The Virtues of Travel

 ‘Odd’ Facts about Several Battles in the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the U.S. Civil War – Black Jack, Osawatomie, Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge

Why does this blog sometimes focus on the 1860s U.S. Civil War?  Because it is still going on at a low level, and could increase in size, especially after this election. This new administration, which basically represents a Neo-Confederacy, will spawn political turmoil on a scale that many leftists are not prepared to deal with if the Trumpers go through with their plans.  So on to the first Civil War and any lessons we may learn for the present …

Black Jack battlefield

Civil War battlefields are by nature also parks.  These have hiking trails, horse paths, bicycle ways and allow cars to drive the battlefield to visit key points.  All this while they are soaked in blood and history.  Most Federal ones usually have a visitor center, but not small non-national locations like Black Jack and Osawatomie – although the latter has a small museum.  These are battles that have mostly been ignored. Here are the odd facts:

 1.   Cherokee, Chocktaw and Creek's fought on the Confederate side in Civil War battles at Wilson's Creek, MO and Pea Ridge, AK.  Ethnic politics doesn't always play.

2.   Many in the Union Army of the Southwest did not speak English, as there were a good number of recent German and Dutch immigrants.  This was the highest proportion of non-English European speakers in the Union armies.

3.   Victories were attempted by Union and Confederate generals using 'tricks' – an early morning attack on Confederates from two directions at Wilson's Creek by West Pointer Nathaniel Lyons; a plan for a battle in winter by Union Genl. Curtis at Pea Ridge; a march to get behind Union lines at Pea Ridge by the flamboyant Confed Genl. Van Dorn.  Tricks, however, do not suffice.

4.   Four Missouri counties on the west central border of Kansas were so full of adamant pro-slavery types that the Union ordered them 'emptied.'  They provided attackers against the free-staters in Kansas, as they sacked both Lawrence and Osawatomie, among others.  They were John Brown's main enemies. To this day this area in Missouri is full of bad roads, few towns, few amenities, shabby or corporate farms and rural poverty.

5.   In both the battles of Black Jack (June 1856) and Osawatomie, Kansas, (Aug. 1856) John Brown took up a position in front of a creek and downhill from the enemy to try to get them to attack.  An odd tactic that worked once at Black Jack, where the pro-slavery militia surrendered; and failed at Osawatomie, when the pro-slavers turned away from Brown’s outnumbered and outgunned men and burned down nearly the whole town.

6.   Missouri did not vote to leave the Union.  However, the Missouri Governor and Genl. Price organized militias to support the Confederacy against the vote of the legislature.  Take note – anti-democratic militias were crucial in Missouri.

7.   Missouri, as a state, saw the 3^rd largest number of Civil War battles, though most were small engagements.

8.   The battle of Pea Ridge had the longest, most intense and accurate artillery barrage for its time in the war – 2 hours straight by Union gunners.  It also saw the biggest infantry charge of the war to date – 10,000 Union soldiers in a solid line coming across open fields.  These tactics shattered the Confederates, who fled in disorder. (March 1862)

The Union cannon line at Pea Ridge

9.   After Pea Ridge, volunteer Missouri militia rebels did not always return to arms, but instead went home to stay.  A tip on the impact of victories over reaction.

10.               Many German settlers and city-dwellers were veterans of the 1848 insurrections in Europe against the capitalist rulers, as was Union Genl. Franz Siegel, who fought in both of these battles.  Politically they hated chattel slavery.  Siegel redeemed himself with his massive and accurate artillery volleys at Pea Ridge after his retreat at Wilson’s Creek.  German Unionists also helped seize the city of St. Louis in the face of slave forces.

11.               Units on the Union side in these battles came from Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana. 

12.               The battlefield at Black Jack, KS named after the small black jack oaks there, was also a transit point for the Santa Fe Trail, as it hosted a spring. There are deep wagon ruts across from the battlefield that still exist.

13.               The battlefield at Pea Ridge was also a transit point for the Trail of Tears.  The trail crossed at Elkhorn Tavern, a major site of the battle and a way station for the Trail.  The battlefield is just across the border from Oklahoma in northern Arkansas. Many Eastern tribes were forced to resettle in Oklahoma, many dying on the way.  Today the tribes play a visible role in Oklahoma, even running toll roads.

14.               At Pottawatomie Creek, on the north edge of the little settlement of Lane, KS, Brown's men killed 5 Missouri slavers in revenge for the burning and killing done in Lawrence, Kansas by right-wing militias.  Only a small sign in a children's park in Lane commemorates this event.  The Creek is still there – wide and muddy near where the cabins were.

15.               Confederate Genl. Van Dorn lost the battle of Pea Ridge by force-marching his troops in the cold, without proper gear or food from the Boston Mountains in northern Arkansas, south of the battlefield.  It split his army in two in the process.  This failure shows the importance of planning and logistics.

16.               As a result of these battles, the Confederacy lost control of most of the western bank of the Mississippi River, which helped Grant split the Confederacy in two at Vicksburg, MS. It was not an immaterial theater of the war, though it is somewhat unknown.

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” “John Brown.”

May Day carries a number of Left books on the Civil War.

