Change, Change, Change

 “Parable of the Sower”by Octavia Butler, 1993

This is a dystopian novel of speculative fiction set in California that posits the need for a new materialist religion - 'Earthseed' - as the answer to the collapse of society. The book starts in a modest 'gated' community in a cul-de-sac near Los Angeles, surrounded by poverty, homelessness, crime, drugs, unemployment, hunger, rape and violence. Outside feral dogs roam, bodies rot, theft is a way of life, arson is frequent, gasoline rare and water expensive as a drought has been going on for years. The residents of the cul-de-sac have to band together to defend themselves from murderous gangs and opportunistic thieves on the other side of their wall. They raise vegetables and fruit and have some chickens and rabbits to supplement their small wages. Many people live in each house in the neighborhood – Latinos, African-Americans, European Americans. The criminals and scavengers outside see them as 'rich' and invading their little area as some kind of class-war, even though they are nowhere near the actual rich sheltering in wealthy enclaves with hired protection, helicopters and money. They are a besieged proletarian group that has not yet become criminalized.

We first meet the lead character Lauren as a bright, dark-skinned kid of 15 in the year 2024. She has a physical problem called hyperempathy, which forces her to feel others' pain. Her father is a Baptist preacher and the leader of the neighborhood, married to a Latino woman with 3 younger sons. The neighbors practice marksmanship as a group in the hills around the neighborhood in bicycle forays into the dangerous outside world. Lauren understands their situation is untenable in the long run, as the 'old days' won't be coming back. She prepares a run-pack full of items useful in surviving outside the neighborhood, from water to sun block to maps to a gun. She also begins to write verses which become part of “The Book of the Living” which forms the basis of her ideology called Earthseed. It posits that “God is Change.” The 'out there' part to most everyone she explains it to - her 'converts' - is that the final goal is to leave planet Earth and live 'among the stars.' She's a 'sower' of this 'seed' even at 18. So there is a hint of the irrational and escapist Heaven's Gate cult here.

Lauren sense of the future is correct and several years later their compound is overrun by arsonists, murderers and thieves. Her whole family dies and she sets off with two other neighborhood survivors to walk north to Oregon, Washington or Canada. It becomes a far more detailed, factual and less Biblical version of Cormac McCarthy's “The Road.” They walk to the ocean on a freeway from LA, then up the 101 along the coast and over to the I-5 through Sacramento, then back to the coast. They want to avoid the chaos in the Bay Area which after an earthquake has become a violent hotbed. Thousands of other refugees are also on the road walking north. Oddly no one is on a bicycle... which might be because it would be a target for theft. Almost no one is in a vehicle either. The group helps people and picks up friendly stragglers, children and couples who Lauren hopes will be part of a rural Earthseed commune somewhere in the North. They have cash, guns, knives, dried and picked food, sleeping packs, water jugs, a tiny radio and changes of clothes, especially shoes. All of them work to avoid trouble and protect each other, standing night watch, buying items along the way, avoiding police, violence and thugs, or killing them if need be. Lauren evaluates the quality of each new arrival to see if they are helpful or a dangerous hindrance. In a way the story feeds into the survivalist movement … though having a 'go bag' and planning for power failures, disaster or escapes is quite practical even now.

Along the way, some of the multi-ethnic party who join have escaped from prostitution or debt slavery. One woman's children were taken away from her. In one case they hear that a man bought multiple wives. They see hungry scavengers feasting on body parts. Every store has heavily armed guards. Drugged crazies take a pill that induces pyromania, leading to many fires. Criminal gangs waylay travelers, trucks and anything else. The party strips bodies to get necessities as a practical form of survival. Some who join them might be ex-slaves, so Lauren guesses their journey is a new underground railroad. There are stories of slave factories full of injuries, poisonous water, bad air and debt servitude along the Canadian border – endorsed by the U.S. government 'to provide jobs.' The group's feet are sore, they are afraid so they smartly camp away from everyone else.

Nothing to look forward to

Problems In Paradise

The ideological problem with this book is clear. While being heavily factual about the advent of barbarism in the U.S., it avoids a fully-materialist answer. Why 'God' is now the name for change, nature or practical survival seems more like a hangover from Butler's own 'strict' Baptist roots in Pasadena, California rather than any rational response. She writes about praying, but praying does nothing. Her 'God is Change' is pure transposition.  As dialectics and materialism understand, 'matter in motion' is the nature of the whole universe, human society included. Change is the nature of everything in existence. There is no need to bring in some magical name for it or escape to some other planet as a solution - by the way an impossible alternative. Change is intrinsic to reality. Ultimately there are no explicit politics in the book, only the need for decent people to stick together and help each other in some way, shape or form against the forces of wealth or crime. So privatized company towns are to be avoided, as are police and and crime-ridden cities.

The book is an excellent and prescient view of climate change, inequality and social breakdown. Yet it's guiding ideology – which of course gained the most attention from mainstream reviewers – is factual and also fanciful and escapist. After all, this is titled a 'parable.' Perhaps that is the faulty ideological compromise that prefigured the social collapse we see here. Irrational religion is a product of inability to grasp facts or pursue correct actions. It prefigures social collapse, which is why some turn to cults, panics, conspiracy theories, religion, God, fascism or ethno-nationalism when things get dire, not to mention drugs, alcohol or suicide.  The other side of this ideology is the organizational side - as if this dystopia would have no organized opposition outside of some neighbors or road friends.  This is a profoundly isolating, pessimistic, anti-historical and a-political point of view.  

At any rate a riveting story as we follow Lauren and her followers trying to survive this nightmare in their trek north.

Note: This book is a Part 1 – the next is “The Parable of the Talents” which won't be reviewed.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “dystopia.”

And I bought it at May Day Books' excellent fiction section!

Red Frog / August 31, 2024

Leviathan and the Small Whale

 “Russia Without Putin - Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War” by Tony Wood, 2018, Epilogue 2020

This is an excellent book on the development of capitalism in Russia after the USSR’s collapse in 1991. It shows that Putin is an extension and maturation of the privatized Russian economy and politics which started under Yeltsin. Wood is a writer for New Left Review and is interested in countering some of the simplistic or anti-communist ideas propagated by the bourgeois press about Russia and Putin which hide this capitalist development. As if everything can be explained by one person instead of a whole system. He addresses the ‘renationalization’ myth; the continuance of the “Soviet man” myth; the myth that a small clique runs Russia and the myth that the present authoritarian regime is an extension of the Russian past. This is an examination of concrete conditions, not clichés. It only hints at the coming Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021, which dents one of Wood's myths, that Russia isn't an aggressor.

