"Oil" in the Petrostate

“Oil” by Upton Sinclair (1927) - Upon which the film “There Will Be Blood” is based.

This book is the basis of the present film, “There Will Be Blood,” nominated for an Oscar this evening. The lead actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, is also nominated for best actor. My prediction? At least Day-Lewis will win.

The film is only loosely based on the book. The film is an anti-capitalist Brechtian horror-show about oil capitalism, riveting and obsessive. Day-Lewis plays the oil baron, Daniel Plainview, as a larger-than-life monster interested in only one thing – oil wealth. In the process, Plainview raises a baby, left by a dead oil worker, to charm investors, and perhaps give him one human thing to love. Even this fake son is rejected by Plainview at the end of the film. The film ends in a Grand Guginol murder in a private bowling alley, where rapacious capitalism and crooked religion come to terms.

Upton Sinclair has enjoyed something of a revival in these times. Eric Schlosser was inspired by Sinclair's “The Jungle” when he wrote “Fast Food Nation”, an exposure of the state of corporate food in the U.S., especially the meat industry. The recent secret Humane Society tapes of downed and sick cows being forced into the slaughterhouses only shows the problem of animal cruelty and enforcement has not changed since Sinclair wrote about it. It may even have gotten worse.

Now Sinclair’s take on oil has gotten a revival. What bourgeois writer has ever talked about oil, except perhaps as a backdrop to a human interest story, as in “Five Easy Pieces?” Try going on a website and advocate the nationalization of the oil industry – especially at this critical time. The sheep will “Baa” and “Baa” and say you cannot do that. Oil still holds the ultimate power as a product in late imperialist capitalism. Our government, our president, our economy and our wars are based on it.

The book and film both display the concrete nitty-gritty of real oil work and oil workers’ lives. People who have worked in the oil industry in East Texas say the film is quite accurate, and the film is based on Sinclair’s images. Detailed descriptions of how to drill for oil, all the equipment necessary to drill a well, and the problems encountered while doing so, run through the book. In the book, Plainview is not described as a monster. He is a quite skilled, hard-working and kind man, who has a real son, Bunny, not a fake son. Bunny accompanies him everywhere he goes and even helps discover oil, as he accidentally steps in some pooling on the ground around Paradise, California while they are quail hunting. The boy Paul, who tells them there might be oil on the family farm, is not a thieving informer as in the film, but a tough, bright boy who grows into being a Communist, and is beaten to death by fascist American thugs at the end of the book.

In the book, Plainview loves Bunny, and Bunny loves his old man. But Bunny, who is actually the central character of the book, is appalled at what the old man has to do to lease, drill and defend ‘his’ oil. Plainview buys off politicians to get roads built, gives ‘premiums’ to vendors to get equipment in place quickly, deceives land owners about what is under their property, is close friends with the police, newspapermen and heads of schools, and eventually has to join the Employers Association. The Federal Government orders an oil workers’ union contract while World War I is going on, to ensure labor peace. When the war ends, things change. The Association hires gun thugs to break the eventual strike in the oil fields that develops against de-certification. They bring in scabs, deport anyone they can, jail everyone they can, blacklist pro-union workers, and coordinate propaganda campaigns against “communism” with the local newspapers. The old man tells Bunny he can’t quit the Association or they would destroy him too, even if he is a capitalist. This subtly shows that even 'kind' people have to do awful things if the system requires it.

Paul’s brother becomes the religious leader and Prophet Eli, of the Third Revelation. In the book, Eli becomes wealthy performing fake healings and making endless bombastic radio sermons. He tells the oil workers that they don’t need a union, they only need God to take them to heaven. Even Plainview makes donations to him, in case Eli’s help is needed in some oil matter. When Paul is assassinated at the end, Eli lies and claims Paul had told him he was no longer an atheist, and so gives Paul a religious funeral.

The larger political environment of the book is around the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. Bunny’s dilemma, as he is repulsed by raw capitalism, is whether he will become a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist.’ This dialog between the two left sides goes on through most of the book. Bunny helps arrested union strikers get out of jail, rescues an old Jewish socialist from being deported, and gets Paul out of jail too. This is all due to the money his father gives him, and also due to his father’s weight in the community, Angel City, which is probably a thinly disguised version of Los Angeles. They call Bunny a ‘parlor pink’ in the yellow newspaper, the Daily Howler, but he does his best to help the working class.

Bunny is swayed to the left by Paul, who is drafted into the U.S. army and sent to Vladivostok to help the Whites during the Russian civil war. There Paul sees how the business men are using the U.S. army to gain a foothold in Russia and Siberia. He becomes a Bolshevik, along with many other American soldiers, and returns home to the oil fields. Sinclair, who ran for Congress as a Socialist in California, is quite positive about the Bolshevik Revolution throughout the book. He quite rightly shows how it was the ordinary people that had finally seized the reins of power.

Bunny lives his personal life going through college, having romances with rich women, driving his motorcars, taking foreign trips and eventually hooking up with a movie star. It is clear Sinclair, ever the materialist, sees that no matter what Bunny thinks, he is swayed by his money and class condition to live life in a certain way. Bunny is kind of able to have his radical cake and eat his bourgeois cake too. He is still an honest boy at that, and starts a left-wing sheet for students and young people with one of the members of the youth arm of the Socialist Party, Rachel. He eventually weds Rachel and starts a school for leftists on a farm, with money from his now dead father’s depleted and looted oil fortune.

Sinclair clearly sees oil as not just an American issue. Sinclair show Plainview becoming part of a syndicate getting an oil lease in Mosul, now Iraq. Some things never change. No blood for oil ... otherwise “there will be blood.”

Order it from May Day Books!
--Red Frog, 2/24/2008

Open forum on the elections

The major candidates do not support immediate withdrawal from Iraq, universal single-payer healthcare or any number of goals of the progressive movement. So what is to be done? Come to a forum and discuss!

UNIVERSITY IN CHAINS

"The University in Chains – Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" by Henry Giroux, 2007

This is one of those cases where someone reads a book so that you don’t have to. This book by a Canadian professor is heavy on the pedagogical and repetitious verbiage of academe, and low on clarity and brevity. Its laudable point is to warn about the present attack on academic freedom in the university, waged by fundamentalist Christians, corporate theorists and right-wing politicos. I assume its target audience are those academics who can tolerate jargon. He takes the title, of course, from an actual quote by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican who looks like a liberal Democrat in light of the decay of politics in the U.S.

Giroux’s thesis is that after 9/11, the government and right wing in the United States have increased their attack on the ‘traitors’ in higher education, in an attempt to control the faculty, course content, research and direction of the modern college. He separates his book into three main chapters – one on the militarization of the universities, one on the corporatization of the universities, and one on the right wing assault, lead by people like David Horowitz, against academic freedom, progressive faculty, research and course material. To boil it down, Giroux thinks the right wants the university to train, not teach, and to prevent a free range of thinking, and replace it by allegiance to corporate and military America. The plan, in essence, is to have universities be the direct handmaidens of the military, the corporation and the government, and to eliminate ANY official space for democracy, and dissident thinking or research. This thesis fits with the thesis that claims U.S. society is slowly veering into a sort of absolutist ‘corporatist’ environment, a totalitarian ‘democracy’, call it what you will.

His first chapter on the military on campus is the most vague, generally attacking national government policy. Military penetration of the University has gone far beyond the ROTC program. Giroux identifies the military as the third largest source of research grants in the U.S. university system - 350 colleges engage in it, mostly in electrical engineering, computer sciences, metallurgy and oceanography. MIT, Carnegie Mellon and the U of Texas are the most prominent. Certain ‘for-profit’ colleges have now become almost exclusive higher training centers for U.S. military personnel, including internet universities like the University of Phoenix. In the 70s, the CIA worked with hundreds of academics over a hundred campuses. That number has now increased, as the military is absolutely flush with money. Prominent members of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia faculty openly encourage students to join the secret services like the CIA. The DOD even convinced some members of the American Anthropological Association to develop some of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Theories like ‘non-linear’ warfare, which says that the military should move LATERALLY through walls and buildings, or above or under obstacles, were developed by theorists in the university setting.

Needless to say, people who work with the CIA and DOD are secretive and trade in disinformation, compared to the normal openness required by academic research. This is one of the obvious democratic contradictions ‘military’ academics faces.

Giroux’s second chapter is about the penetration of U.S. corporations into the life of the university to an unprecedented degree. Anyone working at the University of Minnesota will no doubt be aware of this. Medical companies contract immense amounts of research at the U. In fact, nationally, Big Pharma spends more on advertising than research, as much of theirs is done at public institutions like the University, on the public’s dime.

