Child Of The Future

Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai - “Communism and the Family,” 1918, “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle,” and “Love and the New Morality,” 1919

These essays connect with TV shows like ‘The Bachelor.’  Really!  The first of these essays was part of an address to the 1918 Russian Women’s Congress, attended by 1,000 delegates. Kollontai had been named the Commissar for Social Welfare, the first women to hold a government post like this in Europe.  The second two were interventions in the intra-party debate, in which Kollontai attempted to bring up women’s issues during the Russian Civil War. 

This is very modern stuff.  Seriously.  Marxists are the children of the future, and as such, Kollontai seemed to have a crystal ball. 

Kollontai's first address describes the legal steps the Bolshevik government immediately took to help women.  It legalized divorce and abortion.  It legislated equal pay and equal job opportunities.  Protective legislation was enacted for pregnant women and nursing mothers.  Forced marriage was outlawed.  Distinctions between legitimate and ‘illegitimate’ children were banned.  Laws governing sexual behavior were repealed.  A system of daycare was setup at government expense.  A plan was laid to socialize the ‘private’ domestic tasks of the family.  

Kollontai addresses worries many had at the time that the family was changing too fast.  She basically says the old patriarchal family found under capitalism and serfdom is dead.  As she put it:  “…all the superannuated rubbish which has been bequeathed to us by the cursed epoch of servitude and domination which was characteristic of the landed proprietors and the capitalists … shall be swept aside…”  Kollontai declares that the goal was ending, not the ‘double shift’ but the ‘triple shift’ that many women worked – 1. paid work, 2. housework and 3. baby care.  The best wife in the past had been one ‘with hands of gold.’  She points out that many things that were formerly produced in the family by women – like clothing – are now done in a factory instead.  Central kitchens and restaurants, socialized house cleaning and laundries, child care after the children are weaned – were to be made available and lessen women’s burdens (and mens' too).  She especially poured scorn on the drudgery of housework.  In essence, the nuclear family was not being abolished – many of its ostensibly eternal roles would just wither away by choice. 

She understands that capitalism makes use of the free labor of the family every day – another ‘take’ it indulges in, just as it takes from the environment for ‘free' and hides the reality of surplus value stolen from workers.

Kollontai does not avoid  the sexual issue – marriage.  She thinks that marriage should be a ‘civil’ one of affection and comradeship.  The old marriage – based on the church marriage, “until death do us part,’ saturated with monetary considerations – is done.  Today under neo-liberal capitalism civil marriages are the most common – yet the monetary issue still stands, and an unknown number of people still intend to live by that stupid phrase.  Arranged marriages and ‘covenant’ marriages exist for nearly all Hindus and some conservative Christians, for instance.  Marrying outside your class or religion or ethnicity is still verboten in many societies.  

Kollontai then declares that marriages of (sexual) affection will do away with prostitution.  As we can see, prostitution still exists in the U.S. because marriage is still a monetary and conservative institution which many times kills sexual desire.  She says that a generalized ‘free love’ can only come about through true social equality of men and women.    

This is, after all, the woman who wrote, “The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Woman.”  These 1919 essays were published in a Soviet book, “The New Morality of the Working Class.” 

Sex, like eating and drinking, defecating, physical exercise or work, is essential to the human animal.  This fact religions try to hide and so does economic bourgeois society, which needs restraints on sexuality in order to get the most work out of us. The portrayal of sex’s under capitalism is as a sales tool, to increase buying.  As Marx noted, sex and drink were about the only pleasures the British working class had. Kollontai argues, in the first essay on sexual relations, that developing the seeds of the new society now, even in the midst of war, is essential to winning women and building that society.  She feels it is necessary to find the ‘magic thread.’ 

What is the ‘magic thread’?  Kollontai first points out that sexual problems are not private.  And by ‘sex’ she does not just mean conflict between men and women.  She posits the problem of modern marriage in that it leads one person – usually the man – egotistically ‘possessing’ the married partner in an unequal relationship.  While this seems a bit over the top today in the U.S. or Europe, this is still true for many modern marriages, especially conservative ones.  

Watch the U.S. TV program ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette’ if  you can stand it.  Here marriage has been turned into a reality show – a fake dream-world holding the new Cinderella or Prince Charming.  It caters to a very archaic image of marriage.  In this season of The Bachelor, the mostly desperate big-city women have to plan to marry a rich farmer from rural Iowa, move to his big farm and have children.  That is what he wants.  Talk about ‘possession’! 