Putin was born in 1952 to working-class parents in a communal apartment in Leningrad. After studying law he became a KGB officer, spending most of his time in the GDR. Upon the collapse of the USSR he returned to Leningrad/St. Petersburg where he was appointed by Anatoly Sobchak as head of the economic unit responsible for privatization. He issued licenses to thousands of new businesses – casinos, joint-ventures, timber, oil, metals etc. One of his major deals failed to provide food for the city, though there were enormous kickbacks involved. He was investigated and protected by Sobchak. He was later appointed deputy head of Yeltsin's national property management unit. So Putin's mature origin story is a purely capitalist one, showing the intimate connection between private enterprise and state in the new Russia.

In St. Petersburg he met many of his future collaborators including Dimitri Medvedev, as personal contacts and loyalty are key in the Russian concept of 'blat.' According to Wood, post-Soviet businesses also use versions of KGB 'kompromat' – compromising info and blackmail that might lead to legal cases – to get what they want.

So what are the broad outlines of the present Russian capitalist system? Wood's main point is that Putin continues Yeltsin's trajectory, but developed it further to 'maturity.' Yeltsin initiated the first Chechen war, leveling Grozny and killing thousands of civilians as some in Chenya attempted to declare independence. Putin followed in 1999 with another more brutal Chechen war that butchered thousands more. This raised his public approval ratings to 80%. These wars rest upon the ostensible 'federalism' of the Russian state, which pretends to be a geographically broad 'democracy' but is really run from Moscow due to the fear of separatism. It is a structural bind the Russian state finds itself in, not a personal issue.

Yeltsin shells Parliament

Wood describes the nature of Russian democracy as a 'managed' democracy, an imitation democracy. This is the bind every free-market country has to some extent, as in this case Russia's rapacious capitalism has to be veiled by democratic phraseology. The Russian economy is heavily based on oil, gas, timber, mining and other extractive industries. This means the economy floats when these prices are up, crashes when they are down. It is part of the 'resource trap' of economies not adept at high-end manufacturing. In 2022 most Russian exports were in resources - oil, gas, gold, coal, copper, iron, aluminum, platinum.  

The ownership of the Soviet economy changed under Yeltsin and Putin, with the former 'red' nomenklatura, apparatchiks and enterprise managers taking over many firms, while others were put up for sale to entrepreneurs or foreign enterprises. Wood goes into detail on this. This process actually had it roots under Gorbachev which legalized 'cooperative' businesses and allowed the CPSU and KGB to own enterprises too. Yeltsin's 1992 'democratic' voucher system that gave shares to Russian civilians was a sham. Wood shows the Russian ruling class having two main factions – 'outsiders' and 'insiders.' The insiders held sway in the 1990s under Yeltsin, owning banks, media and consumer mercantile outfits; the outsides hold sway under Putin, owning heavy industry and extractive enterprises.  In 2004 9 companies worth 40% of the Russian GDP were held by Putin appointees.  Insiders are those who got their wealth through connections to government; outsiders are buccaneers who bought at the right time for cheap. This was accompanied by a 'revolving' door of personnel between the two, like the siloviki, from KGB to capitalist. In 2003 one-fifth of government ministers were businessmen.

Due to the parasitic relationship between business, law and government – not that unusual across the world but especially strong in Russia – corruption is endemic. Fraudulent contracts, kickbacks and flat-fee extortion are common. This is something pro-capitalist neo-liberals like Navalnyi latched onto and which came to a head in the 2011-2012 protests. Meanwhile Putin instituted a flat tax; limited labor rights, cut business taxes for several years and converted welfare benefits to cash payments – all moves praised by the U.S. Heritage Foundation. As is obvious, inequality in Russia is huge, at a .64 GINI coefficient in 1996 – in 1988 it was .24. (The closer to 0, the more equality.)

The illusion that 'state' ownership dominates the economy is just that. Many countries like Saudi Arabia have 'state' ownership or involvement in some of their extractive industries. What this means in Russia is not that state assets are principally used for the benefit of the population but that they function like any profit-making business. The wealth is appropriated for the most part. This is why cash havens like Cyprus hold the majority of Russian “FDI.” In 2014 Russian billionaires held as much wealth overseas as the whole Russian population. This has nothing to do with Soviet state planning or ownership nor Chinese CCP methods.

Wood maintains that the inheritance of Soviet welfare programs and methods made it easier for the proletariat to survive the violent capitalist 'shock doctrine' applied by Yeltsin in the 1990s. The crash hit workers, peasants and former 'intellectuals' (professionals) the hardest. Factories that were not closed still supplied food and medical care, or just reduced hours to prevent layoffs. Production workers, due to their status in Soviet times, had higher pay at the time. Large state or collective farms continued, as few were broken up immediately. Trade unions worked with firms to try to keep them functioning, though Yeltsin stripped the unions of providing social benefits in 1993. Municipalities controlled housing and did not put it all on the market. Skills of gardening vegetables, barter and blat helped others survive. But criminals, street peddlers and small businessmen flowered, along with homeless migrants, femicide and women returning to the home. Research funding went to one-thirtieth of 1990 spending and this affected professionals the most. But through this “the past gave a hidden subsidy to the present.”

Under Putin in the 2000s both oil revenues and state employment rose, which helped his approval ratings. Professionals were initially some of his biggest supporters. Wood alleges Russia dissolved the 'intellectuals' as a specific strata, which is also true throughout capitalism. Being a lawyer, doctor, engineer and architect does not dictate a further level of 'intellectualism' as we know from much personal experience.

Wood explains that the opposition to the United Russia party and Putin is divided between social opponents – the actual Left – and a polyglot political opposition that was gradually led by Navalnyi. Navalnyi, as is well known, was a neo-liberal ethno-nationalist for a time, then limited that view but remained heavily pro-capitalist. Navalnyi's forces promoted honest elections and anti-corruption narratives against bans on opponents in Moscow and continued government corruption like Sochi and Putin's new palace. After the 2012 protests repression and nationalism increased on the part of the Russian government. Wood almost never mentions the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which gets a small, second-place tally in elections and is mostly a loyal opposition.