The modern theory, according to Giroux, is that the University is not a democratic space for the pursuit of truth or facts, but a corporation itself. Students are consumers, professors should tailor their teaching to the ‘market of ideas’ and the administrators are the CEO’s running this show. Worried about costs, and returns on investment, and ideas which do not fit into corporate America, only those benefiting academic ‘entrepreneurs.” Money, not truth, is the new standard. Intellectual ‘property’ is more important than intellectual competence. In fact, 60% of academics are now without tenure, partly due to the efforts of these new “CEOs,” thus ‘proletarianizing’ the faculty. Part time faculty increased 82% from 1987 to 1993. Even tenure for those now have it is no longer secure, as certain recent cases have shown.

The first step is to welcome corporate America in the front door – grants from corporations for buildings and sports pavilions; food corporations taking over food service; Barnes and Noble handling the book stores; VISA putting it’s name on “university’ credit cards, and perhaps even mandatory product placement inside classroom Powerpoint presentations!

Part of creating a new University is stopping the democratization of the University, and creating a ‘privileged’ elite, which can afford soaring tuition rates, even if they have to put themselves in peony for many years by taking on large student loans. Giroux estimates the average student debt now at $30,000, almost double just 5 years ago. This process has been obvious on the U of M campus, where tuition increases have been much higher than inflation for years. The old ‘land grant’ institution of the 60s-70s, which lead to tens of thousands of working class children going to college (and leading to much radicalism on campus) has been replaced by an ostensibly ‘elite’ school, with the poor and working class elements being sent to 2 year or out-state schools.

While people still study the liberal arts (a dangerous thing, that), the hard and useful sciences are where the emphasis of the modern University is, as the liberal arts do not translate directly into jobs, or act as very good feeder ramps for local corporations.

He gives examples of academics in the pay of outside corporations who have done studies that support the products they study, while routinely ignoring proper methodology. If the study finds problems with a product, sometimes it has been suppressed. Professors who’s research creates problems for certain products or ideas favorable to some corporation are attacked in public, and academic journals have pressure put on them not to publish their work.

Giroux points out universities may even face the great threat that blue collar workers have faced for many years – being replaced by a software program or ‘professor’ in India, teaching over the web, for a quarter of their pay. Students in the new corporate university will sit at home, alone at terminals, taking on-line tests, watching pop up videos, and will e-mail questions to instructors. Half of all universities in the U.S. now have on-line education. This way libraries, classrooms and labor can be trimmed immensely. Secondary education will become no more than mail-order ‘matchbox’ universities for many people. And of course the content of all these materials will be owned and controlled by the universities or the vendors that provide the content.

The third section concerns the right wing assault on the democratic space represented by the University. Giroux sees the best example of this in the myriad efforts of people like David Horowitz, a former leftist, now a lunatic reactionary who still sees commies and terrorists under every bed. Foundations dominated by extreme right businessmen, starting in 1973, have committed much money to black-listing professors that they see as insufficiently patriotic, or hostile to Israel, or as dissidents against the corporate state. They attempt to control curricula, staff, research and visiting professors. To do this, they work with reactionary yellow newspapers and cable channels, state institutions and conservative politicians, and corporatist ‘intellectual’ foundations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise, Manhattan, Hoover and Claremont Institutes. If it all looks somewhat like the McCarthy era, it is. Though Giroux insists this attempt is more sinister, as it is now directed, not just at ‘terrorists’ or ‘communists’ but at democracy itself. In essence, democracy has become explicitly subversive.

Giroux goes on to cite examples of attempts by Horowitz’s organizations to inhibit democracy on the University campus in recent years. Horowitz usually uses several reactionary students to either outright lie or to complain about hearing ideas they do not agree with, thus putting pressure on professors to tailor their courses to all their ‘customers’ – especially the conservative students. Instead of an exchange of ideas, normal for a democratic space, Horowitz wanst only a prescribed list of approved ideas. This can lead up to fights where conservative campus administrations and trustees, responding to massive pressure from right-wing groupings outside campus, and against the recommendations of department faculties, suspend or deny tenure to left-wing professors who have ideas and do research that does not flatter the corporate state.

An example of this left out of the book is the recent denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in Chicago, after much pressure by Alan Dershowitz and the Likud lobby in the U.S. Finkelstein's work centered on the misuse of the Holocaust in the service of a "my country, right or wrong" position toward the State of Israel. Finkelstein, after being recommended for tenure approval by his peers, was denied tenure by the school's Board on Tenure, and that decision was upheld by the president of DePaul. This decision reflects both the weakening position of the faculty and the inhibition of scholarship.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 2/6/2008

Just having some fun

Book Review: "Revolution in the Air"

“Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum, published 2002

This book is about “the new communist movement.” As a former member of the ‘Trend’ here in Minneapolis, I intersected with the ‘new’ communist movement (“’N’CM”) for a time. Max Elbaum was an independent radical around the Guardian newspaper in San Francisco, and was briefly in the Guardian clubs. He and others around that paper, including the famed Irwin Silber, formed the organization “Line of March,” part of the anti ultra-left correction to the ‘N’CM, and also part of the ‘Trend.’ Elbaum highlights the period between 1968 to 1973 as the ‘N’CM’s high water mark, then traces it slow decline throughout the rest of the 70s and 80s. At least two U.S. organizations still exist from this movement, one of them the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which is actually two organizations now, and the second, the Revolutionary Communist Party ("RCP").

I am grateful for histories of this period that do not denigrate the left. Todd Gitlin’s “The Sixties” for instance is completely antagonistic to the later revolutionary developments in SDS. But I also don’t want to read a history that is only a partial history. Full disclosure here. I was in SDS, Progressive Labor Party, the “Trend,” a supporter of the Spartacist League; then a member of the Global Class War tendency, a “Marcyite” splitoff of the SWP and Worker’s World Party; then a member of Socialist Action, then of the Communist Party, and then the Labor Party. So I’ve been around the block, checking every pretender to Leninism. I’ve been, for periods of time, an anarchist, a Maoist, a Stalinist, a Trotskyist of various types and a labor activist, so, there you go.  Trotsky is still my loadstone prior to 1940.

It’s not pretty. But on the other hand, as Elbaum points out, some of the most dedicated, hard-working and competent people joined the communist organizations of the time, desiring to overthrow capitalism. And what is wrong with that? They could have been pricks and gotten careers, but then they would have missed all the fun. I never got a career, but then we didn’t overthrow capitalism - yet.

Elbaum details each and every collective, third world organization, rank and file committee, group and party that took up mostly Maoism in the period after the split in SDS in 1969. They were all mentioned on the pages of The Guardian, a national paper that most everyone read sometimes. Probably because of its intense identification with the ‘N’CM, it folded when this movement collapsed in the late 80s, closing it's doors in 1992. The Guardian had started during the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in the 50s, and became more left wing in the 60s, and later specifically attached itself to this tendency in the 70s.

While Elbaum mentions Amilcar Cabral or Che or Castro or Ho Chi Minh, or every other Marxist and semi-Marxist in the world, it was Mao “ZeDong” that the “new” communist movement grouped around. Which is why I have a beef with the term “new” communist movement. While the left in the U.S. was influenced by Che “moral incentives” Guevara and Kwame “Black Book” Nkrumah and Nguyen “People’s War” Giap and even the Port Huron statement, the ideological foundation of the vast majority of the ‘new’ communist movement was Mao. And Mao wasn’t really all that new. He was trained by the Soviets, and developed his own ideological twists in the 40s, 50s and 60s in response to Stalin's bad advice. Elbaum uses the term to distinguish the ‘new’ communists from those in the CP and those in the Trotskyist organizations, who were the ‘old’ communists. I think a more correct and honest term would be the new Maoist movement or just Maoist movement. The organizations that were dedicated to Cuba, Venceremos for instance, were marginal. The Communist League, which Elbaum includes in the ‘new” movement, was anti-Mao and pro-Stalin. But they got a stipend to be called ‘new’ while PL, who used Mao against Mao himself, got called ‘old.’ This was a movement that read Stalin’s “On the National and Colonial Question” and called themselves ‘new.’ Go figure. Elbaum uses the terms “Leninist” and “Marxist-Leninist” in the same proprietary way as he uses the term ‘new communist movement,’ as if they owned these phrases. They didn’t, and still don't.

In fact, no Party in this crowd got the Cuban ‘franchise” or the Vietnamese "franchise." And even the Chinese, more interested in making a block with Nixon and the U.S., encouraged only “U.S. – China Friendship Associations" during this period. No Peking millions for some lucky Lenin! Avakian and Klonsky must have been miffed. Even Progressive Labor, when it was recognized by Peking prior to the block with the U.S., probably did not get too much in the way of aid. Signs of things to come.

But I digress.

