Back, Back, Back in the DPRK!

 “Friend - A Novel from North Korea,” by Paek Nam-Nyong, 2020 Eng. Trans. / 1988

The author is one of the top authors in north Korea – a member of the Writers’ Union and the elite April 15^th Literary Production Unit.  Prior to this he worked in a steel factory for many years before enrolling in University.  This book presents a picture of the country totally at odds with the U.S. portrayal of a poverty-stricken dictatorship – the “Hermit Kingdom.”  Instead it is an apolitical, soapy story of love, divorce, psychology and inter-personal conflict.  This is revealed when the judge, as a student, writes a thesis on marriage based on materialism, looking at the role of marriage as a social form controlling inheritance of property.  Then he changed it to add psychological issues within marriage, because of input from his wife-to-be.  This might reflect why Nam-Nyong is so popular in north Korea … he deals with personal problems, which everyone has.

It is unknown what the role of censorship is here, but like many authors in the U.S., he censors himself, perhaps in the choosing and treatment of themes. In the Afterward, it is explained that the Writers' Union has guidelines to follow.  The political angles of several north Korean Party efforts are also reflected in the book.

It mostly involves two couples – a local judge and his agronomist wife from a small village; and a lathe operator and his wife, who is a famous singer.  There is also a 3rd couple - a coal miner and his teacher wife.  The marriages have inherent economic differences, being of different strata - blue and white collar.  The judge is irritated that his wife is always gone to her village, attempting and failing to grow vegetables in the high mountains.  The singer is irritated with her husband, who won’t try to be more ‘successful’ than a skilled factory hand.  The teacher is upset about her alcoholic husband. These differences are not directly addressed in the text as 'economic' differences, but they are there.  The judge must decide on a divorce between the singer and her husband by questioning them extensively.  But it also leads him to question his own relationship, which is souring.

Divorce is legal in north Korea, but it involves a decision from the legal system, with input from community and job leaders.  It is possible a divorce might not be granted.  The decision on who gets custody of any children – there is one young boy in this story – is also up to the judge.  Monogamy in marriage is endorsed as the most ethical solution.  Sexual relations outside marriage are never mentioned in this book, nor serial monogamy outside marriage. The family is seen as a unit of the nation, which itself is seen as a larger family. In a way this depiction of the ‘institution of marriage’ is worse than the U.S. situation back in the 1950s before no fault divorce, cohabitation, single parenting by both parents, gay relationships or ‘friends with benefits.’ 

The writing style is somewhat conventional, fastidious and stilted, with numerous and typical romantic flourishes about nature.  Sentimental uses of clichéd words like ‘soul’ and nobility are used.  There is only one reference to the Korean War, as one character lost his parents to U.S. bombs. The men are sometimes depicted as somewhat headstrong meat-heads, while the women are more demure – until they aren’t.  The women are workers, not only housewives – and sometimes not even that.  The judge had to raise his son mostly on his own and cares for his wife's vegetables in an apartment greenhouse when she’s gone.  There is a long chapter set in a factory based on a conversation with a factory manager about the divorce.  The story is not told in the manner of socialist realism, although there is praise of the Party, the nation and the collective. 

Nam-Nyong tells the story through the eyes of all four characters, and the fifth, the child.  The pain of losing a relationship after being together for years is the center of the narrative.  At the same time, divorce is frowned upon, as it is a 'rent in the social fabric' and affects people's work lives and productivity.  The latter is certainly true if you've gone through one.  The judge is a man of high rectitude and promotes 'Party directives' in solving this divorce issue.  In this book he functions almost like a social worker. The matter leads to the discovery of a crime of embezzlement by an official body against the lathe-operator.  The judge becomes intent on mending the marriage. 

Read the book to see if he succeeds.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, using these terms to investigate our 15 year archive:  “King of Spies – the Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea,” “The End of Free Speech for Sony Pictures, Seth Rogen and America!” “Parasite,” “The Grass – A Young Man’s Journey to the Korean War,” “Squid Game,” “The Vegetarian.”  

And I Bought It at May Day Books!   

The Cultural Marxist

April 27, 2022

Forget Those Bolsheviks...

 “Unlearning Marx – Why the Soviet Failure Was a Triumph for Marx” by Steve Paxton, 2021

Paxton is a supporter of G.A. Cohen of the British “September Group,” working under him as a doctoral candidate. This book is a general look at the USSR’s ‘socialism’ and why it failed.  He rejects the state capitalist analysis, while relegating Lenin and Trotsky to purely political thinkers. (!) Instead he posits that, in his reading of Marx, ‘socialism’ in the primitive, agricultural USSR was impossible.  He contends that Russia was not capitalist in 1917 and that the later Soviet regime actually preformed the same functions as capital in Europe – industrialization, dispossessing the peasants of land and creating a proletariat.  So to their mind the USSR accomplished the tasks of a state-led bourgeois revolution in Russia.  They attempt to base themselves exclusively on Marx’s view of the role of the economic productive forces.  This September group explicitly puts technology in the driver’s seat as far as history is concerned.  They could be called technological determinists.

This brings up far more questions than it answers.  Such as “What level of technical development or productivity is required for socialism?” “Was the USSR able to move to socialism by the 1950s-1960s at least? After all, the USSR lasted 74 years.” “Why did Marx support the 1870 Paris Commune?  Or the 1848 revolutions?” “Logically, the Chinese Revolution was premature too.  Is China now ‘ripe’ for socialism?” “What is the role of a political revolution within a workers’ state when production is higher?” “Wouldn’t a move towards socialism also accomplish these tasks?”  "If it wasn't capitalist, what was it?" And “Isn’t this the same argument pushed by Kautsky, the Mensheviks and the “old” Bolsheviks for a time, then refuted by Lenin in the April Theses?”