Wood speculates on what is to come after the Maidan coup deposed the Russian government's chosen - and elected - Ukrainian ruler. He identifies the problem for Russia as its' status as an intermediate power, with a weak economy, a large land mass, natural riches, a dilapidated but large military and a nuclear power. This contradiction between a former world political power and its fall to an economy in 2000 on the level of Brazil and India, unable to stop the eastward movement of NATO, the EU and the U.S., creates incredible tensions. Wood contends that Putin's geo-political ideology is not clear cut, first resting for long years on an alliance with 'the West,' then a form of ad hoc moves in Syria, negotiations, the Donbass and Crimea. The Crimean annexation actually pushed Ukraine towards NATO even more according to Wood.  The U.S.'s abusive 'great-power' treatment of Russia did not help this situation across a broad range of issues either. The U.S. felt Russia could not be integrated into the EU even after their heavy backing of Yeltsin and his protege Putin.

Euroasianism is not socialism or anti-imperialist

Regarding ideas, Wood rejects the government actually embracing 'Euroasianism' as an ideology - though it does have a Russia-First core and relates to Putin's mentions of 'Novorossiia.' Given China would be the leader in any actual version of this, Russian nationalists would be opposed. Wood considers it a symptom of the larger problem for intermediate Russia. EuroAsian ideology first arose in the 1920s among Russian intellectuals but was rejected by the CPSU for good reason. In the 1990s it was promoted by prolific intellectual Lev Gumilev. It's present promoter is Aleksander Dugin, a war-monger and ethno-nationalist promoter of “National Bolshevism' – a Russian version of national-socialism, as bolshevik means majority. This is an appearance of national weakness and Wood thinks it can promote 'adventurism,' turbulence and unpredictable relations.  Which is a bit prescient, though he rejects what is to come as most did. 

This is a useful book that explains the modern Russian economy and state in clearer terms than just imperial insults. It's also a corrective to naive Leftists who see Russia as some kind of 'anti-imperialist' colossus. It shows the essential capitalist nature of politics, the economy and the wars of Russia as a competitor, not a proletarian liberator. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “War With Russia?” (Cohen); “Russia, Stoli, Snowden and the Gay Movement,” “Russia and the (Very) Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Amin); “Cowleen Rowley on Russiagate,” “The Russian Are Coming – Again,” “Thoughts on Ukraine,” “Dressed Up for a Riot,” “The Black Hundred,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “Look at the War-Monger Facts,” “Abusurdistan” (Shteyngart).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / August 28, 2024

Anti-Fascist Series #14: Unity Triumphs

 “The Day the Klan Came to Town”by B. Campbell / B. Khodabandeh, 2021

This is a graphic story – in both senses – about a massive Ku Klux Klan raid on the working-class town of Carnegie, Pennsylvania in 1923, a town full of mills and mines.  It’s done in pictures and text, with some written explanations on both ends. If you’ve dipped into graphic novels or the “The Idiot’s Guides to…” you’ll know the kind of graphics I’m talking about.  This one is in black and white in a kind of raw, wood-cut style.

What is different about this actual event is that it was not just an attack on African-Americans, it was also an attack on European-Americans - Italians, Jews, Irish, Catholics, Armenians, the Orthodox and whomever wasn’t a light-skinned Protestant.  In essence, mostly newly-arrived immigrants.  This was the second iteration of the Klan, which pretended to be an upstanding civic organization standing for whiteness, God and Americanism.  This nativist, fascistic strain continues in U.S. society to this day.

The Klan came to Carnegie to hold a massive rally with the national Imperial Wizard of the Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, burning crosses and all.  The police chief of the town allows the Klan to march due to ‘free speech.’  The Klan members are armed with clubs, knives and guns.  Little kids and women fawn over them.  Some Klan women knock down a pregnant Italian woman in the street.  The governor, a Republican, refuses to call out the National Guard. Some of the Klansmen are in the U.S. army when they are disrobed.  There is a discussion of parade permits.  The mayor tries to stop the march but is helpless.  The tiny police force is mobilized but does nothing.

Most of the Klansmen wear conical hats that do not cover their faces, or use a bandanna for the mouth.  They march towards the Irish part of town armed, singing Christian songs.  All the suspect ethnicities realize the danger and organize to stop the march.  They block one key bridge with a vehicle and assemble behind it.  The Irish, African-Americans and Italians are armed with clubs and knives too.  The book shows a Russian Jew firing a warning shot at the Klan march.  When the Klan finally arrive in the neighborhood the throng will not let them through and instead attacks their lead car. The very confusing melee is on, rocks rain from the buildings on the Klan dropped by women, guns are fired in response, reinforcements join the neighborhood fighters, many are injured and eventually one dark-skinned man is knifed in front of a Catholic church and dies, and one Klan member is shot.  The confrontation is ultimately won by the united front of working-class ethnicities.  The Klan turn tail and leave because of the armed resistance.

The book’s sections are not linear however.  They jump to a long back story of Italians in WWI, then an Italian village, then the voyage to the U.S. and Ellis Island, which breaks the narrative.  Nor is it clear where these events are happening in Carnegie from the pictures, as none of us have a map of it in our heads. There are two creeks that run through town, which is just southwest of Pittsburgh, almost an outer suburb. The author Campbell grew up in Carnegie and unearthed this history through diligent research, facts which no one in his town knew.  He had to imagine part of it as it had been buried alive.

It illustrates a deep problem with the U.S., a country that repeats its nightmares year after year. We are in yet another cycle, which will not stop until the material economic roots of racism and nativism are removed.  Now that Italians, Irish, most Jews and the Orthodox are closer to ‘whiteness’ and ‘Americanism,’ it remains for new minorities to take their place alongside the remaining Latinos and African-Americans.  In a racist society this process never stops.

Nevertheless the idea that the oppressed working class should unite against fascism across ethnic, national and cultural barriers is the key takeaway from the story.  This obvious truth is still too complex for many identitarian politicians and activists in the U.S. because they are intent on including the upper class in their front, or breaking up alliances.  This illustrated book doesn’t clearly show the support of the upper class strata in Carnegie for the Klan, but it was certainly there across the country at the time.  It could have shown the Carnegie town ‘fathers’ as friends of the Klan, but it didn’t from what I could tell.