I respect historians who specify what part of a river they are studying. To me, the wonder of the 1960s and 1970s is that it gave world-wide birth to many Marxist movements, of various stripes. Even the sclerotic Communist Party USA was able to increase its membership during this period, especially behind Angela Davis. The focal points of this book are organizations like Revolutionary Union / RCP; Worker’s Headquarters / October League; Communist League, Communist Workers Party, League of Revolutionary Struggle, DRUM, Puerto Rican Socialist Party and Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committees, all part of this “new’ communist movement. However, the world wide Marxist upsurge also gained recruits in the U.S. for the ‘old’ Trotskyist (at the time) Socialist Workers Party, the ‘old’ Schactmanite International Socialists, the ‘old’ Marcyite Worker’s World Party, the ‘old’ CP, various 'old' Trotskyist groups and even the ‘old’ PLP. So the question naturally arises, why does Elbaum only focus on part of the river? An historian interested in the whole revolutionary U.S. worker’s movement would cover all the groups. But Elbaum was hip deep in his end of the movement, and it is understandable that he might not feel qualified to write about the rest of the movement. I assume that is his motivation.

Good enough.

However, when some of his descriptions of the rest of the movement read like a clever and diplomatic “Line of March” theoretical article, I begin to wonder if this is a history, or another, more ‘objective’ polemic from that journal.

Elbaum’s tale goes something like this. There was the bureaucratic and reformist Kruschevites of the CP. The radicals of PL split from them, carrying the revolutionary banner until they got too sectarian (or perhaps hostile to the politics of the other factions in SDS). Later PL went crazy and denounced Mao for blocking with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. Well, someone had to uphold the revolutionary banner, and who better qualified than the loyal and reasonable hippie youth Maoists of RYM II (a grouping within SDS). SDS collapsed, PL became insignificant, and the only real forces that mattered from 1968-1973 were the multifarious organizations of the ‘new’ communist movement, until it too went off the rails in the late 70s, and had to be corrected by the magnificent “Trend”, which saved us all to work within the Rainbow Coalition in the 80s, ending up on the left of the Democratic Party. The end. I joke, but not much.

I’ll admit to being one of those ‘prairie’ roughnecks who, perhaps too late, began to give the various left leaders in New York and San Francisco a hard time (Elbaum is from San Francisco, headquarters of several left organizations, including Line of March.) From my own experience, our Minneapolis SDS did not collapse after the convention in 1969, unlike Elbaum’s fable. We had a large presence in 1972, during the anti-war rebellion here on the U of M campus. PL cadre, along with the SWP, organized Local AFSCME 1164 of the U of M Hospital Workers union in the period PL supposedly became irrelevant. While PL was doing this, Maoism dominated the original and tiny May Day Books located on Selby-Dale and later, Franklin Avenue.

Maoism did inspire many organizations in the U.S. across a large ethnic spectrum - black, Latino, Asian and 'white.' The Panthers, legend goes, sold the Red Book to radicals at Berkley to make money, and didn’t read it until later. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party probably had more influence from the ‘old’ Communist Party than from Mao, but was still inspired by that milieu. Black working class radicals in Detroit, working in the auto industry, read and acted on Maoist teachings, and developed a powerful strike wave in that industry, and a mass presence for a time in some of the shops. This to me is the high point of the Maoist movement’s positive influence. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Workers Congress, DRUM, ELRUM, FRUM and the whole Detroit movement are a great expression of the work Marxist cadre can do in the labor movement. This work is wonderfully described in the book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin.

From my experience, as I moved to Chicago during part of this period, the left was pretty balkanized, based on city. Perhaps the ‘N’CM had a large role in the Bay Area or Detroit. Perhaps other groups were strong in Atlanta or New York or Minneapolis? Elbaum’s selectiveness is such that he reports on splendid auto walkouts in Detroit lead by DRUM, and ignores walkouts lead by PL – Mack Avenue in 1973 for instance. Why? Because it does not fit with the fable. Or the overwhelming presence of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the national MOBE and other anti-war groups. Or the campus presence of Youth Against War and Fascism in New York. A Freedom Road comrade here in Minneapolis told me that Line of March never had comrades in factories, and claims Elbaum’s book does not identify factory work done by some forces in the ‘N’CM. I’m sure many comrades could say the same thing as to the carefully chosen nature of this history.

Elbaum points to events in Boston in 1974-75 as showing the first large failure of the RU/RCP, which was the largest of the 'N'CM's organizations at that time. RU/RCP thought the main problem in Boston was busing, not racist attacks on busing. So the RU paper attacked the busing scheme, and black activists noted that their line and the line of racist ROAR were coincidentally the same. Progressive Labor, which was supposedly dead according to the fable, lead 2,500 people waving red banners in Boston in 1975, marching against the racists in ROAR, this mostly from the New York and Boston branches of the party. PL also organized a summer project that year that brought hundreds of anti-racist students to the city to oppose racism. The main large demonstration at Boston’s Carson Beach during that summer, to ‘integrate’ the beach, and against the racist violence of ROAR, was led by forces close to the SWP, NAACP and INCAR. Where is the ‘N’CM in all this? Elbaum identifies the most correct group as the “Proletarian Unity League”, a handful of comrades in Boston. I.E. the ‘N’CM managed to have almost no presence on the progressive side of this fight, while the “old” communist movement did. But that is not in this book. As an aside to this 'feet on the ground' issue, PL, in all it's ultra-left and thuggish glory, had a split of 100 people in Boston at the time. I think this split alone had more people in it than the organized cadre in the whole Boston 'N'CM.  Nothing new here.

Ideologically, Elbaum reports that the ‘new’ communist movement was initially inspired and guided by the ‘deep’ political work of the RU – principally Red Papers I, II and III, authored by Bob Avakian, a red diaper baby who went on to lead the RCP. As someone who tried to wade through those documents can tell you, they were turgid, cliched and slavishly Maoist. This was not clear, concise, factual, working class prose. This was a copy of something from China. Elbaum heralds his own group, Line of March and later ‘Rectification’ as producing the only sizeable theoretical work in the ‘N’CM. I don’t know if he’s right, but it couldn’t have been difficult to claim that title.

The second great failure Elbaum indicates was the debate over the USSR. Crucial to the ideological development of the ‘N’CM was the theory of the USSR as a capitalist and ‘social-fascist’ country. Mao’s bloc with Nixon in 1971 later lead the Chinese CP (minus victim-of- plane-crash Lin Piao) to attacking the Soviets as the ‘main enemy of the people of the world’ in 1971, a consequence of the erroneous theory of magical capitalist restoration. Somehow PL gets no credit, as Maoists, for immediately recognizing the logical consequences of this theory, and breaking with China. This same theory is opposed 6 years later by Elbaum and the developing “Trend” during a ferocious debate within the ‘N’CM over the Cuban intervention in Angola in the late 70s. The "Trend" lined up in support of the Cuban intervention. While most CP and Trotskyist forces in the world supported the Cuban intervention against South Africa and their Angolan front groups, the pro-Chinese groups opposed the Cuban intervention. The Chinese incidentally lined up with U.S. imperialism, which also opposed the Cubans and entered on the side of South Africa.

In order to hide how correct the “old” communist movement continued to be on the issue of the class character of the USSR, Elbaum uses Tariq Ali (unnamed affiliation, but a British Trotskyist at the time) to attack the semi-Trotksyist Schactmanite IS for exaggerating the capitalist nature of Russia. The funny part here is that Max Schactman developed his theory of the USSR’s ostensible capitalist nature about 20 years before Mao. Even in error, the ‘old’ communists beat the Maoists to the punch! Not in this book of course.

Elbaum rightly shows the drift of the U.S. to the right and the dispersal of the working class as the objective cause of the destruction of the ‘N’CM. He also identifies deep flaws in Maoist and Stalinist thinking and organization. This theoretical re-evaluation of the ‘N’CM occurred during the time of the “Trend” in the late 70s as the Angola situation developed. This effort was lead by groupings of local Marxists in various cities like Philadelphia (PWOC), Tucson (TR), Boston (PUL) and San Francisco (Rectification) that began to question ultra-leftism in the party-building Maoist movement, and tried to create an organizational and theoretical alternative, the "OCIC" - Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. Minneapolis also had a “Trend” group, which had a large presence at Honeywell, leading a rank and file caucus in Teamster’s Local 1145 of about 40 individuals for a time. Elbaum asserts that later forces in these Trend groupings formed the organizational basis for the left in the "Rainbow Coalition" movement in the 80s, behind Jesse Jackson.

Elbaum especially highlights the growth of the social-democratic organizations and papers, like Democratic Socialist of America ("DSA") and In These Times, and the weakening of the Maoist papers and organizations in the 80s, as a political barometer of the times. For example, Elbaum traces the trajectory of the New American Movement as it moved from engaging the Marxist left in the 70s, to later joining with DSOC to form DSA in the 80s, as indicative of the winds of 'bad' change.

