A United Front ... of sorts

 “Workers Assembly” at the United Labor Centre, Minneapolis, Mn. USA - 12/15/2024

In response to the election of Donald Trump and his anti-labor plans, an assembly of union and non-union workers convened at the Labor Centre in Minneapolis. They somehow rechristened it as a ‘Workers Solidarity Circle.’  It was a united front meeting of sorts, led by the Black Cat Collective, “Red Time” and the Democratic Socialists of America. The BC Collective seems to be a bit of a reconstitution of folks formerly in the IWW.  Individuals from many unions attended:  UFCW, HERE, MFT, CWA, Carpenters, MNA, NALC, MAPE, SEIU, SPFE, UDAM along with some activists from CTUL and PSL that I know of.  It somewhat reminded me of the old Twin Cities Labor Party, which gathered together nearly every labor leftist in the Cities in the ‘90s, though not centered on independent labor political action as was the Labor Party.

The meeting seemed to be a way to blow off steam, to meet other activists, and to prepare in some way for what is coming.  Three Socialist Left groups in the Twin Cities – the Revolutionary Communists of America, Freedom Road and Socialist Alternative – had previously held individual meetings to prepare for the anti-labor assault by Trump, but they were not in evidence at this meeting.

The meeting was chaired by a CWA officer.  Short talks were given by an organizer of the Delta ground workers campaign; an MFT teacher, a HERE member from Northfield and an AFSCME librarian. They spoke about how Trump connected with more workers in various places than previously as the Democrats orientation to war, Gaza, the UMC, Wall Street and moderate Republicans made them seem the ‘establishment’ party.  This in a time of financial stress which ‘Bidenomics’ ignored.  One said that liberals ‘grease the skids’ for reaction, as they did in the election. This is an insight from the struggle against fascism in Germany.    

Other speakers pointed out that 35% of the population didn’t vote.  Some mentioned that the guardrails and ‘buffers’ of ordinary liberal capitalism could come down, such as the destruction of the Department of Education, increasing ‘charterization’ of the school system and privatization of the Post Office.  In addition ‘buffers’ like the NLRB and the arbitration process for unions could be decimated.  No one mentioned the thousands of possible U.S. government workers who could be laid off and replaced by Republican acolytes in various federal positions, per Project 2025.  Instead of disaster capitalism one said we need ‘disaster revolution.’  A speaker agreed and pointed out the need for ‘class struggle unionism’ as a method to eventually end capitalism as a way out of the declining trajectory of world capitalism. 

Then the crowd of about 75 or more broke up into 9 talking groups to discuss 3 questions:  1, why the election of Trump; 2, what this means for workers; 3, what to do about it.  Each group reported back to the assembled some of the points made in these talking groups, which reminded me of some ultra-democratic Occupy meetings except for the organized efforts of unionists to keep things on track.  Thank god. 

Some things brought up in the smaller meetings:  Somalis, unionists and Latinos voted for Trump in much larger numbers. Others suffered from apathy or non-involvement in politics due to disgust.  Labor and leftist activists could be targeted as ‘terrorists’ by the government.  Health care will be decimated from the top by RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz.  Immigrants in factories will be assailed by ICE round-ups. Physical threats against the Left and even unions by militias will increase. A national ban on abortion is possible now.  The muzzling of speech is already happening, witness Gaza protesters.

More:  This trend in the U.S. is part of an international move by capital across the globe, presaging the end of neo-liberalism.  The capitalist faction fight represented by both major Parties has weakened their hold on national politics, leaving an opening for the actual Left. Liberal and centrist institutions are already folding in the face of Trump, starting with the courts and then media like ABC and the LA Times.  A coming postal worker’s strike over wages may be the first flash-point.  Physical defense might be necessary in the future. And so on … touching on many other issues.

Announcements were made at the closing of the meeting, including a massive vote for flight attendant unionization on the horizon.  This Assembly or Circle, or whatever you want to call it, said they will try to have a general meeting 4 times a year, and will also plan actions and events in between.  I think it is imperative that a United Front of every Left class struggle organization be formed to oppose the coming assault on labor institutions, rights and power, along with social gains.  This meeting was a small step in that direction and is perhaps being replicated across the country. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive using the terms: "May Day" or 'union' or 'united front.'

Red Frog / December 16, 2024 

Opiates of the People and the Corporations

 “Quick Fixes – Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21^st Century Binge” by Benjamin Fong, 2023

This book surveys various addictive drugs, legal and illegal, from caffeine to fentanyl, and their working relationship with capitalism. Fong sees illegal drugs and the gangs that sell them as still following standard capitalist business models. Fong is a prof at Arizona State U who got his Ph.D in religion at Columbia, has written for Jacobin, and runs the “Center for Work and Democracy” so you can guess his orientation.  Fong does a mini-history of each drug from its popular ‘medicinal’ uses in the U.S. in the 1800s – like opium, cocaine and cannabis - to demonization and the drug war of the 1920s, then to resurrection as ‘medicines’ or legality at various points in time.  One thing is clear – each has played a role in how capital functions – as a profit center, a club against dark-skinned, ‘foreign’ people or radicals, a secret government funding source and especial as methods of social pacification, escape and work speed-up. They have been used to medicalize social issues and problems. Here are glimpses into his chapters.

