewish businesses in Germany (there were only a few large ones) would benefit Hitler’s money-grubbing petit-bourgeois shopkeeper base, who’d take them over or eliminate competition after the Jews were gone.  Lebensraum was to be a nationalist form of this same practice, but on foreign soil. 

Swanson has many surprising facts not taught or mentioned anywhere, except for those who go looking.  Certainly the vast majority of U.S. citizens know none of this.  I.E. the same system that claimed it wanted to stop the Nazis and fascism promoted the Nazis and fascism.   WWII was their dirty and bloody ‘faction’ fight, but also an attempt to crush communism.  He ends his book with a long polemic against all wars and all violence, which somewhat weakens the book.

Swanson understands that the false ‘patriotic’ reading of WWII enables present U.S. ‘humanitarian war’ – a phrase of contradictory nonsense.  Bombing, drones, embargoes, sanctions, military bases, weapons’ sales and arms’ manufacturing, low-level JSOC warfare, the ‘Defense” Department, invasions and occupations, ‘failed states,’ the massive military budget, the U.S. gun culture, our militarized police – all are its spawn. 

Hitler still lives for U.S. politicians, at least as a false foil.  Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin have all recently been described by prominent U.S. politicians as “Hitler,” justifying bombing campaigns, arms sales and invasions. Oddly, some of these same people were U.S. allies - Noriega, Hussein, Gaddafi and Putin at one time were allies, agents or promoted as good leaders.  In much the same way, Israel misuses the Holocaust to justify anything their government does.

An excellent book for those tired of a ‘history’ consisting of endless promotion of imperialist WWII. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  “Panzer Destroyer,” “Life and Fate”(Grossman); “Blackshirts and Reds” (Parenti); “War is a Racket” (Butler); “Enemy at the Gates,” “The Unwomanly Face of War”(Alexievich), "The Devil's Chessboard" (Talbot) or the phrase “Anti-Fascist Series.”           

Red Frog / November 20, 2021

Are We Pigs?! NO!

 “In Dubious Battle,” film directed by James Franco, 2016

Every battle against the forces of capital is dubious.  The guns, the courts, money, the propaganda news organizations, the government, the petit-bourgeoisie – all conspire against the worker.  The whole ‘top-side’ of society line up against labor and those below. ‘Winning’ is never a sure thing … in fact it is the rarity.

This film, and the 1936 Steinbeck book, looks at a struggle of migrant apple-pickers in the made-up Torgus valley in 1931, which resulted in a strike led by what seem like a blend of IWW elements, not CPers as in the novel.  It probably was modeled after a real strike in Tulare County, California in the Central Valley. The workers are light-skinned ‘Boomers’ or Sooners who traveled to California for $3 an hour in pay, only to be told it was $1 an hour when they got there.

This somewhat melodramatic and long film is packed with stars – James Franco, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Selena Gomez, Ed Harris, Bryan Cranston.  Franco plays the lead character Mack, which is about as convincing as dirt.  The essential movement of the film (and book) is how a large group of 900 workers change, take actions and have internal conflicts under the violent and blood-sucking pressure-cooker of police, growers, sheriff, gun thugs, hunger and fear.  As to the result, Gomez’ character notes:  “I know these men.” 

Mack, the leftist, seems to be a manipulative leader in this film for awhile.  He really says at one point that “the worse it gets, the better.”  What you are left with is that class struggle is a violent and losing proposition.  The film serves as a description of the battle in the farm fields, but it might dissuade all but the most desperate to follow its lead, at least in 1936.  But many did.

California farm workers in the Central Valley

In the film desperate scabs brought in by rail are turned around because an IWW leftie gets killed by gun thugs, but some still go to work.  Strike sympathizers are burned out and beaten.  The local city council tries to starve-out the strikers.  The local strike leader, London, is bribed to take a high-paying job but rejects the offer.  Scabs are in the fields, anti-communism rises among the strikers, a blockade is put on the strikers’ camp.  Bullshit rumors are introduced by traitors and a barn-full of an ally’s apples is burned, instigated by the snake-like blandishments of the boss’s daughter.   The strikers try to respond in kind, pummeling a spy, breaking a barrier, beating scabs and burning a grower’s house.  The film bails out of an ending on this particular strike, except for martyrdom.  It lists all the pro-union laws passed by Roosevelt's government instead to give it a happy ending. 

As has been said before, capital resorts to fascist tactics when its grip on power weakens or slips.  'Democracy' is a hollow shell.  Strike a bell?    

Latino workers, local and immigrant, have replaced the ‘Okies’ of the 1930s.  The United Farm Workers, big in the 1970s, is now a husk of its former self.  Legal below-minimum wages for farmworkers still reign in the fields of California, Florida and beyond – even though in the U.S. there are almost as many farmworkers as farmers now.  $7.25 has been the minimum since 2010, for 11 years.  It was $1 in the 1970s.  Some improvements due to state laws have been instituted.  But the situation remains somewhat the same – 90 years after this fictional strike.  Which tells you something about the system we live in – essentially rigid, unchanging and exploitative still.  They don't need Gatling guns much anymore.