Elbaum, while disappearing Trotskyism, sometimes repeats the same old slanders. In one passage, he slams the semi-Trotskyist IS as sectarians, a group he accuses of always splitting hairs, and unable to unite with anyone. (As the joke goes, if you had 2 Trotskyists in a room, you’d have 3 factions.) An astute reader of this book will notice the constant splits the ‘monolithic’ Maoists were prone to. But later in the book he includes Trotskyism as part of the left, and treats the Communist Party like something other than a ‘social fascist’ organization, which reflects his fairness. Elbaum himself seems to have ended up politically somewhere just to the left of the CP, but seems to be a person who now has a deeper understanding of the legitimacy of the various organizations across the whole left.

The most powerful part of reading this book, no matter what tendency you are in, is that it chronicles the times and events that we all lived in, and tried to react to politically. Whether it is the postal workers strike, the gas ‘crisis’, the Detroit walkouts, the Boston busing crisis, the Angola war, the Baake decision, the Air Traffic Controllers strike, the wars in Central America, or the election of the insurgent Harold Washington in Chicago, this makes you realize the tumultuous history we have lived through in such ostensibly ‘quiet times.’

And these cadres and former cadres – in whatever organization, from whatever party, who still struggle against capitalism in and out of the labor movement - should be given credit. Whether it is the activists in town from Freedom Road, which came out of the former SDS/ RYMII/ Maoist movement, or Socialist Appeal, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Action, which are part of the world Trotskyist movement, or the CP and SWP, which are still recruiting, or the TDU / Labor Notes groupings, influenced by IS; or those independent Marxists still lying in the organizational weeds – whatever the background, they are part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul workers movement. Quite clearly, we have all been in this together – our similarities are much greater than our differences. No history should pretend we don’t exist, or if it notices our existence, then disappear it. Read this book, but mind the gaps.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, 1/13/2008

Send an Anti-war Message for the Holidays

Scenes from the holiday anti-war gathering in Uptown, Minneapolis. December 21st 6:30 - 7:30

Event: Frida Kahlo, at Walker Art Center

Frida Kahlo, Walker Art Center, through January 20, 2008

Can you say self-portrait? Patron saint of Mexico, self-created icon, Christ and Mother Mary stand-in Frida Kahlo has paintings in her first exhibition in also-ran Minneapolis, running through January 20 at the ‘new’ Walker Art Center.

You have to hand it to Mexico. What country in the world has images of three revolutionaries – Zapata, Villa and Kahlo – hanging all over the country? The U.S. does not have pictures of our revolutionaries like Washington or Lincoln or Grant in stores or houses. Our memory does not go that far back. Kahlo and her story are familiar to many, if only because she probably did more self-portraits than any other painter. When I first discovered Kahlo, I was put off by this. What heights of self-centeredness! What conceit! I avoided Kahlo like the plague. Then I saw the film “Frida” with Selma Hayek. Say what you will about Hollywood, this will be their first, and last, film about Kahlo. And perhaps the last film about Kahlo by anyone. The best part of the film was explaining the self-portraits, and actually showing other, broader works that put her squarely in the surrealist tradition. Andre Breton explained this to Kahlo, who was actually surprised to hear it. She is probably the most prominent woman surrealist painter.

Some of her best non self-portraits are not in this collection, but there are a few that are. Kahlo was tortured by spinal injuries from an accident, multiple miscarriages, and adultery from her two-time husband, Diego Rivera. She spent time in hospitals and at home, flat on her back, where the legend is the only thing she could paint was herself, lying flat, from mirrors suspended above or in front of the bed. In concentrating on herself, breaking the mold of most painters, in showing herself in pain, bleeding, part animal, dressed as a peasant, an Aztec, in high detail, aging over the years, her body parts exposed, she created the first ‘autobiographical’ painting style, which was effective because it spoke to more than just Frida Kahlo. In effect, she created herself as a semi-religious icon for Mexican women and Mexican people, representing their pain. Her personal story became something many women might identify with. Indeed, the show was attended by many women on the one free Thursday I went, including many Latino women.

Some of the paintings here are “Henry Ford Hospital,” about a miscarriage in Detroit; “The Dream”, which hung in Paris; “Self Portrait on the Border,” which is about the clash of Mexico and the U.S.; and “My Dress Hangs There,” about her stay in New York. Another is "Moses," based on Kahlo's reading of an analysis of Freud. "Moses" is one of the better non-self portrait pictures, and in style is similar to Rivera. It includes mini-portraits of Hitler and other assorted odious ones on one side and Lenin, Stalin and Gandhi on the other, in the apparently 'non-odious' area.

There are several portraits of Rivera in the show, though he is not the theme here. There are two paintings, one of which is "Suicide of Dorothy Hale," that spread out onto the frames. Another has a three dimensional approach, as it is mounted under a kind of painted glass, and made me think Kahlo might be the source for so many Mexican three-dimensional ‘box’ paintings now popular. Additionally, Kahlo painted on metal a lot, which might have been a product of poverty, or an appreciation of its hard texture and thin width.

There is also a large collection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera attached to the show, from the collection of a friend in San Francisco. Kahlo, as true in her painting, was also the favorite subject of the camera. Her clothing and jewelry compliment her art, as she saw herself as a 'work of art' as well. In one photo, Kahlo is shown in neck traction, with the Spanish words, “totally fucked’ written across the top. In another, the most famous, Kahlo poses with her family dressed as a young well-dressed man. There are 4 pictures of Trotsky, and one interesting picture of Rivera and Kahlo in front of an English sign selling Marxist pamphlets, which looks like it was taken in NYC in front of a Socialist Workers Party table at the New School.

Typical of the Walker, they make no mention of Kahlo’s specific radical politics in their storyboard descriptions of her life, preferring to dwell on the personal trials. While the storyboards are extremely accurate in other respects, the curators should be spanked for this de-sanitization of Kahlo in the interest of appealing to middle class women from Minnetonka, who they think don’t want to know their dear Frida was a communist, and for a long time a Trotskyist sympathizer.

Go to the show, as the Walker has finally hit two home runs with this and the Picasso 'inspiration' show one after the other. This show was very crowded, on both pay and Thursday nights, so get there early. After years of sterile 'modern' art shows that communicate to few people, the Walker has finally grown as a museum. Of course, in the process they had to abandon 'abstract' art in their special exhibitions. And better yet, visit the main source museum for Kahlo in Coyoacan, Mexico, just southwest of Mexico City. This, also, is close to the Old Man's last resting place.

Red Frog

Russian Revolution event at Mayday!

Book Review: "Party's Over"

“The Party’s Over” – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg

One in a long line of recent books about peak oil, this book speaks from the perspective of oil engineers and scientists. Based on their perspective, a world-wide Hubbert’s peak for oil is being reached somewhere around now, between 2005-2010.

Carrying on with the theme of the ‘cheap oil fiesta’ announced by Richard Kunstler in his book, “The Long Emergency,” Heinberg agrees that the ‘party’ is over, and, cutting to the chase, agrees with Kunstler that no technological fix(es) will suffice to completely replace oil and it’s products - gasoline, jet fuel and natural gas. He says essentially we had better be prepared for a combination of new technologies and reduced material living standards.

Heinberg starts with a description of the first and second laws of thermodynamics (the first says energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, the second says that conversion leads to dissipation of energy) and shows how there is no ‘perpetual motion’ machine in the universe, as much as humans have attempted to invent one. The second law also says that entropy in closed systems increases. The universe is a closed system, as far as we know now, and so is the earth. Hence, entropy is the ultimate fate of the earth and the universe, and our best hope is a ‘climax ecosystem.’ He proceeds to describe the workings of the earth’s biosphere and it’s development into a climax ecosystem - a balanced, sustainable environment. On the road to a climax ecosystem, or growing out of it, there is a danger that some organism will become more populous than the system can support, due to a sudden massive increase in food. When the ‘food’ runs out, the population will ‘overshoot’ habitability, which will resort in a massive die-off of the species eating that food. He considers humans to have acted no differently, to date, than any rat, fruit fly or bacteria would if confronted with a new abundant food source - oil. And our fate may be the same if it runs out.

From this model, Heinberg thinks humans are reaching a point where there might be a massive die-off, due to the collapse in the oil supply, our ‘food’ and the foundation of our present world agriculture. Other theorists, like James Lovelock, the discoverer of “Gaia,” featured in last month’s Rolling Stone, think global warming, and attendant droughts and starvation, could lead to a die off. The numbers they toy with are a remaining 2 or 3.5 billion of 7 billion people, Heinberg the more 'optimistic. ' These are catastrophic projections.

