If you were a Mayday volunteer, this would be your view of the store!
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
You Must Comply
Stacked Chairs
Making sure Mayday's chairs are stored correctly is an important task in book store management. Here, for the record, are two images of perfectly stacked chairs in Mayday's "chair alcove".
The bricks in back of this archway block off one of the old tunnels that run through the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Come the revolution, we'll probably need to break down those walls and reclaim the tunnels as we fight for a better world!
Ravenmn
Making sure Mayday's chairs are stored correctly is an important task in book store management. Here, for the record, are two images of perfectly stacked chairs in Mayday's "chair alcove".
The bricks in back of this archway block off one of the old tunnels that run through the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Come the revolution, we'll probably need to break down those walls and reclaim the tunnels as we fight for a better world!
Ravenmn
Friday, August 21, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Join the Army and Get Radicalized
“Black Radical; The Education of an American Revolutionary” – by Nelson Peery, 2007
Minnesota’s own Nelson Peery tells his story of his revolutionary awakening after World War II. He came home as a soldier and ran into discrimination and poverty in the North and heard about lynchings in the South. After the war, Peery and his 6 brothers became members or supporters of the Communist Party (“CP”), while their father became a well-known and professional anti-communist in Minneapolis and later Los Angeles. Later Peery left the CP to form the Communist Labor Party ("CLP"). This book can be seen as Part 2 of Peery’s earlier memoir, “Black Fire,” about his life in rural American Minnesota, the depression and World War II.
The book starts with him coming home after 4 years of combat. Peery’s experience in the Pacific war paralleled that of many black soldiers – not only in World War II, but also in the Civil War and World War I. Combat empowered black men and some women to feel both competent to handle any physical threat and entitled to equal rights with white people. It, in an odd sense, was the incubator for revolutionary and egalitarian feelings. Black ex-soldiers formed the heart of the anti-discrimination and anti-Jim Crow movement that developed after World War II. Educated not on the pablum of non-violence and obsequiousness, but on combat cohesion and the risking of their lives for ‘democracy,’ black soldiers after World War II were changed men. The 90 years of post-Civil War neo-confederate rule, the result of the defeat of Reconstruction, was about to end, in both north and south.
Peery re-joins his neighborhood after the war, but cannot just blend back into the aimless life of partial work and partying. He joins the Communist Party (at their office on Fifth and Hennepin), greatly influenced by people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Dubois. Later he joins the Party group at the University of Minnesota, where he starts reading Marxism more deeply. He was part of a group that got the first black professor hired at the U in the late 40s. In an incredible scene during this period, Leadbelly tours Minneapolis and Peery invites him over to his home to meet the ‘Red Bishop' of the English Anglican church. At the families' south Minneapolis house, Leadbelly performs an impromptu concert for the bishop, and 200 other people show up.
The Party then asked Peery to leave the U and get a working-class job. With some trepidation, he agreed. Fearing the ordinary unskilled union jobs usually assigned blacks, he walked upstairs in the union hall to the office of the Bricklayers Union, and got a job as the first black bricklayer in Minneapolis through plain moxie and a threat of a lawsuit. Peery worked construction for awhile and learned the trade from the Swedes on the job. As the Red Purge picked up in the United States, mostly targeted at unionists and workers, Peery was then assigned by the CP to go ‘underground’ in Detroit. The CP was afraid the whole organization would be outlawed, rounded up and incarcerated in jail, much as some of their leaders were due to the Smith Act. In Detroit he meets one of the Scottsboro boys hiding there, who had been heavily marked by his experience in prison. Perry lost contact with the Party organization due to its own disorganization. Peery eventually decides to re-emerge on his own, contacts the CP again, and is then assigned to work in Cleveland. There he joins a black Party club that helps initiate a major boycott of the Cleveland Sears for their refusal to hire blacks.
Problems in the Party start to surface. Peery initially made the mistake of going to a CP convention in New York and criticizing Tito when Tito was Stalin’s darling. For this, he is roundly denounced by the Party leadership at the convention meeting. The very next day Stalin denounced Tito, and then the U.S. Party also decided to denounce Tito. Peery, of course, was suddenly back in favor. Peery did not fail to notice that ‘thinking’ in the CP was not an independent process.
It is somewhat difficult in this book to figure out exactly which political or strategic issues lead to the break between Peery and many black comrades on the one hand, and the CP on the other. It is clear during the McCarthy and 50's period that the white leadership was afraid of getting deeply involved in anti-racist activities that might involve illegalities. The Party lost its nerve, and it meant that more radical comrades were asked to leave. The black comrades in Cleveland, through their anti-discrimination work, had stood up to the East Cleveland white racists, the FBI and the Cleveland police in their work in the mass Negro Labor Council. Some were expelled for refusing to leave the Negro Labor Counsel. Peery was also expelled for something similar to this reason, though his conflicts with various leaders over other issues seemed to play a role too.
Peery’s first marriage, to a non-political women, fell apart in Cleveland, and he moved to New York. In New York, he met his politicized second wife, Sue Ying. After the departure from the CP and move to New York, Peery joined the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) ("…to reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States of America"), who were a group of ex-CP’ers in the city. There, in one significant moment, he describes having the idea of giving political speeches on street corners in Harlem. His Marxist speeches were made not far from the headquarters of the Black Muslims. In the audience was a young Muslim, Malcolm X. Later, Malcolm started giving street corner speeches, and of course, drew far vaster crowds than Peery. The implication is that Peery gave the idea of talking on the streets to Malcolm.
Then Peery and Ying moved to Los Angeles’ Watts district for the POC, and helped form the California Communist League, and later, the CLP, his own organization. You see, he seemed to have a habit of pissing-off the leaders of every organization he was part of, until the CLP. While in California, Peery was involved in the 1965 Watts uprising, which he characterizes not as a ‘riot’ but as a people’s rebellion against white privilege and the police state in Watts. During Watts, he sees the unorganized black masses of Los Angeles almost overcome the strength of the cops and state, though at the cost of many dead, wounded and arrested.
This is a personal, non-rhetorical book, combining both private and political details. What runs throughout this second part of his memoir is how Peery always understood that black nationalism, no matter how radical or phrased, is ultimately a dead end in defeating capitalism and institutional racism. While he well knew that many white people, even those who call themselves communists, are flawed, he also knew that no overthrow of American capital can occur without black, white and Latino workers uniting. And this is the ‘red’ thread that runs through all his organizing - his bedrock commitment to a united working-class movement.
And you can buy it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, August 17, 2009
Minnesota’s own Nelson Peery tells his story of his revolutionary awakening after World War II. He came home as a soldier and ran into discrimination and poverty in the North and heard about lynchings in the South. After the war, Peery and his 6 brothers became members or supporters of the Communist Party (“CP”), while their father became a well-known and professional anti-communist in Minneapolis and later Los Angeles. Later Peery left the CP to form the Communist Labor Party ("CLP"). This book can be seen as Part 2 of Peery’s earlier memoir, “Black Fire,” about his life in rural American Minnesota, the depression and World War II.
Peery re-joins his neighborhood after the war, but cannot just blend back into the aimless life of partial work and partying. He joins the Communist Party (at their office on Fifth and Hennepin), greatly influenced by people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Dubois. Later he joins the Party group at the University of Minnesota, where he starts reading Marxism more deeply. He was part of a group that got the first black professor hired at the U in the late 40s. In an incredible scene during this period, Leadbelly tours Minneapolis and Peery invites him over to his home to meet the ‘Red Bishop' of the English Anglican church. At the families' south Minneapolis house, Leadbelly performs an impromptu concert for the bishop, and 200 other people show up.
The Party then asked Peery to leave the U and get a working-class job. With some trepidation, he agreed. Fearing the ordinary unskilled union jobs usually assigned blacks, he walked upstairs in the union hall to the office of the Bricklayers Union, and got a job as the first black bricklayer in Minneapolis through plain moxie and a threat of a lawsuit. Peery worked construction for awhile and learned the trade from the Swedes on the job. As the Red Purge picked up in the United States, mostly targeted at unionists and workers, Peery was then assigned by the CP to go ‘underground’ in Detroit. The CP was afraid the whole organization would be outlawed, rounded up and incarcerated in jail, much as some of their leaders were due to the Smith Act. In Detroit he meets one of the Scottsboro boys hiding there, who had been heavily marked by his experience in prison. Perry lost contact with the Party organization due to its own disorganization. Peery eventually decides to re-emerge on his own, contacts the CP again, and is then assigned to work in Cleveland. There he joins a black Party club that helps initiate a major boycott of the Cleveland Sears for their refusal to hire blacks.
Problems in the Party start to surface. Peery initially made the mistake of going to a CP convention in New York and criticizing Tito when Tito was Stalin’s darling. For this, he is roundly denounced by the Party leadership at the convention meeting. The very next day Stalin denounced Tito, and then the U.S. Party also decided to denounce Tito. Peery, of course, was suddenly back in favor. Peery did not fail to notice that ‘thinking’ in the CP was not an independent process.
It is somewhat difficult in this book to figure out exactly which political or strategic issues lead to the break between Peery and many black comrades on the one hand, and the CP on the other. It is clear during the McCarthy and 50's period that the white leadership was afraid of getting deeply involved in anti-racist activities that might involve illegalities. The Party lost its nerve, and it meant that more radical comrades were asked to leave. The black comrades in Cleveland, through their anti-discrimination work, had stood up to the East Cleveland white racists, the FBI and the Cleveland police in their work in the mass Negro Labor Council. Some were expelled for refusing to leave the Negro Labor Counsel. Peery was also expelled for something similar to this reason, though his conflicts with various leaders over other issues seemed to play a role too.
Peery’s first marriage, to a non-political women, fell apart in Cleveland, and he moved to New York. In New York, he met his politicized second wife, Sue Ying. After the departure from the CP and move to New York, Peery joined the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) ("…to reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States of America"), who were a group of ex-CP’ers in the city. There, in one significant moment, he describes having the idea of giving political speeches on street corners in Harlem. His Marxist speeches were made not far from the headquarters of the Black Muslims. In the audience was a young Muslim, Malcolm X. Later, Malcolm started giving street corner speeches, and of course, drew far vaster crowds than Peery. The implication is that Peery gave the idea of talking on the streets to Malcolm.
Then Peery and Ying moved to Los Angeles’ Watts district for the POC, and helped form the California Communist League, and later, the CLP, his own organization. You see, he seemed to have a habit of pissing-off the leaders of every organization he was part of, until the CLP. While in California, Peery was involved in the 1965 Watts uprising, which he characterizes not as a ‘riot’ but as a people’s rebellion against white privilege and the police state in Watts. During Watts, he sees the unorganized black masses of Los Angeles almost overcome the strength of the cops and state, though at the cost of many dead, wounded and arrested.
This is a personal, non-rhetorical book, combining both private and political details. What runs throughout this second part of his memoir is how Peery always understood that black nationalism, no matter how radical or phrased, is ultimately a dead end in defeating capitalism and institutional racism. While he well knew that many white people, even those who call themselves communists, are flawed, he also knew that no overthrow of American capital can occur without black, white and Latino workers uniting. And this is the ‘red’ thread that runs through all his organizing - his bedrock commitment to a united working-class movement.
And you can buy it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, August 17, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Best Health Care in the World
BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE WORLD.
The U.S. health care is very good for many people including me---but it is not very good for the 40 million plus who have no care. And it is not very good for the 90,000 people who die each year from infections acquired in hospitals and the same number w ho die due to incorrect drug treatment. Except for the first mentioned the care here is a disgrace. This is the richest country in the world. What’s wrong? More than 100 years ago, Germany put in a national plan. Europe and the rest of the industrialized world have had it for 50 years or more. The profit system is blamed, yet Germany did it under the capitalist profit system?
As an advocate of socialist principles, I believe that in a true socialist society , this would never even be a question; it would automatically be instituted.
Tom R. Dooley. 8/15/09
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
There's a Killer on the Loose
“American Assassination – The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone” – by Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, 2004
Are you a ‘conspiracy nut?’ This is the bourgeois media’s eternal phrase for anyone who believes conspiracies are possible. Intellectually, of course, conspiracies are very possible. Intellectually, of course, the ruling-class media is allergic even to the phrase “intellectual.” So is their analysis of the impossibility of conspiracies based on facts? No. Only on oft-repeated myths or cherry-picking.
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| Heavily controlled 'crash' site of Wellstone plane? |
Assassination is an essential tool of the armed bourgeois state's political rule. You will notice that the overwhelming majority of targets are those on the liberal or left side of the spectrum – something mathematically impossible based on the laws of probability. As of 2004, there were 47 ‘accidental’ deaths by plane crash or some other method for U.S. politicians or whistleblowers, also illustrating a mathematical impossibility of 2-1 majority of liberal or ‘troublemakers’ having ‘accidents.’ If Obama strays off the ranch, he too will be the target of assassination. Recently, the Secret Service refused to arrest a gun-toting Republican at a "town hall' anti health-care reform rally, held right outside the site of Obama's appearance.
The recent 2009 revelation that Dick Cheney had set up an assassination squad ostensibly limited only to Al Quaeda is no surprise. Since killing Al Quaeda members has been official public policy for years, this secret Cheney hit squad had something more about it than the supine major press wants to delve into. After all, why would it be secret, even to the Congress, if it was only duplicating U.S. policy? The key lies in revelations by journalist Seymour Hersch, who has information that this unit was actually operating on domestic terrain too.
We are all familiar with how the FBI ‘loses’ much crucial evidence over and over again, in various politically sensitive cases, from the Kennedy assassinations onward. What is interesting is the involvement since 1996 of an ostensibly 'objective' agency, the NTSB – the National Transportation Safety Board – in covering up evidence in controversial crashes. The present head of the NTSB, Carol Carmody, is a former CIA officer. Within hours of a few crashes, this supposedly ‘scientific’ NTSB head has rushed to microphones to assure people that the crash is ‘only an accident.’ Prior to any scientific investigation, the legendary ‘forte’ of this supposedly neutral government agency. How does she know? You may well ask.