Red Frog / November 29, 2024

Four Wheels Worse

 “Two Wheels Good – the History and Mystery of the Bicycle” by Jody Rosen, 2022

If you are a bicyclist this book is for you.  It is an engaging look at the history and issues surrounding the two-wheeled ‘flying’ wonder, from the early 1800s to today. The feeling of riding early bicycles was likened to flying, and even the Wright Brothers started out running a bike shop.  Reading the book gives the interest and practice of cycling some depth and dignity.  Artists and writers like Twain, de Beauvoir, Picasso, Duchamp, Weiwei and Miller wrote about or painted the bicycle.  It will hit home – at least it did for me. The book tells the story in personal visits to various places too, as a reporter might do.

The themes that surround the bicycle are still up to date.  Many of the calumnies thrown against bicycles by car drivers were also hurled at them by horse men back in the late 1890s.  In the 1880s thugs sometimes attacked bike riders and carriages ran over or blocked bikers.  I remember a Republican columnist in the Twin Cities Metro threatening bicyclists with his giant pickup when the first big wave of riding came on in the 1990s.  Today more people ride bicycles around the world than any other form of transport.

The history has been argued about, but Rosen nails it to a German, Drais, who in 1817 developed the ‘laufmaschine’ or in French, the velocipede, the first two-wheeled version without pedals. “Bi-cycle” means ‘two circles’ from the Latin.  It had poor brakes, metal or wood tires and was powered by pushing it forward with both feet.  This is similar to those young children you see nowadays pushing a tiny non-pedal bike while learning to balance. Yet going downhill was akin to flying, without the clodding hooves and heaving back of a thundering horse.  Upper-class Victorian dandies adopted the velocipede, but were loudly derided by the press of the time as sweaty, dirty and dangerous.  It was followed by the heavy iron ‘boneshaker’ using a no-coasting fixed chain drive, and the ridiculous ‘penny farthing’ with the huge front wheel designed to go farther on every pedal turn.  

In 1885, J.K. Stanley developed the ‘safety bike’ from these predecessors – essentially the same design we see today – handlebars, brakes, two equal tires, a diamond frame, ball-bearings and a chain drive located in the middle of the bike that allowed coasting.  In 1887 a tinkering Scotsman, Dunlap, developed the rubber tire. This basic design has remained unchanged, though with many variations. The U.S. Christians at the time, as usual, called the safety bicycle satanic and an agent of the devil.  In 2016 Iran’s leader, Khamenei, issued a fatwa banning biking in public.  Yet it was taken up in the 1890s as a huge mania by millions, who enjoyed its low cost, quietness and freedom.  Women took to it wearing bloomers, the pants of the day. It was a form of physical liberation for women and part of a feminist explosion. Sanitary experts took to it, as it got rid of the horse manure on the streets. Road builders took to it, as it presaged the smoother roads that cars would eventually drive on. And children?  Well, yeah!  But the established press was not amused, especially when marriages broke down due to women enjoying cycling over house-hold drudgery. 

Eventually the bicycle outnumbered the expensive and finicky horse, only to be slowly replaced in the early 1900s by the automobile - at least in the U.S. and Europe.  In China under Mao and Deng the sturdy black ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle became the transport of choice  - this before the modern turn to automobiles. In 2013 Chinese firms sold 20 million cars, the most in history of any country.  Yet in crowded Dahka, Bangladesh Rosen saw pedal-driven rickshaws still dominated the streets. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and the 1899 Boer War, bicycle soldiers were stealthy ambushers, able to be quickly transported across battlefields.  The NVA and Viet Cong used bicycles to transport everything down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, so it even had military uses.

Rosen does a chapter on trick biking, focusing on the daring Scotsman Angus MacAskill riding his various BMX’s in the modern day.  He has another somewhat stupid chapter on sex and bicycle ‘porn’ – yes, a thin reed.  The bicycle seat was ostensibly an erotic frottage device for women, and so objectionable to conservatives.  He has a chapter on winter riding, keying in on “Klondike” bikes and their uses during the Klondike gold rush, riding through snow, ice, storms and cold.  Without mentioning Minneapolis, he highlights polar Spitsbergen, Norway in Svalbard, and how it is normal to ride in the winter there, sometimes using fat tire bikes.  Rosen himself rides in winter in NYC.  Then a chapter on mountain biking in Bhutan, a theocratic, royalist outpost in the Himalayan Mountains, which he visits to interview various personages and their experiences in the ‘Tour of the Dragon’ race in Bhutan.  

A street vendor in Hanoi

Rosen discusses stationary bikes, where legend has it that the RMS Titanic went down while two men were continuing to ride them below-decks.  However, other than for in-house exercise, stationary bikes have been adapted as power sources – most famously generating D.C. current at Occupy Wall Street sites to power phones, computers and lights.  They have been adapted to generate electric power to run lathes and drills, chop vegetables, open cans, make food, pump water and whatever else you can hook up, especially in communes or rural areas in the global South. Even the International Space Station has one. 

Rosen looks into the first mass long distance ride in 1976 by thousands covering the 4,200 mile distance between coastal Oregon and coastal Virginia, going through Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia.  Other rides from North to South America and a ‘Southern Tier Trek’ from southern California to northern Florida are mentioned. Rosen investigates the role of bicycles as ‘beasts of burden’ carrying hundreds of pounds of goods or people, by visiting Dahka and its ‘rickshahwallahs’ and Beijing in China.  Commercial freight cycling continues throughout the world on a vast scale in South and East Asia, in Africa and Latin America.  China has 40-60 million working tricycles alone.  Cargo biking has spread to the U.S. and Europe.  In 1996, before the turn to cars, China had 1.5 bicycles per household and a recent mass ride shows that youth are riding bicycles again.