Heinberg includes a short history of the development of petroleum, and it’s incredible in-built energy. The United States was the discoverer of mass oil, and its first beneficiary - it is the technical foundation of our society. Gasoline is one of the most efficient fuels ever discovered - one gallon can do the work of 510 man hours of work. The dangers of relying on this non-renewable resource are environmental degradation, climate change and eventual over-dependency on a phantom. The defeat of Germany and Japan were both linked to their lack of fuel. When Eisenhower created the interstate system in the 1950s, he helped destroy rail all over the country, something we are still grappling with today. In 1970, Hubbert’s oil peak was reached in the U.S., much as Hubbert had predicted. Heinberg notes that now U.S. troops are in 120 countries, and have established bases near oil and gas pipelines all over the world.

Heinberg takes petroleum scientist supporters of Hubbert’s methodology and presents their arguments. They think Saudi claims of reserves are inaccurate, and are propagated for political reasons, as the alleged Saudi reserve has not changed in 17 years! Nor have the reserves of every other Middle Eastern country. Nearly every known oil field in the world is past peak – the North Sea, Mexico, Nigeria, Algeria, Iran, Russia, etc. The peak is for almost every kind of oil. Heavy Venezuelan and Canadian oil tar are included in the book, though not at peak. They may produce more in the future that other fields, but their costs and consequences are much greater than regular oil. To replace world oil with Canadian oil shale would require 700 fuel plants and a water waste lagoon the size of Lake Erie to process it all. He concludes that the relatively short historic industrial interval of oil is coming to a close.

To make his second point on the uniqueness of oil, he goes through each replacement technology one by one. Natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, hydro, geothermal, tides and waves, biomass, fusion and conservation all have their ‘at bat.’ Natural gas is near or at peak itself. Coal is highly carbon-positive, and its efficiency is growing less as more efficient coal has already been mined. Coal’s global peak is around 2050. Nuclear is promising, but it would take many years to build all the nuclear plants required, not to mention the dangers of nuclear materials themselves. He has no problem with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and tides and waves, although he thinks smaller hydro dams are more feasible, but taken together, these all cannot provide the same energy as oil. Hydrogen is also feasible, but at this point is extremely expensive. He points out ethanol is taking food to feed SUVs. Using ethanol to replace oil would require planting corn in more acres than the world even has in arable land. In the process it is destroying the tree environment needed to combat global warming, for instance in Brazil. The efficiencies of biomass are modest, and again, no substitute for oil on a mass basis. Fusion and its offshoots have never worked.

Conservation through efficiencies and curtailment of energy use is his last suggestion. He concludes that curtailment is more efficient that efficiencies, which have been resorted to already in many areas. Curtailment is thought to be the least palatable politically.

Heinberg’s last section is on what the world will look like in 50 years after peak oil. Well, think about it. Flying to Australia on vacation? Wrapping products in plastic? Steak? Oranges on trucks from California? Everything made out of plastic? Bus service for schools? Just look around, and you will start to get an idea of what will change. Almost everything.

Heinberg thinks the future will bring greater clashes between the classes and he is absolutely right. Peak oil will create a more and more stratified society of haves and have nots. The white collar middle class we have, based on finance capital, will shrink, as the economy shrinks. While Heinberg discounts classical Marxism as rooted in the ‘19th century,’ Marxism is actually rooted in the working class itself. Marxism, although it grew at the same time as the oil explosion, is not related to hyper industrialism per se, or growth. In fact, Marxism is far more compatible with the sustainable, collective society that will be necessary to survive peak oil and global warming than capitalism. The working class is not going away in the future. If anything, a local industrial and agrarian working class will be needed again to replace the oil labor being performed by machines. Shoes will not be exclusively made in China - in fact we might not be able to ship shoes from China. Human labor is not passé.

Some estimate U.S. living standards will go back to the 1890s as oil use declines. I guess about the 1940s. Predictions, of course, are different for the main capitalist countries as opposed to those in the 2nd and 3rd worlds. Whatever the case, Marxism started developing during the Paris Commune in 1870. I would say Marxists or the working class have no fear of being ‘outdated’ by a return to older or more sustainable technologies. We have no alternative to survival. In fact, we might be right at home.

Red Frog – 11/06/2007
“And I bought it at May Day Books!”

Musicians of the Canyon

“Laurel Canyon – The Inside Story of Rock and Rolls’ Legendary Neighborhood” by Michael Walker, 2006

In homage to Gramsci, I thought I’d write about a cultural issue. This one relates to the ‘state’ of things here in the U.S.A. This book is about the effect this Los Angeles canyon, and the people who lived in it, had on rock and folk music in the 60s, 70s and beyond. The issue relates to what I consider to be the essence of creativity – an environment where like-minded people can work together to increase the quality of their art. History is replete with this happening - the groups of U.S. transcendentalists and other writers in Concord MA and Hartford, CT; the Bloomsbury group in London; the writers and painters of the 20s and 30s in Paris; the Bolshevik culturalists after the revolution in Moscow; and the later bohemians of Greenwich Village, the Algonquin Hotel in New York and North Beach in San Francisco. Musically, there were the hippie bands of San Francisco, and all the U.S. music incubator cities - Memphis, Nashville, Austin, New York, Athens, Detroit, Seattle and, even, Minneapolis. And there was Laurel Canyon in LA.  In other countries like the U.K. London, Birmingham, Manchester and Canterbury played the same role.

Why does this matter? Because essentially, when a local music or cultural scene matures, it has more power over the corporate controllers of culture than it would if the corporations ‘created’ the music, or they ‘discovered’ the talent, or they ‘decided’ on the trends. The best music comes out of local roots and environments. So does the best literature and painting. It is the answer to corporate culture. Local scenes can ‘explode’ on a national and international level. To paraphrase, it takes a village to raise a good art form.

The author, Michael Walker, is kind of a kitschy, poppy LA type, who trades on gossip and big names, but what do you expect about a book on rock? I did not really understand the interrelationships between the bands and musicians in LA until this book. LA rock seemed somewhat sterile and isolated, and more driven by commercialism. I thought the situation of a creative enclave was reserved for San Francisco at the time. However, a similar scene did happen in LA, close to the music clubs of the Sunset Strip, and also close to Hollywood and the mainstream music industry. Laurel Canyon musicians 'jammed' together constantly in the houses and porches of the canyon, mixing with artists, producers and dancers, then went down to the “Strip” clubs, to play, watch other musicians, or plan deals. All this outside of Hollywood or the record factories churning out Vic Damone. And they changed those industries because of the creative clout they had.

Many of the people and bands lived in Laurel Canyon. Frank Zappa moved into a large ‘cabin’ at a crossroads in the Canyon, and for half a year, played host to the GTOs, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and some ex-Turtles. Unlike his somewhat stern and sarcastic persona, he was actually encouraging to the talent that flocked up the road to his house. His ‘cabin’ became an endless music party, without many drugs, until the potential for violent behavior made Gail Zappa decide to move the family to a quieter location in the Canyon.

Musicians like Mark Volman of the Turtles, Gene Hillman of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, Roger McQuinn of the Byrds, Carole King, ex of the Brill building, Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Love’s Arthur Lee, Judy Collins, Mick Dolenz of the Monkees, Nick St Nicholas of Steppenwolf, Jim Morrison, John Densmore and Robby Krieger of the Doors and John Mayall all spent time in the canyon. Mayall did an album, “Blues for Laurel Canyon.” Canned Heat lived in Northridge, then moved to the canyon for awhile, until their house burned down. Neil Young lived over in the more isolated Topanga Canyon, as would be Neil’s wont. Of course the most famous residents are The Mamas and the Papas' Cass Elliot, and Byrds' David Crosby and Buffalo Springfields' Stephen Stills, and the king and queen of the canyon, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, who co-habited in that house. The former wrote “Our House” about their small abode on Lookout Drive. The latter did an album, “Ladies of the Canyon.” Elliot actually introduced Nash to Crosby, and put that band together, because she knew harmonies so well. Nash has said his whole life changed because he knew Elliot.

The bands and managers that lived in the Canyon attracted a whole ‘LA sound” which was really folk rock. The Byrds were the first big breakthrough, as the prior Buffalo Springfield with Stills and Young did not make it commercially. Bands like America came out of LA as well, sounding almost exactly like Crosby, Still and Nash, the biggest name of the canyon. These bands and their sound were the link between the earlier ‘pure’ LA folk scene, and the later, mellow Canyon “California rock” of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Brown. "California rock" gave way to later LA hair rock bands like Motley Crue; then punkers like “X” dominated the clubs of the Strip, to be followed by the alternative rock of Janes Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt. Nikki Sixx, from the Crue, actually lived in the canyon at one time, oddly enough.

The Canyon was a short drive to the Sunset Strip, where legendary clubs like the Whiskey, the Troubadour (which was actually on Santa Monica), the Rainbow and Rodneys’ English Disco made stars of many of these bands. Without this display area, they could not have flowered. Like the Avalon, Winterland and Fillmore in San Francisco, it was a natural part of the ‘scene.’ It even applied to outsiders – Elton John’s career started at the Troubadour. He became a star after a playing 6 nights in 1970. Linda Ronstadt was no one until she hit that stage. British bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream visited Rodney’s as their home away from home, then visited up the road. Labels like Geffen grew out of this scene, a label and managers who actually gave the bands and songwriters more power and money than they’d ever had before.

