Nostalgia

 “The Panthers Can't Save Us Now,” by Cedric Johnson, 2023

This book is structured as a debate. The lead essay is directly aimed at 'race' reductionist analyses of black-skin oppression. Other essays in this collection agree or disagree in different ways. Johnson undermines the nostalgia about the Black Panther Party and black power, the idea of the “new Jim Crow” and the flawed black nationalism of Black Lives Matter. Instead he promotes a class analysis of the prison and police state's treatment of 'surplus populations' and the working class, advocating class unity across skin colors, national origins and languages as an actual winning strategy. His take is based on a class analysis of the African-American population. This involves the rise of 'black' business and political elites and a professional-managerial strata to leadership. They steered emancipatory politics towards non-profits, government contracts, small business and alliance with the Democratic Party. Black Agenda Report has called them the “black misleadership class.”

While the Panthers were inspired by a mixture of African socialism, black nationalism and Maoism, their legend now resides mostly in black nationalism given the passage of time. Few pay attention to the ultra-left or lumpen-proletarian tack some took. Romanticizing them comes in a long line of that behavior on the Left. Johnson looks at the historical context prior to the rise of the Panthers – a years-long reformist civil rights movement that embraced cross-color unity and proletarian, economic demands coming out of the New Deal. This slowly changed during the 1960s as 'Black Power” developed, which said dark-skinned people could save themselves alone. Johnson's 'War on Poverty' created a layer of poverty programs that ingested various activists into non-profits, government sinecures and ethnic-based urban politics. With the advent of capitalist neo-liberalism in the 1980s, class politics were further downgraded in the dark-skinned community.

Johnson is nuanced about each of these developments. His main point is that without unity across identities, based on class, not skin color (or gender or sexual orientation, etc.) no real progress can be made against the police state, prisons, poverty, homelessness, poor education and the rest. To do this he maintains that a concrete material analysis of the social-structure is necessary, not memes, vague slogans or theories that cover petit-bourgeois aims. He mentions but avoids the topic of 'decolonization' theory, which elides over the modern existence of capital and classes too.

Specific Polemics

Johnson targets Alexander's concept of 'the new Jim Crow' as ignoring the capitalist economic logic and class-based nature of the prison system. He makes fun of some academics' obsession with the tiny Combahee River Collective, (CRC) like Assad Haider. He attacks the idea of 'black essentialism' – that all black people have the same politics, class base and oppression, as posited by BLM. Some BLM leaders have endorsed black capitalism, charter schools and the substandard, scab Teach For America. Some were ingested into the non-profit sector, searching for grants and friendly foundations. The non-profit sector is how the state and ruling class avoids basic social change as a form of soft power. The BLM analysis is absent any real investigation of the present class structure among African-Americans according to Johnson. He notes how middle-class African Americans live better lives than the majority of dark-skinned people. During 2005's Hurricane Katrina for instance, black middle-class people and workers with cars got out of town and were not stuck in the horrors of the Astrodome or trying to trek across the bridges. While the black middle class can suffer car stops, micro-aggressions and the like, their lives are significantly better than the black working class.

Johnson's main target is the kente-cloth wearing elites promoting liberal anti-racism – a steady diet of which you can hear on National Public Radio / National Government Radio - and which has been mimicked by various radicals. The principal aim is to prevent any unity against capitalism, so they go into panegyrics about the 'deplorables' and the terrible 'white working class.' Johnson himself seems to be close to DSA, advocates limited work within the Democratic Party and supported Bernie Sanders. His analysis is based on class but his solutions are social-democratic unity around economic reform demands.  This accounts for his dissing of the BPP. Johnson is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and this is reflected in these solutions.

Haider

Johnson has an essay critiquing the book “Mistaken Identity” by Assad Haider (reviewed below). He alleges its focus on the CRC and various 1960s radical black nationalists is an attempt to center anti-racism as a winning solution, a method that will fail. I'm not so sure that was Haider's point in the book however. Johnson alleges the SWP, the ISO and even the DSA /DSOC did this. In the 1960s the first two groups were mostly focused on anti-war student work; in the 1970s they advocated going into the unions, so I don't think he's right there either. This smacks of the jealousy of organizational politics more than anything else and leaves out some Euro-American Left groups that did romanticize and 'center' racism.

Johnson mentions how Haider ignores all the right-wing business forces within the black 'community' – which is typical of what he calls 'standpoint epistemology' – i.e. thinking everyone treated the same way thinks the same way, has the same politics, or has the same social outlook. After all James Brown, who wrote “I'm Black and I'm Proud” in the 1960s supported the Vietnam war, backed Nixon and celebrated wealth.  Kanye West is the current version. Back in the 1960s the Black Muslims were another group that promoted black business. Even now, even with black politicians in political control of some major cities (can you say Eric Adams?), crime, poverty, gentrification, homelessness, environmental damage and cruel police departments are still with us. Sections of mostly middle-class black voters endorse more police, more surveillance, more incarceration – giving the lie to the nationalist BLM perspective. The War on Drugs was not exclusively a 'white' thing either. Johnson mentions that most people killed by police are white and most in jail/prison are white, though these are not percentages, so that is a weak point. Nevertheless it shows a joint rationale for being against police violence other than guilt or skin politics.