Paxton gives the Bolsheviks an ‘out’ by quoting Marx in 1882 as to the possibility that Russia could become socialist if the peasant ‘Mir’ communes remained, with the absolutely essential aid of added social revolutions in Europe. Evidently this shows that 1882’s European capitalism was sufficient to begin to build socialism.  The Soviet Communists understood this international perspective by creating the Comintern after the revolution.   Attempts at proletarian revolution were made in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Italy and more after 1917, but all failed. 

Civil war and foreign invasions, continuing isolation, material backwardness, military threats and increasing bureaucratism led to the ‘theory of socialism in one country’ and the Comintern’s dissolution later.  Paxton sees this as ultimately leading to the Soviet's 1991 collapse due to heavy military costs and the failure of consumer production in the USSR.  Essentially, they had lost the support of the majority of people, including the working class. Paxton does not mention the added issues of bureaucracy as a production hindrance in its own right, the lack of workers’ democracy or inadequate planning.   

His argument could be used in a reactionary way in many ‘poor’ countries eviscerated by imperialist looting, telling them to ‘wait’ for more development.  Paxton does understand that capital is now in a descending phase, over-ripe in its world-wide destructiveness, productivity and technological decline – even with the development of high-tech digital and now ‘green’ capitalist production. 

What Paxton mentions only once is the existence of a preparatory phase to socialism – the post-revolutionary, transitional workers’ state – formally called the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Marx mentions this a number of times, especially in "The Critique of the Gotha Programme."  This is what Marx and Engels called the Paris Commune – a political revolution that put the proletariat in charge.  This is the solution to the quandary as to what the USSR was, though bureaucratically degenerated.  Yes, it never reached actual socialism, let alone communism.  Outside of the state-cap schools (Maoist, Schactmanite and anarchist) and the bunker Stalinists, most independent Marxists recognize this. Marx said in Capital, Vol. 1, that the proletariat might seize power politically, but the material foundations of socialism would be lacking, and lead to failure.  This seems to be the path Paxton is following. 

DISCUSSIONS

Paxton claims only 10% of the Russian workers and peasants were under capital in 1917.  At one time he says the Mir constituted the majority of landholdings; later that subsistence and ‘petty production’ dominated.  These forms seem to be intertwined.  This makes him unable to explain why the revolution unleashed a mass struggle against landlords who controlled estates across Russia, or even the SR/Bolshevik slogan of “Land to the Tiller.”  This would not have happened if this were true.  He considers the majority of landlords not to be capitalists charging land rents, but transitional pre-capitalist formations of personal servility, dues collection, labor and grain requirements.  This even though serfdom had been abolished in Russia in 1861.  The U.S. saw a somewhat similar situation in the U.S. when slavery was outlawed, to be replaced by share-cropping.

Paxton goes on to define the various characteristics of class – in-itself and for-itself, while discussing subsidiary characteristics like dominance/submission; education and wealth; skill sets.  He understands that the very useful, highly trained ‘technocrats’ as he calls them – doctors, engineers, architects, dentists, software developers, scientists etc. – have higher skill sets than most workers.  He relegates them to a separate strata from the true petit-bourgeoisie, as they collect salaries from their labor.  He does not note that some professionals like this run businesses, or accumulate wealth in other ways due to their higher salaries – becoming landlords or through investing.

Paxton hosts a debate over the primacy of the productive forces or the ‘relations of production’ and their interaction.  Paxton notes that stagnation and back-sliding occur in production throughout the history of different economic structures, as is happening now. This is how the ‘relations of production’ can stymy progress, as they are doing now. He does not mention colonial mercantilism, looting, slavery or primitive accumulation in his understanding of how capital developed – assuming it was just the bland and automatic ‘development of the productive forces.’ 

Paxton makes a case for survival as the key function of an economic system and its forces of production.  He contends that capital can whither away in an “adaptive metamorphosis” – not always through a violent or confrontational political or social revolution.  He does not address how ‘productive growth’ itself can be a contra indicator to survival.  He goes into a description of the differences between feudalism and capital as related to their goals, methods of extraction and productivity. 

Russian peasants selling in Moscow, 1900

RUSSIAN PEASANTRY & PROLETARIAT

To follow his analysis of Russian non-capitalism, Paxton looks at the real conditions of the Russian peasantry.  In detail, he tracks the number of MIR communes, subsistence and petty production peasants, kulaks, nobility landlords and a handful of capitalist landlords after Emancipation.  He notes that many workers in the cities also went back to villages to farm – similar to the situation in China.  Then he adds up the numbers of city proletarians, servants, members of the armed forces, farm workers and landless – and comes up with the optimistic Soviet number of 8.9% of the population as proletarian, while conservative estimates put it far lower. 

Paxton shows how, prior to 1917, the Czarist state attempted to build an industrial sector due to the weakness of the real bourgeoisie – owning most of the railroads and part of other firms, giving guaranteed prices to firms, becoming their customer, making loans, instituting tariff protections.  On the flip side was the large investment of foreign capital in the Russian banking, metallurgy and mining sectors – another sign of the weakness of the domestic bourgeoisie.  It was unable to build capitalism on its own.   

It is clear that ‘socialism’ was not on the agenda during War Communism or the NEP, which ended in 1929. Paxton’s tracking of MIR village communes is inconsistent, but you’d think their existence would lead to more cooperative organization.  And indeed by 1927 13 million of the 25 million peasant households were in voluntary cooperatives, while only 1.1% were in state collectives.  He considers the kulak threat far over-drawn. This period is prior to forced collectivization and industrialization.