Now to the specifics of this book:
- The Sheriff of St. Louis County confirmed that Minneapolis FBI was on-site at Wellstone's plane crash site, just below Eveleth in northern Minnesota, between 12:00 noon and 1:00 p.m. The crash site was publicly identified at 10:50 a.m. One of the controllers at the airport thought the FBI was there by at least 1:00 pm. No one has claimed they notified the FBI of the crash. It is impossible to get from Minneapolis to Eveleth, even by air, in that time period, without already being on the road. (The FBI claimed they used the Duluth airport, not the Eveleth airport, which necessitated a car rental and drive as well.)
The FBI claimed it got there at 3:30 p.m., and verified it was a Minneapolis evidence crew. Washington D.C. Capitol Police got on-site at 4:00 p.m. The NTSB, the ‘official’ investigators, got there at 8:00-9:00 p.m., also from Washington.
Around 6:00 P.M. the FBI announced there was no ‘terrorist’ connection about the crash to the national news – 2-3 hours before the arrival of the NTSB, the official investigators.
It is NTSB policy that ONLY the NTSB can investigate a crash. The FBI is supposedly not allowed to investigate crashes until the NTSB determines they are criminal matters. The NTSB had not done so.
Carmody announced the initial NTSB focus was recovering the ‘voice data recorder.’ There was none required on this plane, but sometimes they are installed. A voice data recorder might reveal it was not an accident, and could have accounted for the speed of the FBI intervention, and Carmody’s concern. No voice recorder was found, or, if found, was made public.
Weather was blamed by the media for the accident. However, many other similar planes were flying. Visibility was around 2-5 miles, temperatures on the ground were 36 degrees, winds were light to non-existent, the clouds were higher than normal, and icing was not a major problem for any other plane in the area. Local reporters and weather experts said weather was not a factor – only the national news and some government types floated these ideas.
Dick Cheney personally told Wellstone that “There will be severe ramifications for you and the State of Minnesota’ if he continued to oppose the Bush administration on the war. Wellstone was enemy number one in the Senate for the White House across many fronts – asbestos, the Iraq War, the control of the SEC, the Homeland Security and Patriot acts, labor issues and tax cuts.
The guidance system at the airport and the planes mechanical condition were fine, and the NTSB agreed with this finding.
The NTSB said they only have public hearings in ‘high profile cases.’ No hearing was held in the Wellstone crash. They have hearings in almost 50% of cases.
It was known for several days that Wellstone was going to fly up north instead of appearing with Ted Kennedy for a fundraiser. Wellstone used the same pilot 12 times. While the Wellstone boys later sued the aviation firm over an ‘unqualified’ pilot - one has to ask why Wellstone used this same ‘unqualified’ pilot 12 times, if he was so incompetent?
The FBI and Capitol Police were omitted from the listed parties to the investigation by the NTSB. This in spite of the fact that the FBI were the first one’s on the scene after emergency personnel, and later ruled it ‘an accident’ several hours later. The Capitol Police also arrived before the NTSB, and also began investigating.- Carmody much later agreed it was “an accident” too, before her 11 month investigation closed, although NTSB rules indicate no verbalization of cause can be made before a report is officially issued.
First responders were ordered by the FBI not to take photos of the wreckage.
The plane turned almost 180 degrees before it crashed, and was last known going 85 knots -- and hit the ground at a 30 degree angle. A stall is at 69 knots. Stalling was later blamed for the crash. Why would a 'stall' make a plane turn 180 degrees?
Two witnesses heard the plane’s engines going ‘on and off’ and ‘quiet.’ One witness said they heard a ‘bang’ while the plane was in the air. A witness aid they saw fire and blue smoke in the tail. On the ground, it was confirmed the tail was burned, though gas tanks are in the wings. KSTP reporters said the fuselage was a ‘fire pit.’ Mechanics did not understand why the fuselage or tail would burn, when the fuel was in the wings, which were separated at the crash site. Instead of black smoke for fuel, the smoke from the fuselage was blue, which means electrical smoke.
Cell phone call in the immediate area broken up at 10:18 a.m. At 10:19 a.m. the Wellstone plane started its unexplained turn and plunge. The NTSB says it is not aware of ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ weapons. However, electro-magnetic impulses have lead many planes to crash. According to Fetzer, weapons that produce these pulses exist, and they can bring down planes. Time magazine reports their use in Iraq. Rayethon holds many of the patents, some developed in 1993. That is why individuals cannot use electronic devices during takeoff and landing of an airplane.
The NTSB never considered a ‘non-accident’ scenario. This from a supposedly ‘scientific’ body. Not considering sabotage as one scenario is a political decision. It underlines their investigations of nearly every other recent plane crash.
Carmody also worked on the plane crash of Democratic Senator Carnahan in Missouri, who died 2 years earlier, a few days before his senate election in Missouri against John Ashcroft. The NTSB also ruled that crash an accident. What is interesting is that Carnahan's widow took his place and won against Ashcroft. This time, Sheila Wellstone was also on the plane with Wellstone, and died too. So she could not take Wellstone's place on the ballot. This is either an 'accident,' or it implies that this time that option would be unavailable.
The assassination of Wellstone was predicted by a website, Vox Fux, which said it would relate to a tight electoral contest, and look like the Carnahan crash. This web-site was taken down by the government later. A former CIA contact with close ties to the CIA/FBI asserted to the authors that the Wellstone crash was not an accident.
The lead pilot, Conry, was a careful, experienced flier, especially concerned with weather issues. The FAA had re-certified Conry two days before the crash. The co-pilot was also very experienced, and could have easily taken over from a sleepy pilot. The Star Tribune concentrated on the ‘sleepy pilot’ theory, of course.
Both electrical communication and control of the airplane ended at the same time. Hitting a flock of birds or some other ‘catastrophic’ event would normally have been reported, as all power would not be out. Instead all electrical systems failed simultaneously.
Logs of planes arriving in Duluth that day have disappeared. From what I can tell from the book, the car rental logs have also not been found. The FBI said they landed in Duluth and rented a car.
The official NTSB report blamed pilot error for causing the plane to stall, not weather, and not the plane. They highlighted Conry’s prior felony conviction. His felony does not, of course, explain why the plane turned, instead of just dropping down. Nor does it explain why the pilots let the plane stall, in spite of a very loud ‘stall’ horn. It is only useful in a campaign of character assissination.
NTSB simulations of the stall failed to duplicate what happened to Wellstone’s plane.
Opponents of the authors assert that some ‘unexplained event’ caused the crash, not sabotage or the official NTSB explanation. But they cannot verbalize what ‘unexplained event’ that would be.
2 of the 5 NTSB members are HW Bush appointees. Only one is an actual aviation expert. One, again, is a former CIA agent. A real police investigation would start with the questions 'who had the motive, ability, and the most to gain' from the death of Paul Wellstone. The tentative answer here, of course, is Dick Cheney and those around him.
Why, as a radical, would anyone care what happens to Paul Wellstone, a left-liberal in the capitalist Democratic Party? Well, for those whose vanilla schematic of the world is that there are no divisions within the ruling class, or that the Democratic Party is one completely uniform body, that makes sense. However, when divisions arise between the rulers, or a few Democratic Party members stray from the 'path,' then we are left blind to the consequences if conflicts erupt. Leaving out facts, and replacing them with political generalizations makes Marxists into preachers, not scientists. And we are, above all, scientists.
Essentially, Four Arrows and Fetzer argue that the most logical and explanatory answer to what happened to Wellstone’s flight was that it was not an accident, but was sabotage of some sort – an electro-magnetic pulse, small plane-attached bomb, or some combination. This is the only thing that scientifically explains the long string of facts and strange, fraudulent or contradictory happenings concerning this somewhat simple event.
And I bought it at MayDay Books!
Red Frog, 8/12/2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Is ideology important?
I was at a meeting at Mayday Books about ten days back. This was one where anyone who was so inclined was allowed to speak for two minutes, ostensibly on the economic crisis. And what a farrago of nonsense I had to endure (for over two hours). The people at the meeting who understood the roots of the economic crisis could probably be counted on a crippled hand. The rest ranted on whatever took their fancy. These people don't seem to understand that just proclaiming that one is "of the Left" doesn't necessarily make it so. Some theoretical understanding and some responsibility in utterance is called for. Without viewing the world through an ideological prism, one cannot be of the Left. All that is left is inchoate moral outrage and the simplistic and puerile thinking that those in charge are "evil"; and that once these "evil" and "greedy" people are supplanted, everything will be hunky-dory. This is the rubbish one has to endure at these meetings. I remember a meeting two or three years back when one person stood and proudly announced, "I hate Bush." So ...? The problem has never been Bush. This is an imbecile's view of social and political reality. Bush has gone and Obama is in. What has changed? You could put an archangel in the White House and the structure and dynamic of the empire would not change an iota. The aircraft carriers, the foreign bases, the wars of aggression, and the assassinations and the torture would continue unabated (as they are in the Obama administration). Someone has to say this out loud: Ignoramuses who have never cracked a book and never learnt to think and who then go to these worthless meetings and self-importantly spout drivel are not going to accomplish anything. These meetings are an exercise in futility and other than stoking the egos of a pack of sorry losers accomplish precious little else.
Friday, June 26, 2009
The tottering US imperium
Dedicated empire-watchers like myself have long been arguing that the days of the US imperium are numbered. But the argument for this position quickly becomes a little more intricate than I would wish. The imperium has two foundations -- financial and military -- and they are mutually reinforcing. The collapse of one has grave implications for the other. Without the ability to run huge fiscal deficits -- and as a concomitant have them financed by foreigners such as the Chinese and Japanese -- the US military complex cannot be sustained even for a year or two. Yet there is now a growing reluctance to finance these deficits when the value of the paper these foreigners buy (in return for real goods and services) becomes increasingly dubious. This growing scepticism and reluctance is what we've been seeing the last few months, and in particular at the meeting in Yekaterinburg a few days ago attended by SCO and BRIC countries (see Hudson's article here for an excellent analysis).
Every week now there are a handful of articles in serious publications worrying about the fate of the dollar. The crux of the problem is an utterly irrational US financial and political system whose dynamics no-one understands -- not even those at the helm of affairs in the US. For instance, no-one knows what the consequences of "quantitative easing" are going to be -- is it going to be deflation or Weimar-style hyper-inflation? No-one knows. Even I don't know. All serious people agree, however, that the house of cards that is now the US economy, is looking increasingly fragile and unsteady. The US today is not the juggernaut of half a century ago. Most people also agree that this is a time of transition as the US loses its top-dog position and we enter a more confusing multi-polar world whose rules and dynamics are unclear.
The catalyst for this post was a well-crafted article in the Daily Telegraph.
Every week now there are a handful of articles in serious publications worrying about the fate of the dollar. The crux of the problem is an utterly irrational US financial and political system whose dynamics no-one understands -- not even those at the helm of affairs in the US. For instance, no-one knows what the consequences of "quantitative easing" are going to be -- is it going to be deflation or Weimar-style hyper-inflation? No-one knows. Even I don't know. All serious people agree, however, that the house of cards that is now the US economy, is looking increasingly fragile and unsteady. The US today is not the juggernaut of half a century ago. Most people also agree that this is a time of transition as the US loses its top-dog position and we enter a more confusing multi-polar world whose rules and dynamics are unclear.
The catalyst for this post was a well-crafted article in the Daily Telegraph.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The effectiveness of strikes in difficult economic times
Here is an interesting article in today's Guardian:
American capitalism is unequivocally demonstrating that it does not work -- except for an insignificant minority of capitalist. Yet without insistent countervailing pressure from labor, absolutely nothing will change. We can already see this clearly. And conditions for American labor -- and by implication the mass of American people -- are continuing to steadily deteriorate.
The most recent walkouts have naturally focused on jobs, as insecurity grips the labour market. But they also show that, as one leading trade unionist puts it, "it isn't inevitable that employers have the whip hand, even during a recession, and collective action can deliver results" – while passivity guarantees that jobs, pay and conditions are culled, squeezed and slashed.
Second, they underline the irrelevance of anti-union legislation when workers are determined and well-organised. Every single one of the walkouts at Lindsey and at dozens of other power stations and refineries has been illegal under what Tony Blair boasted were "the most restrictive union laws in the western world". But so far no employer has even hinted at a visit to the courts, so counter-productive would that be in the real industrial world.
It's now become obvious that only by defying or ignoring the anti-democratic legislation bequeathed by Margaret Thatcher – which outlaws, for example, all solidarity action – will there ever be the political will to ditch or replace it with something more reasonable.
This is precisely what should be occurring in the United States. American workers need to be organising and striking. And even more importantly, they need to be aiming for political power. Had American labor not relinquished claims to political power eons ago, the social, economic, and political texture of the country would be radically different today. As it is, American labor gets into a one-night stand with the Democratic Party at election time -- a party that is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its obeisance and fealty to capital.American capitalism is unequivocally demonstrating that it does not work -- except for an insignificant minority of capitalist. Yet without insistent countervailing pressure from labor, absolutely nothing will change. We can already see this clearly. And conditions for American labor -- and by implication the mass of American people -- are continuing to steadily deteriorate.
Friday, June 19, 2009
SUV's under Socialism?
Ecology & Marxism – Do They Connect?
Most older Marxists – no matter what tradition – were brought up thinking that the ‘production’ of material goods was one of the only gauges to measure the well-being of the proletariat. Marxism developed against capital, but Marxism also developed in a world where resources were just being developed, or ‘exploited.’ Hence Lenin and Trotsky were for industrializing the primitive, mostly agrarian Soviet Union (quite rightly) and Stalin took this to the ultimate extreme, favoring giant industrial building projects over closing a ‘scissors’ of any kind – the 'scissors' being the relationship with the countryside and peasantry. Instead, it was widened. We can see this today in the deformed workers’ state in China, which has become the productive marvel of the world under its’ mostly planned economy and mixed economy, while depopulating its impoverished rural areas.
However, a look back at the Soviet Union shows some of the niggling flaws in an approach that favors production over anything else. Visit Baku and see the devastation of dry holes, rusting oil derricks and poisoned soils for miles around the city. Watch the Aral Sea shrink, as it is used for cotton irrigation across the plains – to the point where the lake is disappearing. And then there is Chernobyl, which continues to affect hundreds of thousands of citizens with the aftermath of radioactive poisoning. Regarding China, an excellent article in Mother Jones in 2007, "China's Pollution Problem Goes Global" by Jacques Leslie shows what pell-mell production has done to China and her people, exclusively from an environmental and health point of view. It is devastating.