Rosen includes his own history biking in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Morningside Heights and more.  His first ride, his first accident, his parade of bikes, his work as a bike messenger, the ubiquity of stolen bikes and the ‘dèrive’ joy of riding through the streets. This all brings out a reader’s own experiences. I myself learned to ride at 6 going in circles around a basement in Duluth.  My friends and I bought a Schwinn “Sting Ray” bike with a banana seat and a fat slick on the back, doing wheelies for blocks.  My first adult bike was a ‘girls’ 5-speed I pulled out of a creek and refurbished.  I too rode long distances back in the 1960s.  ‘Watery’ bike graveyards he also covers, especially bikes dumped in a canal in Paris.  This reminds us of the array of bike-share bikes and scooters destroyed or dumped in rivers by destructive vandals in our present day.  He envisions himself someday as “a humble but dignified … old man on a bicycle.” All of this resonates with the memories of most bicyclists. 

Rosen ends with the development of the first ‘critical mass’ ride in 1992 in San Francisco and the battle between the car culture and environmentalism.  This is an old topic but still relevant in almost every city.  The ‘politics’ of the bicycle is evident in the flood of bikes involved in the Tiananmen rebellions in China.  Earth Days across the world also feature mass bicycle rides.  He notes that the NYPD and other police forces see bicycle riders as subversives ruining the streetscape.  Back at the 2008 RNC Convention in St. Paul, police rounded up suspicious and anarchist bike riders as a matter of course. Cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris have led the way in European bicycle-based transport. Rosen calls the recent rise of e-bikes one of the biggest advances in bicycling since the 1890s and he might be right.  

What Rosen leaves out - not even a mention - is the scooter, moped and motorcycle.  Much of what can be said for the bicycle can also be said for these two-wheelers.  Bicycles and the e-bike can be feeder ramps to bigger, motorized versions.  On the streets of the third world motorized tuk-tuks, rickshaws, scooters and motorcycles far outnumber cars.  Many are now being built with electric motors.  They are used cross country and in-country, as work vehicles, as commuting methods, as traveling two-wheelers. The blindness to them seems intentional.

Rosen mentions the environmental costs of rubber, metal and labor involved in biking, so it’s not a pure ‘green’ or ‘virtuous’ technology as some pretend. Yet its impact is far less than the car, SUV, truck or pickup. A fun and interesting book about a commonplace item that everyone is acquainted with. Worth reading if you are a bicyclist … and even if you are not or want to be one.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Bikers Unite,”  “Motorcyclist Rant,” “The Bikeriders,” “Shop Class as Soulcraft,”  “The Trials of Traffic,” “Traffi-Can’t,”  “The End of Tourism?”

Red Frog / November 26, 2024

Lost in the Supermarket

 “Buy Now – the Shopping Conspiracy,” a documentary by Nic Stacey, 2024

This is a clever documentary about how the capitalist sales effort works at present.  It is narrated by an Alexa clone called Sasha, who is letting us in on the secrets of successful mercantile capitalism - but not to be shared with anyone.  5 or 6 rules are to be followed – encourage buying; plan obsolescence; create waste; lie more; hide more and control more.  It’s pretty tough on capital, but the solutions are the usual weak tea – buy less, fix stuff and regulate more.

The documentary interviews former top executives at Adidas, Amazon and Unilever who all have turned against capital’s methods and profiteering.  It also includes a proponent of fixing electronics; a designer trying to make clothes that are not disposable; activists who track waste, ‘recycling’ and intentional destruction of goods and an activist who shows how labels are full of lies, especially greenwashing.

First is to make buying as easy as pressing a button at home 24/7.  This was Amazon’s goal and they have succeeded, especially as endless ‘haul’ video’s attest.  The process is visualized as a conveyor belt dumping a product into your home almost instantaneously.  This ease obviously increases consumption, as there is no need to get in a car, look through a store, buy an item and drive home. Second is planned obsolescence.  You know, those printers that stop working, that e-toothbrush that lasts 2 years, that software or phone that needs to be upgraded, those products that are glued together and cannot be repaired, like Apple ear buds. It promotes continuous buying.  Third is waste.  Companies put ‘recycle’ logos on their items, or claim to take back their product after it breaks or is too used – all bogus.  Only 10% of plastic is recycled in the U.S.  Most corporations have zero plan about what happens to all these products afterwards.  Waste is up to the consumer or government, so corporations externalize their toxic junk problem to the public. Waste is exported to places like Thailand, Ghana and Chile.  In addition, vast amounts of perfectly good products and food are thrown away or damaged to keep the price up.  This is one of the most surprising scenes in the documentary.  It's like those old videos of farmers dumping milk on the streets. It is a perfect description of exchange value prevailing over use value.

Fourth, to cover all this up it is necessary to lie in advertisements and on product labels. Greenwashing, blue washing, bogus recycling symbols, social uplift advertising, the color green used in ads, cheery smiles, straight-out lies - it’s all an attempt to divert the consumer into thinking their consumption is frictionless and ‘good.’  Fifth is to hide the evidence of waste and the damage it is causing.  This documentary is trying to counteract that but who is watching this documentary?  Sixth is the most important – to control perceptions and control the corporate workforces who have an inside view of what is going on in their companies.  Lastly, to control politics and the legal systems, although the documentary barely touches this given the ‘partisan’ nature of politics.