The USSR caught up with aspects of early capitalism by 1939 according to Paxton, quite quickly.  Yet he’s still cheering for ‘the development of the productive forces’ under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and celebrates the 1991 counter-revolution thusly:  “At last, the political system would give way to the march of progress.”  The implication is that until the Soviet Union or Central and Eastern Europe became the same as the Western commodity economy, it was ‘lagging in the development of the productive forces.’  You can see there is another logic here other than Marxism and his theory of history.  In the end he does not advocate political revolution but changing to socialism ...“slowly…by utilizing technological developments within the existing system.” 

You might call this ‘vulgar economism’ and idiotic reformism for not recognizing the role of politics and class struggle in material history.  Nevertheless he makes some relevant points.  An interesting, short book that leaves many questions unanswered and problems hanging. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Reinventing Collapse,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” “Slavs and Tatars – Red/Black Thread,” “Secondhand Time,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle,” “Soviet Women,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Workers’ Councils” “Building the Commune,” “Beyond Leviathan,” “From Commune to Capitalism” “Understanding Class” or “Marx,” “historical materialism.”      

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 23, 2022

Class Fighter

 Bud Schulte – 1947 to 2022

Bud Schulte, long time labor and socialist activist, did not wake from his sleep on February 12, 2022.  He was nearly 75 years old.  At the time he was living with comrade David Riehle in St. Paul.  Bud died as a member of Socialist Action (SA).  He had been involved with socialist groups and labor issues since the 1980s – beginning as a meat-cutter in South St. Paul with the UFCW, then with Hormel P-9 strike supporters here in the Cities and lastly as a friend of May Day Books.

Bud at a Recent Rally

Bud leaves behind his beloved dog Lena, 3 children, 3 grand-children and two brothers, along with many cheerful and activist memories for his friends, but not many material goods.  He was overly generous, a compulsive story teller, a car fan, a former hockey goalie and hockey fan, a good cook and baker.  And he was said to have the best hair on the left!

In his Catholic elementary school Bud had physical fights with nuns - winning a few and losing a few. Once was when his Elvis ‘do’ got shaved by a nun, which also enraged his mother.  He graduated from West St. Paul's Sibley High, after which he went to St. Cloud U. for a year.   He then worked as a meat-cutter in South St. Paul at several companies, which paid well as union jobs.  He was able to buy muscle cars and a house with those earnings. 

At 19 he began working at the Swift Plant until 1967 when it closed.  Then he got hired at the Armour plant, which closed 10 years later.  This is when he went to work for Iowa Pork.  He met his first leftists at the Iowa Pork strike in January 1984 in South St. Paul.  He met Harry DeBoer and Jake Cooper, participants in the 1934 Teamster strike, who inspired him and aided the strike.  He joined the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT) within a month or two of the start of the strike, as they were part of the community’s support group.  Melanie Benson was important in winning him over to Marxism and Trotskyism. 

The owner of Iowa Pork, Harry Weinstein, brought in scabs on the first day of the Iowa Pork strike, and police beat up the strikers who tried to stop the scabs.  Bud was elected picket captain and accepted lefties who came to defend the picket line the next day.  The local had a march from its union hall, did outreach and distributed pro-strike propaganda with advice from the labor left.  They won the strike after at least 6 months on strike.  After the strike, Bud was the central leader in the plant, calling in-house meetings before work. After the strike, they would stop the line for safety or other issues, when before they would not.  It was a relief for him and the rest of the workers. 

This intense event, like so many experiences of those on the left, turned Bud into a socialist.

Within a year Weinstein closed the plant.  Bud joined the Federal 'dislocated worker program' due to that layoff.  In that capacity he testified to Congress about the program, along with a UAW officer who ran it.  As part of his visit to D.C. he was escorted around the AFL-CIO building.  In the process he was accidentally shown a secret meeting between union bureaucrats and military generals, who were pouring over a map of Central America in a room.  That door was shut quickly!  On that same trip he met a haggard Edward Kennedy in the Capitol. 

After the meat industry layoffs, Bud worked at a machine shop.  After the machine shop, he drove a truck delivering pet food all over the central states.  He then became a limo driver.  Bud transported many people around the Twin Cities – one of his favorites being Liza Minelli.  He dropped off Denis Rodman at strip clubs with a roll of cash.  He was at Rodman’s beck and call for a few days and got stiffed on the tip.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were hauled around by Bud too.  Bud spent time with Neil Young’s child while Neil was busy.  He felt many of the famous people he met were actually lonely.

During the Hormel strike, Bud spoke at several large P-9 rallies and worked on the food caravans.  Bud also met Joe Hansen, one of the top bureaucrats in the region who strangled the P-9 strike.  For his services Hansen was made head of the national meat-cutters union.  After the P-9 strike Bud continued to participate in Meeting the Challenge, which had done strike support for P-9 from its base in the Twin Cities.  It organized educationals and actions involving national labor figures, led by Peter Rachleff, a professor at Macalester at the time. 

Bud spoke on the labor movement at FIT's national meetings in New York.  Locally the FIT had an office within the old May Day bookstore on 32^nd and Chicago, which is where Bud first met the volunteers, including Craig Palmer. In 1991 FIT 'faded away' and some of the people in FIT joined Socialist Action (SA), as did Bud.  For SA he was a good public speaker and fund raiser and spoke at several May Day events.

Lisa L of SA will be organizing a memorial for Bud at May Day. 

Memories contributed by Dave Riehle, Craig Palmer, John Schraufnagel and CG Gibbs. 