As materialists first and necrophiliacs last, Marxists have to examine this new (actually not so new) phenomenon, and integrate it into our program. A good case can be made that environmentalism should be considered an essential part of an updated transitional program. Where environmentalism would fit into the bureaucratic/Stalinist model of the minimum/maximum ‘program’ conundrum, or the Maoist ‘mass’ line, I really do not know.
The most prominent synthesizer of Marxism and environmentalism in the U.S. is John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, a long running left-Marxist journal in the U.S. Foster wrote “Marx’s Ecology – Materialism and Nature” in 2000. This ground-breaking work looked at the works of Marx and Engels and how they noted environmental pollution and the ill-effects of capitalist production on the health of the working classes of England and Germany. Polluted water, leveled forests, smoke-filled air, work accidents, bad food, early death– it was all noted as part of the exploitation of the working classes. Environmental ‘racism’ would be no surprise to Marx or Engels. Foster has just come out with a new book called “The Ecological Revolution – Making Peace with the Planet.” I have not read the book yet, but his thesis is that human survival – and the survival of our class – is based on a revolutionary transformation of our relationship with the planet. He points out that capitalism cannot succeed at this task, as ‘profit’ demands the unending exploitation of people, plants, animals, air, water and land. So it has been from the beginning of the capitalist mode of production. Only socialism, which is based on scientific planning and not profit, can make the switch to a sustainable economy. Real socialism is not based exclusively on the unthinking exploitation of nature.
We are all familiar with the position – from ostensible Marxists no less - that anything less than an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house on every lot, and a 4x4 in every woods is the due of the working class. Bicycling, growing your own food, shutting off the lights, eating organic, reusing and repairing, vegetarianism, grey-water systems and other environmental methods in building, saying no to bottled water, getting rid of throw-away products, solar or wind power - you get the idea – are all expensive and ‘petit-bourgeois’ deviations from working class needs. This by the way is also the view of right-wing Republican populism. This interesting congruence should raise a ‘red flag’ in the best possible sense.
While it is true that many of these practices did not solely originate from the working class, it is also true that they did not originate from corporate America. American workers have been buying used goods, or repairing broken ones, or eschewing the ease of expensive throwaways since the class began. If one has been to Hanoi recently, bicycles outnumber cars or trucks – though small scooters are now the majority. Vietnamese food is not grown with massive inputs of chemical oil-based fertilizers, as this costs too much. It is fresh and organic – horrors - and is reputed to be the best food in the world, if you listen to people like Anthony Bourdain, or even your own stomach. Anyone following the development of Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet workers’ state will find out that the Cubans have developed organic agriculture to an extent not seen anywhere else in the world. Their army of scientists has been devoted to this issue. This was occasioned by the end of cheap Soviet oil imports. If Cuba had been a capitalist society, they would have gone into debt as a nation to buy more oil from OPEC or the United States. The Cubans refused to go this route. Interestingly, urban gardens in Havana now account for much of the fresh food in the city. North Korea also faced this situation in 1989 too. Instead of switching over to another mode of agriculture, hundreds of thousands or more died of starvation. This does not reflect well on the entrenched bureaucrats in Pyongyang in comparison to the cadres in Havana.
More importantly, an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house and a 4X4 actually impact the environment of the rest of the world. Internationalists do not consume in a state of oblivion. The constant flow of scientific data now indicates that global warming is past the point of no return, and that it is affecting the third world even more than the first world. Which is one reason the Republican Party pooh-poohs global climate change as an erroneous ‘theory’ – they couldn’t care less about people in Bangladesh or New Orleans. Unless Marxists can refute the science behind global climate change, Marxists are obligated to follow what it indicates. And by all indications, global warming is now farther alone than most thought only two years ago.
The other fact that will dominate future development in the world is the issue of oil. American capitalism was based on early and massive exploitation of oil – the most useful and powerful energy source ever discovered. To some extent, the immense growth in the Soviet Union was also based on drilling for oil. Oil is the key commodity for the recent development of capital. US imperialism cut off the oil supply to Japan, which was one of the sparks behind the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Battle of the Bulge was won because the Nazi tanks ran out of … gasoline from Rumania. The two wars in the Gulf were directly based on control of this most precious of commodities. Arguments can be made over the importance of oil to the wars in Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia. And as oil dwindles it will become more precious, more expensive, more destructive, but also more marginal. The oil age is over, and Marxists should read the handwriting on the wall.
I have to agree with Foster that without a Marxism infused with environmentalism, we will be unable to cope with the destruction of our biosphere, or the depletion of oil, and hence our ability as a class to lead the way to the future. As the saying goes, an unlimited appetite for ‘goods’ has now run up against the limited objective carrying capacity of the planet. The effect of bourgeois ‘globalism’ has created its opposite - a sense of a some world-wide alternative to a runaway cheap-labor, oil-war Dickensianism.
Enlightened Democratic capital thinks there is a purely technical fix to this – turbines, solar panels and a massive grid. And this project is indeed part of the solution. However, conservation is not a concept that is bankable, even under ‘enlightened’ capitalism. Nor is the need to control production, and eliminate anything that is unsustainable. Capital and its commodification of everything cannot do this – without moving towards social control.
Note my use of the word ‘enlightened’ – most capital is not enlightened and will fight the other wing of capital, and the working class, to the death. This is partly what we see in the battle between the Republican and Democrat parties – the clash of outmoded production, and an ostensibly ‘new’ production. Al Gore and Obama want to grow or transform a new generation of capitalists to meet this situation – witness what they are attempting to do with Chrysler and GM. However, they are also representatives of that whole capitalist class. Given this, they cannot carry through this battle to the end, and will instead protect all wings of capital. The collapse of the capitalist world economy is already hindering efforts to accomplish this transition in time. Money for a new grid is being dumping into warfare or the dead banking system by the Democrats. One of their solutions, the proposed market for ‘pollution credits’ will only create another unregulated gold rush in pollution derivatives – and, as has been proved in Europe, will not slow carbon production significantly. The declining dollar will make deficit financing even more difficult for U.S. imperialism - including infrastructure improvements related to a green economy.
Of course, China, which has created itself as the workhouse of world capital, has many of the same dilemmas. What they have as an advantage, however, is some centralized planning control. Overnight they shut hundreds of small coal plants. Overnight they ordered an end to the production of plastic bags. Overnight they decreed that all new skyscrapers built in Shanghai and Beijing would be ‘green’ - if that is even possible. This is the benefit of a theoretically planned economy, not one dominated by a short-term market and millions of individual bourgeois decisions. Because global warming and peak oil are not ‘short term’ issues, the short term corporate shareholder is not the best judge of where an economy should go. Nor is a government theoretically and financially based on these same shareholders able to chart a real solution.
Both books by Foster are available at May Day books.
Red Frog, 6/19/2009
Most older Marxists – no matter what tradition – were brought up thinking that the ‘production’ of material goods was one of the only gauges to measure the well-being of the proletariat. Marxism developed against capital, but Marxism also developed in a world where resources were just being developed, or ‘exploited.’ Hence Lenin and Trotsky were for industrializing the primitive, mostly agrarian Soviet Union (quite rightly) and Stalin took this to the ultimate extreme, favoring giant industrial building projects over closing a ‘scissors’ of any kind – the 'scissors' being the relationship with the countryside and peasantry. Instead, it was widened. We can see this today in the deformed workers’ state in China, which has become the productive marvel of the world under its’ mostly planned economy and mixed economy, while depopulating its impoverished rural areas.
 |
| The Aral 'Sea' |
As materialists first and necrophiliacs last, Marxists have to examine this new (actually not so new) phenomenon, and integrate it into our program. A good case can be made that environmentalism should be considered an essential part of an updated transitional program. Where environmentalism would fit into the bureaucratic/Stalinist model of the minimum/maximum ‘program’ conundrum, or the Maoist ‘mass’ line, I really do not know.
The most prominent synthesizer of Marxism and environmentalism in the U.S. is John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, a long running left-Marxist journal in the U.S. Foster wrote “Marx’s Ecology – Materialism and Nature” in 2000. This ground-breaking work looked at the works of Marx and Engels and how they noted environmental pollution and the ill-effects of capitalist production on the health of the working classes of England and Germany. Polluted water, leveled forests, smoke-filled air, work accidents, bad food, early death– it was all noted as part of the exploitation of the working classes. Environmental ‘racism’ would be no surprise to Marx or Engels. Foster has just come out with a new book called “The Ecological Revolution – Making Peace with the Planet.” I have not read the book yet, but his thesis is that human survival – and the survival of our class – is based on a revolutionary transformation of our relationship with the planet. He points out that capitalism cannot succeed at this task, as ‘profit’ demands the unending exploitation of people, plants, animals, air, water and land. So it has been from the beginning of the capitalist mode of production. Only socialism, which is based on scientific planning and not profit, can make the switch to a sustainable economy. Real socialism is not based exclusively on the unthinking exploitation of nature.
We are all familiar with the position – from ostensible Marxists no less - that anything less than an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house on every lot, and a 4x4 in every woods is the due of the working class. Bicycling, growing your own food, shutting off the lights, eating organic, reusing and repairing, vegetarianism, grey-water systems and other environmental methods in building, saying no to bottled water, getting rid of throw-away products, solar or wind power - you get the idea – are all expensive and ‘petit-bourgeois’ deviations from working class needs. This by the way is also the view of right-wing Republican populism. This interesting congruence should raise a ‘red flag’ in the best possible sense.
While it is true that many of these practices did not solely originate from the working class, it is also true that they did not originate from corporate America. American workers have been buying used goods, or repairing broken ones, or eschewing the ease of expensive throwaways since the class began. If one has been to Hanoi recently, bicycles outnumber cars or trucks – though small scooters are now the majority. Vietnamese food is not grown with massive inputs of chemical oil-based fertilizers, as this costs too much. It is fresh and organic – horrors - and is reputed to be the best food in the world, if you listen to people like Anthony Bourdain, or even your own stomach. Anyone following the development of Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet workers’ state will find out that the Cubans have developed organic agriculture to an extent not seen anywhere else in the world. Their army of scientists has been devoted to this issue. This was occasioned by the end of cheap Soviet oil imports. If Cuba had been a capitalist society, they would have gone into debt as a nation to buy more oil from OPEC or the United States. The Cubans refused to go this route. Interestingly, urban gardens in Havana now account for much of the fresh food in the city. North Korea also faced this situation in 1989 too. Instead of switching over to another mode of agriculture, hundreds of thousands or more died of starvation. This does not reflect well on the entrenched bureaucrats in Pyongyang in comparison to the cadres in Havana.
More importantly, an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house and a 4X4 actually impact the environment of the rest of the world. Internationalists do not consume in a state of oblivion. The constant flow of scientific data now indicates that global warming is past the point of no return, and that it is affecting the third world even more than the first world. Which is one reason the Republican Party pooh-poohs global climate change as an erroneous ‘theory’ – they couldn’t care less about people in Bangladesh or New Orleans. Unless Marxists can refute the science behind global climate change, Marxists are obligated to follow what it indicates. And by all indications, global warming is now farther alone than most thought only two years ago.
The other fact that will dominate future development in the world is the issue of oil. American capitalism was based on early and massive exploitation of oil – the most useful and powerful energy source ever discovered. To some extent, the immense growth in the Soviet Union was also based on drilling for oil. Oil is the key commodity for the recent development of capital. US imperialism cut off the oil supply to Japan, which was one of the sparks behind the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Battle of the Bulge was won because the Nazi tanks ran out of … gasoline from Rumania. The two wars in the Gulf were directly based on control of this most precious of commodities. Arguments can be made over the importance of oil to the wars in Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia. And as oil dwindles it will become more precious, more expensive, more destructive, but also more marginal. The oil age is over, and Marxists should read the handwriting on the wall.
I have to agree with Foster that without a Marxism infused with environmentalism, we will be unable to cope with the destruction of our biosphere, or the depletion of oil, and hence our ability as a class to lead the way to the future. As the saying goes, an unlimited appetite for ‘goods’ has now run up against the limited objective carrying capacity of the planet. The effect of bourgeois ‘globalism’ has created its opposite - a sense of a some world-wide alternative to a runaway cheap-labor, oil-war Dickensianism.
Enlightened Democratic capital thinks there is a purely technical fix to this – turbines, solar panels and a massive grid. And this project is indeed part of the solution. However, conservation is not a concept that is bankable, even under ‘enlightened’ capitalism. Nor is the need to control production, and eliminate anything that is unsustainable. Capital and its commodification of everything cannot do this – without moving towards social control.
Note my use of the word ‘enlightened’ – most capital is not enlightened and will fight the other wing of capital, and the working class, to the death. This is partly what we see in the battle between the Republican and Democrat parties – the clash of outmoded production, and an ostensibly ‘new’ production. Al Gore and Obama want to grow or transform a new generation of capitalists to meet this situation – witness what they are attempting to do with Chrysler and GM. However, they are also representatives of that whole capitalist class. Given this, they cannot carry through this battle to the end, and will instead protect all wings of capital. The collapse of the capitalist world economy is already hindering efforts to accomplish this transition in time. Money for a new grid is being dumping into warfare or the dead banking system by the Democrats. One of their solutions, the proposed market for ‘pollution credits’ will only create another unregulated gold rush in pollution derivatives – and, as has been proved in Europe, will not slow carbon production significantly. The declining dollar will make deficit financing even more difficult for U.S. imperialism - including infrastructure improvements related to a green economy.
Of course, China, which has created itself as the workhouse of world capital, has many of the same dilemmas. What they have as an advantage, however, is some centralized planning control. Overnight they shut hundreds of small coal plants. Overnight they ordered an end to the production of plastic bags. Overnight they decreed that all new skyscrapers built in Shanghai and Beijing would be ‘green’ - if that is even possible. This is the benefit of a theoretically planned economy, not one dominated by a short-term market and millions of individual bourgeois decisions. Because global warming and peak oil are not ‘short term’ issues, the short term corporate shareholder is not the best judge of where an economy should go. Nor is a government theoretically and financially based on these same shareholders able to chart a real solution.
Both books by Foster are available at May Day books.
Red Frog, 6/19/2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
NO SOCIAL SECURITY FOR YOU, DUDE!