Rotten Tomatoes reviewers hated this film.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive, using these terms:  “The Jungle," "Viva Zapata," "Polar Star," "Factory Days," "American Rust," "Red Baker," "Foodopoly," "A Foodies Guide to Capitalism," "Far From the Madding Crowd," "The Latino Question." 

In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck is for sale in May Day’s excellent progressive, political and proletarian fiction section.

The Kultur Kommissar

November 16, 2021

Virgin Territory?

 “A People’s Guide to Capitalism,” by Hadas Their, 2020

For a recent issue in the Marxist Discussion Group on Facebook, participants tried to come up with a good ‘first’ written introduction to Marxism.  Some suggested the Communist Manifesto, a few Quotations from Chairman Mao or State and Revolution by Lenin, others the Beginner’s guides to Capital or to Marx and Engels, while one suggested you need to read all the classics on your own - and get to it!  All of these suggestions are marred by age or complexity or infantilism for a beginner, though ‘beginners’ begin at different places.  I think the Communist Manifesto is still a good place to start.  (All these books are available at May Day.)

However this book might also be a place to start for some – a freshman 101 college course on Marxism, with modern examples, clear, grounded writing that avoids archaic verbiage, using current Marxists and updating Marxism regarding the current state of the world economy.  It could also serve as a refresher course.  She cites many past Marxists, among them – Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Maksakovsky, Hilferding and current ones – Bhattacharya, McNally, Foster, Harvey, Henwood, Mandel, Moody, Vogel and Zweig.   

Their is an ‘economics’ specialist and has published in Jacobin.  She was/is a member of the International Socialist Organization, publishing in their journal International Socialist Review.  Issues like the nature of the capitalist state, election participation, revolutionary organizations, class collaboration, the definition of socialism, how to deal with fascism or the nature of the USSR/China are not covered in this volume.  It intends to only describe capital – not what to do about capital, except pointing out the inevitability of class struggle due to the existence of classes. As she understands, the ‘gravediggers’ are increasing each day and may turn from a ‘class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself.’

She discusses almost every main economic Marxist concept, among them:   

        1.   Primitive accumulation, mercantilism and colonialism;

         2.   the enclosure of the commons

         3.   the commodity as key to capitalist production;

         4.   Money as the easiest solution to sell commodities; the fact that prices do not reflect value

         5.   the difference between the use-value and exchange-value of a commodity; the false balance between supply and demand

         6.   the labor theory of value, which shows labor to be the key to production; socially necessary labor; labor-power; reproductive labor; surplus labor

         7.   the creation of surplus value from the exploitation of labor; machinery as dead labor; the ownership and role of the means of production; labor exploitation rates

         8.   the inevitable logic of competition results in oligopolistic concentration and centralization of capital; benefiting from economies of their scale.

         9.   Variable capital (labor) and constant/fixed capital / the organic composition of capital

10. the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to an increase in machinery and technology investments, i.e. from increasing the organic composition of capital

11. Profit rates equalize across a capitalist economy in normal times

12. Capitalists are a “band of hostile brothers.” (Marx)

13. Overproduction and credit freezes are inevitable signs of an underlying economic profit crisis, not the cause

14. Overaccumulation and related financial  or ‘fictitious’ capital

15.  the falsity of the Keynesian underconsumption theory of economic crisis

16.  the essential role of credit / debt / loans in the circulation of idle capital

17.  Financial capital leads directly to speculation and unstable financial products, i.e. as seen in the 2008 financial / housing crash

18.  Financialization is a result of capital fleeing the stagnant productive economy for higher profits, where money 'makes' money, but nothing is created.  Both parts of the economy are still intimately inter-connected and cannot be separated, as some like Michael Hudson claim.

19.  Capital works on a global scale, aka imperialism.

She also takes up issues like why the market cannot save the planet; why mainstream economists are clueless; the environmental trap of 'growth', mega-capitalism, Taylorism and the like. 

The book uses clear modern examples, from the individual wage relation, the small household to the national and international, to explain each concept.  A reader needs a grasp of simple formulas and math, befitting the fact she is talking about economics, not the latest two-horse-race commentary from the corporate nightly news, or the latest hot-button Facebook take.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  “The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles” (Harvey); “The Robbery of Nature” and “Ecological Revolution” (both by JB Foster); “Old Gods, New Enigmas” (M Davis); “The Young Karl Marx” (Peck); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx); “Patriarchy of the Wage” (Federici); “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Monsters of the Market” (McNally); “The Long Depression” (Roberts).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 11, 2021 

Celebrate Red November!