Amazon actually has a facility dedicated to destroying unsold goods. Amazon’s ‘climate plan’ pledge applies to about 1% of their impact according to the former executive.  She was fired for leading fellow employees in a sustainability revolt.  The executive at Unilever makes the well-known point that shareholder prices and short-term profit thinking are not guides to how to manage production.  By 2050 there will be twice as much waste, which is the trajectory overproduction is on right now.  The familiar scenes of fast fashion products dumped in Ghanaian beaches shows a bit of what it is like.  15 million garment items are dumped in Ghana every week according to the Ghanaian clothes designer.  A ‘waste tracker’ located a facility where Thai workers labor by hand over toxic electronic waste, as e-parts can affect human health. The documentary shows huge landfills across the world full of garbage and flows of throwaways flooding city buildings and streets.  See the pic below.

The Sydney Opera House flooded with throwaway junk

What are their solutions?  The former Adidas exec has come up with a plant-based sneaker which will break down in the soil.  Others thunder against omnipresent single-use plastics in food packaging, pop/soda bottles and the rest. Micro-plastics are showing up in the fish and meat that humans consume - though no one is suggesting vegetarianism.  The iFixit guy says ‘buy less.’ He fought for laws to allow people to fix their own broken products and also advocated designing them in such a way so that is possible. The documentary does not mention buying used, sharing items, giving away items or exchanging items with others.    

And then there is ‘regulation.’  The theory is that the capitalist government will supposedly restrain over-production, profiteering, consumerism, waste and the rest.  But they don’t really go into this because they can’t prove their assertion. Their position misunderstands the role of government in a capitalist economy, which is to be a handmaiden, if only sometimes issuing correctives.  The problems addressed in this documentary go to the heart of the consumer economy - unlimited growth, profiteering, environmental damage and the rest.  Certainly things have been done around the edges, especially in the EU.  Yet as one executive points out about planned obsolescence, if you told your board of directors that your product will last for many, many years, and future sales will be cut in half, they will throw you out and hire another CEO. 

The volume of production and intentional destruction of products presently hints that the price of some commodities is actually nearing zero.  This possibility undermines an exchange-value economy.  This documentary is a peek into the back room of commodity production and what that implies about a possible working-class and socialist future where production is for use, not for profit.    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Seaspiracy,” “You Are What You Eat,” “Planet of the Humans,” “Garbage Land,” “The Avalanche of Plastic, Stupid Packaging and the Lies of Recycling,” Monopoly Capital” (Baran & Sweezy); “Inconspicuous Consumption,” “Brandy Hellville,” “Civilization Critical.”  

The Cultural Marxist / November 23, 2024 / Black Friday Week!

Pandemic Technology

 “Global Civil War – Capitalism Post-Pandemic” by William I. Robinson, 2022

Robinson’s thesis is that the CoVid pandemic super-charged capital’s world-wide movement into a Fourth Industrial era of technology – that of advanced digitalization of nearly everything – labor, profits, military issues, surveillance and commodification.  This is thru AI, robots, cloud data computing, 5G, the Internet of Things, blockchain and ‘immaterial’ commodities. The results are increasing inequality, financialization and exploitation of the earth’s resources.  Like Peter Phillips, he thinks the transnational capitalist class (TCC) is leading this effort.

The Pandemic

What are the details?  Robinson first discusses the vast increase in inequality across the world.  The pandemic ran up the number of millionaires and billionaires as they took advantage of the crisis, with an 88% increase in wealth for the top group.  This though $9 trillion was lost in the general world economy as it went into a deep recession in 2020. Trillions were doled out by national banks to keep corporations afloat.  The pandemic is one of the key recent ‘restructurings’ of capital according to him – in the 1930s under Roosevelt, in the 1970s with the advent of neo-liberalism, in the 2007-2008 crash that ushered in austerity and damaged neo-liberalism and now the 2020 pandemic, which is prompting a digital restructuring of capital globally.  

The pandemic allowed capital to move work to the internet for many white collar jobs.   It increased robotization.  It led to new algorithms, making work more productive and resulting in fewer employees. It elevated the role of TCC corporations, which were further able to escape national economies.  The pandemic led to an over-accumulation of capital but without a productive or profitable outlet.  This situation results in speculation, internal drives for privatization and national and military conflicts to stave off stagnation. Equity firms buying houses fits into this strategy for instance.  Robinson also applies Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  When capital invests in machines instead of labor, moving from variable capital to fixed capital, this pushes down profit rates. As all profits come from labor and nature, the capitalists ‘naturally’ begin to squeeze global labor more and increase exploitation of the last bits of the earth.

Accompanying the rise in inequality was a jump in digital surveillance and police action, spurred by technical fixes to deal with the plague.  China was a leader in this method, but other countries followed suit and he details examples of each.  Populations were subject to a high level of national control around movement, killing the tourist industry, stranding citizens and grounding planes.  While flirting with the ‘lab leak’ theory, Robinson understands the majority of new diseases are ‘zoonotic’ – coming from human invasions of formerly pristine animal environments - so the Wuhan ‘wet market’ is the very likely culprit.  Regarding China, even in 2020, U.S. investors owned $1.1 trillion equity in Chinese entities.  In 2023 it went to $1.26 trillion.  Both economies are entwined in spite of the conflict.     