The Wizards of Wall Street have convinced millions of younger Americans that there will be no money for their Social Security retirement This could happen if we let the finance thieves run things and it would have come partly true if the Bush plan for privatizing the system had been enacted.
As of now, our planet is quite sick BUT with intelligent planning it can support 2 or 3 billion more persons for a millennium or two and, as always, there is more than enough labor to create the wealth needed to provide economic security for everyone. The same would be true for our health care system. Or is this overly optimistic?
The Wizards of Wall Street have convinced millions of younger Americans that there will be no money for their Social Security retirement This could happen if we let the finance thieves run things and it would have come partly true if the Bush plan for privatizing the system had been enacted.
As of now, our planet is quite sick BUT with intelligent planning it can support 2 or 3 billion more persons for a millennium or two and, as always, there is more than enough labor to create the wealth needed to provide economic security for everyone. The same would be true for our health care system. Or is this overly optimistic?
Bye-bye, US hegemony
In the last few days there have been three articles devoted to the imminent demise of US financial hegemony -- a corollary of which will be the loss of US military hegemony.
1) An essay by Michael Hudson on "de-dollarisation,"
2) An essay by W. Joseph Stroupe on the move out of dollars and US Treasuries,
3) And an essay by Chris Hedges on how bankrupt the US imperium is.
These essays are of interest to someone like myself who for years has known that the US-dominated financial system is utterly unsustainable but yet was never able to figure out what kind of tectonic changes would have to occur for the demise of the old system and its replacement by a multi-polar system. In the past few months we've begun to receive intimations, suggestions, of what an emerging new set-up may look like. It appears that both the world's major central banks and private investors are becoming increasingly averse to both dollars and US treasuries. This means it will not be possible for the US to deficit-finance its budget. And since half the budget deficit for this year is defence-related, this suggests the US is going to have to trim its sails. Drastically.
I always enjoy everything Michael Hudson writes. If memory serves, I bought one of his two books -- "Global Fracture" -- at Mayday some years back, and this was my introduction to his historical analysis of how the US-dominated financial order came into being. In the essay listed above he examines how, inter alia, the emerging BRIC powers, are trying to diversify out of dollars -- primarily for economic reasons (no-one wants to be left holding a bag of worthless paper), but also with an eye to reducing USA's deficit-financed bellicose stance towards the rest of the world. But in order to get out of the present system, they have to devise a new one, however tentatively and uncertainly. This is what the current SCO meeting in Yekaterinburg is all about.
The second essay, by Stroupe, confines itself to discussing how Washington's policies of exploding budget deficits is undermining faith in both dollars and Treasuries, and how this will likely accelerate a trend towards a new global around based around the major emerging economies rather than the USA and UK.
And the final essay, by Chris Hedges, rewords some of Hudson's essay, and points out some of the dire domestic implications for the United States. Some of these can be questioned but will no doubt divert those who enjoy doomsday scenarios.
1) An essay by Michael Hudson on "de-dollarisation,"
2) An essay by W. Joseph Stroupe on the move out of dollars and US Treasuries,
3) And an essay by Chris Hedges on how bankrupt the US imperium is.
These essays are of interest to someone like myself who for years has known that the US-dominated financial system is utterly unsustainable but yet was never able to figure out what kind of tectonic changes would have to occur for the demise of the old system and its replacement by a multi-polar system. In the past few months we've begun to receive intimations, suggestions, of what an emerging new set-up may look like. It appears that both the world's major central banks and private investors are becoming increasingly averse to both dollars and US treasuries. This means it will not be possible for the US to deficit-finance its budget. And since half the budget deficit for this year is defence-related, this suggests the US is going to have to trim its sails. Drastically.
I always enjoy everything Michael Hudson writes. If memory serves, I bought one of his two books -- "Global Fracture" -- at Mayday some years back, and this was my introduction to his historical analysis of how the US-dominated financial order came into being. In the essay listed above he examines how, inter alia, the emerging BRIC powers, are trying to diversify out of dollars -- primarily for economic reasons (no-one wants to be left holding a bag of worthless paper), but also with an eye to reducing USA's deficit-financed bellicose stance towards the rest of the world. But in order to get out of the present system, they have to devise a new one, however tentatively and uncertainly. This is what the current SCO meeting in Yekaterinburg is all about.
The second essay, by Stroupe, confines itself to discussing how Washington's policies of exploding budget deficits is undermining faith in both dollars and Treasuries, and how this will likely accelerate a trend towards a new global around based around the major emerging economies rather than the USA and UK.
And the final essay, by Chris Hedges, rewords some of Hudson's essay, and points out some of the dire domestic implications for the United States. Some of these can be questioned but will no doubt divert those who enjoy doomsday scenarios.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Not Socialist Realism...
Let Us Now Praise the Dead!
The Grateful Dead got their start in 1965 in the Bay area. They are on tour this summer again, 45 years after they got their start as the Warlocks in 1964. The survivors – Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman, Mickey Hart – were joined on this summer’s tour for the second time by Allman Brother’s member Warren Haynes, and by keyboardist Jeff Chimenti of Ratdog, who is the permanent keyboardist now. Former core members Jerry Garcia and Rod ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, lyricists Robert Hunter and John Barlow, and keyboard players Keith Godchaux, Tom Constanten, and Vince Melnick, along with female vocalist Donna Godchaux, were all inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as members of the Grateful Dead. People like Stanley Owsley, the creator of LSD, was their soundman for many years. They are the most long-running rock act in the U.S. The only acts that have been around longer are doing an ‘oldies’ style show at casinos. I don't think I go out on a limb when I say they are the best live rock band - ever.
Let us examine what the Dead have done to music.
They came out of a scene in San Francisco that was not controlled by corporate music interests. It was the product of an artistic community of musicians and the cultural impact of the unique times and a unique place – San Francisco. Other bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Country Joe & The Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape and Janis Joplin/Big Brother came out of that same organic scene. In fact, at Monterey, they and the other San Francisco bands faced off with the more commercial groups from Los Angeles. The Dead played free shows and benefits constantly. They fought and succeeded in controlling their studio sound from record one. They are one of the main historical links between the Beat Generation of the 50’s and the counter-culture of the 60’s –working with Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg at “Acid Tests” – and traveling with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the ‘bus.’ Their style of music is an amalgamation of blues, country, folk, bluegrass, rhythm & blues, 50’s rock, electronica and jazz into a peculiarly American style. First called ‘psychedelic’, they became the originator of the ‘jam band’ scene, which has spawned imitators like Phish, Widespread Panic and festivals like Bonnaroo and ‘10,000 Lakes’ across the U.S. In effect, they encompass almost every popular U.S. musical style. Their use of drugs to enhance music creativity and collectivity is almost unique, but also predictably destructive.
The Dead started out as a cover band, and continue to play covers of Rolling Stones, Dylan and the Beatles, along with blues, country and 50’s covers. They make each cover song their own, which is why they can get away with it. Listen to Pigpen singing “King Bee” and compare it to Jagger, and you will see McKernan rips the throat out of the song, while Jagger sounds like a mincing boy. They are the best cover band in the country, and in this process, show their respect to other musicians, and to popular music’s traditions.
The Dead are the most recorded live group in history, playing more than 2,350 concerts, including three at the Great Pyramids in Giza. They encouraged their live shows by allowing music tapers, not discouraging them, and not suing people who recorded them ‘illicitly.’ They were the first group to sell soundboard CDs to fans after each show. Until recently they sold their own tickets so that people did not have to go through Ticketmaster – a conglomeration of thieves. They are followed by both young and old at live concerts, not just elderly fans in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks. Their fan base is, to put it mildly, very dedicated. Very few bands have such numbers of people who drive from one concert to another. Concerts range up to 3+ hours normally, so that the audience gets their money’s worth. Marijuana is a standard item at concerts, shared by many, and hence the band plays a non-public role in efforts for the legalization of this, and other, drugs. A Dead concert is a sort of semi-religious event, heightened by the marijuana as communion, much as peyote is used in Native American Church. People dance for nearly the whole 3 hours, so it has something of the nature of an ecstatic St. Vitus dance. They like outdoor arenas due to the clear sound outside. Essentially, the heart of the Dead sound is jazz improvisation, by every musician, not just one. Set lists vary from night to night, and songs are played as themes, not copies. So one song can have many versions, segueing into each other, which stretches the music out. This is the heart of their jazz approach, and one reason people like Wynton Marsalis play with them.
Garcia started as a bluegrass player, Lesh as a classical musician, Pig Pen as a blues man, and Kreutzmann as a jazz drummer – incorporating their styles at the very beginning. No other band has two such accomplished drummers as Kreutzmann and Hart – making the Dead sound heavily rhythmic and intricate. Hart himself has become a top ‘world music’ drummer. Every concert includes a 15-20 minutes “drums & space” set allowing these two to stretch out, which includes an electronic section that the other members come in on.
Since day one, sound quality and instrument quality was a number one concern. They were tired of the low quality PA systems offered bands. Their interest in giving the audience the best sound possible lead to the Wall of Sound – a massive distortion-free sound system with 7 separate instrument systems - being developed by Owsley and Alembic Studios. The Dead recorded their albums on 4 and 8 track systems long before any other band, including the Beatles. They even went independent for awhile, putting out their own albums. Their staff was large, and paid well – until they could no longer support so many people. Graphically, the Dead still rely on striking graphics and light shows at their concerts. No other band has so many ‘logos,’ symbols and emblematic/thematic visuals – strutting bears, skulls alone, and crossed with roses, terrapins, Uncle Sam as a skeleton, and others. Most music acts pay little attention to artwork – but the Dead, and the San Francisco sound they came out of – revered visuals.
The Dead have done it their own way from the beginning, not following the clichés of the music business. They came out of a collective music scene, and the way the band toured and played was an extension of that collectivity. Which is why so many musicians have been part of the band. They represent the best of American popular music creativity and artistic freedom. So let us praise the Dead. They are growing old, and will one day no longer be able to play. They are the great American ‘rock’ band. Period.
And you cannot buy them at May Day books.
Red Frog – 6/7/2009
The Grateful Dead got their start in 1965 in the Bay area. They are on tour this summer again, 45 years after they got their start as the Warlocks in 1964. The survivors – Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman, Mickey Hart – were joined on this summer’s tour for the second time by Allman Brother’s member Warren Haynes, and by keyboardist Jeff Chimenti of Ratdog, who is the permanent keyboardist now. Former core members Jerry Garcia and Rod ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, lyricists Robert Hunter and John Barlow, and keyboard players Keith Godchaux, Tom Constanten, and Vince Melnick, along with female vocalist Donna Godchaux, were all inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as members of the Grateful Dead. People like Stanley Owsley, the creator of LSD, was their soundman for many years. They are the most long-running rock act in the U.S. The only acts that have been around longer are doing an ‘oldies’ style show at casinos. I don't think I go out on a limb when I say they are the best live rock band - ever.
 |
| Fare Thee Well at Soldier Field, Chicago |
They came out of a scene in San Francisco that was not controlled by corporate music interests. It was the product of an artistic community of musicians and the cultural impact of the unique times and a unique place – San Francisco. Other bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Country Joe & The Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape and Janis Joplin/Big Brother came out of that same organic scene. In fact, at Monterey, they and the other San Francisco bands faced off with the more commercial groups from Los Angeles. The Dead played free shows and benefits constantly. They fought and succeeded in controlling their studio sound from record one. They are one of the main historical links between the Beat Generation of the 50’s and the counter-culture of the 60’s –working with Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg at “Acid Tests” – and traveling with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the ‘bus.’ Their style of music is an amalgamation of blues, country, folk, bluegrass, rhythm & blues, 50’s rock, electronica and jazz into a peculiarly American style. First called ‘psychedelic’, they became the originator of the ‘jam band’ scene, which has spawned imitators like Phish, Widespread Panic and festivals like Bonnaroo and ‘10,000 Lakes’ across the U.S. In effect, they encompass almost every popular U.S. musical style. Their use of drugs to enhance music creativity and collectivity is almost unique, but also predictably destructive.
The Dead started out as a cover band, and continue to play covers of Rolling Stones, Dylan and the Beatles, along with blues, country and 50’s covers. They make each cover song their own, which is why they can get away with it. Listen to Pigpen singing “King Bee” and compare it to Jagger, and you will see McKernan rips the throat out of the song, while Jagger sounds like a mincing boy. They are the best cover band in the country, and in this process, show their respect to other musicians, and to popular music’s traditions.
The Dead are the most recorded live group in history, playing more than 2,350 concerts, including three at the Great Pyramids in Giza. They encouraged their live shows by allowing music tapers, not discouraging them, and not suing people who recorded them ‘illicitly.’ They were the first group to sell soundboard CDs to fans after each show. Until recently they sold their own tickets so that people did not have to go through Ticketmaster – a conglomeration of thieves. They are followed by both young and old at live concerts, not just elderly fans in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks. Their fan base is, to put it mildly, very dedicated. Very few bands have such numbers of people who drive from one concert to another. Concerts range up to 3+ hours normally, so that the audience gets their money’s worth. Marijuana is a standard item at concerts, shared by many, and hence the band plays a non-public role in efforts for the legalization of this, and other, drugs. A Dead concert is a sort of semi-religious event, heightened by the marijuana as communion, much as peyote is used in Native American Church. People dance for nearly the whole 3 hours, so it has something of the nature of an ecstatic St. Vitus dance. They like outdoor arenas due to the clear sound outside. Essentially, the heart of the Dead sound is jazz improvisation, by every musician, not just one. Set lists vary from night to night, and songs are played as themes, not copies. So one song can have many versions, segueing into each other, which stretches the music out. This is the heart of their jazz approach, and one reason people like Wynton Marsalis play with them.
Garcia started as a bluegrass player, Lesh as a classical musician, Pig Pen as a blues man, and Kreutzmann as a jazz drummer – incorporating their styles at the very beginning. No other band has two such accomplished drummers as Kreutzmann and Hart – making the Dead sound heavily rhythmic and intricate. Hart himself has become a top ‘world music’ drummer. Every concert includes a 15-20 minutes “drums & space” set allowing these two to stretch out, which includes an electronic section that the other members come in on.