Others Comment

This book includes an essay by Jay Arena, who focuses on Rosa Luxembourg's opposition to Lenin's slogan of 'right of self-determination of nations' - and all nationalisms - because they can be and are manipulated by capitalist ruling classes. Certainly in 1919 this was partly true, but as history has gone on, it is now harder for any nation or nationality to be actually independent from capital or imperialism. It used to be a transitional demand – now it has become, except in some obvious cases, an impossible one to actually achieve.

There is another essay by another academic, Mia White, who challenges Johnson. She criticizes his praise of the New Deal, seeing it still discriminated; and says that 'race' can't be ignored as a huge component of minority life. In this essay, like Johnson's own, she uses the term 'race' to describe black people. While admitting it is a political category, not biological, she still uses it – like the U.S. government, the liberal media and so many other academics. I submit that the terms 'multi-racial,'bi-racial,' 'races' and other forms of multiple usage are – racist. There is only one race, the human one. Stop it! Skin color is not a race, it is a geographic origin marker.  Nor is speaking another language, coming from Ireland, having differing eyes, noses or hair, wearing certain clothes, eating certain foods and all the rest of the bullshit promoted by race 'scientists'

Kim Moody writes another essay that debates Johnson. He contends that racism is a central capitalist project, given the large amount of workers who are non-white. 72% of prison inmates are not white according to him. Most people in prison and jails are employed – they are not a surplus population – according to one 2014 study. The avalanche of EEOC, lawsuit, grievance and other actions related to discrimination shows this is a central concern of workers. The black middle class play a contradictory role, given their traditional class position as petit-bourgeois - they are not merely betrayers. Moody himself, like many new-leftists, worked with or on BPP issues. Most of all Moody targets Johnson's 60's nostalgia around Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph and Michael Harrington - social democrats who formed an alliance with the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party – and ended up supporting the Vietnam War! He thinks Johnson is harking back to those other 'great days' too – reflecting the irritation those activists had with the BPP and black power figures.  Based on this debate, both1960's routes were flawed but in different ways. History has proved that true.

Johnson responds to both essays. His key point against Moody is that Moody defends 'black self-organization' and questions some of his figures while promoting his own definition of 'surplus population.' Their views are actually closer than they claim. If you favor a multi-ethnic revolutionary party, labor party and mass organization, I'd say Johnson has a point here. Purely black organizations are preparatory organizations that will have a too limited impact but that doesn't mean you oppose them.

If you are interested in another book on this debate topic, especially the material weaknesses of black nationalism, or the real relation between class and 'identity,' or how to actually begin to defeat racism and police violence, this book can help.

Prior blog reviews on this matter, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Mistaken Identity” (Haider); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “The South – Jim Crow and Its Afterlives,” (A. Reed); “Towards Freedom – the Case Against Race Reductionism” (T. Reed); “Intersectional Class Struggle,” “Virtue Hoarders – the Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class,” “Caste” (Wilkerson); “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded – Beyond the Non-Profit-Industrial Complex.”

Red Frog

July 28, 2023

Dumpkopfs

 “Karl Marx, Private Eye” by Jim Feast, 2023

This bon-bon of a book has drafted Karl Marx and his daughter into the august company of the detective lodge. This is a development we should have seen coming given the flood of modern mystery, crime and detective stories in books, TV and streaming series. Are you sick of them yet? Set in 1875 in Karlsbad, Bohemia, (now the Czech Republic) it resonates with the sedate manners of the period, sprinkled with archaic period English and slang. A group of well-off ‘naturists’ is taking the healing waters in a fine Karlsbad hotel. Karl and his daughter Eleanor are in disguise to avoid the police. A murder of a vicious U.S. capitalist arms dealer and his maid is committed in the spa’s pump water room. Who dun it?

Pater familias and daughter discuss the recently crushed Paris Commune, which both are writing about or have written about. Eleanor is deciding on whether she should dump or suspend her suitor. The capitalist is depicted as a vile crudity. His wife is heartily sick of him and interested in another man. Oddly, a young 16-year old Sherlock Holmes is also in residence at the hotel, brought there by his family. Holmes of course takes on the task of sussing the culprit, but keeps it from his father and mother. An escaped Serbian anarchist or lover, who had killed a princess in a carriage prior to this, is lurking in the city. He is the too-obvious suspect. A selection of ridiculous doctors, police, con men, society matrons and masters people the story. The radical-leaning proletarian maids significantly edge around the action.

Suspects abound per formula, even Karl, or ‘Dr. Arbuthnot’ as he is called – blamed by the capitalist’s wife and suspected by the police, who discover his identity. There are numerous romantic triangles. There are two deaths, so two possible killers. More killings follow. The clues seem to connect to bigger events – Serbia, the Commune, the capitalists – but in the end the motive is pedestrian. The location of the various hotel rooms, stories and abutments are somewhat mysterious in description - a clear picture of the physical layout is difficult. The story is overly and tediously complex, per genre. This story would make a better mousetrap of a movie, perhaps directed in sterile happiness, bright colors and pastel shades by Wes Anderson of the Grand Budapest Hotel.