A new and valuable story for anti-fascists to take to heart.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Anti-fascist series,” “Ku Klux Klan,” “A Fever in the Heartland,” “A Time to Kill” (Grisham); “No Fascist USA!” “BlacKKKlansman” (Lee); “The Bloody Shirt,” “Monument,” “Comrade Harry McAllister,” “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has more than textual books – buttons, some shirts, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, graphic novels, songbooks and left books on art and music.

Red Frog / August 25, 2024

Time Is On Our Side?

 “Slow Down – the Degrowth Manifesto” by Kōhei Saitō, 2020 / 2024

This is the ‘hot’ Marxist book, which was originally titled ‘Capital in the Anthropocene,” but is now changed to a more trendy title.  What is frustrating about this book is its repetition of ‘conventional’ and ‘common’ explanations of what is wrong with Marxism as if they were true for all. In effect whose explanations is he talking about?  Evidently “all Marxists of the twentieth century.” Saitō claims to discover a new, late-stage Marx who overturns Marx's own flawed ‘traditional’ conceptions of the 1850s and ‘60s, principally Eurocentrism and productivism.  To my mind the weight of political correctness, anti-communism and being au courant on Saitō’s thinking is implicit throughout the whole book, along with the eagerness of a young academic to brand his own version of Marxism.

So Saitō wobbles all over the place, implying things he later corrects, ignoring actual Marxist terms and issues, and finally comes out for a ‘degrowth communism’ that will be achieved by the gradual work of cities, cooperatives, self-management, citizen assemblies, mutual aid and individual efforts.  “Degrowth” is a flawed popular slogan, as even in this book it’s clear not all growth is forbidden.   It is not a return to the forest or farm certainly.

GREENWASHING POLITICS

On the other hand Saitō opposes the Green New Deal and ‘green Keynesianism’ as a ways that are meant to re-invigorate capitalism.  That is exactly the way it is seen by Democrats and their co-thinkers like Gore and Biden.  The GND will not stop climate change but actually acts as an accelerant and placebo.  After detailing the problematics of electric cars, battery production, raw earths, slave labor, environmental despoliation and more, he reminds us that he’s still for the creation of solar, biomass, water and wind energy for a future society.  Thomas Friedman’s techno-optimist assertions that new tech will solve all climate problems is in his sights though, as new tech will be woefully insufficient.  

As you can see the concept of 'growth' hinges on the definition of the necessary technologies and production angles that can deal with the climate catastrophe and those that are useless or destructive.  His problem with the GND is that the GND does not target consumer and growth capitalism, which is the essence of the system. Saitō makes clear it is capital’s whole functioning that has to be abolished to save the planet, humanity and maybe even the working-class.  His solution to growth is a ‘steady state’ economy that is sustainable and human, not profit-based or GDP-focused, not just swapping out e-cars for gas ones.

Saitō opposes dangerous geo-engineering fixes, nuclear power, ethanol, palm oil deforestation, MMT, rampant greenwashing and the U.N.’s growth-based “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG).  He argues against various other ‘degrowth’ theorists that include capitalism in their schemas.  Like many he knows individual consumerist efforts to deal with climate change will fail.  He assails the ‘imperial mode of living” which externalizes environmental and economic problems to the global South. This ‘ecological imperialism and exploitation of the periphery is reaching a limit according to him. He notes the ‘great acceleration’ of carbon emissions that started after WWII, and further increased after the end of the cold war in 1989-1991. This clearly puts himself outside the ‘all industry is bad’ camp of deep ecology.  The chart he has in the book show carbon emissions starting to rise around 1848, the year the Communist Manifesto was published.

MARX’S Errors and Exits

Saitō treads much of the same ground covered earlier by theorists like J.B. Foster about Marx’s environmentalism, as Marx saw the exploitation of nature as accompanying the exploitation of workers.  Soil, forests, animals and water were all of concern, with capital’s treatment of them creating a ‘metabolic rift’ between humans and nature. Saitō claims that Marx rejected productivism at this point when he saw that merely increasing all production was not a feasible path.  He bases his view of Marx’s ‘productivism’ on questionable interpretations of several paragraphs.  In the process Saitō rejects historical materialism or any role for capital in creating better technology, though later he admits that we have to take advantage of improvements in technology that help the social economy. 

Yet Marx never maintained that production by itself would promote socialism.  That role was reserved for class struggle – something Saitō never mentions. The working-class barely gets a nod in the text, but the ‘caring class’ does. The support of Marxists for a revolution in mostly non-capitalist Russia and China or Marx’s own support for the 1848 and 1870s revolutions in very early capitalist Europe and France testifies to that.  No one was waiting for anything.  Now capital is ‘overripe’ of course and somewhat rotten.  

Russian 'mir'

Marx’s parallel research into the Russian ‘mir’ or 'obshchina' – peasant communes that collectively owned the land give Saitō the idea that Marx had finally rejected Eurocentrism, as now a rural country like Russia could more easily move towards communism.  He defines Eurocentrism as Marx maintaining that all societies had to go through European-style capitalism, as if Marx were a Menshevik or a Bernstein.  Saitō points out that in Germany there were also self-sufficient peasant communes called the Markgenossenschaft that blocked outside trade, held land in common and rotated plots among the commune members.  He then alludes to their presence in the global South, trying to undermine Marx and Engels’ view that feudal, tributary, slave or patron/client states actually dominated these regions. Even Graeber didn't assert this in 'The Dawn of Everything."  Certainly communal living still existed in places, as all historical development is ‘combined and uneven,’ such as the ejidos of Mexico.  But it’s not as if China or India or Egypt were run by communes.  At least he cites nothing, not even in his home country Japan.  Saitō follows this by saying he does not want to go back to subsistence and autarkic farming communes anyway, nor can society do this at this point in history.

His discovery of Marx’s unpublished notes and documents in the massive MEGA – Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe  – archive is the source of his ideas on Marx’s ostensible late-life ideological shift.   