Since day one, sound quality and instrument quality was a number one concern. They were tired of the low quality PA systems offered bands. Their interest in giving the audience the best sound possible lead to the Wall of Sound – a massive distortion-free sound system with 7 separate instrument systems - being developed by Owsley and Alembic Studios. The Dead recorded their albums on 4 and 8 track systems long before any other band, including the Beatles. They even went independent for awhile, putting out their own albums. Their staff was large, and paid well – until they could no longer support so many people. Graphically, the Dead still rely on striking graphics and light shows at their concerts. No other band has so many ‘logos,’ symbols and emblematic/thematic visuals – strutting bears, skulls alone, and crossed with roses, terrapins, Uncle Sam as a skeleton, and others. Most music acts pay little attention to artwork – but the Dead, and the San Francisco sound they came out of – revered visuals.
The Dead have done it their own way from the beginning, not following the clichés of the music business. They came out of a collective music scene, and the way the band toured and played was an extension of that collectivity. Which is why so many musicians have been part of the band. They represent the best of American popular music creativity and artistic freedom. So let us praise the Dead. They are growing old, and will one day no longer be able to play. They are the great American ‘rock’ band. Period.
And you cannot buy them at May Day books.
Red Frog – 6/7/2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
California Upholds Ban on Gay Marriage: Build a National Movement for Equal Rights Now! | ||
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| May 31, 2009 By Dan DiMaggio | ||
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On Tuesday, May 26, in a 6-1 ruling, California’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. In response to this ruling and the continued discrimination faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people across the country, activists have called for a National March for Equality in Washington, D.C. the weekend of October 10-11 to demand full, equal rights for all LGBT people. Just hours after the verdict on Prop 8 was released, thousands took to the streets in protest across the country, in an echo of the hundreds of thousands who demonstrated on November 15 after the initial passage of this reactionary law. According to DayofDecision.com, there were events organized in over 115 cities, including rallies of 15,000 in Los Angeles, 5,000 in San Francisco, 3,000 in San Diego, and over 1,000 in Seattle. Another 4,000 marched in Fresno on Saturday, including hundreds who marched 14.5 miles in an effort to reach people in more socially conservative areas. The ruling on Prop 8 in California is a major slap in the face to equal rights, even though the court did agree to recognize the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California prior to the passage of Prop 8 in November 2008. Yet while the California decision is a huge setback, recent months have witnessed a number of victories for the gay rights movement. New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Iowa have all legalized same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states that have legalized marriage equality to six. In addition the movement is making a huge dent in the battle for hearts and minds. 44 percent of Americans now say same-sex marriage should be legal (up from just 21 percent in November 2004). This includes 58 percent of those ages 18-34 (CNN, 5/4/09). There is a widespread feeling of confidence among many LGBT people and activists that the tide may be finally turning, despite the California ruling – although a major struggle lies ahead. As Robin Tyler, one of the plaintiffs in the Proposition 8 suit, said, “No civil rights movement has ever lost. Never. We will win. It’s not an ‘if’ it’s a when. Only we are going to have to fight like hell.” Tyler, who was married while same-sex marriage was legal in California, founded the website DayofDecision.com, which was responsible for the protests Tuesday evening. Activists are now gearing up to put an initiative to overturn Prop 8 on the California ballot in 2010. There is also a major lawsuit being filed in the federal court system, arguing that California’s ban on gay marriage violates the constitutional right to due process and equal protection under the law. Yet many major LGBT rights organizations oppose this strategy, saying it is too soon to aim for a challenge at the national Supreme Court level given the current balance on the court. We can't rely on corporate politicians or the courts to defend our rights, much less expand them. Rather than waiting for a supposedly more favorable balance on the court, now is the time to step up the movement in the streets, which can change the relationship of forces in society and build public support for LGBT rights. Now is the perfect time to seize on the momentum generated by recent victories and the outrage at the passage of Proposition 8 in California (and the state supreme court’s refusal to reverse it) to go all out in organizing the national demonstration for equal rights for all LGBT people on October 10-11. Such a demonstration will help link up all the many efforts in different states and localities to push for marriage equality and broader LGBT rights. Crucially, the mobilization will demand that the Obama administration repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, as well as demanding marriage equality at a national level. While Obama promised to repeal DOMA during his campaign, his administration has yet to make any moves in this direction. Expressing the growing frustration and anger of some in the LGBT community at the timidity of Democratic politicians on this issue, Tyler said, “If the National Democratic party does not, after 35 years of promises to our community, make sure we have full equal rights in this country, the gay divorce you are going to see is the gay communities divorce from the Democratic party. We are a civil rights movement. It’s time we acted like one.” The national march this fall will allow LGBT rights activists to boldly campaign in their communities, schools, and unions to mobilize and build support. It will place the issue in the national spotlight and highlight the broad support for equal rights for all that exists, giving confidence to the millions who support marriage equality that they are part of a broader movement. As the National March for Equality organizers put it in their call, “As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.” The call for a national demonstration on October 10-11 should be enthusiastically supported by all progressive organizations, linked to the struggle against all forms of oppression and for equality and real justice for all. As socialists, dedicated to building a world free of exploitation, we wholeheartedly support the call for a national demonstration for equal rights for LGBT people in Washington on October 10-11. We link the struggle for equal rights for LGBT people to the need to replace this rotten capitalist system, which gives rise not only to economic crises and wars, but also feeds off of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Ultimately, it is only through mobilizing a powerful mass movement that we can transform society. As the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “Without struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will.” | ||
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Are You Shocked?
“The Shock Doctrine” – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, 2007
Naomi Klein is a left critic of the Democratic Party and neo-liberalism. She herself seems not to be a through-going socialist, and implies that a ‘non-disaster’ capitalism might just succeed. “It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and no such ideological purity.” (p.24, SD)
This book is a work of research and journalism, and gathers the economic threads of Milton Friedman Thought into one historical basket It shows how Freidman’s ideas have played out over the last 30 years in history, at the World Bank & IMF, and in torture regimes. The oddest fillip here is Klein’s use of the metaphors of modern psychological ‘medicine’ and torture – sensory deprivation, the destruction of personality and memory, the breaking of all social bonds and violence – and equate them with what neo-liberalism uses to break down a … society. Psychological methods which developed into the CIA torture regime of MKUltra were then used in Iraq in Abu Grahib, after being used on the Iraqi people themselves. This is how Klein links electroshock therapy and … Shock and Awe.
I think Klein is on to something here. The key point is that capitalism can no longer create sufficient wealth itself, and must severely loot the public sectors and working classes all over the world to maintain profits. It is the twists of a decaying system, much like the move toward financialization in the 70s in the U.S. was a result of a failure to make adequate profits the old-fashioned way. These two developments actually go together – Friedmanite “privatization, deregulation and cuts to social services” are at the bottom of our own financial meltdown here in the United States in several ways. And the fact that disasters – which were at one time avoided by prudent capitalists – are now eagerly sought as new profit opportunities by many major corporations – shows the capitalist system is at an even lower economic and historical point. During World War II, war-profiteering was a dirty word. During Iraq War II, war-profiteering was standard operating procedure. Capitalism has not changed, but the perception of it has.
Much of this history will be familiar to leftists. The operations of the “Berkeley School” in Indonesia in the 60s, which lead to the fascist crackdown by Sukarno. The counter-revolution in Chile, lead by Pinochet, which gave Friedman’s Chicago School and it’s homegrown acolytes their first chance to destroy an economy for the greater good of the comprador bourgeoisie and international capital. Similar events in Bolivia and Argentina followed, the latter leading to years of dictatorship and disappearances. Friedmanism spread to the UK after the Falklands War, when Thatcher seized upon that war to bring it ‘home’ against the Miners Union. It was used in South Africa after the defeat of apartheid. And the climactic moment - the massive destruction of the economies of the USSR and Poland, and other former workers’ states, through Friedmanite methods championed by people like Jeffrey Sachs. All this has started to come to an end – especially in Latin America where the ideology of Friedmanism and neo-liberalism has been defeated by bourgeois ‘developmentalists’ and leftists. They both oppose making their nations nothing but raw material suppliers and passive debt payers for U.S. capital.
Kleins’ thesis is that many times ‘changes’ and ‘reforms’ have to be accompanied by physical and cultural violence – in fact violence is an almost necessary part of neo-liberalism. Much as torture and some ‘therapies’ use the same methods. Chile, Indonesia and Argentina come to mind. But even in Bolivia, where the U.S. used ‘liberals’ like Victor ‘Paz’ Estenssoro to institute a draconian Friedmanite plan, they had to declare martial law and round up protest leaders.
The wrecking behavior of the IMF and World Bank, which were, and still are, stocked with Friedmanites, came to a glorious conclusion in the USSR, when U.S capital intentionally drove the former USSR’s economy over a cliff in the early 90s. These entities saw no contradiction in their so-called love of ‘democracy when they praised Boris Yeltsin's use of tanks and soldiers to break up a democratically-elected parliament, killing many in the parliament. Jeffrey Sachs, the U.S. ‘man on the spot,’ had promised Yeltsin IMF/WB aid in exchange for drastic measures to privatize, deregulate and remove social programs in Russia. When this aid didn’t come through, even Sachs has now realized that the U.S. had no intention of ‘helping” Russia. Russia, and much of eastern Europe, fell into a depression that lasted many years, with productivity, health and every other factor dropping like a stone. The social gains of the revolutions were nearly all destroyed or sold off for pennies on the dollar. George Soros, another buccaneer of the time, realized (after making millions off of neo-liberalism in eastern Europe), that something was wrong with the formula.
Even the ostensibly leftist Solidarnosc leadership in Poland bought into the neo-liberal agenda, and instead of getting workers self-management, they got plant closures and poverty. Recently, the Polish government sold the historic Gdansk shipyard to a Dutch off-shore company, UIT, for L82M. The EU Commission forced the sale when it determined that 'state' aid gave the shipyards an unfair competitive advantage. This sale was protested by the 9,000 employees and by the Polish shipyard union.
Friedman also made a visit to the Chinese bureaucracy before the Tiananmen Square massacres. He encouraged the bureaucracy to integrate more fully with the world capitalist system, and one way to do that was not to coddle the population. While some analysts think only students opposed the regime at Tiananmen and in other cities, many workers were actually part of the protest. Some students left before the crackdown. Klein points out that workers were the main target of the assault by the bureaucracy, in dead and arrested. This makes perfect sense if the point was to discipline the class in order to provide a cheap, quiet place for imperialist factories to re-locate.
The most astounding story is still playing out – in South Africa. Klein carefully dissects the mistakes of the ANC, which focused almost exclusively on the political, and ignored the economic, at the moment of victory over apartheid. This guaranteed that the economy would continue to be controlled by the white apartheid bourgeoisie. The economic conditions for black workers in South Africa since apartheid was overthrown have barely improved, if not gotten worse. And that is because the economic aspects of the Freedom Charter – which guaranteed nationalized control over major industries and banks – were dumped by the ANC leadership. There is no way the black proletariat in South Africa can better their situation now without seizing economic power. The moment was lost when apartheid was defeated – and apartheid economics remained. This is presently the struggle we are seeing now within the ANC and the South African workers movement - the realization that the Freedom Charter, whatever its limitations, was not instituted. In retrospect, the 'stagist' theory of the ANC leadership and the South African CP has resulted only in the prolongation of the masses' misery.
Klein looks at how the Friedmanite approach worked in the Asian financial crisis in the early 90s, the tsunami several years ago, and of course, Iraq and Katrina – using disaster to enrich a large, well-connected segment of international capital. For instance, the tsunami lead international resort owners to seize beach land that had been lived on by fisherman for hundreds of years, all in the name of ‘reform’ and ‘aid,’ and then turn it over to paying western tourists to enjoy.
Is there an essential link between Friedmanite theory and disaster? No, but in reality, it has played out that way. In theory, Friedmanism is such a vicious assault on the working class that it needed an opening in society to institute its methods. And collapses helped it take hold. What is most interesting here is to apply Klein’s thesis to the U.S. now. How is capital taking advantage of the present financial crisis to INCREASE their control of the government and society?
And I bought it at May Day Books!
05/19/2009
Red Frog
Naomi Klein is a left critic of the Democratic Party and neo-liberalism. She herself seems not to be a through-going socialist, and implies that a ‘non-disaster’ capitalism might just succeed. “It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and no such ideological purity.” (p.24, SD)
I think Klein is on to something here. The key point is that capitalism can no longer create sufficient wealth itself, and must severely loot the public sectors and working classes all over the world to maintain profits. It is the twists of a decaying system, much like the move toward financialization in the 70s in the U.S. was a result of a failure to make adequate profits the old-fashioned way. These two developments actually go together – Friedmanite “privatization, deregulation and cuts to social services” are at the bottom of our own financial meltdown here in the United States in several ways. And the fact that disasters – which were at one time avoided by prudent capitalists – are now eagerly sought as new profit opportunities by many major corporations – shows the capitalist system is at an even lower economic and historical point. During World War II, war-profiteering was a dirty word. During Iraq War II, war-profiteering was standard operating procedure. Capitalism has not changed, but the perception of it has.
Much of this history will be familiar to leftists. The operations of the “Berkeley School” in Indonesia in the 60s, which lead to the fascist crackdown by Sukarno. The counter-revolution in Chile, lead by Pinochet, which gave Friedman’s Chicago School and it’s homegrown acolytes their first chance to destroy an economy for the greater good of the comprador bourgeoisie and international capital. Similar events in Bolivia and Argentina followed, the latter leading to years of dictatorship and disappearances. Friedmanism spread to the UK after the Falklands War, when Thatcher seized upon that war to bring it ‘home’ against the Miners Union. It was used in South Africa after the defeat of apartheid. And the climactic moment - the massive destruction of the economies of the USSR and Poland, and other former workers’ states, through Friedmanite methods championed by people like Jeffrey Sachs. All this has started to come to an end – especially in Latin America where the ideology of Friedmanism and neo-liberalism has been defeated by bourgeois ‘developmentalists’ and leftists. They both oppose making their nations nothing but raw material suppliers and passive debt payers for U.S. capital.
Kleins’ thesis is that many times ‘changes’ and ‘reforms’ have to be accompanied by physical and cultural violence – in fact violence is an almost necessary part of neo-liberalism. Much as torture and some ‘therapies’ use the same methods. Chile, Indonesia and Argentina come to mind. But even in Bolivia, where the U.S. used ‘liberals’ like Victor ‘Paz’ Estenssoro to institute a draconian Friedmanite plan, they had to declare martial law and round up protest leaders.