All good things end, and according to Walker, what did-in the ‘hippie’ vibe of the canyon was cocaine, money and Charles Manson. Manson’s gang, who’d hung around some of the parties in the canyon, killed 4 people in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. At that point, the wide open scene of the Canyon lead to doors shutting along the wooded streets. Manson actually had moved in with the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson for awhile. Wilson was too clueless to get rid of him, as Wilson was having sex with two of Manson’s women. What Walker doesn't point out is that doors closed all over LA… not just in the Canyon. Walker also links Manson with “Altamont” as a ‘culture’ ender. Though how a poorly planned rock festival ‘killed’ a counter-culture is a theory only a Time journalist could love. The Dead, for one, bailed on Altamont when they saw how bad the concert was. The only thing that took a fall at that racetrack was the Stone’s hubris, and one dead concert-goer. Manson was no different. Guy with long hair who likes the Beatles kills someone? End of the counter-culture? Come on.

The real poison was cocaine, which slowly substituted for weed and LSD. Notorious coke heads like Crosby and Stills were just a few of the victims of a massive infusion of coke into the rock and roll industry. As Walker explains it, coke is expensive, and is not ‘shared,’ so coke heads are naturally more possessive and less friendly to anyone. The third wicket was money. Walker points out that behind the friendliness of the canyon was a desire to be famous and get ahead in their careers. When many of these very young musicians finally became overnight millionaires, and bought Porsches, it changed the atmosphere, as you’d expect. After awhile, the small inexpensive houses that had drawn them there in the first place, and the run-down condition of much of the steep canyon roads and buildings lead people and families to moving out, and ‘up’, to better houses, and a different, less collective way of life.

The funny part is, Walker still lives in Laurel Canyon right now. Each year, the present denizens of the various roads intersecting with Laurel Canyon Boulevard, between Mulholland and Sunset, get together for a picture at the Canyon Country Store, the heart of the canyon. In the old days this store saw, day or night, famous musicians wandering in looking to buy something. It is still there, still painted, still full of the signs of those times, and still open for business.

Red Frog, 10-21-2007 -
And I might have bought it at Mayday books, but I didn’t. But I DID see Woodstock at Mayday Books! And of course you can by Gramsci at Mayday. Do so.

Human Monkey's Wrenching

The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, 1975

This classic is the first fictional manifesto of the radical environmental movement. Abbey helped found Earth First! and was a member thereafter. He came from a poor background, became a partially college-educated anarchist, then took to fiction. The forward indicates that everything in the book happened at one time ... in probably the same way Mark Twain means it.

This is the story of four radicals – a “jack” Mormon river rafter, Seldom Seen Smith; a Jewish hippie girl from new York, Bonnie Abzug; an overweight surgeon, Dr. Sarvis, and an ex-Viet Vet, George Hayduke (Doonesbury anyone…) who, while taking a raft trip down the Colorado, decide to defend the Arizona-Utah desert together. The desert, under assault from strip mining, road building, industrial tourism, real estate developers, energy exploiters and politicians, needs someone to stand up for it. Their dream is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam, but first they start with ‘smaller targets’ – road building equipment in the Utah canyonlands; strip-mining trains and bridges on Black Mesa; forest-destroying chain tractors north of the Grand Canyon, and bridges over the smaller canyons in Utah above Glen Canyon.

The author, Edward Abbey, wrote some 14 books, and also cut down ugly billboards along highways, sabotaged bulldozers creating useless roads and cut barbed wire fencing that trapped wild animals, while burning tires and one mansion. Some of these events are in the book. He worked as a forest ranger all over the northern Arizona and southern Utah area – Arches national park, Organ Pipe and Petrified Forest national monuments and the northern rim of Grand Canyon national park. He spent an immense amount of time alone, out on the desert, in hikes or staying in one place in a sleeping bag, which also might have helped his writing. While never reading Muir, and making gentle fun of Thoreau, he is more like a rural Ned Ludd, the famous slinger of ‘sabots’.

Abbey is an excellent writer. He is poetic, and uses sentences in odd ways. The book has an edge of ‘comedy’, as the quartet face the numerous dangers they are taking up with a little too much nonchalance. Almost like the “Fabulous Four” facing down the hyper-American evil ones destroying their desert. When eventually caught, after numerous hair-raising and hysterical chases, they get off with a wrist slap and a wink. Hayduke eventually gets ‘killed’ – but of course he doesn’t. Nowadays, the present environmental activist trying to destroy construction equipment would be arrested by the Department of Homeland Security, treated like Al Queda, and put in jail for most of their lives. Recent sentences for some California activists who burned up environmentally-destructive Hummers on a new car lot was in the dozens of years. So we know what this society wants now – screw nature, jail anyone who defends it, and throw away the key. Property destruction in the name of environmental protection is terrorism! This has changed since Abbey wrote. If anything, the ‘bastards’ have only gotten worse, as Hayduke puts it.

The focus of many of Abbey’s books is the Glen Canyon dam, as the epitome of human destruction in the desert. Indian ruins, towns and petroglyphs, beautiful canyons, rare plants and trees, animal and fish habitats were destroyed when it was built, to create a fake boat playground for water skiers and fisherman. This of course starved the downstream areas for water. Water and electricity were then sent to unsustainable cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. If you’ll remember, Earth First’ initial protest was to unveil a giant plastic sheet with a ‘crack’ on it down the Glen Canyon dam, symbolizing what they would like to do with that structure. Now some smaller dams all over the country are being demobilized and destroyed, as the damage they create is higher than the benefits they produce. This might come one day to Glen Canyon too.

The role of environmentalism in U.S. politics since 1970 has grown. During that year, the first Earth Day was declared, and later governments under Nixon and Carter started to pay attention to environmental issues like species protection and water/air quality. This was all partly spurred by the oil boycott of 1973. Since then there has been a counter-attack on the environment, culminating in the criminal Bush administration. Albert Gore, who you’ll remember was the vice-president under the neo-liberal Bill Clinton, had few environmental accomplishments to remember from his 8 years in POWER. Now, as an environmental activist, he is trying to save capitalism (and imperialism) from itself.

Environmentalism should be part of a modernized ‘transitional’ program, but in and of itself, it cannot overthrow capitalism. Marxists point out that profits naturally conflict with the needs of the environment, and a profit-making society cannot really pay attention to the biosphere. An excellent book on this is “Marx’s Ecology” by John Bellamy Foster, which shows Marx and Engels equating the ravaging of the working class and the ravaging of nature. There is certainly money to be made in environmentally-friendly products and technologies, which is the financial sector Gore is working for. But to configure the whole U.S. society into a carbon-neutral and especially non-growth one is impossible for capitalism to accomplish. No more than it can become a true democracy.

Essentially, environmentalism means a slowing, and even a reversal of harmful growth in the capitalist heartlands. And ‘growth’ is the heart of capitalism and corporations. To be fully implemented it will mean putting ‘society’ ahead of the individual. It will require the government to be in control of production. It will require the community to share water and energy and food. It will essentially restore a cooperative model of life and sustainability from an unbalanced and exploitative one. And this Al Gore is not prepared to do.

Edward Abbey would be proud if this happened. He was an inspiration to greens who oppose the complacency and horse trading of the ‘big’ Green organizations. At the fictional trial of three of the “monkey wrench gang” at the end of the book, Abbey noted that the defense managed to get two secret “Sierra Club” members on the jury. The defense was hoping for an acquittal vote from them. Later, they found out both voted full felony convictions for the three environmental ‘terrorists.’ We need a new mass environmental movement that they cannot put in jail.

And I got it at MayDay Books –

Red Frog – 10/15/2007

A Modern Tolstoy?

"Life and Fate" by Vassily Grossman, 1960

This book has been looked at as the Soviet version of "War & Peace," Tolstoy's masterpiece of imperial Russia and the Napoleonic wars, i.e. the 'great Russian novel." And it succeeds, perhaps better than it's predecessor. One of Grossman’s characters even makes a point of saying, as a humorous aside, that Tolstoy never lived at the same time as the battle of Borodino or the Napoleonic invasion. The obvious hint is that the novel you are reading WAS written by someone involved in the events of war.