TERMINOLOGY

Saitō discusses the issue of various forms of decoupling GDP and CO2 emissions, which he sees as impossible in a capitalist framework, based on the ‘growth trap’ and the ‘productivity trap,’ which both accelerate commodity production.  This involves the “Jevons paradox,’ which states that improvements in efficiency and productivity will actually increase energy and commodity production, as investment and consumption move elsewhere.  In other words, 'recyclable' plastic means more single-use pop bottles.  The ‘market,’ the corporations and the rich cannot and will not stop climate change, as they are the main beneficiaries.  He shows the huge limitations of Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which use massive amounts of land and water.  He reminds us that the global U.N. IPCC plan is based on economic growth continuing.  He also reminds us that the ‘dematerialization economy’ (AI, the internet, software, etc.) is based on huge material inputs.  He shoots down Pinker and Gate’s ideas of climate adaptation.  He looks at ‘doughnut economics’ (?) which tries to estimate the level of production the earth can handle while supplying the world population with the basics.  He estimates that very little redistribution of food or electricity would be needed to do this.

DEGROWTH

Saitō’s grid for the 4 responses to climate catastrophe are:  barbarism, climate fascism, climate Maoism and degrowth communism. The middle two are both authoritarian, centralist methods that he does not favor.  This goes to another issue.  Nearly all of Saitō’s ideas are local.  The word ‘planning’ is only used once.  He favors democratic control, but has no idea how this is going to work on a regional, national or international level.  Later he says that we cannot get rid of the state, so again, he spends pages explaining one idea, then corrects it in one sentence. What kind of state is not clear, though he mentions ‘citizen’s assemblies’ of 150 people or so, which is clearly inadequate.  China has used ‘top down’ methods to attempt to blunt carbon, but it has also accelerated others, including coal and private capitalism in its version of neo-liberalism. China is not Maoist and hasn’t been since the late 1970s, so it’s not clear what he means by climate Maoism except under the control of a central Party hierarchy and Politburo, not of workers democracy or any democracy. 

He notes that there is money to be made by disaster capitalists and ‘disrupters’ as the climate crisis gets worse and who see the whole thing as a profit opportunity.  Even disaster bonds are having a moment.  Saitō claims that getting rid of the consumer economy and capitalist ways of looking at wealth can be countered by ‘radical abundance’ which seems to consist of a happier, more stable and creative lifestyle full of non-alienated work and shorter hours, along with the human basics.  So it's not just living out of a locker and bunk-bed in a barracks. He wants to counter the image of degrowth as austerity, as he points out capitalism creates scarcities in food, housing, health care, education, jobs, peace and the like while blindly following the fraught GDP goal.

Saitō repeats Occupy’s deceptive 99% number, as if the only problem was the 1%, when his own figures show between 10-20% of the world benefitting the most from the consumer economy.  His intention is to even out the disparities between the global north and the global south, which makes 99% a deceptive number.  Nor does he imply there are classes of wealth within the global south. China is now the largest individual emitter by far, a country not in the global north, with India and Brazil doing their share too.

So whose going to lead the charge for degrowth communism and participatory socialism?  His predictable laudatory heroes include:  the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the Zapatistas, Via Campesina, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, Mondragon, BLM, the Spanish United-Left Party and cities like Barcelona.  If this patchwork gives you hope, be my guest.  He reminds us that the CoVid epidemic, the 2008 crash and the long stagnation of the Japanese economy led to reductions in growth and emissions.  His basic strategy is to “gradually expand the commons” which seems like a form of left-liberal utopianism in the fight against the presently growing climate catastrophe. 

Time is not on the side of fighting climate change, nor is the state of our social movements.  What Saitō lacks is an all-around revolutionary Marxist approach which his social-democratic and academic tendencies seem to forbid. But he does take a hard line against capitalism itself in this book, which is a refreshing change given the environmental movement’s wide-spread reformism.

The Guardian weighs in on degrowth. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/27/what-is-degrowth-can-it-save-planet

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Shock Doctrine” (Klein); “Marx and the Earth,” “Ecological Revolution,” “The Robbery of Nature” (all 3 by Foster); “Bullshit Jobs” (Graeber); “The Deficit Myth” (Kelton); “Living in the End Times’ (Zizek); “Reading Negri” (Negri); “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani); “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); 'Against Doomsday Scenarios" (Foster); "A People's Green New Deal," "Hothouse Utopia," "The Dawn of Everything" (Graeber).   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / August 22, 2024

Conflict Sells

 Bar None Rescue

Now for something completely different.  A summer break of sort.  Tired of reading theoretical philosophic ‘hokum?’  Like to visit taverns, bars, public houses, pubs, watering holes, lounges, alehouses, roadhouses, speakeasies, tap rooms, breweries, gin mills, beer joints, distilleries, grog shops or dives? 

Taffer Bellows

There is a show on free TV called Bar Rescue hosted by an aggressive, tough, cranky former New Yorker named John Taffer.  It follows a formula like all reality shows, and seems like it was inspired by an angry Brit, Gordon Ramsey of Hell’s Kitchen.  Ramsey visits failing restaurants and confronts their inept owners, filthy conditions, terrible food and aging décor with yelling and denunciations.  Taffer does the same thing, but includes drinks.  Shows like this might convince you never to go out for food as they reveal the secrets ‘behind the kitchen door.’  It might also convince you that all problems can be solved by a yelling bully who owns you.

There are hidden things going on in this show, as in all reality TV.  Like whose paying for the upgrade, does Taffer’s company get a share of the bar, what is the failure rate, and how much scripting is done to depict ‘reality.’  The show claims Taffer has rescued hundreds of bars from bankruptcy and closure.  Many of these places were losing money every month and were tens of thousands in debt.  Yet statistics show that only 49% of his ‘bar rescues’ actually work to keep the bars open, as of July 2024.  A 51% failure rate shows something else is going on that Taffer’s quick fixes, which last 3 days, can’t fix.  What that is left is unmentioned but it has to do with the intricacies of the capitalist system.

If you’ve been to bars where the drinks are weak, the staff clueless, the food terrible and the atmosphere weird, this show is for you.  Most of these places are run by families, so these bars fit the common profile of the petit-bourgeois small businessmen.  The families on this show are dysfunctional, are always fighting and many have little experience in running a place or a business.  One of the formulas is Taffer tearfully bringing the family members together to try to make a go of it.  Mwaa mwaa.   