CAFFEINE

As I write this I’m sipping some coffee, and you might be too.  Let’s start there.  Coffee, and the stimulant caffeine, is the drug delivery vehicle capitalism runs on. The cheap coffee in every factory or warehouse vending machine or the free coffee in white collar office ‘kitchens’ attest to this.  The Stanley© thermos for truckers and construction workers is their portable cousin. In England tea took over as the stimulant of choice.  All the while coffee plantations decimate jungles and forests.  It was at one time cartelized as a defense against Castroism and communism, and price supports were instituted until 1989, when coffee prices collapsed for 5 years.

At one time in the late 1800s coffee-houses were sites of conviviality and subversion; now they are arid places where people tap on keyboards, ‘alone together.’  This corresponds to the drop in social connections brought about by hyper-capitalism.  The same thing happened with alcohol and ‘the bar’ where you face the booze bottles and the bartender, not other people.  You, too, can be just like Charles Bukowski at the 'bar.' 

NICOTINE

The tobacco companies, which later bought major processed food companies, hid the dangers of smoking for years.  Their lies, power and delaying tactics have later proved fruitful to oil and gas, pesticide, chemical and yes, processed food, corporations.  They made science into “fair game in the battle of public relations.” Cigarettes were once marketed as liberating for females by Edward Bernays.  They were sexy, thinning, healthful and calming.  They certainly do that until you need another cig.  They were sold as a cheap diversion.  Now they are marketed across poor countries and sales are booming.  In the U.S. cigarettes are now seen as ‘down-market,’ as class marks every kind of drug as licit or illicit.  Why do you need to stay calm under capitalism? Of course you do!  Yet Fong claims smoking kills more people in the U.S. than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.  Of most humor, the tobacco companies accused worldwide efforts against cigarettes as Western ‘cultural imperialism.’  You see, lungs are ‘cultural’ – at least according to Judith Butler and the Marlboro Man.

ALCOHOL

Fong notes the huge omnipresence of beer, wine and alcohol in U.S. and U.K. societies in the 1700s-1800s.  Like Engels, he notes its role in sociability and also oblivion after the harsh conditions of early work.  The English ‘pub’lic house was its pinnacle. Alcoholic drinks appeared at breakfast and substituted for unpotable water.  It was part of a ‘gift economy’ for its role in social rituals, including church.  But in the 1900s the Temperance movement understood that drunks didn’t make very good workers in an industrial society, so they pushed prohibition.  Prohibition was a form of labor discipline and was accompanied by racialized attacks on other drugs used by workers. The national KKK endorsed, which made it official. The middle class avoided being targeted, and low-end saloons and taverns took the brunt. Yet highly alcoholic ‘patent medicines’ were exempt – I guess for 'wellness' reasons.  It was a first act in the War On Drugs.

After Repeal alcohol, like coffee, became part of consumptionism.  Your brand marked your cultural status.  AA made the personal responsibility for being a drunk clear – it had nothing to do with the pressures of home or society, and let the producers off the hook.  It was your problem exclusively.  MADD was even financially supported by liquor companies for the same reason. 

OPIATE ‘PAIN KILLERS’

Opium morphed into morphine, which then led to heroin, which became 50 times stronger with fentanyl.  And yet in the 1800s opium derivatives were available in hundreds of products in the U.S. without a prescription.  This happened at the same time the British forced the Chinese into being an opium ‘paradise’ through two colonial wars.  Only later in the 1900s did the anti-drug crusade demonize these drugs as ‘Chinese.’ In fact the term ‘hip’ is derived from the posture of opium addicts lying on their sides, on their hips, puffing on pipes.

Thomas de Quincy, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, made opium an esoteric way to happiness for those with psychic ailments.  The CIA made opiates common currency in Thailand, Central America, Marseilles and Afghanistan.  Henry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, had 1 in 5 of his agents both regulate and deal heroin.  This was the agency that hounded Billie Holiday to death and pushed 'Reefer Madness.' When Big Pharma took over opiates, Anslinger protected their legal monopoly. Later Joe Biden played a key role in civil forfeiture laws, allowing police to seize any assets on probable drug causes, a nice funding source for law enforcement. Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers round out this tale of corporate drug dealing. 

AMPHETAMINES

The Nazi’s doped their Blitzkrieg soldiers with amphetamines.  The U.S. military still uses vast amounts of  ‘energy tablets’ to keep soldiers up for long stretches, raising their attention level and maxing out their energy. This is the U.S. version of the Viking ‘berserkers.’  This medicating of U.S. troops has happened since World War 2. According to Fong, the U.S. military stacks their aide stations with a cornucopia of other drugs, including Viagra.  But these drugs are also useful in a hyper-active 24/7, on-call, over-time, double jobs, double-shift, unpredictable schedule, short sleep, work life.  They make you ‘thin, smart and peppy’ to use Fong’s phrase.  Meth on the other hand is reserved for working-class rural white people down on their luck.  There are now 6,000 amphetamine products on the market.  In 2008 37 million U.S. citizens used amphetamine-like drugs just to keep up with the crushing speed of capitalism.