The wrecking behavior of the IMF and World Bank, which were, and still are, stocked with Friedmanites, came to a glorious conclusion in the USSR, when U.S capital intentionally drove the former USSR’s economy over a cliff in the early 90s. These entities saw no contradiction in their so-called love of ‘democracy when they praised Boris Yeltsin's use of tanks and soldiers to break up a democratically-elected parliament, killing many in the parliament. Jeffrey Sachs, the U.S. ‘man on the spot,’ had promised Yeltsin IMF/WB aid in exchange for drastic measures to privatize, deregulate and remove social programs in Russia. When this aid didn’t come through, even Sachs has now realized that the U.S. had no intention of ‘helping” Russia. Russia, and much of eastern Europe, fell into a depression that lasted many years, with productivity, health and every other factor dropping like a stone. The social gains of the revolutions were nearly all destroyed or sold off for pennies on the dollar. George Soros, another buccaneer of the time, realized (after making millions off of neo-liberalism in eastern Europe), that something was wrong with the formula.
Even the ostensibly leftist Solidarnosc leadership in Poland bought into the neo-liberal agenda, and instead of getting workers self-management, they got plant closures and poverty. Recently, the Polish government sold the historic Gdansk shipyard to a Dutch off-shore company, UIT, for L82M. The EU Commission forced the sale when it determined that 'state' aid gave the shipyards an unfair competitive advantage. This sale was protested by the 9,000 employees and by the Polish shipyard union.
Friedman also made a visit to the Chinese bureaucracy before the Tiananmen Square massacres. He encouraged the bureaucracy to integrate more fully with the world capitalist system, and one way to do that was not to coddle the population. While some analysts think only students opposed the regime at Tiananmen and in other cities, many workers were actually part of the protest. Some students left before the crackdown. Klein points out that workers were the main target of the assault by the bureaucracy, in dead and arrested. This makes perfect sense if the point was to discipline the class in order to provide a cheap, quiet place for imperialist factories to re-locate.
The most astounding story is still playing out – in South Africa. Klein carefully dissects the mistakes of the ANC, which focused almost exclusively on the political, and ignored the economic, at the moment of victory over apartheid. This guaranteed that the economy would continue to be controlled by the white apartheid bourgeoisie. The economic conditions for black workers in South Africa since apartheid was overthrown have barely improved, if not gotten worse. And that is because the economic aspects of the Freedom Charter – which guaranteed nationalized control over major industries and banks – were dumped by the ANC leadership. There is no way the black proletariat in South Africa can better their situation now without seizing economic power. The moment was lost when apartheid was defeated – and apartheid economics remained. This is presently the struggle we are seeing now within the ANC and the South African workers movement - the realization that the Freedom Charter, whatever its limitations, was not instituted. In retrospect, the 'stagist' theory of the ANC leadership and the South African CP has resulted only in the prolongation of the masses' misery.
Klein looks at how the Friedmanite approach worked in the Asian financial crisis in the early 90s, the tsunami several years ago, and of course, Iraq and Katrina – using disaster to enrich a large, well-connected segment of international capital. For instance, the tsunami lead international resort owners to seize beach land that had been lived on by fisherman for hundreds of years, all in the name of ‘reform’ and ‘aid,’ and then turn it over to paying western tourists to enjoy.
Is there an essential link between Friedmanite theory and disaster? No, but in reality, it has played out that way. In theory, Friedmanism is such a vicious assault on the working class that it needed an opening in society to institute its methods. And collapses helped it take hold. What is most interesting here is to apply Klein’s thesis to the U.S. now. How is capital taking advantage of the present financial crisis to INCREASE their control of the government and society?
And I bought it at May Day Books!
05/19/2009
Red Frog
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Katrina One – “When the Levee Breaks”
"Rising Tide – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and How it Changed America," by John M Barr, 1997
Katrina wasn’t the first time. This book details how many of the same problems of Katrina – racism, government inaction, broken promises, profiteering, the Army Corps of Engineers, the ruling clique of New Orleans – were there in 1927, long before the 2005 hurricane over-topped the levees around New Orleans. However, instead of coming from the Gulf, this torrent of water came from upstream. 1926 and 1927 had massive rains upstream, in the various tributaries of the Mississippi. The river levees broke in 145 places, 27,000 square miles were flooded, some to a depth of 30 feet.
ARMY CORPS WRONG
Barr starts the book with an analysis of the debate after the Civil War between two engineers – Andrew A Humphreys, an arrogant and intense soldier appointed head of the Army Corps of Engineers; and James Eads, a bootstraps businessman, who first got his start dragging sunken boats out of the Mississippi. Humphreys was appointed because he had made a signature and ground-breaking study of the whole Mississippi basin and its flood potential. Eads, representing civilian engineers, spent his life on the river, and made his calculations based on his study of the real behavior of the river. Essentially, the debate centered over whether levies alone were enough to protect the surrounding areas to the rivers. The Corps said yes – even though Humphrey’s himself had shown this might not work. And Eads said no – levies alone would only raise the flood higher, and eventually be over-topped. He recommended that the Mississippi be allowed to drain into other rivers like the Atchafalaya, and some surrounding land areas. His thesis was that careful ‘diversion’ of flood waters into reservoirs, outlets and through cutoffs was the only way to prevent massive destruction.
Essentially, the Corps was wrong. In a debate with Eads and the building of jetties to create a boat channel in the Mississippi at the Gulf, they said it couldn’t be done. They lost that argument - the jetties worked, digging a deep channel using the natural flow of the river, which allowed big ships to reach New Orleans. However, they won the debate prior to 1927 regarding Mississippi flood control. As a result, the Corps started damming natural outlets, including the river just above Greenville, Mississippi. They were ready to dam the Atchlafaya in Louisiana too, which is the biggest natural outlet to the sea. Prior to Katrina, the Corps also claimed the levies around New Orleans were adequate for a category 5 hurricane. They actually are not recommending an improved levy system to this day. Having the Corps in control of the Mississippi river basin is a little like handing the freeway system to the Pentagon.
THE LEVEES BREAK
In spring 1927, levees upstream in state after state had failed. That still didn’t reduce the main pressure on the Mississippi, as some of the water just flowed back into the main channel. The main levee broke (called a ‘crevasse’) near Mound’s Landing, Mississippi, just above Greenville, and scoured out a long lake, still existing today. Hundreds of black levee workers drowned. It flooded the whole Mississippi “Delta” – the rich cotton land north of Vicksburg in the Yazoo basin that General Edgar Jadwin of the Corps said could never be flooded. The song, “When the Levee Breaks,” written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, and later made famous by Led Zeppelin – that is this flood. It was one of many blues songs written about it. As Barry himself puts it, 1927 was 'when the blues came to the Delta.'
It was not just the flood waters that made people miserable, principally black sharecroppers. They were herded to work prior to, and after the flood, under compulsion and guns. Blacks lived in concentration camps, some right on the levee, eating inadequate food. Somehow whites were not qualified to do the backbreaking, grinding work of dam building and flood recovery. The sharecroppers were not allowed to leave by the Red Cross, especially in Greenville. They were physically and sexually abused by National Guard troops. Greenville had been dominated by liberal white plantation owners for many years, lead by the Percy family, who had even stood up to the Klan. But when the flood hit, the ‘liberal’ plantation owners showed their true colors, and imprisoned their black populations, as they were afraid to lose their labor. However, this very action created the exodus they feared. After the flood subsided, millions of former sharecroppers moved north to Chicago, Detroit and other cities, having had enough. Scratch a ruling-class southerner, liberal or not, get a neo-Confederate wage-slaver.
NEW ORLEANS BANKERS
The ruling clique of New Orleans, an especially powerful and in-bred collection of bankers, dominated the Mardi Gras krewes and private clubs like the Louisiana Club, the most exclusive in the country. At that time, they were led by James P Butler, president of the South’s largest bank. To guarantee that New Orleans would not be flooded, Butler and his cronies got the government to agree to dynamite the levee in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes below New Orleans, thus releasing the flood waters into mostly white, Cajun areas. Butler and the New Orleans bankers promised the Cajuns restitution, and of course, reneged on their promise after the levee was destroyed. At the time, all factual indications were that the Atchafalaya would carry most of the flood waters straight to the Gulf, and they would NOT come through New Orleans. And that is what happened. Hence the levee did not need to be destroyed. This unjust dynamiting helped Huey Long win the governorship of the state later, as he ran against the New Orleans ruling clique for what they did to the citizens of the state, among other things. Later, Long would pay with his life, when he was assassinated, by most careful accounts, by a policeman working for those very same bankers.
COOLIDGE, HOOVER and ROBERT MOTON
Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover the head of the relief effort. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Hoover was an engineer too, and thought that a scientific and energetic approach to the disaster would solve the problems quickly. He was all over the newspapers, and it was this effort that led Hoover to being named candidate of the Republican Party and then President. Hoovers fundraising from private sources did not really work, but he did put pressure on the federal government to get involved with aid. At the time, the Red Cross was a private organization, and the government had no role in disaster relief. Hoover was able to get the government to make small contributions, for the first time, to aide citizens. Coolidge, much like Bush, thought the problem was someone else’s responsibility.
At the time, black people still voted for Republicans, due to the heritage of the Civil War. Robert Moton, head of the Tuskegee Institute, was the modern representative of the Booker T Washington style of black leadership. After the flood, Moton went to meet Hoover. Moton, in exchange for a promise by Hoover that the Government would give black sharecroppers their own land, and break up the plantation system(!), promoted Hoover for president among the black population, and helped cover up the conditions that black people had been subjected to in the Delta during the flood. Of course, Hoover never kept his promise after winning the election. Moton was that flood’s Ray Nagin. Nagin voted for Bush in 2000, and worked hand in hand with the New Orleans ruling clique for their interest. He failed to prepare poor citizens of New Orleans for evacuation, and now colludes with white real estate interests to decimate the 9th and other wards and parishes.
This disaster, like Katrina, revealed the rotten parts of the ruling class – a plantation system rooted in slavery; a banking elite that would drown their fellow citizens property so that their property would survive; technocrats who make mistake after mistake; a political class that used disasters to gain political power, and then went on as if nothing had happened; and a black elite that covered for the white elite. However, the black population of Mississippi paid attention; the poor white ‘crackers’ of Louisiana paid attention, and both made progressive steps to change conditions. Katrina itself had some of the same effect, and played a role in turning part of the population against the Republican Party and its philosophy.
And I bought it in the Vieux Carre, on Chartres Street, in New Orleans –
Red Frog, 5/10/09
Katrina wasn’t the first time. This book details how many of the same problems of Katrina – racism, government inaction, broken promises, profiteering, the Army Corps of Engineers, the ruling clique of New Orleans – were there in 1927, long before the 2005 hurricane over-topped the levees around New Orleans. However, instead of coming from the Gulf, this torrent of water came from upstream. 1926 and 1927 had massive rains upstream, in the various tributaries of the Mississippi. The river levees broke in 145 places, 27,000 square miles were flooded, some to a depth of 30 feet.
Barr starts the book with an analysis of the debate after the Civil War between two engineers – Andrew A Humphreys, an arrogant and intense soldier appointed head of the Army Corps of Engineers; and James Eads, a bootstraps businessman, who first got his start dragging sunken boats out of the Mississippi. Humphreys was appointed because he had made a signature and ground-breaking study of the whole Mississippi basin and its flood potential. Eads, representing civilian engineers, spent his life on the river, and made his calculations based on his study of the real behavior of the river. Essentially, the debate centered over whether levies alone were enough to protect the surrounding areas to the rivers. The Corps said yes – even though Humphrey’s himself had shown this might not work. And Eads said no – levies alone would only raise the flood higher, and eventually be over-topped. He recommended that the Mississippi be allowed to drain into other rivers like the Atchafalaya, and some surrounding land areas. His thesis was that careful ‘diversion’ of flood waters into reservoirs, outlets and through cutoffs was the only way to prevent massive destruction.
Essentially, the Corps was wrong. In a debate with Eads and the building of jetties to create a boat channel in the Mississippi at the Gulf, they said it couldn’t be done. They lost that argument - the jetties worked, digging a deep channel using the natural flow of the river, which allowed big ships to reach New Orleans. However, they won the debate prior to 1927 regarding Mississippi flood control. As a result, the Corps started damming natural outlets, including the river just above Greenville, Mississippi. They were ready to dam the Atchlafaya in Louisiana too, which is the biggest natural outlet to the sea. Prior to Katrina, the Corps also claimed the levies around New Orleans were adequate for a category 5 hurricane. They actually are not recommending an improved levy system to this day. Having the Corps in control of the Mississippi river basin is a little like handing the freeway system to the Pentagon.
THE LEVEES BREAK
In spring 1927, levees upstream in state after state had failed. That still didn’t reduce the main pressure on the Mississippi, as some of the water just flowed back into the main channel. The main levee broke (called a ‘crevasse’) near Mound’s Landing, Mississippi, just above Greenville, and scoured out a long lake, still existing today. Hundreds of black levee workers drowned. It flooded the whole Mississippi “Delta” – the rich cotton land north of Vicksburg in the Yazoo basin that General Edgar Jadwin of the Corps said could never be flooded. The song, “When the Levee Breaks,” written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, and later made famous by Led Zeppelin – that is this flood. It was one of many blues songs written about it. As Barry himself puts it, 1927 was 'when the blues came to the Delta.'
It was not just the flood waters that made people miserable, principally black sharecroppers. They were herded to work prior to, and after the flood, under compulsion and guns. Blacks lived in concentration camps, some right on the levee, eating inadequate food. Somehow whites were not qualified to do the backbreaking, grinding work of dam building and flood recovery. The sharecroppers were not allowed to leave by the Red Cross, especially in Greenville. They were physically and sexually abused by National Guard troops. Greenville had been dominated by liberal white plantation owners for many years, lead by the Percy family, who had even stood up to the Klan. But when the flood hit, the ‘liberal’ plantation owners showed their true colors, and imprisoned their black populations, as they were afraid to lose their labor. However, this very action created the exodus they feared. After the flood subsided, millions of former sharecroppers moved north to Chicago, Detroit and other cities, having had enough. Scratch a ruling-class southerner, liberal or not, get a neo-Confederate wage-slaver.