Some of the owners are drunks who think the place is just a party room for them and their buds.  Others think it is a display area for their crappy singing or DJ skills.  Others use it to hit up on women.  Many have bad tempers.  Some can’t think of any food other than burgers, fries and pizza and still make a hash of that. There are problem employees too – lazy, drunk or inept.  Many have never been trained in anything.

Taffer scopes out the bar before entering as the thundering elephant he is, using staff members that are secretly sent ahead.  He has hidden cameras showing bar tenders giving away drinks, managers lounging around, cooks using unhealthful methods to make food and food or drinks that are inedible or undrinkable. Is the staff oblivious to the cameras and just do what they do?  Is the owner so stupid he doesn’t even try to spruce the place up before Taffer shows up?  After all, the owner has called Taffer’s company for help. 

Taffer barges in and normally bellows at the owner in front of the patrons.  Get this, many of the owners refuse to listen to Taffer even though they called on him.  The confrontations actually seem real. If there is an incompetent or problematic worker or ‘manager,’ Taffer later forces the weak, wobbly ‘boss’ to fire them.  None of these places are union of course.  If the bosses don’t listen to him, he walks out and they have to beg him to stay.

Taffer brings in an expert mixologist and an expert chef to improve drinks and food after analyzing the neighborhood and location of the bar.  A constant is that he’s usually shooting to gentrify or upgrade the bar to make more money by luring in a more moneyed clientele, not a bunch of bikers, rowdies and bar flies.  One of his statistics is that if there are more than 3 motorcycles in front of a bar, many women will not go in.  Uniformly the bar tenders don’t know how to make drinks properly, they waste beer down the drain, the equipment is flawed, the wood rotten and bar systems non-existent.  One poured cheap booze into top-shelf bottles. One punk barkeep’s shtick was making lewd comments to every woman customer.  He pledged to stop.  Right.

The kitchens are sometimes even worse.  Unclean, grease all over the place, coolers and fridges that are too warm, food handled poorly, an untrained cook and cockroaches. Taffer will scream and sometimes shut the whole bar down when he sees a health-code violation. Taffer’s experts try to upgrade the menu, teach the bartenders how to make more advanced cocktails, tell them they have to ‘work together’ and make the manager actually manage.  Then they have a ‘stress test’ packing the bar with people that overwhelms the staff every time.  This is all part of their quickie training.  As you watch, you are dubious that the training will ever take.

It's a TV show, not Reality.

The bar’s design and décor is many times that of someone’s fraternity house basement full of tacky ideas, like Halloween or pirate stuff all over the place - as if a child envisioned the theme.  Booths are worn through, the bar itself is structurally unsound and the place from the outside looks wrong – invisible, creepy or dirty. He’ll change the bar name if it’s off, making it more modern.  Taffer brings along a bunch of contractors to quickly improve lighting, replace furniture, install modern POS systems, fix the bar displays and modernize the kitchen equipment.  Is this install fully paid for by the advertising of the show? Or does Taffer become the real owner?  Given the failure rate, I’d say no and Taffer claims the same, as his production company and sponsors pay for everything.  Yet he also gets an equity stake in the bars he fixes, a partial ownership claim.  He sometimes even says to the ‘staff’ – “I’m your boss now.”    

Then they reopen after the upgrade, invite a huge crowd of supposed locals into the ‘new’ bar and it’s a happy ending for TV.  They never show the bar attempts that fail initially.

REALITY

Taffer used to manage the legendary Troubadour music club in LA, and then opened his own bar later.  But he’s sometimes full of hot air, making obvious mistakes about drinks.  Like all ‘reality’ shows Bar Rescue is manipulated.  Participants on the show have said the staff fed them lines, made up the amount of debt they were in and otherwise structured their performance.  Many of the people in the bar are extras hired for the show. Some confrontations are staged.  The last season is trying to put an emphasis on emotions and kindness instead of yelling and anger but that might bore faithful viewers. The confrontations are what gets people watching, not tips on how to run a bar.  The show does provide a behind-the-scenes look at how bad some businesses are though.

Taffer oddly owns the phrase ‘Shut it Down!” that he uses when everything in the bar is going awry during a stress test.  Taffer, unsurprisingly, is a multi-millionaire business owner himself and told Fox News that the unemployed were like ‘hungry dogs.’  He later apologized.  Most bars only last 5-7 years, so like many small businesses, the failure rate is high. Statistically 85% of most new businesses fail after 18 months according to the IRS. The lure that a small business will save you from proletarian drudgery is just that, a siren song sung by the capitalists. This show and its actual stats hints at the reality.

(Insulted by covering pop culture and TV?  It is a long Left tradition...)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Palmer’s Bar,” “L’Assommoir”(Zola);  “In Search of the Blues,” “Post Office” (Bukowski); “Sweet Thursday” (Steinbeck); “Dill Pickle Club,” “Postcards From the End of America,” "The Bachelor," 'Behind the Kitchen Door."

The Cultural Marxist

September 19, 2024    

The CPGB Philosopher Speaks

“Materialism and the Dialectical Method” by Maurice Cornforth, 1953

This is a somewhat ponderous and dated introductory explanation of dialectics and materialism.  Cornforth joined the British CP at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1931 and became one of their leading lights.  His specialty was philosophy.   

Cornforth explains the great battle between idealism and materialism that is still going on, which later morphed into a battle between religion and science.  He points out the non-philosophical understanding of materialism is that it means being a grubby consumer, a shallow person and a greed-bag.  “You’re so materialistic!” is the insult.  However, science is based on materialism, as is all technological innovation, and it is in the sense of understanding material reality as dominant that the term comes from.

THE IDEAS

Cornforth quickly examines: 1, ‘subjective idealism’ – the idea that everything that exists is in your head; 2, a ‘realism’ or dualism that allows for gods, ghosts, devils and suchlike; 3, ‘mechanical materialism,’ which thinks the world has no internal contradictions, but instead works like a clock with all that entails – absolute predictability, an outside clock-maker; an inability to grasp non-mechanical processes and treating society as a machine too; 4, idealism within the Left, which thinks that ‘bad ideas,’ ‘bad people’ and psychology are the real source of the problem.  Given the old publication date, he is unaware of post-modernism, semiotics, constructivism, identity politics, colonial and trans theories and the like.