PSYCHOTROPIC ‘BRAIN’ DRUGS

Fong notes that medications for diagnoses like neurasthenia, anxiety and later depression used to be understood as responding to the conditions of society.  Now they are meant to address something wrong in the brain.  So the theory moved to the right, away of social and real causes understood up to the 1970s, to individual biological brain problems a pill could cure. Sedation was the answer! The bible of the medical industry, the DSMMD, explicitly began linking each diagnoses to a chemical solution, though many medical professionals have now rejected its validity.  Nevertheless this was a huge boon to the medicalization of every human emotion, and Big Pharma profited from this.  Even grief after a death was described as something that needed to be ‘cured’ with medication.  No longer would we have to worry about what effect poverty or long hours or the high speed of life entails.  Take a pill!  This method has slopped over into the vitamin wellness industry and Big Pharma's other cures, like heart disease, diabetes, stroke, overweight and the rest.

PSYCHEDELICS

Fong’s focus is on LSD, but also psilocybin, peyote and MDMA.  He starts with the familiar story of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program of LSD and mental torture, which the CIA cleverly blamed on China.  His rehash of the 1960s is a Time-Life view focusing on Timothy Leary, dropping-out, the Yippies and “New” Leftists like the Weathermen. He quotes upper-class dolts like Joan Didion and centrist liberals like Scott Gitlin to make his points.  What he misses is that most ‘new’ Leftists became ‘old’ Leftists.  He does note that psychedelics work as pacification, inwardness and escapism, sort of like Soma from Huxley’s Brave New World.  They divert people from engagement in social struggle, though humans naturally need a break. Now they are used by a corporate elite ‘micro-dosing’ as a way to generate new ideas for capitalist functioning.  One day he predicts they may be prescribed for depression and anxiety, much like psychotropics Valium and Prozac, so they have immense profit potential.   

ZOMBIE DRUGS

PCP and Ketamine make their users passive and zombified, like too much alcohol makes people fall asleep.  Useful in any pacification program.  Is this what Pink Floyd was talking about in the song Comfortably Numb?  No.  But I do think this is what the Ramones were talking about... I Wanna Be Sedated!

COCAINE & MARIJUANA

Powder cocaine is the drug of irrational overconfidence according to Fong, a perfect fit in a hyper-competitive work world like Wall Street, but also a great party escape.  Crack on the other hand was class-targeted, a poor-person’s escape, and even Daniel Moynihan pointed out that blaming crack took the politicians and capitalists off the hook. Marijuana and hemp on the other hand is relatively benign and useful, yet they have been banned since the 1930s until recently.  The former is still nationally a ‘Schedule 1’ drug.  Its current partial legalization wasn’t possible until medicalization preceded it according to Fong, something that benefitted the drug companies.  Now it is benefitting state coffers and private entrepreneurs.  Yet in his distain for Boomer hippies, Fong ignores the role of marijuana arrests in the incarceration state. 

So that’s bits of the book.  I’m not sure you’ll learn anything unless you are pretty unfamiliar with drugs in the U.S. Fong says that with the decay of neo-liberalism as a dominant capitalist ideology, something else is taking its place.  The punitive solution has not worked, certainly.  “Drug policy is not about drugs” – it’s about society, so a ‘drug policy’ misses what is really at issue. He thinks improvements “in jobs and healthcare” will mitigate the need to take drugs or to demonize them. He opposes blanket and simple legalization as libertarianism, as it allows profiteering and addiction to continue.  He sees most of these drugs as being pleasurable but also having negative personal effects.  

Drugs will continue to mask capital as the stress, poverty, long hours, loneliness and exploitation continue. Drinking and cigarettes are both related to the stress put on the working-class. Then he agrees that decriminalization should proceed, with addiction counseling, safety, knowledge, de-stigmatization and the like. So he ends by recommending a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare For All as associates to decriminalization. How these forms of semi-transitional socialization will come about is left unsaid by Fong.  This is always the weak part of all these kinds of books.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Drugs,” “Alcohol” or “An Insider’s Look at Big Pharma,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “We Own This City,” “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “American Made” (Spinelli); “The Long, Strange Trip,” “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety” (Kuhn); “The Outlaws,” “Yesterday’s Man,” “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Painkiller,” “The Truth About Drug Companies,” “Hollywood” (Bukowski), “Bar None Rescue.”    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / December 12, 2024

Crime and the Coverup

 “Wilmington’s Lie - the Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy” by David Zucchino, 2020 (Part 2) 

This book is a case study of how a ‘liberal’ state like North Carolina turned into its opposite after 30 years of somewhat free elections after Reconstruction in 1865.  Every crime needs a cover-up.  In fact the cover-up is as important as the crime.  It’s not enough to kill 60 people, railroad enemies out of town and violently take over a government, local and state.  You have to hide what happened and then complete your project.  The project was to disenfranchise every dark-skinned person in the state and institute Jim Crow segregation.  This is the essence of North Carolina’s anti-democratic counter-revolution of 1898. 