Technology Expansion

In 2019 about half the planet was on-line, with 5.2 billion smartphones in operation.  Now it is 7.2 billion in 2024.  The misnamed ‘sharing economy’ and 3D printers saw huge increases in 2019.  In 2019, digital services made $1.9 trillion, half of all services world-wide.  In 2022 global IP traffic hit around 15,700 GB per second.  All of these have increased since he wrote the book.  This is why ‘intellectual property’ has become so valuable, a tech understanding essential to almost any job and why ‘intangible assets’ for corporations outweigh ‘tangible’ ones.  Paper currency is more and more going out the window to boot, though according to Robinson world capital had $14.4 trillion in digital cash in 2020, showing its inability to find investment opportunities. 

The pandemic, according to Bank of America, most profited tech services, new media and entertainment, e-commerce, data centers, biopharma and bio-tech, on-line medical diagnostics, industrial and military automation, software, semi-conductors, cloud services, renewable utilities and food and household staples. Robinson contends that this grouping is part of the new ‘bloc of capital.’  He contends this reflects capital reaching a limit to global ‘extensive expansion’ and turning to internal ‘intensive expansion.’  The goal is ‘laborless production’ and even ‘zero marginal costs.’  For instance automation has reduced agricultural employment picking things like fruit and nuts in California by 11%. He contends, as have others, that automation is coming for every sector of jobs, even middle-class professionals.  

On-line work weakens the class

Isolation is the social product engineered by working at home or in scattered, small offices and shops.  It reflects the reduction in size of huge auto factories like River Rouge, mini-steel mills and the export of production to China and Mexico.  This is being partly counteracted by the growth in huge logistics warehouses like Amazon, but even in these locations workers are monitored and fewer due to robots. 'Essential workers' were the blue-collar exception but, as in the slaughterhouses, they got sick and died in higher numbers.  Isolation and automation breaks up the social ties and links among workers, especially the digital proletariat. The huge growth in ‘independent contractors,’ ‘gig’ jobs and temp labor emphasizes this point.  This all helps capital.

The Answer?

Robinson has 3 outcomes to this last phase of capitalist restructuring.  Either a class revolution, a rise of fascist dictatorships or an environmental and barbarous collapse of world civilization.  These are all extreme poles, but they reference present tendencies.  Robinson runs through a familiar, anodyne list of large Left protests before and during the pandemic in 2019-2020 – among them huge strikes in India, the French Yellow Vests, Chinese labor disruptions and protests against police brutality across the world after the murder of George Floyd  The quantity of conflicts went way up worldwide.  Robinson notes that revolutionary organization, a socialist goal and theory are missing, so the ‘quality’ is not yet there.  International coordination is another, as ‘socialism in one country’ wasn’t possible in the last century, nor in this one.  Another is that being ‘anti-state’ or trying to reform the state ignores the state’s absolute connection with the economy.  As if the police are a stand-alone entity!  In this context he writes against the ideologies of post-modernism and identitarianism as being absorbed and promoted by a wing of capital. 

One cheery rebellion Robinson highlights is the 2019 Sudanese political revolution which ousted a corrupt dictator from Khartoum.  Unfortunately his book was written before the brutal reversal of that revolution and descent into a bloody and long-lasting civil war.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the genocidal bombing of Gaza are also missing.  His main point is that neo-liberalism no longer suffices as a capitalist answer to the world’s problems.  This is the conundrum the U.S. Democratic Party faces but will ignore. 

Which leads us to his second option – fascism. Protests did not just originate from the Left but from the Right and Libertarianism – although some reformist ‘leftists’ still can’t understand this. The growth in elected authoritarians like Trump, Orban, Netanyahu, Putin, Erdogan and Modi reflect this. It’s the ‘democratic dictatorship of the oligarchs and petit-bourgeoisie’ to my mind.  On their shirttails are ultra-right to fascist militias, organizations, religious sects and internet podcasters - some even pretending to be ‘anti-war’ or ‘anti-imperialist.’    

Fascism is a particular response to capitalist crisis according to Robinson, trying to appeal to a plebian base, but violently supporting capitalist accumulation by blaming everyone but the monied ruling class.  This method is no secret.  The U.K.s Brexit was a good example.  It showed the reactionary rot of nationalism, which is a compliment to irrationalism, fundie religions, racism and ethno-politics in the backasswards arsenal of the Right.  Robinson understands that the TCC appreciates pro-business efforts, but not outright fascist or authoritarian tacks so far.  They would rather have improved and widespread policing instead of Brownshirts and illegal violence.    

Robinson's main influence is Gramsci, though Gramsci didn't dwell on this economics.  Robinson understands that the 'spatial' displacement of crises is no longer as possible. A guide of cyclical, structural and systemic crisis is Robinson's template to understanding breakdowns and restructuring under capital.  Cyclical crises occur on a regular basis, like recessions and depressions.  Structural ones demand a fundamental change in accumulation and technology, which is what is happening now with the 4th industrial revolution.  The third, a systemic crisis, spells trouble for capital itself … something no one can predict but one can prepare for.  Take your pick.