At any rate, not sure why this story was written except to tickle the aesthetic word buds of the literati. The Marxs were dead broke most of the time, and setting them in this elegant spa atmosphere away from London is suspicious. It’s entertaining, perhaps a parody, and maybe touts or promotes Karl Marx among liberals. There are Communard refugees, members of the Serbian independence movement against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and a discussion of Hegel after all.

But personally I don’t get it. These fake crimes – which shadow real ones - are infotainment.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “A Spectre Haunting,” “The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx” (Callinicos); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx & Engels).

The Kultur Kommissar

7/25/2023

Dear Marat: “Weee Want a Revolution... Now!”

 “Let’s Rent a Train!” documentary by Douglas Williams, 2023

This is a story of a Canadian Marxist group, the League for Socialist Action (LSA) in the heady period of 1961-1977. The title comes from the plan they carried out to rent a train from Toronto to Ottawa, the Canadian capitol, for a demonstration against Canadian complicity in the American war in Vietnam.  It includes 60 interviews of LSA members, observers and historical footage.  The LSA was a militant, national and active organization that had an outsized effect on Canadian politics.  Remember, Canada is less populated than the U.S. so small radical groups in the right situation and area could have a bigger punch.

Ross Dowson, first leader of LSA

They took up struggles against war-making by the U.S. and Canada, for abortion rights, for indigenous, Quebecois, civil rights and against racism.  They worked inside unions and within the New Democratic Party (NDP), while also running independent candidates in various ‘ridings’ (electoral districts for you Yanks…).  Their entry into the NDP, which is a labor party based on the trade unions, allowed them to reach more working-class people.  They also worked directly in unions, including the Teachers where they formed a significant caucus.  Young LSA members were expelled and purged by the NDP in the 1970s in various red hunts.  The LSA promoted the 'new-left' in the NDP, the early 1970s oddly-named “Waffle,” which mounted a huge challenge to the NDP bureaucracy.  Waffle candidates almost won the election for president of the NDP in 1972.

The LSA were key activists in the abortion rights struggles in the early 1970s and defended Dr. Henry Morgentaler when he was arrested for defying Canada’s anti-abortion laws.  In the 1960s Canada would not allow unmarried women to have birth control pills or rent an apartment without a man signing for them.  They dissuaded women from getting a STEM education. There’s even a remembrance of a personal comment by the Frankfort ‘School’s’ Herbert Marcuse when he told a woman comrade that ‘girls’ should not be in academic life. (!)  There is another about how a man’s feminist books helped him ‘get laid.’  Women’s conscious raising sessions occurred in the organization, leading to forming a women’s caucus for a time.  This, again, was common in other Left groups. By the way, it took until 1988 for Federal Canada to make abortion fully legal. (!)

The Canadian economy is heavily dominated by U.S. corporations.  The LSA acted against U.S. nuclear tests that affected Canada. Their work in the NDP’s Waffle was partly oriented against U.S. corporate control of Canadian economic and political life. 

Of note is the fact that members who joined the LSA learned many skills useful in any setting –speaking, art, writing, organizing, negotiating, defense tactics, running meetings, printing, working with different types of people, studying various topics, reading, glad-handing, theory, practical maintenance, electoral work – you name it.  This is similar to other Marxist groupings by the way.  Some members discuss their radicalizing moments, others their political reminiscences, others their problems. 

The Waffle - Fighting the right trend in the NDP

LSA politics were in the tradition of Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels and as a result they were in conflict with the reformist Canadian Communist Party, anarchists and various Maoist grouplets.  The organization’s history started in 1928 when Maurice Spector read the suppressed Platform of the Left Opposition at a Comintern meeting.  During the period of the documentary the LSA was first led by Ross Dowson and tied internationally to the U.S. SWP and the United Secretariat of the 4^th International. According to the interviewees, insulting hatred of the ‘Trots’ by mainstream and reformist types was frequent when they veered to the left from liberalism on various campaigns … abortion, labor struggle, Quebec independence, indigenous rights, socialism in the NDP, etc.

The documentary confusingly and partially describes a 1973 split within the LSA, which led to the formation of the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG).  The RMG was evidently based on a more student-oriented / youth-oriented and ‘ultra-left’ perspective according to some interviewees.  The RMG did not carry out real campaigns, yet at the same time labor activism was dropping within the LSA.  The interviews describe the factionalism of that time, reflective of an across-the-board Left downturn in the later 1970s- early 1980s due to the decline of the labor movement, the end of the Vietnam War and the growing strength of corporate neo-liberalism.  There are touches of romanticism and illusions about the closeness of a revolution - things shared across the Left.  I am not an expert on the Canadian political scene, so I can't opine on their errors or correctness.  They do not seem to be a mirror image of the U.S. SWP however.

The documentary is professionally done, the interviewees interesting and the topics still relevant.  Graphic visual art is provided by Mike Alewitz, who also did great work for the U.S.-based Labor Party in the late 1990s. For those who went through the school of organized Marxism of various types during this period, events and issues will seem very familiar. When the next period of upheaval happens, this documentary can give clues as to how to win against capital, especially starting in smaller contexts like Canada.

Link to the documentary, which is free:  https://www.letsrentatrain.ca/

Prior reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “On Canada! – Reflections on Canada,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Slaughter on Target Avenue,” “Northland,” “Tar Sands,” “Canada,” “Cornell West in Toronto, Canada,” “NAFTA 2: USMCA,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil Straw,” “USMCA Fraud.”