Red Frog / April 21, 2022 

Substantive Equality

 “Beyond Leviathan,” by István Mészáros, edited by J.B. Foster, 2022

This is a book that attempts to provide a Marxist theory of the state. It is ultimately based on Marx’s insight that socialism / communism consists of the “withering away of the state.”  Mészáros was an inspiration for Hugo Chavez, a colleague of Gyorgy Lukács and one of the foremost modern theorists in the Marxist movement.  Venezuela’s “The Organic Law of the Commune” in 2010 was inspired by his writings.  Mészáros understood there would be a transitional, post-revolutionary period prior to socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (workers' state).  This would slowly dissolve as capital’s remnants died with the increasing involvement of the population in power, and the first version of the socialist commune would be born… a commune without a state, with administration by elected members instead. Eliminating the state in this way was the unique task of the working-class and Marxist movement, as an oppressive ‘state’ had been a feature of most prior social / economic formations – slave, tribute, feudal and capitalist.

As can be guessed by this analysis, conceptions like ‘state socialism,’ ‘the state of the whole people,’ 'socialist state,' 'really existing socialism,' 'people's democracy' and other similar formations are theoretical and lazy bombast. While some Marxists think 'socialism' began in November 1917, Lenin clearly said in Pravda:  "Everyone agrees that the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible."

“Leviathan” of course is the term used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the early capitalist state.  Mészáros highlights the highly destructive nature of modern imperial and monopolistic capitalist states, which, due to their world-wide reach, now threaten international carnage on unimaginable terms – nuclear, environmental, economic and war. Quite literally they have to be overthrown for humanity to begin to survive. We see this today in the new cold/hot war, the inability to deal with climate change, resource limits, failed states, economic collapse and the continuation of nuclear threats.

Mészáros takes apart theorists of the state from Plato to Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Weber and dozens of lesser-known theorists, who mostly substitute actual, substantive social equality with inadequate ‘legal equality.’  He considers Hegel and Hobbes to be the greatest bourgeois philosophers of the state, though few present bourgeois thinkers reference them. Mészáros claims that real freedom is the child of equality, and does not consist of abstract legal nostrums.  As he puts it: “Freedom as such, divorced from its necessary connection with materially substantive human equality, is inevitably idealistic/mystifying.”  Today we can see the failure of Leviathan’s ‘laws’ to create equality, abundance or justice.  Economic and political control still rests in the ruling class, not among the population, no matter how many (bourgeois) democratic gains have been won.

Mészáros solution is the increasing control of society by the whole working class, by the ‘associated producers,’ by the commune, in line with Marx’s conception of the state’s ‘withering away.’  Then substantive equality and democracy can be achieved and capital definitively left behind.  This concept replaces the bureaucratic version of a ‘socialism’ which includes a state that never disappears, with a Party or its leaders substituting for the working classes forever.

A society is a ‘social metabolism’ to Mészáros, which includes an organic unity of every facet of society – the economy in all its forms, the legal system, the repressive apparatus, the propagandist media, the school system, cultural institutions, the electoral system and lastly the government.  All reinforce one another.  They ultimately rest on a mode of production and how it extracts the natural, financial and labor surplus.  The fact that capital can swing between fascism, political dictatorships and a descending scale of liberal democratic standards indicates the subterranean similarity between them all.  The fact that war, waste and environmental destruction are now ‘normal,’ along with severe inequality and the threat of nuclear annihilation, shows the extent to which capital has become destructive and outmoded.  He calls it a 'centrifugal' and 'descending' mode of production.

The Leviathan State.  Game of Thrones was a documentary.

This book is more erudite, abstract and philosophical than I let on, as I boil it down, but there it is. The point of reading this book is to see what kind of new light can be shed on the nature of the capitalist state – or any state – as well as the resolution of that contradiction.  Mészáros uses frequent repetition, philosophic terms, large words, many italics and a somewhat wandering argument.  Hegel thought that the bourgeois-democratic state was the ‘endpoint’ of history.  Unlike Hegel, Mészáros sees the necessary human dialectic as moving towards the abolition of the state, capital, class and scarcity, on a world-wide basis.

Other points made by Mészáros:

     1.   Capital is in a global, universal, extended and creeping structural crisis.

     2.   This is not a normal ‘boom and bust’ cycle.

     3.   “Socialism in one country” is not possible.  Solutions must go beyond national borders.

     4.   In an argument with Sartre / Marcuse, he rejects their characterization of the working class in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries as bought-off.

     5.   Hence, their and other’s theories of only waging ‘cultural struggle’ are inadequate.

          6.  'Evolutionary socialism,’ the ‘welfare state’ and the “New Deal” have failed.

     7.   He warns against increasing global ‘adventurism’ by political/military capitalist elites.

     8.   It is not enough to simply overthrow a capitalist state or nationalize industries.  The ‘capital complex’ remains mostly in place, while an overthrow can be reversed.  

     9.   Debates about ‘morality versus realism’ or ‘representative democracy versus direct democracy’ are straw men.

     10.               At present states and economies are inter-dependent, dominated by global imperialist state combines and great-power logic.  The state has actually strengthened in the declining period of capital’s rule, which is logical, as it needs more control over a restive population.      

     11.               States are supposedly founded on ‘the law,’ yet state lawlessness abounds in the international arena.  No explanation is ever given.

     12.               According to the bourgeoisie, the law and the state are identical.  Which in practice means ‘might is right,’ justifying repeated domestic state lawlessness. He uses the 1984 British miners’ strike as an example.  This lawlessness is not an exception.

     13.               Marx never gave up his conception of the withering away of the state.

     14.               Mészáros opposes both liberal/utilitarian and liberal democratic ideas of the state, which many times rest on the individual.  As he quotes the utilitarian Bentham:  “The community is a fictitious body, composed of individual persons…” thus beating Margaret Thatcher to the punch.