Prior blogspot reviews, use search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Global Police State” (Robinson); “Giants – the Global Power Elite” and “Titans of Capital” (both by Phillips); “The Long Depression” and “Capitalism in the 21^st Century” (both by Roberts); “Zombie Capitalism,” “The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles” and “The Enigma of Capital”  (both by Harvey); “Dead Epidemiologists” (Wallace); “Pandemic – CoVid Shakes the World” (Zizek); “Who Get’s Bailed Out?” “Going Viral” or the word “technology.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / November 20, 2024

Multi-Culty Christendom

 “Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok© Cult” documentary by Jessica Acevedo, 2024

I’m looking at YouTube© and I’d been watching groups of people dance to the funny, political and danceable song “Rasputin” by Boney M.  In the feed I also saw some videos of these frenetic but precise dancers doing Michael Jackson style moves, dancers named Miranda, Vik and B’Dash (James) dancing to other tracks.  Oddly, this documentary is about those three, the hell-fire church they belong to and the exploitative cult it became.

Ex-members

Miranda’s parents had spent years promoting the dancing of their two daughters Miranda and Melanie.  The sisters eventually move to L.A. when they get older and instead of getting hired by a dance troupe, they start doing TikTok© videos together, which garner followers and later advertisers.  All is good and they join a cohort of excellent dancers in the city doing a similar thing. Gradually Miranda is drawn in by B’Dash into a church and the 7M production company, which promises companionship, housing and a career.  It’s run by a South Korean pastor, Robert Shinn.  The church is called SheKinah which follows a form of strict fundamentalist Protestant theology that claims everyone sins thousands of times a day.  To cure their ‘sins’ and go to heaven they must follow the pastor at every turn or they will go to hell.  The church condemns them to hell if they leave the church or don’t agree with the pastor. They fear being cursed by God’s man on earth and that is a heavy burden for a parishioner.  The Bible becomes their text.

Now to an atheist, this is pure abuse disguised as ‘truth.’  But these young people actually believe this nonsense and are in fear for their mortal souls.  Miranda’s parents were nominal Catholics, but when Melanie tells them about the church, which she refused to join with her sister, they are apprehensive.  In line with this, Miranda is told by “Robert” to cut all ties to friends and family, to ‘die’ to live again and be saved. So Miranda stops talking to her family. This is the advice given to all members of the church.

What follows is a run-down of how this particular cult worked.  The church members inform on each other over ‘infractions.’  They are forced to live in various houses owned by the church, and are moved every 9 months or so.  They do pay rent for their shared room.  Friends are separated. All of the members are controlled by ‘mentors’ over what they buy or eat or where they go or how they look while dancing. Their communications are monitored and some people are shunned for not performing well.  Female members of the church testify to repeated sexual demands by Robert during ‘massages.’  You don’t want to disappoint God’s man on earth!  So sexual abuse was endemic.  The kicker is the economics. 

Miranda, Vik, B'Dash

The Church takes almost 75-80% of their earnings as dancers or employees.  Robert and the Church own a number of businesses where church members work for next to nothing too … a real estate company, café, flower shop, mortgage company and the like.  7M Films, which is also owned by Robert, made an amateurish show called The Millionaires’ Club, and tried to promote members as singers and actors, but struck it big with the dancers.  The TikTok© dancers bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars and appeared in big venues – TV shows, the Super Bowl, music videos, adverts and even one movie, Road House 2. For their own use they got between $15 and $100 dollars every week or two.  Their accounts are controlled and deductions are made by the Church, 7M or directly to Robert, which are ostensibly separate, but really one entity controlled by Pastor Shinn.

All of this slowly leaks out to Miranda’s family and they start trying to contact her.  She has nothing to do with them.  They reach out to other families who report the same situation.  Eventually their intrusive efforts at contacting their children start bugging the man of God.  Whispers start even within his churches’ closeted walls, along with internal, public accusations of sexual abuse. Robert decides that for publicity purposes he will allow occasional sterile ‘meetings’ with parents or siblings.  Nevertheless several groups of members quit and some of them are interviewed in the documentary.  But Miranda, Vik and James (B’dash) never quit.  Most of their YouTube© videos are dated before the documentary’s release in May 2024 but they still maintain their personal sites. 

This situation ends in the filing of a civil suit and a criminal complaint alleging labor exploitation, fraud, sexual abuse and more.  The problem is that a cult is not illegal.  Those who ‘willingly’ comply are responsible under the law.  The key is what constitutes coercion – what level of pressure, what kind, what are the consequences of disobeying?  If you went along with demands for sex, is it ‘consensual’ or coerced?  The clearer violation might be financial exploitation, but as SheKinah says, many people ‘willingly’ donate their time and energy to religious or non-profit institutions – even political parties. Complaining about being paid a sub-minimum wage might have a time-limited value too, as the suit covers many years. 

So the success of this lawsuit, which will probably go to trial in 2025, is unknown given our ‘hands off’ legal system in regards to religion.  The church even sued these ex-members for defamation – a tactic familiar to anyone who has opposed Scientology, which sues anyone who criticizes it.  They also intentionally brought out the ‘race’ card, claiming the family opposed Miranda’s relationship with the dark-skinned dancer James.  Not true, as the family had him over a good number of times before the Church intervened.  They were not invited to their daughter’s wedding to James, which was held under SheKinah’s auspices.  Many of the original church members were young Koreans, so there is an ethnic side to this.  Much of the evidence in the documentary is of tape recordings of Robert’s sermons. 

Cults are kind of a fun-house, extreme version of what goes on in capitalist society.  Even some diets, like the carnivore one, are accused of being cultish.  Are you in a cult? This blog has covered Scientology, Bikram Yoga, the Rajneeshees, NXIVM, FLDS, Remnant Church, Children of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hasidim and certain MLM schemes and businesses like Brandy Melville.  Certainly for personal political, emotional or real reasons people cut ties with their families, sometimes for good reasons, many times not.  But when a church orders its members to do so, that is a different kettle of fish. Capitalism lives off of labor exploitation, lost wages, unpaid wages, low wages and the like.  SheKinah seems to be a front for a rip-off financial racket, using religious language to severely control its employees.  This is not rare at all.  Take heed.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use the search box in the upper left to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “cult,” “religion.”      