Der Kultur Kommissar

July 21, 2023

"Wake Up, Get Out of Bed, Drag a Comb Across Your Head ..."

 “Mute Compulsion – A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital” by Sören Mau, 2023

Sören Mau explains how power is exercised in a capitalist society. It is not just through military / coercive legal power or through the impact of ideology, politics and propaganda – the typical duopoly. It is a 3^rd way, through the everyday influence of economic power on the lives of workers - even the whole population, including capitalists. In other words you don't go to work because a cop tells you, or an ideology about the Puritan work ethic or 'keeping up with the Jones' compels you to, but because you need a roof over your head and food to eat. Capital forces us to punch in to survive, like a huge invisible machine. This is the 'mute compulsion' of the title, taken from a quote by Marx, based on a quote by a pro-capitalist reactionary who said: “...hunger is ... peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure...” Everyone is aware of this force, so much so that it is part of the wood-work, and as such, becomes 'natural' for most.

Much of this book has the odor of a bright young academic challenging his elders for their mistakes and praising them for their insights. It is based on his Ph.D. thesis after all and he takes pages to trace his outlook, as the book is not just narrowly focused on power. In a way it becomes a high-level explanation of aspects of Marxist theory. He engages, debates and refutes many Marxists, semi-Marxists and bourgeois theorists in order to pursue 'mute compulsion.' He tracks Marx's idea changes too. It should come as no surprise that Marx did not come out of the egg fully-formed, but developed and changed concepts over time.

Historical Materialism

Mau has an unnecessary disdain for 'classic historical materialism.' Normally he hews to Marx quite closely and here he contends Marx left it behind. It looks like his assertion comes from a misunderstanding of the concept through the lens of partial quotes or erroneous interpretations by reformists. It is usually understood as grounding the mode of production of every society in history. He claims it is actually 'determinist' and assumes the 'forces of production' will automatically function as leading towards socialism or in history, to past social forms. Yet he has no discussion of how capital's technical and economic development is 'tending' to lay the groundwork for possible world-wide socialism.

Witness the planning inside massive international firms; the growth of the internet linking humanity together; the development of sophisticated software and huge data banks; the rise of the proletariat in numbers world-wide; the increase in education; the obvious need for the state to manage economic crises; the rise of women; the near completion of national independence; the falling rate of profit; the disrepute in which neo-liberalism and false democratic bourgeois politics are held; unsustainable debt levels; the creeping destruction of the environment caused by this system; the power of large oligopolies; a global financial, production and transport logistics system; scientific and technical advances and even the centralized success of firms like Amazon, replacing physical shopping and stores. These are not mirages, yet they guarantee nothing either.

Mau complains that his view on capitalist power did not get much attention until now. Early 'classical' Marxists spent more time on coercion and violence as the form of capitalist power because it was, while Marxists in the middle 1900s looked at ideology more carefully (Lukacs and Gramsci, for instance) as more subtle form of power because it was. Mau himself can now luxuriate in the silent compulsion of capital's requirements, because silent compulsion is even more obvious now. This is due to the historical development of capital and its older, encompassing exercise of profit power world-wide.

Some Insights

This is a useful book in elucidating why we show up for work without a gun to our heads or the ideological Nazi idea that 'arbeit macht frei' -work makes you free. Mau makes these useful points: A. That economics and politics are not separate, as ordinary bourgeois economics claims. The corporate idea is that the 'free market' is a place where equal people, with the same information, freely exchange labor for pay, and make or later purchase commodities through free choice. This fantasy endures to this day, hiding the very real compulsion behind labor 'exchange' and the forces of commodification. B. That proletarian and working-class are not the same, as some proletarians do not work for a wage. Mostly female care-work in the home is the largest example. C: That tools and machines are extensions of the human body. Tools became a necessary part of the labor process, developed to reproduce human life. Humans now make their own existence, they do not live off the 'free' gifts of nature as do other animals. D. That the physical and social needs of the human body are part of 'bio-politics.' He looks into the issue of how sex and having babies is a material part of social reproduction of the proletariat - not just as an ideological identity or social construct. Being a 'women' in this sense is not a product of plastic surgery, hormone replacement or feelings. E. That wage labor is a draft on the workers' future, not just the present. He calls capital a debt system - where the past mortgages the future to control the present. F. The concept of “monopoly capitalism' has been sometimes understood as getting rid of competition. As can be seen, what actually exists are oligopolies in different sectors, which do compete, along with international competitors, even organized in state blocs, even through war. Competition below these levels is still rampant.

What some call 'bio-politics' (a questionable term...) has become more important to capital in its battle to control the population. This is witnessed in the U.S. by present 'culture war' issues like abortion, birth control, gay and transgender issues, women's rights, the drug war, health-care and day-care, pandemics and vaccines, food quality, solitary confinement and capital punishment, violent policing, etc. – anything to do with the proletarian body. Mau comes out against pure identity understandings of gender or skin color. After a confusing debate with himself, he understands that capital will use divisions within the working class, as long as these divisions do not interfere with capital accumulation. I.E. capital performs a balancing act. He ignores the financial benefits to capital of having a super-exploited part of the proletariat designated by skin color or national background or gender.