Ethnic Cleansing

First, ethnic cleansing.  Besides the dark-skinned businessmen forced out of town or who escaped ahead of time never to return - and the Fusionist and Republican light-skinned office-holders – a.k.a. ‘white niggers’ and ‘race traitors’ - who were also put on trains heading north, there were others.  Many black families, after hiding in the swamps for days, returned only to leave.  Zucchino’s figures are that 2,800 black people left Wilmington and went north to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.  Their jobs were taken by white country bumpkins who were not as skilled as the exiles had been. 

Business Opportunities

As you might imagine, the fact that nearly every African-American small businessman, along with a number of Fusionist ‘carpetbaggers,’ were railroaded, literally, out of town, without any time to settle affairs, leaving most of their possessions, shops, homes and businesses behind – that white supremacists would gain financially by taking their place.  Zucchino reports that a State Commission in 2000 later declared that this did not happen, which I find to be nonsense.  Empty houses and apartments were filled by rural white people coming to Wilmington.  Those left in town had to change where they shopped.  Every job formerly held by a dark-skinned person in Wilmington’s government was given over to a white Democrat.  For instance the wealthiest black Wilmingtonian lost his home, saloon, restaurant, pawn shop and real estate holdings.  This kind of thing happened when Jews were expelled from German cities; when Idi Amin in Uganda kicked out Indian merchants; and even after the witch trials in Salem.  The white aristocracy in Wilmington gained the most in financial wherewithal, which makes me wonder about this Commission. 

Legal Impunity

The new city government, led by ‘mayor’ Waddell, convened an inquest to determine the cause of death of the black men.  It was determined that no suspects could be identified for the corpses laid out in the coroner’s office.  Many still wore blood-stained coveralls.  Witnesses finally reported that white men shot first, but no legal proceeding or investigation ever took place by the new Democratic Party chief of police.  Black leaders pressured Congress, Republican President McKinley and the Justice Department to do something.  Eventually a Justice Department probe was ordered, but no one – i.e. ‘reliable white people’ - would testify for fear of their lives.  There were no consequences and all the leaders of the coup went on to illustrious careers in politics. 

The Press and Opinion

There was always an attempt to make everything ‘legal’ looking.  White ministers and the southern press, along with part of the northern press, justified the pogrom as legitimate, as defense against a Negro riot. Most of the black ministers, except two who were expelled from town, counseled ‘turning the other cheek’ – even though they had been accused of stock-piling weapons in their churches.   Yet a Richmond paper and some northern ones realized the coup had been pre-planned.  The general consensus of the press was that the violence was regrettable, the result not.  Textbooks in North Carolina either ignored the issue or claimed the ‘rebellion’ was legitimate and ‘martial law’ necessary.  In 1951 the first research paper at a local University finally contradicted the lie about the takeover and the violence.  

The Color Line

The outrage over Manly’s editorial about all the black women raped by white men or plantation owners reveals something about skin color.  Manly himself had a lighter-complexion, and so did another ‘black’ man in town who was actually mixed ‘white’ and Native American.  North Carolina wanted to institute a Jim Crow rules not allowing anyone to vote whose ancestors hadn’t voted before 1867 and Reconstruction.  However the supremacists realized that many light-skinned ‘darkies’ had white fathers of sorts and could vote based on this, so there was a loophole. This idea of looking back in time was the so-called “Grandfather” clause. Later this is where percentage rules for voting came in – the ‘one drop’ of blood rule – to rule out light-skinned ‘mulattos.’ You can’t get more racist than that.  It's a skin-color method still used by the Federal Government.  The Government refuses to recognize the mixed ancestry of so many people and continues to claim that light and dark skinned people, or those of mixed parentage, are different ‘races.’  Just check your census form or citizenship questionnaires for proof.  

Jim Crowism

The ‘Grandfather Clause,’ already mentioned, was dreamed up first in Louisiana because it allowed poor and illiterate whites to vote, which a poll tax or literacy test would bar.  In effect 'grandfathering' them in.  This law also barred immigrants like Italians from voting in Louisiana, so it was nativist too.  The Supreme Court had legalized poll and literacy tests in 1898 in Mississippi.  North Carolina had almost 60,000 literate African-Americans of voting age in 1900, so they needed something to bar them from voting besides gerrymandering, intimidation and taxes.  The Grandfather clause was quickly adopted in North Carolina, then Georgia, Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma.  Congress refused to oppose the clause on the basis of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.  In 1900 only 5 black citizens in Wilmington voted over a suffrage law that passed barring blacks from voting.  The only dark-skinned man in Congress, who was from North Carolina, lost his seat. 

In Wilmington the African-American celebrations of Jonkonnu and Emancipation Day were banned. In 1899 segregationist laws began to be implemented – dividing railroad cars.  Following that were cruel laws separating blacks and whites in schools, hospitals, cemeteries, cinemas, pools and parks, water fountains, toilets and the like. Jim Crow was fully instituted, a process that spread across the South.      

North Carolina Today?