     15.               The goal of a classless society is the real goal of human emancipation. Capital and state stand in the way.

     16.        The goal is not a "utopian bucolic village community" a la Robert Owen.  True wealth consists of disposable time, based on eliminating scarcity.  

     17.         Capital creates 'failed states,' but cannot curtail their own war adventures that create those failures due to liberal imperialism's and capital's drive for control and profits.  Mészáros thinks this is because of the impossibility of a capitalist 'world state,' as the world only consists of antagonistic nation-states. 

The last chapters are detailed analyses of Plato, Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, Campanella, Bacon, Harrington, Paine, Owen, Thomasius and Bloch on the state, which I’m not going to cover. 

Mészáros doesn’t answer the question of what happens to the revolutionary organizations or single ‘Party’ after the revolution.  It would seem that they would also wither away as the dictatorship of the proletariat fades and socialism develops. He does not address the ‘nation’ as separate from the state.  Like Marx, he does not fully describe ‘statelessness.’ These are the largest theoretical questions left in this otherwise clear book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms: “The Necessity of Social Control” (Mészáros); “Georg Lukács: Record of a Life,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács); “Marx and Human Nature” (Geras) or words like Marx, state, stateless, communism or Hegel.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 16, 2022

Peak Blind

 “Peaky Blinders, Season 6,” directed by Anthony Byrne (partial spoiler alert)

This is the last season of this BBC series, done after the actual death of actress Helen McCrory, who played indomitable Polly Shelby, Romani matriarch of the Shelby crime family of Birmingham.  Set in 1933, the whole season is saturated in more death than usual.  A daughter is lost and a key player has an incurable disease.  Arthur Shelby is an opium and alcohol-addicted wreck, to be saved by his uber-Christian wife.  PTSD flashbacks of WWI tunneling haunt Tommy Shelby, along with seizures.  Errant son Michael Shelby is pledging to murder Tommy from his jail cell.  Michael’s creepy wife, a social-climber played by Anna Taylor-Joy of The Queen’s Gambit, is sticking her makeup-covered rat-face into the crime business.  Tommy’s ally in the Jewish mob in Camden Town, Alfie Solomons, is hiding with opera records.  Ada Shelby attempts to replace Polly, battling the creepy fascists with her socialist wits, but doesn’t have the full stomach for Shelby Ltd.

Over it all is the battle against Sir Oswald Mosely, the head of the British fascist movement, who now has his own vicious, buxom, upper-class Eva Von Braun. Like Mussolini who was a socialist for a time, the real Mosely was a Labour Party member, then quit to form the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The BUF was formed in 1932.  Mosely is pushing for a united block between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the U.S. (!) and the “aristocrats and meritocracy” of Britain, who he claims now support fascism. Tommy is still secretly working with Churchill to undermine the fascists by pretending to work with them.  This is his main goal.  A faction of the nationalist IRA in the northern counties of Ireland want an alliance with Hitler and the British BUF, and the Boston Irish mob back them.  Most historians agree signs of this alliance were observed in 1936, a few years later.  (The enemy of my enemy is my friend…the fractured logic of bad politics we now see in the Ukrainian war.)

U.S. prohibition has ended and that money-chain is shut down.  Tommy is claiming his attempt to run illegal opium into Boston for $5M will be his last job.  After that he’ll be building housing for the poor along the canals and quitting crime.  This last job also involves the importation of machine guns for the IRA and a block with the treacherous Irish mob. As a result, his treatment of his wife Lizzie is cruel, as he never tells her what is really going on, is adulterous, abandons her at a key moment, still kills people and generally acts the shit boss.

The only person that really stands up to the Shelbys in this season is a union steward in his Liverpool warehouse where the drugs and guns are stored … with a bust of Lenin behind him.  Even after Tommy points a gun at him, the steward needles him.  This might remind us of Jesse Eden, an aggressive (and real) female union leader in Birmingham, who stood up to Tommy Shelby for a time in earlier seasons.  Tommy, a former rocker with piercing blue eyes was so handsome she couldn't resist ... which is the 'Hollywood' treatment of women.

What are the odds that a criminal gang or gang-leader would fight fascism?  Most criminals go where the money is - who will pay them, where they will be immune from prosecution, where they can keep their enterprises going.  It would not be to the left, as history has shown many times.  Al Capone was a friend of capitalism, while the Mob in Cuba had to be chased out, as they were allies of Batista. Hitler and Mussolini recruited among lumpen gangs, as does Putin. The Peaky Blinders and Tommy are mostly "doomed Romantics" as pictured in this series, as criminals seem to have a continuing fascination on television.  On the other hand, the anti-fascist, Jewish, labor, socialist and communist movements in the U.K. in this season are invisible .  This is the BBC - though they are certainly miles ahead of wretched PBS. Can Mosely be taken down?  If you know your history…

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Peaky Blinders,” “1917 - Film,” “The Queen’s Gambit” or words like “streaming,” “crime,” “drugs” or “fascism.”

The Cultural Marxist

April 13, 2022 

Dead Political

 “The Romance of American Communism,” by Vivian Gornick, 1979

This famous book was written by a red-diaper baby who looks back fondly at the human side of the members of the U.S. Communist Party (CP), nearly all joining during its heroic period in the 1930s.  Communists are usually stereotyped as robots, thugs or pointy-heads by capital – the psycho-ingredients of a bag of nonsense for years. This book refutes those ideas in spades. Gornick interviewed ex-members of the Party in the 1970s (1974) about their lives as big ‘C’ Communists.  Little ‘c’ communists are not present in her narrative, as this is a sociological study blind to the rest.  She interviews poverty-stricken eastern European Jews from the Bronx; former Poles who immigrated to the Philly slums; hoboes who became sailors out of San Francisco; dirt poor populists; lawyers that became CP functionaries; miners; fruit pickers, labor organizers, former artists and the rest. 