Silent but Obvious Compulsion

Mau debates 'value-form theorists' who deny that class is primary under capital regarding value. He opposes this idea but posits that forms of direct class struggle are only one aspect of the exercise of power under capital. This is where his take on 'mute compulsion' comes in. This involves both vertical class struggle and horizontal inter-capitalist and even inter-worker competition. This competition also unites each class, or can. He shows how the 'free market' is actually free only for the capitalist, while for the worker it is an abstract, impersonal force against him or her. Mau notes that workplace discipline has changed in some workplaces, with bosses now your post-modern 'friend' instead of a cruel or authoritarian overseer. Either method is used based on how much surplus value can be extracted by each, on pain of dismissal. Machines, computerization and automation powered by inexhaustible energy allow impersonal and constant pressure to be put on workers. The abstract time of the punch clock is also a silent ruler.

Mau discusses the 'deskilling' debate as a red herring, given it is really a struggle issue, not an automatic trend. Nor are the 9 kinds of intelligence within humans compensated by capitalists. Being treated as 'low-skilled' acts as a control mechanism, though it is obvious that every job requires quite specific, complex skills. Consider the roofer … without experience in physical, carpentry, endurance, pattern, material and tool skills, they'd be useless or dead. Mau also takes on how food – a human basic – is now mostly being controlled by capitalist industrial agriculture and privatization, starting in the 1950s. The development of machinery and attendant debt, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, seed patents and bio-engineering in food and agriculture, along with antibiotics, growth hormones and cruel conditions in the animal sector are the culprits. Self-sufficient farming is more and more difficult in some countries, as the market controls growing. You want to eat? You will eat their products, no matter how healthy, water-intensive, toxic or destructive they are. This reflects the penetration of capital into rural areas. This is part of capital's pressure on nature itself, which has many other aspects.

Capitalist globalism has increased competition between workers in different countries and even parts of countries, another quiet threat, and sometimes not so quiet when they threaten to move their businesses. So logistics and mobility are forms of capitalist power. Containerization and computerization has sped-up the whole economy and the work force too... another time power. Mau discusses 'surplus population,' which Marx called the reserve army of the unemployed, which he considered to have 3 layers and predicted would increase. At this point, it is worldwide, up to 1.2B people. This also puts quiet pressure on the employed ... as they see people looking in the window waiting for a job. Starvation is the terminal state of being in surplus. Lastly is the effect of periodic capitalist crises generated internally and sometimes externally. They cow the population at first, though they can lead to increased rebellion and organization. Mau argues that most of the time the former is the result. Capital seeks a new profit stability after each, only to be disrupted again. Mau's idea that crises are almost circular seems to defy historical development, as each is somewhat different and, given the world-wide nature of the economy, wider.

An excellent book, thoughtful, breaking some new ground, yet its overall impression is that capital's power is almost limitless. This impression is barely contradicted in the book by countervailing forces.

Mau has an exhaustive appendix of works by Marx cited. Some of the theorists also cited: Adorno, Althusser, Baran, Braverman, Callinicos, Chakrabarty, Engels, Federici, Foster, Foucault, Gramsci, Hardt, Harvey, Hegel, Hobsbawm, Kautsky, Lenin, Lukacs, Malm, Negri, Saito, Sweezy, Vogel, Weber, Zizek – many of whom who have been mentioned in this blog.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Levers of Power,” “Facing Reality” (CLR James); “The Struggle for Power – Russia in 1923,” “Giants – the Global Power Elite.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 18, 2023

The Magic Circle

“Surrealism – Inside the Magnetic Fields,” by Penelope Rosemont, 2019

The title is borrowed from the 'Magnetic Fields,' the first Surrealist manifesto by Andre Breton. This is an account of surrealism by Penelope, the partner of the most well-known U.S. surrealist, Franklin Rosemont. U.S. surrealism was a fellow traveler of 1960s radical politics – by way of the IWW, Marx, Marcuse, labor, anarchism and SDS anti-war activity. The French surrealists had worked on a manifesto denouncing the French occupation of Algeria, so they too were involved in politics. U.S. surrealism was also influenced by Freud, Dada, the Situationists and cinema. Rosemont calls it “the language of the Unconscious” involving automatic writing, visual juxtaposition, dreams, machines, theater, sexual ambiguity and shocking the bourgeoisie, among other things. It has influenced much culture that came afterwards, from psychedelia to, unfortunately, post-modernism.

In 1965 20-somethings Penelope and Rosemont travel from the dull confines of Chicago to Paris, the homeland of surrealism. They accidentally go to the international surrealist exhibition, meet Andre Breton at a local cafe and others in the Surrealist Group at a 'colorful' 1966 New Year's Eve Surrealist Party. They experience the bookshops, cafe and street life of Paris; meet various Marxists and even Guy Dubord of the Situationist International, who tells them the Surrealists were now just an archaic art object. As she puts it, in Paris the impact of history, literature and revolution is profound: “everywhere in the streets the spirits whispered.” The Rosemonts submit their surrealist plan for the U.S. to the French Surrealist Group, as they intend to form a circle in Chicago and keep up the ties they made in France. This was their 'magic circle.'