The modern Republican Party in North Carolina are the Democrats of old. They have used gerrymandering, vote purges, voter ID Laws, reduced early voting, eliminated same day registration and straight-ticket voting, along with other voter suppression tactics for years, even though some have been legally barred.  The repeal of most of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 didn’t help.  Things might even be worse, given the gubernatorial candidacy of Mark Robinson, a vile businessman who called himself a “black Nazi” – outshining in reactionary glory any of the Wilmington blacks who accused Manly of ‘causing’ the pogrom.  Thankfully Robinson lost. Remember, this is the state that sent the reactionary segregationist Jesse Helms to Congress in 1973 for 30 years. 

One sign and one memorial commemorate the events in Wilmington.  There have been some tense local ‘peace’ meetings about this history.  Zucchino interviews descendants of many of the players, especially the initiators of the coup.  None of them apologize for what their predecessors did.  And so it goes.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Wilmington’s Lie (Part 1); “Black Cloud Rising,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “The Bloody Shirt,” “The State of Jones,” “Struggle & Progress,” “The Second Founding" (E. Foner); “Slavery By Another Name” (Blackmon); “Southern Cultural Nationalism.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent cut-out and used section, which has received many books donated by comrades for the holiday season.

Red Frog / December 9, 2024

Lies, Guns and Money

 “Wilmington's Lie - the Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy” by David Zucchino, 2020 (Part 1)

This is a relatively untold story, yet similar to other pogroms against African-Americans like 1921’s Tulsa, OK massacre; 1923’s Rosewood, Florida’s massacre and the 1876 Hamburg, South Carolina killings. The story is told from the moment Union troops, including armed freedmen among them, entered Wilmington in 1865, through Reconstruction, to the bloody violence and coup in 1898, to its aftermath.  It shows that while the Confederacy lost the war, it won the peace.  And, of note, it is still trying to win it.  What is indicative is how you can trace present methods back to those times.

Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 was an enlightened model of somewhat democratic functioning, financial wherewithal, government participation and geographic integration of its dark-skinned citizens.  African-Americans played a prominent role in the economy, the trades, the local government, the skilled professions and more. At the same time abuse of local dark-skinned citizens was normal. Wilmington's pale capitalist elite wasn’t having this ‘black rule’ anymore, and formed “The Secret Nine.”  Wilmington and nearly every county in eastern, tidewater North Carolina had a black voting majority, and this was the real target.  What broke the camel’s back was the unity of the Republican and Populist parties representing blacks and whites, who united in a 'fusion' to replace Democratic Party rule. This political unity was one of a kind in the South.  It was essential to break this bloc with racism, fear and violence.

Supremacist businessmen and politicians in the Secret Nine organized a pogrom just after the November 1898 statewide election, which did not include municipal Wilmington officers.  Their militias started it at the intersection of Hartnett and Fourth Street in Wilmington near the Cape Fear River, now a somewhat bland and anodyne intersection in town, but then a location where darker-skinned workers had congregated. The racists opened with a barrage of gunshots but the lie was told that blacks had shot first.   

The Conspiracy

Zucchino tells of the mobilization of an aggrieved planter and business class, led by people like ex-Klan leader Roger Moore and lawyer and politician Col. Alfred Waddell, followed by many ex-Confederate officers in the Democratic Party. They made the Dems an explicitly white supremacist organization. Waddell promised to “choke the Cape Fear River with (black) carcasses.” The local white-owned papers read like KKK broadsides in 1898, raving about rapists, inventing fearful stories, blowing up trivial incidents to incite race hatred, similar to present hysteria about immigrants.  Racists blamed blacks for planning a riot on election day, a classic lie of projection. The memory of Virginia slaves under Nat Turner rebelling in the early 1800s fueled fake stories about blacks planning to burn white homes and rape white women. The northern press, like the Washington Post and NYT, parroted the racist newspapers.  These kind of conspiracy theories, rumors, lies and fake news are all familiar.  Local militias backed the Democrats, including the Red Shirts, a state-wide militia run by the Democratic Party.  The Secret Nine militia spear-headed the pogrom in Wilmington, with the Red Shirts and 2 white state military units in their wake. 

Opposing them was a long tradition of civil rights activism in North Carolina, first starting with an escaped slave and union spy named Abraham Galloway, of mixed ethnicity, who stood up for ‘colored’ soldiers and then African-Americans in eastern North Carolina and Wilmington as an elected representative.  After he died he was replaced by the ‘light-skinned’ editor of The Daily Record, Alex Manly, who crusaded for better conditions for black people, then had the temerity to oppose lynchings of supposed black rapists in print. He was a member of the ‘talented tenth’ and was targeted for a lynching himself. His allies were white Republicans and Populists – called Fusionists - including the Governor.  The Governor, out of fear, bowed to racist intimidation and removed a slate of local candidates while refusing to call for federal marshals. Conservative black leaders accused Manly of being the cause of the commotion. He himself was nearly lynched on election day. Manly was naïve about the intentions of the city’s white elite. President McKinley, after warnings about a white riot, did nothing.    