Gornick herself grew up in the hotbed of New York kitchen-table Jewish socialism, surrounded by poor working-class men and women who had found meaning in their lives by being active Communists.  Whole New York neighborhoods like the lower East Side and the Bronx Coop building complex were this way, part of city culture. For Gornick, her life in New York surrounded by Communists told her they were “honest dissenters” who wanted “a change in the law” towards socialism – not a revolution. 

Only one of her older interviewees was in the CP or politics anymore in the 1970s, though a few still worked in unions.  Being expelled is a semi-regular event in these tales, as the CP allowed no factions, disagreements or dissent. They couldn’t handle disagreements even in the 1960s. Nor was there any voting to decide policy or leadership. One women divorced her husband when he was expelled.  Nearly all of them finally left or were expelled from the CP for one reason or another. 

In the conversations, Gornick uncovers the great events and also disagreements within the Party – the Depression; the struggle of California farm laborers; the fight against fascism in Spain; the Popular Front; the Hitler/Stalin Pact; WWII; 1946 no-strike pledges; the Marshall Plan; Smith Act jailings; the McCarthyite witch hunts; the blacklist; Party members going underground; the Wallace Candidacy, the Hungarian invasion and Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, which decimated the CP back into a small sect.  And then Czechoslovakia. She’s aware that the U.S. CP never had any ideological independence from the Kremlin, as do some of her interviewees, but her political grasp does not go much beyond that.  An understanding of Marxism as different from Stalinism is entirely absent, even by Gornick.

Literary references abound in the book.  Gornick interviews men and women across the U.S. from working class, middle-class and even a few rich backgrounds, ill-educated and not. Many were “dirt poor and dirt political.” One of her themes is that ‘they came from everywhere’ and ‘they returned to everywhere’ - there was not one CP type.  Nearly every part of the country is represented. In the CP they learned many skills, ideas and history, learning how the world actually functioned.  The mysteries of why society included poverty, war, bosses, racism and exploitation were revealed.  They became tied to an international movement, no longer isolated wage slaves in one town.  The real thing that drew most was Marx’s writings, not just ‘the struggle’ or comradeship.  Marx sparked ‘a bright light’ to go off in their heads.  They became what she calls “fully human.”

Gornick notes their inability to make personal, psychological or emotional insights into themselves as Communists.  Or even to think in any other way but politically. Yet as one woman remarks about her 4 years in the furious and bloody battles engaged in by California fruit pickers: “they were the best 4 years of my life,” a period “of total comradeship.” This radical crucible, like fighting in the Spanish Civil War or significant strikes, is common to many leftists, including younger ones that went through movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and later events, like the George Floyd protests. She calls it “being and becoming.” Gornick also discusses how CP life was a totality, involving a connected “wholeness of the world.” 

Being a CPer was intimately linked with being a trade unionist for some.  Many were sent into certain industries as part of ‘colonization.’  The CP was a constant and powerful force in the ‘30s and ‘40s union movement and upsurge. Nevertheless several activists say the CP “never understood the American working class” and the multiple contradictions within U.S. workers.  Others always had conflicted feelings over Party directives they disagreed with.  Some covered it up by being more dogmatic and rigid.  There were contradictions between art and the narrow crudities of many CP functionaries – which Gornick is unable to explain. They made every single branch expel Earl Browder in 1948, a seeming unnecessary act. One member was told to stop seeing his sister because she was taking a school class from a Trotskyist.  Self-criticism, charges and trials were normal.  Ex-Party members were shunned. The idiocies are multiple. 

"Disarm the Rich Farmers or Arm the Workers for Self Defense" 

Of especial misery was the deluded decision by the CP leadership to have their 2^nd tier leadership of 2,000 ‘go underground’ for 4-5 years in the 1950s, to preserve the Party in the face of ‘imminent fascism.’  This policy led to many of these comrades leaving the Party, as fascism did not occur, only isolation and poverty.   

Gornick asks people about their present lives and one thing is clear – no matter what they did afterwards, they were all productive people whose experiences in the CP shaped them.  Nearly all do not regret their involvement. Yet all of these interviewees rejected the revival of the Left in the 1960s.  Gornick does not interview the small handful of CP dissidents who went on to form Progressive Labor, the Revolutionary Union and the Communist Labor Party in the 1960s.    

The animating force overriding the drudgery of daily Communist activity - raising funds, selling the paper, calling contacts, organizing and attending meetings and pickets, going door to door, running off leaflets, postering, mutual aid, educationals, electoral work, travel, etc. – was “the revolution around the corner.”  This was also a motivation during the 1960s and early 1970s.  It did not come to pass.  But it will animate U.S. history again … and one day it will be true.   

Note:  The author was a member of the Communist Party for a year and a half, then quit.  The Party in Minnesota was mostly led by old Finnish ladies at the time.  None appear in the book, although nearly half of the Party ‘toveri’ in the early days were foreign language section Finnlanders, mostly from northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Tyomies was their Finnish publication, coming out of Superior, WI.  Tyomies means ‘worker’ or ‘working-man’ in the Finnish language.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Revolution in the Air” (Elbaum); “Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary” (Peery); “A Threat of the First Magnitude” (Leonard/Gallagher); “I Married a Communist” (Roth); “The French Communist Party versus the Students,” “You Say You Want a Revolution? (Levin/Silbar); “The Way the Wind Blew” (Jacobs), "In Dubious Battle" (Steinbeck) or the words “Communist Party.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent used / cutout book section for cheap!