The book is written in kind of a personal, wide-eyed way. It is a taste of the times, though it goes up through 2018. It is also a hosanna to Paris and Chicago, including a bit on the blues players on Chicago's Maxwell Street market and various scenes around Chicago. Rosemont profiles mostly unknown surrealist and anarchist heroes, individualists all, who challenged capitalist culture in their own offbeat ways – the female Parisian artist Toyen; the magic boxes of Joseph Cornell; the roving anarchist George Train; the 'outrageous' feminist writer Mary MacLane; the African-American surrealist griot Ted Joans; the German anarchist revolutionist Gustav Landauer; the loyal Parisian surrealist Mimi Parent; the wealthy author of the historical and cultural book “Negro” Nancy Cunard; and Lee Godie, a local outside artist who used to sell her work on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Breton's Magnetic Fields 'manifesto'

Rosemont spends time trying to square the circle between the Situationist International and the Surrealists, who were estranged from each other. She was one of the writers on the long-running surrealist journal Arsenal, organized surrealist shows in Chicago twice and was a writer and painter in her own right. This is a cozy, heavily name-dropping group of stories ranging across cultural landmarks and personages which have slowly faded into history. It is clear that the Rosemonts' visit to Paris in 1965-1966 was the main event in their life, only 2 years before the 1968 French general strike and uprising. However history has not been kind to surrealism, as much of its oeuvre has been adopted by popular culture or made into curious objects d'art.  It was defanged.  If you are an artist or interested in culture or the ground-breaking efforts of surrealism, this book will be for you. I was a surrealist for about 6 months, but realized it's political limitations, but it nevertheless it can be an entry-way to radical politics. I lived in Chicago's Rogers' Park during some of the time that Rosemont writes about and where she also lived, and attended the same “No Blood for Oil” demonstrations in downtown Chicago in 1986 that she did. So it has a personal impact, perhaps for many in Chi Town.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “One Way Street” (Benjamin); “9.5 Thesis on Art and Class,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “Society of the Spectacle” (Dubord); “Transatlantic,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Dill Pickle Club,” “The Marxist Theory of Art” or the word 'anarchism.'

Red Frog

July 14, 2023

Happy Bastille Day!

Welcome to the Neighborhood

 “Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors,” by Slavoj Žižek, 2016

Žižek aims his arrows at liberals, Left-liberals and the petit-bourgeois ‘left’ in this slim polemic, dealing with the issue of refugees in Europe and the racist liberal idea of ‘cultural relativism.’ I’ll leave you with quotes for the most part.  He deals with growing femicides, Islamic terror groups like ISIS, ‘nihilist’ violence, Europe’s libratory side, imperialism and invasions, fascism’s two aspects in religion and nationalism, then delves into some questionable psychology.  He seems to take somewhat of a ‘culture of civilization’ tack at first, but then clearly promotes universal liberation.  It was written in the aftermath of gang attacks on women in Cologne, Germany carried out mostly by Arab youth, ISIS attacks against civilians in Paris and the kidnapping of girls in Rotherham, UK by Pakistani gangs.

Žižek’s overall solution – a left solution by the way – to the dilemma of either completely open borders or unscalable walled borders, promoted by humanitarian liberals and rightist nationalists in that order, is not new.  Liberals do not deal with the causes of immigration; the Rightists don’t either, nor do they care.  The solution is to stop wars, invasions, bombings, unequal trade, export substitutes and debt, ‘pragmatic’ support for dictators and imperialist economic competition over minerals, oil, gas, diamonds, food, land and rare metals.  Add to that global warming.  Refugees do not want to leave their families, countries and societies unless they are in dire need.  And they are.  To follow this route would mean an overturn of the capitalist system world-wide. 

Žižek knows that immigration is only going to increase due to ‘failed states’ and national borders are going to become more and more useless.  His scalable solution is to highly organize the inclusion of immigrants into Europe.  Many stations in countries interviewing, classifying and organizing immigrants as to what work they can do, where they can live, their rationale, their ties to fundamentalism, but still with limits.  After all, capital is actually looking for workers and consumers, though he doesn’t mention that key economic fact except once, commenting on a “cheap precarious workforce.”  Nor does he mention the concept of ‘blowback’ for the crimes of capital.  Europeans, like many societies, are having less babies as well.

What does Žižek have to say?  His use of the term “Left” is a muddy idea mixing liberals, left-liberals and Stalinists together.  By the way, he is not a Marxist, he is just secretly inspired by Marxism. 

QUOTES:

     ·        “Every four minutes in South Africa a woman or a girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – is reported raped and every eight hours a woman is killed by her partner.”

     ·        “Western leftists ... make some kind of ‘strategic compromise’ in which the humiliation and persecution of women and gays are silently tolerated on behalf of the greater ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle.”  

·        “Their remedies (charity in this case) do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it.” (Oscar Wilde)

·        “Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism and ‘Asian values’-infused authoritarian capitalism” are the two, twin poles of capital, both of which need to be opposed.  He thinks the latter is now being preferred by most capitalists as more effective.

·        “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” … allows companies to sue governments if those government’s policies result in loss of profits.”

·        “… culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the ‘real’ economic infrastructure, but more and more a central ingredient of our mainstream ‘real’ economy.”

·        He opposes the liberal-leftist mantra that “our main task is the critique of Eurocentrism.”

·        “…another Leftist taboo that needs to be abandoned is that of prohibiting any critique of Islam.”