As opposed to mechanical materialism, which was at one time a huge improvement over various idealisms, Cornforth says dialectics as applied to the material world shows that:  1, The world consists of processes; 2, matter and motion are inseparable; 3, there are an ‘infinite diversity of forms; 4, all things exist through connections and interrelations, not as discrete elements.  As can be seen, like most Marxists, Cornforth applies theory to nature, not just to class struggle or social issues.  

Evolution is a confirmation of dialectics in nature, as it shows changes from ‘quantity into quality,’ a signpost of dialectics.  For instance, a machine doesn't change - it just breaks or wears out.  It can't morph from water to ice for instance.  It shows how changes are part of a process, the interplay between environment, genes and animals. Internal contradictions and struggles of opposites also affect evolution within materiality.  When you apply this theory to society, it implies that capitalism is not the end point of history, which is why dialectics is not favored by the ruling class in science or politics.    

DIALECTICAL Receptacle?

Cornforth explains dialectics as rising above the ‘either/or’ abstractions, forever fixed concepts and the false dualisms of metaphysics.  ‘Man’ to the metaphysicians is an abstraction, not a living, breathing human embedded in a certain social and natural environment.  ‘Pure democracy’ and ‘human nature’ are other abstractions, absent a look at the social context in which they are being discussed. It’s like looking at a dead fish out of water.  “Growth” is not automatically linear either, as changes from quality into quality, like the development of a fetus, imply jumps in processes.   Liberals believe that all change should be gradual going forward, while conservatives believe all changes should be gradual going backward.

Dialectics on the other hand recognizes the ‘unity and struggle of opposites,’ not irreconcilable differences.  This implies that change can grow out of conflict, that, like the yin-yang symbol, contradictions can produce a synthesis that explains the movement of matter, nature, ideas, art, people and societies.  Even artists understand the combination of equal parts of red and blue is purple.  Class struggle is the foremost example affecting society.  But it is also evident that the seeds of socialism are present in capitalist planning, its world-wide spread, the growth of the working class and its' technology. Cornforth, who was balding, comments that men are not just ‘bald’ / ‘not bald’ as baldness is a process!  This is his answer to metaphysics which in the 1950s was a thing.

Cornforth goes after the liberal ideas of ‘fairness’ and rights.  He cites Lenin against ‘abstract truths’ and how dialectics and materialism presuppose “a thorough, detailed analysis of a process in all its concreteness.”  In this context, Lenin argued against a rigid, constant or perfect usage of ‘thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis’ thinking which came from Hegel, not Engels or Marx.  As Lenin said, ‘truth is always concrete.’ 

Cornforth says that development does not move in a straight line, but in zig-zags.  However sometimes stagnation is a result in history – witness the long reign of medievalism which only slowly developed into something else. In the present context ‘negation’ actually implies change, though liberals claim it is only negativity and anarchism, not a reaching for something higher.  This is how they treat all serious opposition to capitalist methods. A ‘negation of the negation’ actually implies development.  The phrase is an unfortunate conundrum, originating from Hegel but then upgraded by Marx.  In one key example an older form of society can come into being at a higher level, as primitive communal relations are joined with higher productivity and labor saving.  Private property is negated that once itself negated collective property. Engels pointed out that the law worked in looking at aspects of geology, plant breeding and chemical interactions too.

Cornforth ends with the concept of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ – a misused tactic that was later implemented to brow-beat internal opponents of the ‘correct’ line.  He instead means that theory and practice should be combined, which is an odd usage.  He ends with an ironic quote from Stalin:  “A Party is invincible if it does not fear criticism and self-criticism…”  Unfortunately not the tack taken by the CPSU.

SOURCES

The present print of this book omits the original publication date.  It also removed original parts of a section about Lysenko, who Cornforth accuses of a ‘miscarriage of dialectics’ in this text, a position against Stalinist orthodoxy.’  It was published 1 year prior to Stalin’s death, so it has many quotes as flattery to the dear leader, along with his acolyte Zhdanov.  Following Stalin, Cornforth thinks that ‘dialectical materialism’ can understand reality fully.  Since reality is always changing, this position of omniscience is actually impossible.  Nor is a concept like infinity fully comprehensible, a concept he occasionally endorses.  In a short description of the formation of ‘the whole stellar system’ Cornforth supports the idea of the original formation of the universe, which implies a ‘creator’ or creation myth, not a constantly changing universe. Cornforth also endorses Stalin’s perspective that dialectical change is ‘invincible’ and the working class ‘must conquer.’  This implies that socialism is inevitable, which is not true.  As Luxemburg remarked, a possibility could be ‘socialism or barbarism.’ The later fall of the USSR and the European workers' states is more proof.  This theory is yet another form of abstract, dogmatic positivism.  The struggle predominates, not some pre-ordained destination, as if socialism was the inescapable heavenly destination for the true believer.  Socialism is not a church.

This is all written under the moniker of ‘Marxism-Leninism” a code for Stalinist or bureaucratic socialism. Again and again Cornforth explains that “…dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist Party” as if it was exclusive to the CP, as if a human organization embodied a certain theory – sort of like the Catholic Church once claimed for Christianity.  How did that work out?  Let’s apply dialectical and materialist analyses to the fates of the CPs then.  I'll bet we can find some internal contradictions!

Cornforth’s book is a simple introduction to the subject, using many political and some natural examples, along with quotations.  Some will appreciate its direct language, though perhaps not its errors. 

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to search our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Principal Contradiction,” “Hothouse Utopia,” “The Destruction of Reason” (Lukacs); “Reason in Revolt” (Woods/Grant); “Marx in Motion,” “Can History Predict the Future?” “Ubiquity,” “The History of Philosophy” (Woods); “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “On Revolution” (Sartre); “Materialism” (Eagleton); “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Crisis in Cosmology” or the “Big Bang.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / August 16, 2024              

Gangs of the World Unite!

 Capitalist Shadows

“Fear City - New York vs. The Mafia,” “How to Become a Mob Boss” and “Get Gotti” are all Nexflix documentaries.  They paint a picture of mobs, Cosa Nostra / Mafia and Medellin crime lords that reveal a somewhat unsurprising reality.  The good ones are all excellent businessmen.  At least while they last, as they eventually all go ‘bankrupt’ – ah, go to jail.  They are mostly men from humble, proletarian beginnings who decide to be involved in an illegal enterprise as a way of making the holiness of holies in our society – big money.  That is what links them to investment banking, Silicon Valley and the capitalist system.  They are striving entrepreneurs at bottom who wield their own guns, not the state's.