Grossman was a Jewish supporter of the Russian revolution, first discovered as a writer by Maxim Gorky. His first short story, “In the Town of Berdichev,” became a famous Soviet film, “Commissar.” Grossman wrote several novels during Stalinist times when he became a member of the Writers Union. He reported during WWII for Red Star, the Soviet military paper. He covered Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and was the first journalist to write about a German death camp, Treblinka. He worked with Ilya Ehrenburg on the "Black Book", a log of Nazi crimes against the Jewish people of Russia, a book that is still unpublished in Russia. His mother died when the Nazi's annihilated the Jewish population of his home town Berdichev – 20,000-30,000 people, similar to what they did at Baba Yar. His attitude towards the bureaucracy began to change during and after the war. Just prior to Stalin's death in 1952, Grossman was most likely on a list to be imprisoned. When Grossman asked Khrushchev to publish Life and Fate in 1960, the KGB confiscated all copies. It was finally published in the West after being smuggled out in the early 1980s by Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich.

This novel is 871 pages, and is not for the faint of heart. Like War and Peace, it is a panoramic 1942-1943 portrait of the U.S.S.R. during the battle of Stalingrad. Grossman traces a large Russian family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered across this vast country during war time. Scenes from the book include the ruined factories and power station on the front line at Stalingrad, and across the Volga in the command areas; a science lab removed from Moscow to Kazan, and then returned to Moscow once more; imprisoned Soviet soliders in German concentration camps and imprisoned Communists and others in Soviet labour camps, including the Lubyanka; hospitals full of dying soldiers and the evacuated women waiting for them in various eastern towns; a Jewish ghetto in Berdichev surrounded by the fascists and a Nazi death camp itself; Nazi's like Eichmann, Hitler and Von Paulus; Soviet airfields and the mobile Soviet tank troops on the steppe, preparing to encircle Von Paulus’ army at Stalingrad. All add up to a series of intimate miniatures of a nation at war. Over it all is the oppressive rule of the Soviet bureaucracy, which seeps into every aspect of the novel. Some of the characters have a very difficult time handling the pressure of this state. You can see the intimate internal battles as they rage, especially in the character Victor Shtrum, who deals with the moral pressures of denunciations and confessions. Constant references to the purges of 1937 and the collapse of the Soviet armies in 1941 due to Stalin's trust of Hitler are a prelude to the action.

Like many other observers of the war years, Grossman notes that the war actually weakened the bureaucracy. The war mobilized the Soviet people, who relied on their own initiatives. The prior criminal purges in the military and Party, the forced collectivization and the gross military errors of 1941 showed them that the rulers were not all powerful, no matter their propaganda machine or bloody hand. Stalin's view that England was the main enemy and so ignored information of a German attack is also germane.  Trotskyists also noticed a revival of the Soviet working class during and after the war, as they became more confident of their own strengths. Many observers think this is what helped lead to the revelations in 1956 by Khrushchev, who was a general at Stalingrad.

Special reference is made to the encircled 'House 6/1'on the front line at Stalingrad, where the Soviet commander no longer sends reports back to headquarters, and the men live in the style of a commune, not a latter-day Soviet military unit. A commissar sent to dismiss the commander is 'winged' while he sleeps and must be sent back to a hospital, probably the first instance of 'fragging' in a novel on WWII. The whole house and everyone in it is then destroyed by a massive Nazi assault. Of course the 'fragging' also saved the commissar's life. The famous machine-gunning of retreating Soviet soldiers by NKVD units, made public in the film "Enemy at the Gates" is bemoaned as a military mistake by some officers. Even Ziatsev, the sniper from that film, makes an appearance, as do many other Soviet and German officers, some with their real names and some without. Grossman lived with and observed people from every grouping in Soviet society for many years from the inside. His depiction of the characters in each group is one of the great strengths of the novel.

Grossman had a life-long interest in science, and the improbable lead character Shtrum is a somewhat self-involved but creative nuclear scientist, who is dismissed for a time by the Central Committee science 'commissar" for not being "Lysenkoist" enough, or perhaps being too Jewish. In a twist of fate, Stalin himself calls Shtrum and rehabilitates him, as Shtrum is involved in the valuable field of nuclear research. He has been likened to Grossman himself, or a real Soviet scientist, Lev Landau. The ties and names of the main Shaposhnikov family in the book are somewhat confusing, and hard to link to each other, but as you read you 'kind' of understand who's who. The last letter from a fictional Jewish mother in Berdichev's Jewish ghetto is based on Grossman's mother, and is heart-rending. The scenes from the death camps have become familiar to western readers and film goers, and so it must be remembered you are reading some of the first literature to describe it, if not the first.

Grossman gradually was repelled by Stalinism to the point where he equated it with fascism. Like other honest observers - Orwell and Solzhenitzyn come to mind - he developed slowly in the direction of a kind of social humanism, angry at the use or misuse of Marxism in the name of slaughter and totalitarianism. This novel stands as a great monument to the Soviet people, and to a great writer's search for 'truth'. Relatively unknown in the west, as are most Soviet writers and painters, Grossman may one day rank as the best literary product of that era, even standing above Babel, Solzhenitsyn, Gorky, Serge, Sholokhov, Rybakov and Ehrenburg.

- Red Frog, 10/1/2007 – and I might have bought it at May Day books, but of course I did not.

"God is Not Great"

“God is Not Great,” by Christopher Hitchens, 2007

Christopher Hitchens is unfortunately best known for being a former leftist who endorsed Bush’s invasion of Iraq. A little of the reason for this might be found between the lines of this book. The invasion is barely addressed. In one paragraph Hitchens says it would give the Iraqi people some ‘breathing space” from the religious and bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, probably because of this blindspot, he does not address the religious ‘rationale’ behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in this, a book on the negative effects of religion. You’d think it would be appropriate. No one wants to talk about the dead dog they buried in their back yard of course.

Hitchens was a Marxist at one time. Eating at Trotsky’s bountiful table paid off, and now he has been declared one of the top “public intellectuals” in the world. He survived in the form of an extremely opinionated and strict uber-liberal. While not as good a writer as Sam Harris, nor as scientifically clear as Richard Dawkins, two other prominent atheists, Hitchen’s strength is his intellectual consistency, polemics, and his familiarity with the Bible, Christian thinkers and contact with various religious people. He recently appeared on many news talk shows to put forward his views against religion. Atheists appearing on TV are a rarity in the U.S. It is a hoot to see Hitchens on CNN talking to the befuddled and clueless anchors about their most cherished myths.

"Religion Kills"

Hitchens points out the many ways religion can kill. There is the obvious - fomenting religious wars or religious hatred that leads to violence. Then there is the religious love of the apocalypse, especially in both Christianity and Islam. Then the anti-scientific or anti-sexual religious fanaticisms that promote leader worship, AIDS, pregnancy, circumcision, infibulation, polygamy, male chauvinism and oppose pork, condoms, flu shots, sex education, medical care, science, evolution and abortion.

Faith less

Hitchens sketches the intellectual battle between religion and reason over the centuries. The question of religion, of course, is the beginning of philosophic discourse. It seems religion has lost this philosophic slug fest. Intellectually, in the present day, religion has no real standing. From the Greeks - Socrates, Epicurus and Democritus - to the enlightenment intellectuals like Spinoza, Voltaire and Hume, and to our present day - there are so many anti-religious intellectuals that the fight against the obscurantism of religion is like punching a helpless bag of bony lies. From what I can tell, no top philosopher or writer in the West in many years has endorsed religion, except perhaps the children’s writer C.S. Lewis. And a poor writer he was. Hitchens is especially good illuminating the distant fabrications that make up both the old and ‘new’ testaments, pointing out that the latter is really not all that new. He scours the indoctrination of children with the terrors of ‘hell” as child abuse. He does not spare Islamic or Hindu fundamentalism. Or even the supposedly ‘enlightened’ religions of the ‘east.’ He has sections on the supposed ‘anti-religion’ and actually anti-life attitudes of Zen, or the Buddhist religious hierarchy that enthusiastically backed Japan in World War II. He even nails Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, two supporters of theocracy beloved by liberals everywhere.

Islam and Hinduism

In one of this most useful thoughts, he describes how the Indian independence movement lead by a non-secular figure like Mahatma Gandhi actually pushed away Muslim Indians, and helped set the stage for the partition of India from Pakistan, and the bloodbaths of Lahore and other cities. He also explains the cults of Stalin and Mao to be similar to religious fervor, and structured in much the same way as fundamentalist religious movements. He celebrates the freeing of the Jews from the religious ghettoes of the world, which allowed world class intellectuals like Marx, Freud, Kafka, Einstein and others to flourish outside the hold of the archaic temple. His omission of Trotsky of course is telling, like an embarrassing uncle.

Hitchens, like many others, declaims the absence of a true Islamic ‘reformation’ or 'enlightenment', which has allowed it to rule civil society in many countries in which it is believed, to the detriment of the faithful. Without a civil alternative, such as exists in more secular societies, citizens are not even free to openly question the foundation of Islamic belief itself. They could loose their life, job or social standing if they do. There are certainly Christian theocrats in the United States who secretly admire just that, and back our military as “God’s army.” However they don’t yet have the internal kind of bloody power invested in the mullahs in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Republican Party, as Kevin Phillips has pointed out, is attempting to be that theocratic party and the Christian fundamentalists are using it as such.