Red Frog

April 9, 2022

Capitalist Cons of Conservatism

 Weird Conservative Feminism

I think there is some weird feminist thing happening on the right, especially among light-skinned working class women.  It’s connected to a whole raft of cultural, political, religious and financial issues.  Take QAnon, which is about child abuse on the surface, which everyone is against except the pedophiles - and women especially oppose it.  QAnon starts as some kind of weird female empowerment thinking, of women protecting the children!  It then descends into a fascistic mirror-glaze hell.

Branded and Bilious Biblical Billionaires

Or multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, which are advertised to ‘stay at home’ mothers and women, or as a ‘side gig’ - and exploits their last dime since these are pyramid scams.  MLMs are accompanied by success coaches, motivational speakers and network marketing events, whose ‘self help’ is a brew of toxic positivity, emotional grooming and dollar demands.  Irrational positivity that ignores reality actually engenders depression, but they won’t tell you that.  Low-skilled, low-paid women and those who cannot afford daycare fall prey to ‘get rich quick’ ‘side hustles’ they can do at home.  They also fall for evangelical traps like home schooling – as if one or even two barely-knowledgeable ‘teachers’ with a lesson plan from some half-baked Pat Robertson U can actually do the job of many dozens of trained, educated teachers in a real school system.

Then there are all the off-base Trump  political women – Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Betsky DeVos, Marsha Blackburn, Michele Bachmann, Dana Perino, Margery Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, the female governors of South Dakota Kristi Noem and Iowa Kim Reynolds - and on and on.  They are the modern heirs of Anita Bryant and Phillis Schlafly.  Most of them are business types, shallow politicians or performance artists lusting after $$$$.  Many intersect with the ‘prosperity gospel’ pushed by slick religious loons like Joel Osteen or money-con, boot-strap schmoozers like Dave Ramsey. The MLMs draw flocks of desperate female inductees from white Christian evangelical and Mormon churches into their meat-grinder.   

On the internet, MLM motivational speakers and prosperity clones flaunt their perfect lives and wealth to women in contortions of performative success – showing off bricks of cash, high-end sports cars, yachts, big houses, pools and champagne. Tik Tok, You Tube, Instagram, Pinterest and even Facebook are full of coiffed and curated female ‘influencers’ trying to get you to buy some product, trying on fast fashion, using some miracle chemical goop, quack diet or 'wellness' miracle.  They are acting as the latest version of the capitalist ‘sales effort.’ MLM's ultimately commodify a whole family - in space, time, the husband and the life.  Male door-to-door salesman are outmoded in this context!

What has happened is that, like Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit, Instacart or AirBnB, MLM companies have cleverly unloaded their real estate, maintenance, transport and stock costs onto their sales people, while claiming they run 'their own' business.  In reality they are proletarians using their personal property to make money, no different from a carpenter who brings his own tools, the artisans of old England with a loom in their garret or a home worker who has a personal computer to do a company's business. The vast majority are still being exploited.  You don't actually have a 'business.'

Some of these lonely women get dragged into small religious cults – mini-versions of large religions. These cults are full of male-domination, child and sexual abuse and exploited free labor, not just magical thinking. Even the larger Evangelical and Mormon churches can end up with aspects of cultish behavior.

Home Schooling!

Nearly all these forces promote perfect marriages, ‘the family,’ the ease and wonders of having children to receptive, conservative females.  (It is rumored that the Republican Party has rechristened itself as the “Parents Party!”) Conservative men want women at home, 'barefoot and pregnant,' so this fits.  Many of these women have low skills, are recently divorced or work in poorly-paid jobs.  They are concentrated in the backward South, in rural areas or in empty plains or mountain states.  

The con artists will pitch fantasies of the entrepreneurial, Shark Tank girl boss / boss babe running the world or her company and making loads of money. This fake feminism is only in the service of profits for the corporations.  The political Trumpist or Libertarian women will demonstrate how ‘strong’ they are. These sources are where Christian Nationalism gets some cultural steam. These tendencies form the fuel for various sad capitalist fantasies and magical manias, in a society actually coming apart at the seams.  In a sense they mirror one another.

What do you call this cultural complex?  It is certainly not 'the fight against the patriarchy' which is trumpeted by liberal feminists. The Trump women complex?  Frustrated feminism?  Evangelical feminism?  Fake feminism?  Working class female desperation? The Capitalist Cons of Conservatism?  Trad wives and trad mothers?   Perhaps you can think of a better one.  But don’t fall for them...  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Cults and Cultists,” “CoVideo Nation,” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “The Happiness Industry,” “Bright-Sided” (Ehrenreich); “Psychology and Capitalism,” “McMindfullness,” “Lost Connections” (Hari), “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Feminists and ‘Feminists’”; “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Revolt.  She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marx and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “The Testaments” (Atwood); “Patriarchy of the Wage” (Federici); “To Serve God and Wal-Mart.”   

The Cultural Marxist

April 5, 2022

Bullhorns versus Bullsh*t

 “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming – A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21^st Century,” by Shaun Richman, 2020

This is an odd book.  Richman is a former staffer with the AFT and UNITE-HERE. He describes how labor in the U.S. has been bound – like Gulliver by the Lilliputians – in complex, multiple and archaic labor laws, concepts, economic constraints and politics.  After all, the laws and state are capitalist, though he doesn’t say this.  He says labor is “trapped in a rotten anti-union system;” “Unions bargain like it’s still 1950;” and within the labor movement “a moral and strategic rot has set in.”