·        “The silent premise of some critics of Islamophobia is that Islam somehow resists global capitalism.”  It does not, as for instance ISIS was a profit-making machine, as is Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf States.

·        “The Old Testament describes this gift (of Israel) in the terms of ethnic cleansing.”

·        “Netanyahu suggested that Hitler had wanted only to expel Jews from Germany, not to exterminate them” – instead blaming that on the Palestinian mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini - thus giving comfort to holocaust deniers.

·        “…the good thing about the intolerance of religious fundamentalisms: that they cannot tolerate each other.”

·        “…some apparent anti-racism is effectively a barely covert racism, condescendingly treating Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not be held to our standards…” regarding women.

·        Rapes in India, Ciudad Juarez, of aboriginal women in western Canada, and Catholic pedophilia he calls “learned, externally imposed, ritualized: part of the collective, secret, symbolic substance of a community.” 

·        “…violence against women resonates with the subordination of women and their exclusion from public life.”

·        Some riots and violence are “means without ends.” (Walter Benjamin.) See the destruction of two post offices and damage to one library in Minneapolis during the Floyd rebellion.  

·        “The dynamics of world capitalism” and “western military intervention” constitute “the political economy of refugees.” This is based on export substitution and exploitation of oil, diamonds, food and land in ‘failed states.’ 

·        “What if the obstacle to integration is not only Western racism?” Some communities have no interest in integration.

·        “…the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode.”

·        “The wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all others…which is … the concrete universal…”

·        “…yet another taboo to be left behind is the dismissal of the worries and cares of so-called ‘ordinary people’…”

·        “… the multiculturalist anti-colonialist defense of the multiplicity of ‘ways of life’ is also false; it covers up the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life…”

·        “We are not gays!” (Robert Mugabe); “The struggle against gays appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial struggle.”  He opposes this idea.

·        “The principal threat to Europe does not come in the shape of Muslim immigrants but in its anti-immigrant populist defenders.”

·        “…Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor…”

·        “…there is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it claims to be…”

·        “…all the imagined, democratic-multitude-grassroots changes ‘from below’ are ultimately doomed to fail…”

·        “Should we tolerate it if refugees settling in Europe prevent their children going to school; if they force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; if they arrange the marriage of their children; if they maltreat – and worse – gays among their ranks?”

·        In this situation:  “Our axiom should be the struggle against Western neo-colonialism as well as the struggle against fundamentalism…”

·        “… humankind should get ready to live in a more plastic and nomadic way…”

·        “…national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation invented.”

At the end Žižek endorses a reinvented Communism as the only progressive solution to the capitalist melt-down of the entire world by climate change, refugees, dictatorship, poverty and apartheid.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Living in the End Times,” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?” “Violence,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Pandemic – Covid 19 Shakes the World,” “Heaven in Disorder,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” (All by Zizek); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Illegals, Migrants and Refugees,” “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “The Great Escape.”

Red Frog

And I bought it at May Day Books! / July 10, 2023

Reds Under the Hood

 “Fighting Times – Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War” by Jonathan Melrod, 2022

This is part memoir and part history of a turbulent time in U.S. politics, when every issue was up for grabs – the late 1960s into the early 1980s.  Melrod was one of those at the forefront of in-plant trade union struggles.  He went from being shocked by seeing a black chain gang in Virginia as a child, to standing up to an archaic teacher at his private high school, to attending the U of Wisconsin at Madison in 1968, a student political hotbed.  There he joined SDS, marched with thousands of others supporting black studies, fought along with hippies defending a People’s Park against the police, participated in the 1970 mass student strikes and became a supporter of the Revolutionary Union (RU).  He worked with Obreros Unidos helping organize farmworkers in Wisconsin.  That connection brought him to the organized labor movement, who called the Latino’s ‘brother.’ 

The September 1970 Math building bombing in Madison motivated Melrod to move to Milwaukee and join the labor movement.  Melrod, a slight guy, worked at toxic worksites inhaling silica dust, plastic fumes, chlorofluorocarbons, leather solvents, degreasing chemicals and the like.  Later he contracted pancreatic cancer because of it.  But he does not regret his progressive activism in the labor movement, which lasted for 13 years.  

UAW/AMC

Melrod finally got a job at a UAW / AMC plant in Milwaukee, which became a hotbed of a different sort.  He had several advantages at the AMC plant.  The plant had an excellent UAW Working Agreement that limited the power of the bosses and supervisors, won by UAW activists long ago.  It was full of young workers, ex-Vietnam veteran black workers and Latino comrades.    AMC’s Wisconsin plants were large and key production sites.  1972 was a time of labor turmoil in auto and across the country, with many strikes.  This upheaval is one reason why the capitalists opted for a neo-liberal strategy in the late 1970s. His ties with the RU helped, though he had already earned an FBI file for his work in support of the Black Panthers.  His work at AMC added to that file, as he was an open communist only a few months after gaining permanent status … a somewhat questionable option.        