The Cultural Marxist / November 17, 2024

Gothic Enough For You?

 “Capitalism – A Horror Story. Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination” by Jon Greenaway, 2024

I’m not a fan of horror films of any kind, as there is enough real horror under capitalism.  Greenaway on the other hand is a fan.  In this book he wallows in a good number of modern horror movies and several books, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Dracula by Bram Stoker.  These 3 are well known and have been thoroughly examined already.  This is all in the service of something he calls ‘Gothic Marxism.’  Greenaway is a Brit with a Ph.D from the Manchester Center for Gothic Studies, so you better listen.  Or not. 

I’ve only seen two of the films he mentions – Parasite and The Platform.  I had to stop watching the latter because it was so cruel and terrible.  It’s a about a multi-story structure of trickle-down food and cannibalism based on 133 class levels, with the bottom ones getting the least to no food.  Parasite is based on the conflict between a servant family and a wealthy family, with two sets of servants fighting and slaughtering each other to retain their jobs.  Both illuminate capitalist nightmares.

So what the f*ck is Gothic Marxism?  Greenaway riffs off of Marx’s use of vampire, ghost, body and horror images to extend the notion that there is an emancipatory and utopian side to political splatter films, a case I find weak. But you know Marxists, using dialectics to tease out the inner contradictions of anything.  He enlists surrealism, expressionism, Ernest Bloch and Walter Benjamin in his logic. Then he promotes TERF feminists and people as ‘fascists,’ so his materialism is somewhat twisted.   He maintains that these films don’t just embody the fears and damage of capitalist society, but also point towards a more human, utopian future. His ‘monsters’ are supposedly all figures of rebellion, like claiming Dracula didn’t want to work. Well, don’t all criminals have that aspiration?  Hobbesian communal and individual violence is the result in film after film. Witches, in the context of sexism, may be the outstanding exception. The ‘spectre’ still haunting capital and the Republican and Democratic Parties is another.  “Zombie” corporations exist, who will never pay their debts back. And yeah, the Stones did Sympathy for the Devil.  So there is some kind of bargain to be made with ‘Gothic’ Marxism, but perhaps not a deep one at all. 

Greenaway’s ‘gothic’ Marxism is based on the human body, which is the target of so much damage under capital – through work, war, weather, sickness, pregnancy, bad food, pollution, pandemics, starvation, addiction, crime, accidents and the like. Mortality has a habit of working like that. He calls the outcomes ‘necro-political’ and ‘necro-neoliberal’ class antagonisms in a world I have labeled verging on sado-capitalism.  “Gothic” in his mind is the haunting of the present by the past – a virtual description of conservatism.  Ghosts are the representatives of history, as ‘dead generations’ weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. As Faulkner put it, the past is never past.  How the past impacts the future positively is the problem for Greenaway – other than reminding all of the impermanency of social life. 

Saws All

The films covered, besides Parasite and The Platform are: the dystopian Purge and Saw franchises; Ready or Not, The Sadness, The Beach House, Crimes of the Future, Possessor, “VVitch,” “Suspira,” “Can the Monster Speak,” “Pulse,” Unfriended: Dark Web,” “Host,” “A Dark Song,” “Tell Me I’m Worthless” (book);

The real form of horror in culture today is not actual horror films, which are a niche commodity.  It is the overwhelming flood of murder stories – kidnapping, sexual assault, assassination, war, drug, gang, true crime, secret agent and serial killer TV shows, series and movies.  These reflect the increasing barbarity of societies on a plain level and their heroes are mostly cops, detectives, spies or civilians looking for justice or revenge.  Actual horror films pale in comparison, especially knowing their main audiences are teenagers and 20-somethings.  Films like “Get Out” reveal the horrors of liberal racism so they still have a role to play, but this film was missed by Greenaway as was the whole Black Mirror series.   A real ‘purge’ is coming in the U.S., while purges in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are already here. Most older adults have by necessity moved on to a horror more real. 

If this kind of Left cultural criticism is your thing, or you read a lot of horror, than come on in and buy the book!

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Jungle” (Sinclair); “Parasite,” “Monsters of the Market” (McNally); “Get Out” (Peele); “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher); “New Dark Age” (Bridle); “Capitalism, a Ghost Story” (Roy); “The Hunger Games,”

The Cultural Marxist / November 15, 2024

Lifestyles of the Poor and Alienated

 “Living a Marxist Life: Why Marx is a Drug You Should Probably Take” by Andrew Pendakis, 2024

On the cover of the book is a picture of Che looking like a hipster, reading Goethe.  This is a ‘cool’ book from a cultural angle that turns being a Marxist into becoming some kind of hip intellectual and activist. It’s a work about what Pendakis thinks of as a subculture and lifestyle, an almost declasse boho strata, a romantic cohort of cosmopolitans who know the real truth. Pendakis is an Associate Professor at Brock University in Canada, yet his father was a truck driver and his home-life religious.  He imbibed this negative class lesson into his angle, so shopping, work, a house, family, love, careerism and money are all approached with irony, alienation and ambivalence through a Marxist lens.  The book is aimed at young people – or precisely ‘students’ – and so being hip is essential to his ‘drug’ dealing.