Richman mentions exclusionary bargaining; the open, closed and union shop; corporate benefits; no-strike pledges and wage freezes; collective bargaining, unfair labor practices and grievances; ‘replacement’ workers and sub-contracting; off-shoring and closing plants; wildcats, strikes and slowdowns; management ‘rights’ and forced arbitration; working without a contract and ‘work to rule;’ new organizing versus internal organizing; labor splits, unions acting as disciplinarians and union raids. 

Yeah, it’s all there from the union perspective.

Richman focuses on large labor law, Supreme Court and NLRB decisions that tie labor’s hands: the Wagner (NLRA) and Taft-Hartley Acts; the Wooster, Harris-Quinn and Janus Supreme Court decisions; the General Electric/McCullogh Co. and MacKay NLRB cases; and mentions the PATCO and Phelps Dodge disasters.  

In the process he gives credence to labor-management cooperation and not opposing union leaders, as he’s against ‘rank and filism.’  He leaves politics to the Democrats, so his is a purely syndicalist view. He doesn’t mention automation, which is a key aspect of union job losses and which many unions can’t or won’t bargain over.

So what is Richman’s solution to his impasse, this hobbling of labor by capital’s state, which has gone on for decades?   After all, Taft-Hartley is now 75 years old.  What is ‘da plan, boss?’  What are you going to “blow up”?

Richman suggests some nuts-and-bolts small-bore changes, but realizes that the Sweeney and “Change to Win” strategies stalled.  He does not focus on what is going on outside unions.  The Fight for $15 campaign, the teacher wildcats, the siege of the Wisconsin State House, Starbucks certification victories and the recent union victory at Amazon on Staten Island all came from union ranks or were separate from the stagnant union federations.  This fact is unaddressed.  His new strategy suggests going outside the standard U.S./Canada union format. 

Here are Richman’s suggestions:

1.    A “left-wing strategy of judicial activism” with a Constitutional® challenge to unequal and unfair applications of labor law.  And a “Labor’s Bill of Rights,” which he published in In These Times, a mild liberal / social-democratic publication. He suggests filing ULP charges frequently, especially on forced ‘at work’ anti-union meetings.

     2.   Sign up active minorities to unions, not everybody in the shop.  Dues are not the main issue.  This ends ‘exclusive representation,’ manipulated majority votes and avoids a future Janus for private employers.

     3.   Multiple union representation in workplaces.  “Bring the chaos.”

     4.   Bring back the strike, as the strike has been severely restricted in the U.S.  He has no silver bullet, but gives credit to the IWW, new unions and wildcats by non-union and union workers.    

     5.   Federal payroll dues check-off.

     6.   Revive state NIRA industrial labor boards to get universal labor improvements in a company or industry.  This takes the onus of a loss off the union to the board.  He suggests this replace some collective bargaining.

     7.   German-style “works councils” or work committees at workplaces that try to get more control over conditions and ‘management prerogatives.’ (This was suggested in the Transitional Program” but as a way to prepare to take over a business as part of a planned economy.)

     8.   Ending ‘at-will’ employment. I.E. federal law would define what ‘just cause’ is for termination everywhere.

     9.   Union-controlled health care plans partially funded by firms.

     10.     Use union pension investments to influence corporate boards.

     11.     “Fix” the NLRB through ‘fixing’ Taft-Hartley language.

     12.     “Outlaw state ‘right-to-work’ laws.”

As you can see, this is a collection of pretty wonky, legalistic, small to medium ‘practical’ fixes – many of which would need a huge power bloc to actually push through.  

Union Win at Amazon

Richman claims that the present labor structure was demanded by every U.S. capitalist.  The fact is there are capitalists with crueler ideas than the bind of collective bargaining.  Just look at the reactionary South or the libertarian tech industry.  It seems some of his methods would ‘take the gloves’ off from both sides … which would be good.

Richman never goes beyond trade-union issues.  His strategy is still within a ‘trade union consciousness’ embedded in capitalism, as Lenin labeled it in 1902. But the fact that a former union staffer is at his wits end about the stagnant labor structure in the U.S. is to be commended.   It’s a shit show and he knows it.

The most glaring flaw Richman shares with others who want to revive unionism is that ‘politics’ is outside his purview, left to the capitalist Democrats. (Though he calls unions ‘political institutions’…) He was excited in 2020 when he actually thought the 2020 Democrats were going to overturn Taft-Hartley!  How did that work out?

Every single mature labor movement in the world creates a political organization to represent its interests in government – a labor party, a workers’ party, a social-democratic party, a socialist party, a communist party. For instance, our neighbor Canada has the New Democratic Party, which is tied to Canadian unions. Nada here, which shows you how immature the U.S. labor movement still is.  A labor party was tried in the 1990s but was intimidated out of existence.  Nor has Richman any demands beyond unionism – no social demands, no program, no nothing.  

None of this – and more - will actually be accomplished without the revival of a strong, mass, full-blooded, hard-core socialist movement. This is a good book for unionists as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Rebuilding Power in Open-Shop America,” “Night Shift” (Macaray); “A Snake Slithers Up the Mississippi,” “In and Out of the Working Class” (Yates); “Class Action,” “The Cradle Will Rock,” “Class Against Class” (Matgamna): “Striking to Survive,” “Damnation,” “In Dubious Battle” (Steinbeck); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Sick Out Against the Shut Down!” “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Save Our Unions” (Early); “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “On New Terrain” (Moody); “Factory Days” (Gibbs).   

Red Frog has been a member of the Bakery Workers, Garment Workers, Iron Workers, Teamsters, UE and IBEW, serving as a steward and on a contract negotiation team.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 3, 2022