As the election in November drew closer, the wealthy white elite organized Wilmington into a military fiefdom, running patrols in each ward.  They knew they would have to use violence to evict local black municipal officers, as the election was only for state and federal seats. As Zucchino describes it, night-riders threatened, beat and attacked potential black voters, while their employers told them they’d be fired if they registered or voted.  Just prior to the vote, Red Shirts attacked dark-skinned people in the streets.  Ben Tillman, a vicious racist who helped organize the killings of black militiamen and people in Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876, lectured them on methods.  He was very open about using lies, fraud, ballot stuffing, forged ballots, beatings and bullets to end ‘nigger rule.’  This was the method subsequently adopted in Wilmington.

The rioters outside the burned building housing the Daily Record

For their part Wilmington blacks were nowhere as well organized.  Gun dealers refused to sell them weapons as individuals, and if they were armed, they had archaic rifles and pistols from the Civil War or hunting.  The Red Shirts had Winchesters and modern hand guns, along with machine guns. Black protests were put down and Fusionist politicians tried to make compromises out of fear.  The Republican and Populist Parties were not armed either, at least not formally.  Black Federal units that had enlisted to fight in the Spanish-American war were kept in Georgia, while white Federal units returned to Wilmington just before the election. They brought their guns, including a machine gun, with them.

The Massacre and Coup

The Red Shirts patrolled on election day, but were dissuaded from lynching Manly – who had already left town. The Democrats, predictably, swept state-wide and federal offices so the lies, racism and intimidation had worked. The next day the local white elite ordered all municipal black, Republican and Populist office holders to resign, under threat.  The day after Red Shirts burned Manly’s newspaper office, confronted fearful black workers at the Compress Cotton mill, then headed over to Hartnett Street where the shootings started.  The fascist pogrom commenced.

The Republican governor bought the lie that this was a ‘black riot’ and ordered the two State militia units in Wilmington, fully trained and armed, to intervene to ‘prevent bloodshed.’  They did not, they perpetrated it.  His decision allowed the white supremacists to declare ‘Martial Law’ in the town against ostensible black rioters.  It was a betrayal.  I’m not going to go into detail from here on in, but the result was, from gunfire by militia men, state ‘national guard’ types and random local whites:  60 black people killed and many injured; middle-class black businessmen expelled from the city overnight, some having escaped earlier; many working-class black families terrorized into leaving town; white Fusionists marched out of town too; the mayor, police chief and aldermen forced to resign, replaced by Democratic Party men; some black-owned buildings burned, wrecked or shot up - all to solidify Jim Crow segregation for almost 70 years in North Carolina. 

(More to Come in Part II)

The value of the book is that it points to an existential problem in the United States.  A virulent capitalist society bent on crushing minorities, splitting the working class and raising up the rich continues to this day, built on an archaic Constitution, history and ideology. It’s like a hamster wheel of progress and backwardness, rolling into the future, a bloody ground-hog day of repetition, nonsense and lies.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Black Cloud Rising,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “The Bloody Shirt,” “The State of Jones,” “Struggle & Progress,” “The Second Founding" (E. Foner); “Slavery By Another Name” (Blackmon); “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” "The Watchmen."

*PBS has a documentary, "American Coup: Wilmington 1898"

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent cut-out and used section, which has just received many books donated by comrades. Come and get them for the Holidays.  Make an Offer!

Red Frog / December 6, 2024

Gothic Anti-Racism

 “The Piano Lesson”– 1987 Play by August Wilson, 1995 film directed by Lloyd Richards

This is part of Wilson’s intense “Pittsburgh Cycle” of 10 plays, this one set in 1936.  The central conflict is between a brother, Boy Willie, up from Mississippi with a load of watermelons to sell, and a sister, Berniece, living in Pittsburgh. It is about a jointly owned piano sitting in their uncle’s two-story home.  Willie’s a sharecropper and Berniece is a mother and housekeeper. 

The piano is unique, carved with images of the family’s relatives, but was originally owned by a slave-owner named Sutter who had this odd carving done by accident.  Their mother kept the piano clean for 17 years as a servant to later Sutters.  Their sharecropper father eventually stole it from the bossman’s house and he subsequently died in a fire set by Sutter’s son or grandson in revenge. But the piano was hidden and later moved to Pittsburgh. This is the piano’s ‘legacy.’

Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy the last Sutter’s land, as that Sutter is now dead.  He’s fallen down a well.  Willie’s father, as a sharecropper, had taught him to revere the soil.  Berniece wants to keep the piano as a link to her toiling mother and the long lost relatives carved on it. So what to do? 

Various local people – one taciturn uncle, one musician uncle, an on-the-make preacher and Boy Willie’s hulking, slow-minded buddy - populate the tale, taking various positions on the fate of the piano.  The complicating factor is that Berniece thinks Boy Willie is a criminal and got a man she was sweet on killed back in Mississippi.  She also suspects him of pushing Sutter into the well to get the land.  He blames the death on a mysterious ‘yellow dog’ that had been flipping bosses into wells for years.  This might be a hint that the oppressed were engaged in payback for Jim Crow and blaming magical ‘yaller dogs.’   