The book could be used by present union comrades on how to organize on the shop floor in certain locations.  It goes into union minutia occasionally.  It’s also an entertaining read.  It involves distributing the contract, working to rule, forming a rank & file caucus, issuing leaflets and periodic news bulletins, creating buttons and T-shirts, opposing speed-up and forced overtime, enforcing the contract, in-plant strategies and wildcats - all the while finding allies where you can.  Bars become organizing centers; socials useful in melding comrades. This while opposing the sell-out leadership of the UAW locals and the International.  As you might guess, Melrod was fired quickly after an anti-speed-up struggle.  A grievance was filed with the company against the termination.  The Local 75 Working Agreement allowed the workforce to strike over grievances (!), not just go to a dead-end arbitration.  Melrod and the majority of the work-force stood up to the Union president, who purposely miscounted a hand vote to defeat a possible strike vote. He was terminated.  Melrod won his NLRB suit against AMC for “McCarthy-like tactics,” but it was appealed by AMC, per normal.

More Struggles

While waiting to be rehired Melrod works at a reeking, non-union tannery staffed by black workers; another toxic job at a welding shop from which the FBI gets him fired; and a steel workers union (USW) job in 1974 at a metal-dust-filled plant in West Allis, where he was also tracked by the FBI.  None of these places provided protective masks or anything else. The USW job resulted in a wildcat contract strike against the missing Local and the Steelworkers’ international led by a local Unity caucus, part of Melrod’s doing.  The picket lines were honored by Teamster drivers.  They stopped scab trucks by placing large sharp ‘jacks’ quietly under the tires.  They won some of their demands in a 7 week strike. 

At this time there were still massive civil rights, student, women’s and native movements, so there was plenty of fuel lying around for ‘prairie fires.’  Melrod also worked on an anti-police brutality campaign; support for the Menominee Warrior Society takeover of a reservation abbey, similar to what AIM did at Wounded Knee; the 1976 Bicentennial protest in Philadelphia and a rally in Tupelo, MS against the racist Klan and cops.  All in his spare time!  This was closely connected to his work with RU and its various front groups.

AMC Milwaukee Again, then Kenosha

After 2.5 years Melrod got his AMC job reinstated by the NLRB and the Appeals court. He reentered the plant, was harassed by supervisors and helped launch a campaign against 1,000 proposed layoffs in the Milwaukee plant.  This failed and he was transferred to another local, Local 72 in Kenosha, with 350 others who were not laid-off.  They were there to build one of the shittiest cars ever, the Gremlin.  There was already a Fighting Times caucus at Kenosha.  The first issue was the 1976 industry-wide contract negotiations, followed by negotiations every 2 years.  AMC went after voluntary overtime, the steward system and the right to strike over grievances.  At least 30+ rank and file caucuses in the auto plants united to fight concessions and satisfy a hunger for information, as the officials were keeping a lid on it.

At one point the Fighting Times caucus members were told by an older union activist that they needed to drop the ‘outsider pose’ and run for union offices if they were serious. I’m not going to tell the rest.  What follows is the story of their combative climb up the union ladder, with Melrod going from steward to department chair to chief steward and eventually to the board of the Kenosha local.  He details the small and large internal struggles that led to his victories, along with the characters you meet in any workplace. 

Some of this happened after Maoism shattered in the U.S., leading to the RU splitting in 1978.  He left the organization after that.  It ends with AMC’s partnership/ownership by Renault, and the international battles that ensued over new car models, robots and automation.  In ’85 Renault pushed through a crushing give-back contract, heaped on layoffs, work transfers and the threat to close Kenosha.  At that point Melrod decided to leave AMC and go to law school.

Constant Themes

A constant theme is the do-little to do-nothing attitudes of local and international union leaderships – UAW and USW – complacent as they lose members in the 1970s and still siding with the company. UAW Local 75 had 10,000 members and was down to 2,500 in ‘76.  The other theme is ‘divide and conquer’ – by job category, by skin color, by ethnicity, by anti-communism, by work location or department, by age, by gender.  Anything will do in a pinch.  Racism was one of the most embedded.  The counter-theme is to bridge divides in order to be successful, which he always tried to do.  Another theme is to try to find embedded activists that they could ally with.  And another is the damage to the body and exhaustion working greatly ‘physical’ jobs.  An obvious theme is connecting the trade-union struggles to events outside the factory walls.  A background theme is the role of a Marxist organization in being able to influence and affect events, even in the conservative and anti-communist U.S., by training, guiding and supporting class struggles.

Melrod was in the right place at the right time, as this saga shows.  Many Marxist organizations sent cadre into the factories in the 1970s and ‘80s.  The RU was not alone.  Like much radical syndicalism, it did not attempt to gain political power outside of street protests, but focuses on union struggles most of all.  The stories will ring bells for comrades who worked in factories, warehouses, plants, mines and shops in that period, union and non-union; those who work there now or are planning to; or those who want to know what it is like. The book pictures a radical time in detail, which has faded from view but will return with a vengeance.  It ended in the crushing of organized labor’s great bargaining agreement at AMC.  But labor is rising again.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Smith); “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Autopsy of an Engine,” “Night Shift,” “The Unseen” (Bellestrini); “Red Baker,” “A Contract is a Contract,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Flivver King” (Sinclair);  “Save Our Unions” (Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming,” “Embedded with Organized Labor” (Early); “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Rebuilding Power in Open-Shop America,” “On New Terrain” (Moody).

And I bought it at May Day Books.

The author will be present for a book talk September 30 at May Day.  

Red Frog

July 7, 2023