It’s not based on a survey of the many different types of Marxists across the world or prior books or studies about being a Communist - it’s a work of informed imagination.  That information is gleaned from the work of hundreds of famous or prominent Marxist revolutionaries, activists and academics, the ones he constantly lists – people like Adorno, Badiou, Benjamin, Ghodsee, Luxemburg and Zizek.  It is not clear he’s in a socialist organization or been in class combat.  The book only intersects with those experiences – which seem to be essential to actual Marxism – in the last chapter. He once calls Lenin and Engels ‘vulgar’ Marxists, but he did use quote marks on the word ‘vulgar.’ He’s a good writer, with many clever turns of phrase, and jokes at capital’s expense. He over-emphasizes, then auto-corrects like a zig-zag train. And he needs an editor in this chatty book.  So what has he got to say?

In his celebration of alienation, he thinks Marxists do as little on an employed job as possible.  However, as anyone who has actually worked for a long time in a blue, service or white collar occupation knows – lazy or incompetent people get no respect, usually because this impacts their co-workers.  It doesn’t matter how ‘brilliant’ they are or how pro-union.  They’re seen as sad dicks.  This is part of his flawed description of Marxists as knowing hipsters, though that type certainly exists too.  As Vivian Gornick pointed out in her book “The Romance of American Communism” party members were from many ‘walks’ of life, though most were poor or working class but also included artists, the middle class and intellectuals.  She said “there was not one CP type.”  (“Romance” reviewed below.)  My contact with older, organized Marxists from the 1970s to today shows many were union people, some were down and outs, some profs, but solid and established comrades.  This is unlike the generations coming up now as the ‘Boomer’ good times slide away.  ‘Who’ is a Marxist changes depending on what historical stage a society is at.

Pendakis makes a point about the enormous and omnivorous intellectual influence of Marxism in many fields – sociology, geography, politics, history, anthropology, psychology, environmental and natural sciences, culture, military studies, political economy, philosophy, religion - even cosmology.  No wonder the Right wants to shut down universities outside of the business school and the technical or hard sciences and focus high school only on the 3 ‘Rs’. This is because Marxists are autodidacts – always learning; and because Marxism is a holistic method of actuality and flux that recognizes few barriers.  In this context he objects to simplified bumper-sticker / Facebook© thinking, to repetition, reduction and the bureaucratized groupthink of the Stalinized Communist Parties in the Twentieth century, as it mitigates against Marxist methods. Marxism is a method and mentality clearly not frozen in amber, much as some wish it so.

Wadya' smokin' boys?

Pendakis spends a long time on how Marxism is in a deep sense true – an almost ‘documentary’ vision of the world, not one clogged by veils, lies, ideology, intentional blindness or complacent comfort.  It reads like a pat on the back for all us Reds.  He paints it not as a dark vision but believes that knowledge and clarity are their own rewards.  This insight he gained out of a depressing working-class childhood and then brought it into the professional academic arena.  Instead he makes a plea for anger, a very un-academic recommendation.  Liberals and technocrats see politics as “little more than rational conversation” (Ha!) so rage is the province of thugs and crazy people. Religion and yoga want to banish anger too. Pendakis sees it as fuel for action if properly directed and applied creatively.  This is nothing new of course.

According to Pendakis, liberals identify rage with fascism, which makes Marxists … fascists.  As historically stupid as this co-identification may be, it’s a lie told to maintain immediate control.  Marx’s own combativeness is held against him, though it was to sharpen his own theories and defeat opponents – an intellectual version of the class war. In this context Pendakis keeps on mentioning Zizek’s clever demolition of the lazy thinking of Canadian conservative Jordan Peterson, who seems to be his bête noire. 

Pendakis finishes with a discussion of organization.  He describes the dedication of a Maoist in 1962 trying to reconstruct a city in China and an Adivasi Naxalite guerilla in India - both to show that hard conditions can be the most fulfilling to a socialist.  In the process he dismisses Maoism as a product of its time and place, and guerilla war as almost extinct. In this context he points out that Marxists have repeatedly been the subject of anti-communist pogroms in many countries, so ‘courage’ is one of the ingredients of being one.  He says he’s a supporter of some kind of Leninist party, but describes all the other forms of organizations Marxists might participate in – unions, cooperatives, united fronts, specific activist organizations, community and ad hoc groups.  His definition of “Marxist’ here is broad – actually including anarchists and unions, with a nod to social-democrats and others in a ‘big’ church.  He does a non-specific roundup of debates between socialists over the possibility of revolution, the nature of socialism, the question of violence and the overwhelming need for organized politics as part of a ‘spiritual,’ atheistic Marxism. He makes a passionate plea for a Marxist morality but most of all, for the value of a politically organized life against individual or performative isolation.    

Will this book win over the kids?  Pendakis is obviously a highly literate writer with an intimate knowledge of various philosophers, so ‘headier’ youth might be recruited to join a Marxist subculture.  But as they say, acts speak louder than words.  Profs are impressive to students, but not so much to others.  This book itself is hard to get through because of its somewhat endless, rambling and repetitive nature, along with its tiny print. Nevertheless it is a good introduction - for some - to the “constantly expanding theoretical universe” of Marxism – being personal without being too theoretical after all.   

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

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / November 11, 2024

Celebrate Armistice Day!