NEW ORLEANS BANKERS
The ruling clique of New Orleans, an especially powerful and in-bred collection of bankers, dominated the Mardi Gras krewes and private clubs like the Louisiana Club, the most exclusive in the country. At that time, they were led by James P Butler, president of the South’s largest bank. To guarantee that New Orleans would not be flooded, Butler and his cronies got the government to agree to dynamite the levee in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes below New Orleans, thus releasing the flood waters into mostly white, Cajun areas. Butler and the New Orleans bankers promised the Cajuns restitution, and of course, reneged on their promise after the levee was destroyed. At the time, all factual indications were that the Atchafalaya would carry most of the flood waters straight to the Gulf, and they would NOT come through New Orleans. And that is what happened. Hence the levee did not need to be destroyed. This unjust dynamiting helped Huey Long win the governorship of the state later, as he ran against the New Orleans ruling clique for what they did to the citizens of the state, among other things. Later, Long would pay with his life, when he was assassinated, by most careful accounts, by a policeman working for those very same bankers.
COOLIDGE, HOOVER and ROBERT MOTON
Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover the head of the relief effort. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Hoover was an engineer too, and thought that a scientific and energetic approach to the disaster would solve the problems quickly. He was all over the newspapers, and it was this effort that led Hoover to being named candidate of the Republican Party and then President. Hoovers fundraising from private sources did not really work, but he did put pressure on the federal government to get involved with aid. At the time, the Red Cross was a private organization, and the government had no role in disaster relief. Hoover was able to get the government to make small contributions, for the first time, to aide citizens. Coolidge, much like Bush, thought the problem was someone else’s responsibility.
At the time, black people still voted for Republicans, due to the heritage of the Civil War. Robert Moton, head of the Tuskegee Institute, was the modern representative of the Booker T Washington style of black leadership. After the flood, Moton went to meet Hoover. Moton, in exchange for a promise by Hoover that the Government would give black sharecroppers their own land, and break up the plantation system(!), promoted Hoover for president among the black population, and helped cover up the conditions that black people had been subjected to in the Delta during the flood. Of course, Hoover never kept his promise after winning the election. Moton was that flood’s Ray Nagin. Nagin voted for Bush in 2000, and worked hand in hand with the New Orleans ruling clique for their interest. He failed to prepare poor citizens of New Orleans for evacuation, and now colludes with white real estate interests to decimate the 9th and other wards and parishes.
This disaster, like Katrina, revealed the rotten parts of the ruling class – a plantation system rooted in slavery; a banking elite that would drown their fellow citizens property so that their property would survive; technocrats who make mistake after mistake; a political class that used disasters to gain political power, and then went on as if nothing had happened; and a black elite that covered for the white elite. However, the black population of Mississippi paid attention; the poor white ‘crackers’ of Louisiana paid attention, and both made progressive steps to change conditions. Katrina itself had some of the same effect, and played a role in turning part of the population against the Republican Party and its philosophy.
And I bought it in the Vieux Carre, on Chartres Street, in New Orleans –
Red Frog, 5/10/09
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
At Last!
...A well known, respected economist and Nobel Prize winner saying what some of us have waited a long time to hear:
"...[T]here's no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society."
-Paul Krugman
When the deaths from Swine Flu reach 35,000 that will equal the number of flu deaths that occur every year in the US. What is the problem?
"...[T]here's no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society."
-Paul Krugman
When the deaths from Swine Flu reach 35,000 that will equal the number of flu deaths that occur every year in the US. What is the problem?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Nazis in America!
“A Bright Room Called Day” – Tony Kushner, 1985-1990
As part of Tony Kushner “time” in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota theatre department staged “A Bright Room Called Day,”a play Kushner wrote in 1985. This play was his first. Kushner went on to become famous as the author of the 7 hour “Angels in America”, which won the ’93 Pulitzer for ‘best drama’ about the 80s AIDS crisis and ... Roy Cohn.
Kushner visited the student actors at the U last week, and described himself to them as a gay Marxist agnostic. He is definitely a progressive, and is influenced by Bertold Brecht, as most progressive playwrights are. 'Bright Room' was inspired by Brecht’s “Private Lives of the Master Race.”
“A Bright Room Called Day” is set in Weimar Germany and also in 1990 Berlin. It is a carefully researched historical play about events that led to the triumph of fascism in Germany, combined with a look back at this period by an outraged lesbian activist fresh from Reaganite America, Zillah. Zillah is a reader and history buff, and has decided to move to Berlin where things are more 'real' than Long Island. She occupies the same apartment in which all the events almost 50 years earlier take place. In that far, long ago time, a quite ordinary and sometimes leftish actress, Agnes Eggling, shared this apartment with a group of friends - Husz, her Trotskyist Hungarian film-maker boyfriend; Gotchling, a Communist Party activist and artist; Baz, a mascara-wearing homosexual Reichian; and Paulinka, an actress interested in fame and opium, in that order.
Politically, the play agrees with Trotsky’s analysis of the failures of the German Communist Party (KPD) to unite in a military and electoral united front with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to smash Hitler. This was due to the KPD's ultra-left position that social democracy was ‘social fascism.’ (Readers might also note that Stalin alleged Trotsky was a fascist as well.) At the same time, the SPD spent time trying to vainly unite with rightist elements like the Catholic Party to oppose Hitler. The KPD argument is best represented by the presence of two KPD officials, who argue about taking orders from Moscow, versus acting to block the Nazis using their own knowledge of what was really necessary to win.
The key person in the play here is Agnes, an ‘everywoman.’ She is a middle-aged, somewhat frumpy and emotional person who flirts with joining the KPD, produces a puppet show at a workers meeting for them, then ostensibly drifts from politics. As fascism triumphs, she refuses to leave Germany, as every single one of her friends are doing. She wants them, actually, to stay and … fight. She helps one of the comrades escape, but refuses to leave, and later, we are told, ‘dies of a broken heart.’ The subtext of the play, quite clearly, is the inability of most to act in the face of ‘evil.’
As evidence, the KPD organization folds up shop after their disastrous politics. The homosexual has a chance to kill Hitler, but fears for his own life, and doesn’t aim his gun in a darkened theatre. The Trotskyist filmaker flees to Chicago, with his remaining one good eye, after a brawl involving he, Paulinka and some brownshirts. Paulinka has no intention of getting involved in politics, and settles for dope. She is refused entry to the US because she was at one time a KPD member, joinging for a few weeks 'because they make the best films,” and instead departs to the USSR by train. Gotchling, however, returns to Germany underground, continuing the fight, and asks Agnes to help a comrade escape to Czechoslovakia. Gotchling is the one comrade that seems the most dangerous to Hitler, and in spite of the mistakes of the KPD leadership, represents the working class people who continued to play a heroic and underground role in Germany itself during that period. She is clearly contrasted with Agnes, who is middle class, and while sincere, is unable to act.
The figure of Zillah is ostensibly the most ‘controversial’ because of her modern anger at the Great Communicator, the senile actor Ronald Reagan. Kushner allows her stright-out diatribles - not usually allowed in American theatre. While some think the play and Zillah compare Hitler and Reagan, it does no such thing. She makes the philosophical point that the yardstick for ‘evil’ is now Hitler, and if, in that context you only kill hundreds of thousands (the handling of AIDS, contras in Nicaragua, government death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala were some of Reagan's crimes) history somehow determines that you are not 'evil' enough, and you don't even get an dishonorable mention. I.E., now the ‘smoking gun’ has to kill millions ... or it doesn’t smoke.
Like other Kushner plays, there is a ghost that haunts Agnes’ apartment, Die Alte, just as Agnes herself becomes a ghost that haunts Zillah’s apartment. I thought that Die Alte represented a woman who lived in the apartment during World War I, and was consumed by famine. However, she insists she was taken to the camps, and shown the dead, and ate all the way through it… which would post date WW I. The figure of the Devil appears as Herr Swetts, a charismatic and powerful man who has taken up residence in Germany for the duration. Paulinka is quite taken with him. She would sell her soul for a good part, and actually introduces Satan to the play through a role she had in Faust. Common to Brecht, dark humor is laced throughout, with Paulinka, Baz and Zillah providing the most jokes, at the expense, respectively, of self-centeredness, gay orgasms and doddering reactionaries like Reagan.
The high point of the play for me is an ecstatic scene after the Communist Party made temporary gains in the Reichstag in 1933, while the Nazis lost seats. To celebrate, Husz pours vodka and pretends to film Gotchling, as Trotsky, and Agnes, as Dziga Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker, shaking hands. They all sing the International, with the modest Hungarian Husz standing at the side, singing too. The merger of art and politics, he says. I sang along, but was one of the few that knew the words …
And I saw it at the U of M, Rarig Theatre.
Red Frog
April 26, 2009
As part of Tony Kushner “time” in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota theatre department staged “A Bright Room Called Day,”a play Kushner wrote in 1985. This play was his first. Kushner went on to become famous as the author of the 7 hour “Angels in America”, which won the ’93 Pulitzer for ‘best drama’ about the 80s AIDS crisis and ... Roy Cohn.
Kushner visited the student actors at the U last week, and described himself to them as a gay Marxist agnostic. He is definitely a progressive, and is influenced by Bertold Brecht, as most progressive playwrights are. 'Bright Room' was inspired by Brecht’s “Private Lives of the Master Race.”
“A Bright Room Called Day” is set in Weimar Germany and also in 1990 Berlin. It is a carefully researched historical play about events that led to the triumph of fascism in Germany, combined with a look back at this period by an outraged lesbian activist fresh from Reaganite America, Zillah. Zillah is a reader and history buff, and has decided to move to Berlin where things are more 'real' than Long Island. She occupies the same apartment in which all the events almost 50 years earlier take place. In that far, long ago time, a quite ordinary and sometimes leftish actress, Agnes Eggling, shared this apartment with a group of friends - Husz, her Trotskyist Hungarian film-maker boyfriend; Gotchling, a Communist Party activist and artist; Baz, a mascara-wearing homosexual Reichian; and Paulinka, an actress interested in fame and opium, in that order.
Politically, the play agrees with Trotsky’s analysis of the failures of the German Communist Party (KPD) to unite in a military and electoral united front with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to smash Hitler. This was due to the KPD's ultra-left position that social democracy was ‘social fascism.’ (Readers might also note that Stalin alleged Trotsky was a fascist as well.) At the same time, the SPD spent time trying to vainly unite with rightist elements like the Catholic Party to oppose Hitler. The KPD argument is best represented by the presence of two KPD officials, who argue about taking orders from Moscow, versus acting to block the Nazis using their own knowledge of what was really necessary to win.
The key person in the play here is Agnes, an ‘everywoman.’ She is a middle-aged, somewhat frumpy and emotional person who flirts with joining the KPD, produces a puppet show at a workers meeting for them, then ostensibly drifts from politics. As fascism triumphs, she refuses to leave Germany, as every single one of her friends are doing. She wants them, actually, to stay and … fight. She helps one of the comrades escape, but refuses to leave, and later, we are told, ‘dies of a broken heart.’ The subtext of the play, quite clearly, is the inability of most to act in the face of ‘evil.’
As evidence, the KPD organization folds up shop after their disastrous politics. The homosexual has a chance to kill Hitler, but fears for his own life, and doesn’t aim his gun in a darkened theatre. The Trotskyist filmaker flees to Chicago, with his remaining one good eye, after a brawl involving he, Paulinka and some brownshirts. Paulinka has no intention of getting involved in politics, and settles for dope. She is refused entry to the US because she was at one time a KPD member, joinging for a few weeks 'because they make the best films,” and instead departs to the USSR by train. Gotchling, however, returns to Germany underground, continuing the fight, and asks Agnes to help a comrade escape to Czechoslovakia. Gotchling is the one comrade that seems the most dangerous to Hitler, and in spite of the mistakes of the KPD leadership, represents the working class people who continued to play a heroic and underground role in Germany itself during that period. She is clearly contrasted with Agnes, who is middle class, and while sincere, is unable to act.
The figure of Zillah is ostensibly the most ‘controversial’ because of her modern anger at the Great Communicator, the senile actor Ronald Reagan. Kushner allows her stright-out diatribles - not usually allowed in American theatre. While some think the play and Zillah compare Hitler and Reagan, it does no such thing. She makes the philosophical point that the yardstick for ‘evil’ is now Hitler, and if, in that context you only kill hundreds of thousands (the handling of AIDS, contras in Nicaragua, government death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala were some of Reagan's crimes) history somehow determines that you are not 'evil' enough, and you don't even get an dishonorable mention. I.E., now the ‘smoking gun’ has to kill millions ... or it doesn’t smoke.
Like other Kushner plays, there is a ghost that haunts Agnes’ apartment, Die Alte, just as Agnes herself becomes a ghost that haunts Zillah’s apartment. I thought that Die Alte represented a woman who lived in the apartment during World War I, and was consumed by famine. However, she insists she was taken to the camps, and shown the dead, and ate all the way through it… which would post date WW I. The figure of the Devil appears as Herr Swetts, a charismatic and powerful man who has taken up residence in Germany for the duration. Paulinka is quite taken with him. She would sell her soul for a good part, and actually introduces Satan to the play through a role she had in Faust. Common to Brecht, dark humor is laced throughout, with Paulinka, Baz and Zillah providing the most jokes, at the expense, respectively, of self-centeredness, gay orgasms and doddering reactionaries like Reagan.
The high point of the play for me is an ecstatic scene after the Communist Party made temporary gains in the Reichstag in 1933, while the Nazis lost seats. To celebrate, Husz pours vodka and pretends to film Gotchling, as Trotsky, and Agnes, as Dziga Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker, shaking hands. They all sing the International, with the modest Hungarian Husz standing at the side, singing too. The merger of art and politics, he says. I sang along, but was one of the few that knew the words …
And I saw it at the U of M, Rarig Theatre.
Red Frog
April 26, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
90 more years of black oppression?