The problem with the play and film is that Gothic horror takes over, as ghosts of the dead are seen in the hallways and mysterious waters flood the floors, seen by both Berniece and her young daughter.  During an exorcism of the house by the preacher, the lights go off, the ground shakes, dishes break and there is a lot of commotion, yelling and fear.  It’s like a scene from The Exorcist.  A dead apparition of Sutter even physically wrestles with Boy Willie upstairs. Loudmouth Boy Willie never took the ghost sightings seriously, but now he does.  This causes him to give up his plan to sell the piano, as it seems black magic haunts it.  It’s a happy ending and the siblings embrace. Right.

The Yaller Dog?

A side story is that Berniece does not want to get married to the preacher in a feminist stand for her independence, and perhaps love for her dead sweetie.  The preacher offers the exorcism to get in her good graces about the piano.

Now this Gothic and magical approach to solving the conflict seems to be a literary slight of hand saying ‘respect’ your ancestors.  However buying Sutter’s land and getting back at that family for slavery and the death of their father seems to be a concrete form of respect.  So it’s ‘respect’ mother or ‘respect’ father in their eyes, but in different ways.  One is a material solution and one is a cultural solution.  The play fails to make the point that keeping the piano was the best idea, as Berniece refuses to play it except in the midst of the exorcism. Perhaps she will teach piano later and earn some money that way, but that is not indicated. So the ‘horror’ is a fake deus ex machina* solution.  There is no ‘lesson’ here at all. Wilson took the weaker choice, enabled in the play by Boy Willie's arrogance and magic. 

The last scene shows Boy Willie driving by a “For Sale” sign on Sutter’s land in Mississippi, but there’s no indication he’ll be buying anything soon.  Dark-skinned sharecroppers and farmers losing land is a historic trend that has not slowed even today.

Perhaps they could have sold the piano to a museum of African American history with a heritage like that, and perhaps won both battles.  But that is a big ‘if.’ A poignant film, similar to Fences and other Wilson plays.  A highlight is the music:  a work song from Parchman Farm, a blues singer and band at a crowded club and an uncle tickling the keys.  Worth watching amongst all the violent and stupid muck that populates streaming nowadays. 

 

*”Deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation.”

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Things of Dry Hours,” “The Dutchman” and “Owl Answer” (Amiri Baraka); “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Butler,” “One Night in Miami” (King); “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “12 Years a Slave” or the word ‘slavery.’

The Cultural Marxist / December 4, 2024

Poverty Abolitionism

 “Poverty, By America”by Matthew Desmond, 2023

This seems to be a re-run of Michael Harrington’s famous 1962 book The Other America, updated to today’s conditions related to poverty.  It is a wonky tour packed with facts, studies and surveys, making a case for “a redesigned welfare state.”  It is consciously not anti-capitalist, endorsing a “capitalism that serves the people.”  It advocates efficient tax collecting, including tax havens; lessening welfare to corporations and the upper middle class and increased taxes on the wealthy and corporate coffers. $1T per year is lost to tax avoidance in the U.S.  Then he says “we can’t spend our way out of this” with tax monies. So he endorses empowering the ‘poor’ and breaking down neighborhood segregation walls regarding class and ethnicity. He finally declares that ‘movements apply the heat.’  All this is familiar stuff. 

Desmond is a prof at Princeton whose main focus is on evictions and housing.  Now he’s enlarged his scope and is searching for a ‘theory’ of poverty.  I use his term ‘poor’ though it is a semi-class term that avoids the fact that most ‘poor’ people work, as even he recognizes.  Desmond never questions why the Roosevelt’s reforms, LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty and various subsequent anti-poverty programs have not actually reduced poverty in the U.S. - certainly not since LBJ 60 years ago. The impoverished working class is still with us, even with increased outlays. He does not make clear that tax monies are subsidies to the capitalists for paying unlivable wages, discharging workers, charging high rents and discriminating themselves  His NYT best-seller book Evicted became an answer on Jeopardy©, so let’s hear what he’s got to say. 

Desmond answers every upper-class, right-wing and centrist attack on poor people or government aid. He challenges the mostly racist ‘laziness’ myth and the idea that most people in poverty are black.  He points out that the mortgage tax deduction, property tax rebates, student loan breaks and 529 Plans are welfare programs for the higher reaches of the class structure.  He contends that wealthy families gain 40% more in government benefits than those at the bottom.  He looks at how poverty measures based on a 1965 food basket haven’t changed, and are just updated for inflation. For instance bourgeois “economists’ say each individual needs $4 a day in the U.S. to afford basic necessities, which is ludicrous.  He notes that those in prison, half-way houses, psych wards, homeless shelters and jails are not counted in statistics of poverty, which is far more than 2 million people. Prison, which affords a roof, regular food, health care of sorts and even a ‘job,’ might be superior to living on the streets!  He makes the point that Black men in the U.S. have the same life-span has men in Pakistan and Mongolia.