Saudi Arabia is the heartland of Islam and a true theocracy, It is the source of most of the 9/11 bombers and the birthplace of Al Qaeda. The Saudis are long-time funders of political fundamentalism, from the promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 50s to the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the 80s. Saudi Arabia is still religiously ruled over by the strict Sunni Wahhabi sect, who are no less backward than the Shiite mullahs around Ayatollah Khomeini in declaring “holy war.” And this ‘holy war’ is not necessarily against imperialism, but against other religions, and even others within their own religion. Yet the Saudis are a key ally for the United States, recently receiving $20B in military aid, because they sit on a rapidly diminishing sea of oil and are opposed to Shiite Iran.

And so the Bible thumpers prop up the Koran thumpers.

Einstein

As an intellectual, Hitchens sees more insight into the human condition in Shakespeare than the primitive arid backwater verses of the Bible, Torah or Koran. He would rather quote true intellectuals and scientists like Einstein than frightening religious writers like St. Augustine. So I will end with a quote from the former included in Hitchen's book. Einstein wrote:

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Hitchens equates religious thought to the childhood of the human race. The measure of our growth and the survival of our species will be determined by how far we leave religion behind, and embrace reason and science. The question is if this can be done in the context of capitalism - but that is another story.

And I bought it at May Day Books!
by Red Frog, 9/6/2007

"Non Violence Protects the State"

“Non-Violence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, published 2007

This is a book by a young Virginia anarchist activist involved in street protests and organizing against the School of the Americas, for which he went to jail for 6 months. It is principally aimed at the academic pacifist wing of the anarchist movement, and the pacifists he has met in various ‘reform’ struggles.

I am not a pacifist. I was prepared to like this book. I was told I wouldn’t be able to put it down until I was done. I actually couldn’t get through more than a few chapters before putting it down, for good. But I soldiered on and picked it up again. It is written in somewhat academic phraseology, and is skimpy on details. It suffers from both the strengths and predictable weaknesses of a specific kind of anarchism.

WEAKNESSES OF PACIFISM

Gelderloos makes many correct points. He shows how pacifist ideology ignores the true history of many mass movements, like the Indian independence struggle and the U.S. civil rights movement. He shows how pacifism cannot deal with or overthrow a violent state. He shows how the history of struggle is one of using all kinds of tactics, not one tactic, or one tactic raised to one strategy, then raised to one goal, as have the pacifists with pacifism itself.

In the Marxist movement we have plenty of secret pacifists, who think some ultimate mass demonstration – UNARMED – will somehow bring about the collapse of capitalist power. Or a strike alone will bring the state to its knees, and to its destruction. Parties such as the Communist Party and the SWP are full of this kind of thinking.

Gerlderloos instead shows the violent opposition of Jews to the Nazi’s – not the diet of Spielbergian heroes we have been fed. He details the intimidation of the leadership of the IWW, and the role of a group of Northeast U.S. Italian anarchists – Galleanists - in combating WWI in the U.S. and later Mussolini, without abandoning the right to self defense and even the right to aggressive action.

REFORMISM?

He weakens his argument by condemning certain gains as non-existent, like the independence of India, the defeat of Jim Crow in the south, the massive demonstrations against U.S. intervention in the Middle East, or the withdrawal of the U.S. army from Vietnam. In essence, he almost says that violence is needed for revolution, not reform. Well, actually, it is needed for both. In this he cedes some apparent gains to the pacifists, which is unnecessary.

Franz Fanon seems to be his most quoted figure. Fanon aided the FLN in Algeria, who’s victory lead to the formation of a bourgeois nationalist government in that country… i.e. a state. Would Mr. Gelderloos denounce the ‘useless’ Algerian war, since it did not result in the complete freedom of the Algerians? Given his comments on other ‘reform’ struggles, I would imagine so. He does not have the transitional program to connect reform and revolution, and so must fulminate at the former without showing how to connect it to the latter.

LABOR and MARXISM

What is disappeared in this book is the class struggle and the violent efforts of workers to fight or overthrow capital. He has chapters on how pacifism is racist and patriarchal, but not one on the working class and labor, and how pacifism is actually petit-bourgeois. Labor violence is only mentioned in one example, at Blair Mountain, safely in 1921. The word ‘class’ appears maybe 5 times. He is more incensed about white people and men than he is about bourgeois and middle class men, and bourgeois and middle-class women. The working class has a natural affinity for defending itself, and in his screeds against white people, he forgets this. Of course, Gelderloos is white. His approach as an anarchist is essentially ‘sectoralist’ instead of classist. Not all anarchists have this position.

But in his gut he understands that it is middle-class people in the protest movement who are the most attached to pacifism, and his hostility is a healthy class reaction, although he has a hard time verbalizing it.

He also almost disappears the communist movements’ efforts to violently confront or overthrow capital, referring let’s say to ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Cuba’ as just names of countries. Why? A, because Marxism is his main competitor; and B, because somehow overthrowing capital without having anarchism as an end product is wrong, since a kind of ‘state’ survives after these revolutions. Since the principal enemy of anarchism seems to be the state, not capitalism, he cannot condone overthrowing capitalism and creating a new transitional state. Which would put him in an interesting position if the communist movement was close to overthrowing the capitalist state.

Of course, he also can’t tell the difference between Stalinism and Leninism or Trotskyism, but so be it. That is not his topic.

NORTHWEST STRIKE

Vanderloos central point holds true – non-violence is only one tactic in a full arsenal. If you stop at pacifism, you cannot win. It is like painting with a palette of ‘beiges’ only. You might ‘feel good” but at the expense of some real progress. And as he illuminates you can actually end up helping blunt the protest movement. And ‘blunted’ protest movements is all we’ve had for years.

Here is a local example. The defeat of the Northwest mechanics happened the day after they shut down the scabs at the Holiday Inn 5 Corners and the day after they blocked the Northwest Airlines terminal gates in Bloomington with cars. Mass pickets is what it is called in the labor movement and the transitional program. What happened after those days?  This was a form of civil disobedience and damage.

That is the day that the voluble Ted Ludwig, chubby leader of that Mechanics local full of mostly middle-aged, but working-class, white men, decided that these events were one-shot deals, and his union didn’t need to shut down the scabs every day. The events had been a success, mind you. Only a few were arrested. They gained massive publicity and involved many union members, who weren’t afraid to intimidate the scabs. Instead he decided to follow the main path of the later P-9 and get Ray Rogers to start a ‘corporate campaign’ appealing to the ‘public’ to boycott Northwest Airlines. And with the appearance of Ray Rogers in any struggle, you can kiss your ass goodbye.

LIMITS OF PACIFISM in CULTURE

Gelderloos is to be congratulated for trying to get a discussion going about the limits of pacifism, as it is a taboo topic in the protest movement. Candlelight vigils are second nature to people who think that good thoughts and bearing witness will overcome. He points out that pacifist hostility to more militant action actually makes them ally with the police and authorities over and over again. Engels also pointed out the use of force in history. It is somewhat akin to the use of force in doing mechanical repairs. Anyone who has laughed at someone who has ‘hit’ or hammered something, and suddenly it works or is in the right place, understands the use of force in the physical world. This is not far different from its role in politics. Some are afraid to 'hit' with the hammer. But sometimes it is the only thing that works.

Another example, which he touches on, is the fondness of many for violent movies in which the ‘good’ guy kicks the ass of the ‘bad’ guy. Since this rarely happens in real life, people get a primitive satisfaction out of this. A good recent example is the series of films of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, who manhandles CIA thug after CIA thug throughout the whole series of 3 films. A book written by reactionary Robert Ludlum has been changed in the hands of a British director into its exact opposite – a series which shows the CIA as a crooked bunch of killers, who need to be dealt with not with compassion or ‘discussion’ but with their own medicine.

REPUBLICAN JAIL

As we approach the Republican convention in St. Paul, where they will attempt to herd us into approved ‘protest’ pens, let us keep that in mind. There will be plenty of ‘responsible’ people, friends of the hotel and restaurant industry, backed by 100s of police, telling us to do whatever we are told, and that will mean not seriously disrupting the convention. Instead, I think we should make the Republicans regret coming to St. Paul. And remind the Democratic Party politicians that inflicting this convention on the Cities is a net loss of citizens’ tax dollars, and only a gain for the businessmen and the respectability of these bloodthirsty cretins. Why would Democrats ‘welcome’ the Party of endless war in Iraq and endless tax breaks for the rich? Really, why?

And perhaps Mr. Gelderloos and the ‘black bloc’ will be there to make that point too.  But they will make it badly

And I bought it at May Day Books ...

8/14/2007, Red Frog