"The Bloody Shirt – Terror after the Civil War," by Stephen Budiansky, 2008
The “bloody shirt” was a phrase used by the defenders of racism in the South to hide the bloodshed, intimidation and anti-democratic methods used against ex-slaves and Republicans during Reconstruction. It came from a real incident where an ordinary northern white man named Higgins was beaten by the Klan in Mississippi. The legend was that this same bloody shirt (and there really was one) was taken to Congress and waved in the air by Benjamin Butler, an abolitionist general. (This part never happened, of course.) The ex-Confederates would say ‘he’s waving the bloody shirt’ to make light of any claim they were violent. Asserting all along that they were unjustly accused of barbarism, they insisted that ‘they’ were the victims of ‘nigger rule’ and carpetbagger Yankees. And this inversion of the truth is, even today, the accepted myth about the period after the Civil War.
If you wanted to know why the Civil War did not end segregation and destroy Klan terror, or promote voting rights and black land ownership, this book explains the brutal process whereby the Confederate aristocracy, while losing the war, won the ‘peace’ - mainly through violence. It confirms Marx’s analysis that a democratic revolution - or indeed any revolution - must become ‘permanent’ in order to fully succeed.
The Civil War did not develop into that ‘permanent’ revolution. The legal end of slavery brought about by the war led for a time to voting rights being granted former slaves. For almost 10 years, the vast majority voted in Reconstruction governments in all the former slave states, as the freedmen outnumbered the Confederate whites. These governments allowed blacks to sit on juries, vote, hold office, own land, travel, build up businesses and generally act like anyone else. And that was unheard of. These governments were slandered by the White Leagues and the Klan (who themselves were led by the South’s most prominent citizens…) as ‘carpet baggers', ‘scalawags’ and ‘nigger rule.’ To the racists in the South who wanted a "white man's’ government,” whites who supported the Republican Party were as bad, or worse, than the black ex-slaves. It took almost 10 years of Klan and White League violence to be successful in overturning democratic rule in the South. These same elements then controlled the South for the next 90 years. Only with the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s was there another attempt to end the rule of the Jim Crow, segregationist South.
Budiansky focuses on 5 different people to tell this story. One was typical of the white people who moved south after the Civil War to make a living. Albert T Morgan, a moderate, non-abolitionist, just wanted to start a business in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Like most Northerners, he had no clue about what was really going on in the South. Until he found out - 'the half has not been told you!' What Morgan discovered was that any white person who had ANY sympathy for black people was first shunned, then verbally harassed, then tricked out of property, and finally assaulted and shot at by the leading citizens and ‘good’ white people of Mississippi. You see, among other things, he had made the mistake of marrying an educated, mixed-ethnicity woman, Carolyn Highgate, of New York state. Morgan was elected several times as a Republican, until armed Democratic Party thugs swung the election of 1875 in the other direction.
Even being a Confederate General was not enough, as James Longstreet found out. Probably the best general in the Confederate Army – actually superior to Lee in some respects - he suggested to his fellow Southerners that they had lost the war, and should accept the peace. He joined the Republican Party. For this impertinent suggestion and act, he was roundly reviled by the whole Southern establishment, to the point where his death went unremarked by the Confederate Army societies in the south. Although every other Confederate general was ‘not forgotten.’ Longstreet fought the "Knights of the White Camelia" reactionaries at Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874 while leading the pro-Republican Louisiana State Militia. 100 people died or were injured, and Longstreet was captured. While U.S. troops came in the next day and put down the rebellion, this event signaled the end of reconstruction in Louisiana and the triumph of reaction. To this day there is a memorial to the battle in New Orleans, by the river in the French Quarter, mentioning both 'sides' as somehow co-equal heroes. It has only recently been removed. (2023)
Another was a black man, “Prince” Rivers. He joined the Union Army outside Charleston, South Carolina, ending as a sergeant of the First South Carolina Volunteers. Rivers had great abilities, and went on in to become a legislator and then judge in Reconstruction South Carolina. He settled in a town called Hamburg, across the river from Augusta, Georgia. Hamburg, South Carolina, was later to be the scene of a massacre of black militia and other citizens, led by violent white racists under command of a former Confederate general, Matthew Butler, and a former Confederate legislator, Ben Tillman. This event set the stage for the complete destruction of this black-run town, and the beginning of the end for Reconstruction in South Carolina. Prince Rivers ended up as a coach driver, the same occupation he had during slavery. Hamburg vanished after burnings and floods, and now lies beneath a riverside housing project in “North” Augusta, SC. Even in 2006, a monument commemorating the one white racist killed during the slaughter at Hamburg was mentioned positively during the Centennial of North Augusta. The text of the monument reads, “to the only (sic) resident of Hamburg to be killed in the Hamburg riot of 1876.”
There is a local connection in this book as well. Adelbert Ames’ parents lived in Northfield, Minnesota, and owned the Ames Mill, right next to the dam on the Cannon River, and at one time the original source for Malt-o-Meal. Ames became the Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, where he built schools and universities for the first time, which also included black people. He was forced from office in 1875 after the terrorist Mississippi White Leagues threatened, killed or beat anyone attempting to vote a Republican ticket. They were successful and the “white man's government’ of the Democratic Party took control – for the next 90 years. As the Yazoo Democrat (newspaper) said, “Carry the election, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”
Even during the 10 years of Reconstruction black people were shot, hung, beaten, driven off land, fired, foreclosed on, their crops burnt, their animals stolen. They were hindered from voting, sitting on juries, going to school, holding office, and generally having much more rights than a slave. White Republicans were killed, insulted, burnt out, mobbed and made the victim of various ‘legal’ stratagems by the white southern aristocracy. Essentially, the Confederate Army and the Confederate government became the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and the Democratic Party. 3,000 freedman and Republicans, including 60 office holders, were killed during this period. The Republican administrations of Andrew Johnson, U.S. Grant and Rutherford Hayes did not send enough troops to the south, nor have any deep commitment to democracy for blacks or even their own Party. And they allowed the South to slip back into the hands of the ex-Confederacy. The United States paid for this.
While this story may seem like ancient history, it is not. In the American body politic the Civil War and black slavery are defining events. Even now, the Republican South is still the most conservative, where workers are the most economically impoverished, with socially retrograde state governments. You can track the movement of members of the Southern Baptist Convention into the north, and where they settle will coincide with extremely conservative politicians being elected in those western or northern rural areas. The day Lyndon Baines Johnson supported the Voting Rights Act in 1966 was the day the Democratic Party Bollweevils started to move into the Republican column, until today the Ex-Confederate South is almost solid Republican. Irony of ironies. So it doesn’t matter what your party label is in these states – only so long as it is reactionary in every way.
The Civil War played a role in fusing fundamentalist Christian religion with racism. After the war, it promoted the rule of a southern aristocracy that has used southern ‘nationalism’ and religion to weld many southern whites to their reactionary banner. The open shop in the south is a testament to that. The South today is still the homeland of the most conservative politicians in the United States – and has been since the end of the Revolution, for more than 200 years. The southern bloc has held back progress in the Unites States for nearly every year of its existence since then. There is a long running argument about even bothering with the "backward southerners," promoted by Democrats like Thomas Schaller. However, social progress in the United States will be far more difficult without winning over working class elements in the southern states. Undermining the influence of the Bourbon corporate capitalists in oil, real estate, military procurement, coal and auto is essential to a national revolutionary strategy. After all, they still use the slogan of fake oppression - i.e. 'the bloody shirt,' to this day.
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
---- Red Frog, 2/22/03.
The “bloody shirt” was a phrase used by the defenders of racism in the South to hide the bloodshed, intimidation and anti-democratic methods used against ex-slaves and Republicans during Reconstruction. It came from a real incident where an ordinary northern white man named Higgins was beaten by the Klan in Mississippi. The legend was that this same bloody shirt (and there really was one) was taken to Congress and waved in the air by Benjamin Butler, an abolitionist general. (This part never happened, of course.) The ex-Confederates would say ‘he’s waving the bloody shirt’ to make light of any claim they were violent. Asserting all along that they were unjustly accused of barbarism, they insisted that ‘they’ were the victims of ‘nigger rule’ and carpetbagger Yankees. And this inversion of the truth is, even today, the accepted myth about the period after the Civil War.
 |
| Thugs Play Victim |
The Civil War did not develop into that ‘permanent’ revolution. The legal end of slavery brought about by the war led for a time to voting rights being granted former slaves. For almost 10 years, the vast majority voted in Reconstruction governments in all the former slave states, as the freedmen outnumbered the Confederate whites. These governments allowed blacks to sit on juries, vote, hold office, own land, travel, build up businesses and generally act like anyone else. And that was unheard of. These governments were slandered by the White Leagues and the Klan (who themselves were led by the South’s most prominent citizens…) as ‘carpet baggers', ‘scalawags’ and ‘nigger rule.’ To the racists in the South who wanted a "white man's’ government,” whites who supported the Republican Party were as bad, or worse, than the black ex-slaves. It took almost 10 years of Klan and White League violence to be successful in overturning democratic rule in the South. These same elements then controlled the South for the next 90 years. Only with the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s was there another attempt to end the rule of the Jim Crow, segregationist South.
Budiansky focuses on 5 different people to tell this story. One was typical of the white people who moved south after the Civil War to make a living. Albert T Morgan, a moderate, non-abolitionist, just wanted to start a business in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Like most Northerners, he had no clue about what was really going on in the South. Until he found out - 'the half has not been told you!' What Morgan discovered was that any white person who had ANY sympathy for black people was first shunned, then verbally harassed, then tricked out of property, and finally assaulted and shot at by the leading citizens and ‘good’ white people of Mississippi. You see, among other things, he had made the mistake of marrying an educated, mixed-ethnicity woman, Carolyn Highgate, of New York state. Morgan was elected several times as a Republican, until armed Democratic Party thugs swung the election of 1875 in the other direction.
Even being a Confederate General was not enough, as James Longstreet found out. Probably the best general in the Confederate Army – actually superior to Lee in some respects - he suggested to his fellow Southerners that they had lost the war, and should accept the peace. He joined the Republican Party. For this impertinent suggestion and act, he was roundly reviled by the whole Southern establishment, to the point where his death went unremarked by the Confederate Army societies in the south. Although every other Confederate general was ‘not forgotten.’ Longstreet fought the "Knights of the White Camelia" reactionaries at Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874 while leading the pro-Republican Louisiana State Militia. 100 people died or were injured, and Longstreet was captured. While U.S. troops came in the next day and put down the rebellion, this event signaled the end of reconstruction in Louisiana and the triumph of reaction. To this day there is a memorial to the battle in New Orleans, by the river in the French Quarter, mentioning both 'sides' as somehow co-equal heroes. It has only recently been removed. (2023)
Another was a black man, “Prince” Rivers. He joined the Union Army outside Charleston, South Carolina, ending as a sergeant of the First South Carolina Volunteers. Rivers had great abilities, and went on in to become a legislator and then judge in Reconstruction South Carolina. He settled in a town called Hamburg, across the river from Augusta, Georgia. Hamburg, South Carolina, was later to be the scene of a massacre of black militia and other citizens, led by violent white racists under command of a former Confederate general, Matthew Butler, and a former Confederate legislator, Ben Tillman. This event set the stage for the complete destruction of this black-run town, and the beginning of the end for Reconstruction in South Carolina. Prince Rivers ended up as a coach driver, the same occupation he had during slavery. Hamburg vanished after burnings and floods, and now lies beneath a riverside housing project in “North” Augusta, SC. Even in 2006, a monument commemorating the one white racist killed during the slaughter at Hamburg was mentioned positively during the Centennial of North Augusta. The text of the monument reads, “to the only (sic) resident of Hamburg to be killed in the Hamburg riot of 1876.”
There is a local connection in this book as well. Adelbert Ames’ parents lived in Northfield, Minnesota, and owned the Ames Mill, right next to the dam on the Cannon River, and at one time the original source for Malt-o-Meal. Ames became the Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, where he built schools and universities for the first time, which also included black people. He was forced from office in 1875 after the terrorist Mississippi White Leagues threatened, killed or beat anyone attempting to vote a Republican ticket. They were successful and the “white man's government’ of the Democratic Party took control – for the next 90 years. As the Yazoo Democrat (newspaper) said, “Carry the election, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”
Even during the 10 years of Reconstruction black people were shot, hung, beaten, driven off land, fired, foreclosed on, their crops burnt, their animals stolen. They were hindered from voting, sitting on juries, going to school, holding office, and generally having much more rights than a slave. White Republicans were killed, insulted, burnt out, mobbed and made the victim of various ‘legal’ stratagems by the white southern aristocracy. Essentially, the Confederate Army and the Confederate government became the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and the Democratic Party. 3,000 freedman and Republicans, including 60 office holders, were killed during this period. The Republican administrations of Andrew Johnson, U.S. Grant and Rutherford Hayes did not send enough troops to the south, nor have any deep commitment to democracy for blacks or even their own Party. And they allowed the South to slip back into the hands of the ex-Confederacy. The United States paid for this.
While this story may seem like ancient history, it is not. In the American body politic the Civil War and black slavery are defining events. Even now, the Republican South is still the most conservative, where workers are the most economically impoverished, with socially retrograde state governments. You can track the movement of members of the Southern Baptist Convention into the north, and where they settle will coincide with extremely conservative politicians being elected in those western or northern rural areas. The day Lyndon Baines Johnson supported the Voting Rights Act in 1966 was the day the Democratic Party Bollweevils started to move into the Republican column, until today the Ex-Confederate South is almost solid Republican. Irony of ironies. So it doesn’t matter what your party label is in these states – only so long as it is reactionary in every way.
The Civil War played a role in fusing fundamentalist Christian religion with racism. After the war, it promoted the rule of a southern aristocracy that has used southern ‘nationalism’ and religion to weld many southern whites to their reactionary banner. The open shop in the south is a testament to that. The South today is still the homeland of the most conservative politicians in the United States – and has been since the end of the Revolution, for more than 200 years. The southern bloc has held back progress in the Unites States for nearly every year of its existence since then. There is a long running argument about even bothering with the "backward southerners," promoted by Democrats like Thomas Schaller. However, social progress in the United States will be far more difficult without winning over working class elements in the southern states. Undermining the influence of the Bourbon corporate capitalists in oil, real estate, military procurement, coal and auto is essential to a national revolutionary strategy. After all, they still use the slogan of fake oppression - i.e. 'the bloody shirt,' to this day.
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
---- Red Frog, 2/22/03.
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