Some tender leftists think gangs are some kind of radical opposition to capital and ‘the system.’  That was the feeling among some in Little Italy, in Medellin, in Sicily too, as the gangs cultivated their neighborhoods and cities with largesse. Yet they are not an opposition, but actually violent proponents of private enterprise.

FEAR CITY

“Fear City” is about the top 5 Mafia families in New York during the 1970s and 1980s.  They were the Bonanno, Columbo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese clans. They ran the city secretly, functioning underneath Wall Street, the City Council, the police and the legal capitalists, their dark shadow  They had their mitts in garment, concrete, waste hauling, trucking, the docks, restaurants, strip clubs and night spots, real estate, unions and what have you.  Besides the usual crime businesses – gambling, loan sharking, prostitution, smuggling guns and drugs, porn, shaking down small shop owners, etc. – they specialized in big-time ‘white collar’ extortion, taking 2% off the top of every large construction project in Manhattan, of which there were many.  They killed or threatened whomever got in their way or refused to do business with them. Bodies dropped all over the city. They made billions.  This is a picture of the ‘greatest city on earth’ that does not have a smiley face. New York was not just the home of sophisticated musicians, stage actors and bad painters but actually a load of crude and violent goombahs. 

Noticeably the Teamsters, Laborers and ILA dockworkers around NYC were under their control.  They stole from pension funds, skimmed money out of union coffers, ‘double-dipped' and made deals with the firms if it suited them.  Cheery news for left-wing unionists, right? 

Like any business – and wire taps picked up the gangsters saying they were just like a corporation – the 5 NYC families had organization in the form of “The Commission” – a form borrowed from Sicily.  When Lansky and Luciano formed ‘The Syndicate’ of Italian and Jewish gangs they even traversed ethnic boundaries.  When Escobar realized that a cartel of all the cocaine drug gangs in Columbia worked better than each gang fighting each other, they came to a conclusion far above the sad squabbling of U.S. Left sects.

Both Donald Trump and Rudi Guiliani make an appearance in Fear City. Trump did business with the Commission as a builder, though that is left unsaid. Guiliani was the U.S. attorney for the feared Southern District of New York who successfully used RICO against the Commission.  At one point he admits he could have been a ‘wise guy’ too as a youth.  What is not weird is that both these sleazebags, Teflon Don and Ridiculous Rudi, end up in a political form of a gang, the present Republican Party.  They are even involved in their own Georgia RICO case as defendants. “Naw Yawk” crime sticks.

GET GOTTI

“Get Gotti’ focuses on the head of the Gambino crime family – notice the cuddly ‘family’ moniker – John Gotti.  “Family” is what they model themselves on – with a stern ‘fatha.’   Yet Gotti killed his own capo to become head of the family in order to continue his drug business, which the former had forbidden. He dressed well, earning the name “Dapper Don” for his fancy clothes, $2,000 suits and perfect hair. The NY press, that guardian of truth, fell for him after he beat the rap in 3 different trials.  He was portrayed by them as an exciting and clever “Robin Hood” movie star.  Fake tough-guys Mickey Rourke and Anthony Quinn showed up at his last trial in support. You cannot make this shite up. 

The FBI and NY Organized Crime squad used wire-taps to seal his fate and that of the whole Commission.  These were the days of analog phones and long-range cameras.  They would send a ‘repairman’ to fix a phone or cable TV unit or late-night burglars to install bugs in cars, apartments, social clubs and homes. On the wire taps the thugs all sound like a swearing Joe Pesci - although what other kind is there? The 5 Families thought they took precautions but never swept their places for bugs. They never developed a method of talking about business without being heard. Stupid. Now digital methods have replaced the analog ones, which has made it easier for police.

HOW TO BECOME A MOB BOSS

“How to Become a Mob Boss” is narrated tongue-in-cheek by, of all people, Peter Dinklage.  The show covers Chicago Prohibition thug Al Capone; Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas; bloody Sicilian Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore ‘Toto” Riina; Dapper Don John Gotti; Boston thug Whitey Bolger and cocaine cartel leader Pablo Escobar.  Each episode details how they were successful for a while, with Bolger probably the cleverest of all of the U.S. bunch.  He made an alliance with the Boston FBI – yeah – that he used to block and jail his competitors in the Italian Boston mob.  He also had an escape plan by secreting money, IDs and disguises away, which worked for 16 years before he was nabbed in Santa Monica. 

All of them used violence, with Rina the most violent, ordering the killing of upwards of a 1,000 people even from his jail cell.  Capone was creative in realizing that after Prohibition was announced, the money was in beer, rum and whiskey.  Lucas developed his own direct heroin connections in Thailand, circumventing the middle-men of the “French Connection” through Marseilles. Most of the heroin addicts in NYC were unsurprisingly in Harlem, so he was no Superfly ‘black hero.’  John Gotti broke all the rules of being a boss - those of keeping a low profile, avoiding personal violence, only killing the right person and not shooting your mouth off. He serves as a ‘what not to do.’  Lastly Escobar sought political power too, but was thrown out of the Columbian government after 1 year.  He realized that you not only had to unite with your allies, buy off police and the judiciary, establish good public relations using charity, fool the press, get an established bank to launder your money, but also get power to change laws. At the end he was one of the richest men in the world. All of these people were parasites on the productive economy, much like legal capitalists.

I retell these tales only to sink the romantic image of gangs held by our more ‘sensitive’ Lefties. As the stories go, it was extremely difficult to indict these people, which took years.  The present state used kid glove methods in a way, obeying every law in order not to undermine a conviction.  However the revolution in Cuba did not use kid-glove methods with the Mafia in Havana.  Remember that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Outlaws – One Man’s Rise Through the Davage World of Renegade Bikers,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Ragged Revolutionaries,” “Central America’s Forgotten History,” “Peaky Blinders,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “Kill the Assassins!” “Mayans M.C.,” “Marx Dead and Alive,”   

The Cultural Marxist / August 13, 2024