Desmond discovers that many poor people do not access federal poverty funds at the state level, which go unspent or are spent on non-poverty related issues.  This was most obvious in Mississippi but has happened in many states. Incidentally Mississippi is a state that has a child poverty rate similar to Costa Rica.  Poverty program applications for disability, SSI, SNAP, Medicaid, housing, temp assistance and unemployment are complicated or automatically rejected.  He gives statistics to show immigrants do not bring down wages or use social services.  Nor is the lack of marriage the problem, as it has become a ‘luxury good’ in his words, with many anti-poverty programs, along with incarceration, mitigating against marriage.  Raising the minimum wage was alleged for 50 years to increase unemployment – yet finally people studied its effect and found no correlation.  The U.S. has some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world with a pathetic sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in many states – another subsidy to capital. The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most successful anti-poverty measures, but it also subsidizes capitalist low pay and benefits.  Dark-skinned workers still make .74 to every dollar made by light-skinned ones in similar jobs, so racism is inherent in the whole color caste U.S. poverty system.

The Welfare Office - I've Been There!

Poverty affects health, thinking, violence, stress, learning and relationships.  Warned against ‘taking a Marxist path’ by a fellow senior academic, he nevertheless understands that poor people are exploited by employers, banks, check cashing outfits, pay-day lenders, slum lords, corner stores, temp agencies, gig work firms, mortgage brokers, rent-to-own fronts and courts. This is a ‘duh.’ Each year $61M in fees from banks, pay day lenders and check-cashing stores are gathered from mostly low-income workers.  Poverty can be made to pay!  In fact Desmond maintains that rents in ghettos are higher than outside of them.

Desmond makes a case that federal anti-poverty programs make a difference, especially during the pandemic.  Poverty levels actually dropped, as did evictions, due to the financial flows from the U.S. government. Child poverty was cut in half. Of course, corporate fraud rose too. He saw no increase in unemployment related to generous unemployment benefits. The “Great Society” of the 1960s halved poverty according to him too. He discusses whether aid programs should be ‘need’ based (as exists now in the U.S.) or universal (as in some European social democracies) like UBI.  He settles for ‘targeted’ aid, but targeted far higher on the economic scale.  He makes this decision given the classes of millionaires and billionaires in the U.S. who would benefit from universal aid.  Class rears its ugly head again.

Desmond looks at the impoverishment of the public sector in certain places, along with the rise in private wealth. This he connects to Reagans massive 1981 tax cut for the rich, which he calls the largest in history - just above Trump’s 2018 version.  Along with Prop.13 in California they knee-capped public spending.  Reagan cut HUD’s housing allowance by 70% for instance. Both were engines of public squalor and private accumulation. This has allowed segregation by ethnicity and net worth in neighborhoods, something busing couldn’t make a dent in.  He claims that $170B in government funds could almost eliminate poverty – an unlikely bet.     

“Empowering the poor” to Desmond means changing labor law, unionization, raising the minimum wage, getting rid of sub-minimum tip and field work wages, initiating housing cooperatives, advancing small dollar mortgages, outlawing usury, heightening consumer activism and more.  He does not mention a federal bank but does mention the Federal 502 Direct Loan program.  He stands for the right of abortion, as it has been shown that unwanted pregnancies throw families and children into poverty or more poverty. 

The second part to this is ‘tearing down the walls’ of class and ethnic discrimination with economic integration.  School districts, public services, hospitals, streets and roads, private enterprise – all are marked by geographic class status in urban and rural areas.  The rise of charter schools has amplified this, as these capitalist schools loot the public sector.  To him the key would involve multi-occupant buildings and apartments in single-family home areas that are ‘affordable’ – a concept no private builder actually complies with. He does note that mixed housing does not degrade property values. This building zone idea has been suggested by the centrist Democrats in Minneapolis, yet builders have objected to it as unworkable regarding ‘affordability.’ Desmond does not mention rent control or empty homes due to disuse, corporate ownership, short term rentals or AirBnB©.  As such he leaves the private real estate sector untouched.    

After reading through all the ‘musts’ in this book, his optimistic view that poverty can be abolished under capital through his ideas seems like a pipe-dream in the U.S.  It would take a social movement of far larger scale than his vague nod to ‘movements’ entails.  He mentions nothing about politics, for instance.  Wonks and the Democratic Party aren’t going to push this soft social-democratic agenda through.  It would involve a wholesale attack on capital in all its various guises by a mostly united working-class led by a competent leadership – a movement which would still have to stop on the brink of replacing capital itself, of socialization and nationalization of basic economic functions and entities.  Desmond advocates a social movement with one hand tied behind its back.

The fact that we have a class system across the world, but especially vile in the U.S., attests to a more systemic and structural problem. His avoidance of the term 'ruling class' testifies to this. A good book on the need to fight poverty, on some ways to do it, but whose solutions, though admirable, come up short. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Poverty” or “Poverty?  What is it Good For?” “The Lie of Global Prosperity,” “Under the Affluence,” “Toward Freedom” (T Reed); “U.S. Cities With the Lowest Life Expectancy,” “The Lower Depths” (Gorky); “Famished Road” (Okri); “Ragged Revolutionaries,” “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” “Price Wars,” “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance); “A Terrible Thing To Waste.” 

Red Frog / December 2, 2024