Kollontai says the real solution is to increase ‘the potential for loving.’  She calls for ‘new relationships between the sexes that are deeper and more joyful.'  Pretty vague, right?   She continues: 

“The attempt by the middle-class intelligentsia to replace indissoluble marriage by the freer, more easily broken ties of civil marriage destroys the essential basis of social stability of the bourgeoisie.  It destroys the monogamous property-oriented family.  On the other hand, the greater fluidity in relationships between the sexes coincides with, and is even the indirect result of one of the basic tasks of the working-class.  Rejecting the element of submission in marriage…”

Which is what is going on now in U.S. society, in Europe & Japan, due to the rise in divorce and the putting off of marriage.  In bourgeois Japan, the rise of working women is putting a crimp on marriage and baby-making because, as the Guardian stated: “Japan …still has some of the worst systemic gender inequality in the world” because it “has a European economy and South Asian social family mores.” I.E. women in Japan have to choose to have sex=babies=stay home=quit job=imprisonment. 

In her last essay on love and a new morality, Kollontai lays her cards on the table.  She discusses a book by the German Grete Meisel-Hess about sexual issues.  Kollontai thinks that the reality of the ‘soul mate’ or the ‘perfect love’ is few and far between.  She discusses 3 kinds of sexual relationships and suggests a fourth.  

1, she takes apart the ‘marriage is forever’ thesis, as it mainly cripples the family members, especially the woman.  

2, she points out that prostitution is the commodification of sex – the perfect capitalist plan.  

3, she discusses the ‘free marriage,’ pointing out that ‘free unions” (today’s civil marriage of sexual love) still have a problem.  Though the partners spend more time together, these unions demand a greater amount of time and emotional energy than most people have left after working.  “In a society based on competition … there is not room left for the cult of the demanding and fragile Eros.”  Which is why even these marriages disintegrate or cripple. This kind of marriage usually involves 'full possession' as well. 

So what to do?  Kollontai:

            “…a person, in the course of his/her long life and in the process of the development of his/her personality, will change sexual partners.” 

            “When two people live on top of each other all the time the tender spring flower of even the most loving attachment will be killed.”

According to Kollontai, still given the need for a socialist society, the most frequent relationships in the new society (and by implication the present) should be ‘game love.’  What is this?  “Game love,” from what I can tell from this text, is sort of like ‘friends with benefits.  An ‘erotic friendship’ as she calls it, ‘light and carefree.’  Sort of a considerate relationship in which each party doesn’t try to get ‘undisputed possession’ of the other person.  Kollontai thinks that relationships like this can train people for those very rare ‘greater loves.’  She thinks humans need to “overflow with erotic inspiration without having to lose freedom and give the future as payment.”  Which they do in most marriages.

And you thought all Marxists were prudes.

Reviewed below, a book on “Soviet Women –Walking the Tightrope,” and an art show on “Women in Soviet Art,” – use blog search box, upper left. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books in the used section

Red Frog

January 8, 2015

Afrossippi Crossroads

"The Blues – A Visual History – 100 Years of Music That Changed the World,” by Mike Evans, forward by Marshall Chess, 2014

This book is a delight if you are a blues fan.  Stitching together the history of the genre and its connections to ragtime, jug band music, jazz, country, gospel, folk, skiffle, boogie-woogie, R&B, soul, rock & roll, blues-rock, heavy metal and rap, it compliments the narrative with pictures of blues performers, album covers, concert posters, records, period scenes, and what-have-you.  For once, a coffee table book that will actually be looked at.

The blues has been born, lived, forgotten, revived, beaten to death by cliché and repetition and still lingers on mostly behind the scenes.  In blues bars, the ‘party blues’ have replaced the sad ones.  If you think Led Zeppelin is a roots band, think again.  Bands like the White Stripes and the Black Keys have brought heavy blues-rock into the present, but they are in a minority.  Music kids and musicians study older music styles, but most popular styles pushed by corporations are distanced from roots music of any kind. Roots music like the blues continues in the nightclubs, bars, festivals and coffee shops of the modern day, in the interstices and corners of popular life. 

Dominant present styles like pop, rap, country, EDM and alternative rock only distantly reflect the roots and are more and more denatured.  Heavily processed reality-singing shows like “The Voice” and “American Idol” would not let a voice with excessive character ever win.  Even ‘country’ has become a bro cliché of girls in short-shorts, pick-up trucks, beer and partying, sung by almost identical singers.  There is no real ‘country’ left – at least not in that pushed by corporations. Artists based on the blues are now relegated to the ‘Americana’ sub-genre. To this day about half the visitors who come to Clarksdale, Mississippi – the musical heart of the Mississippi Delta - are from outside the U.S.  What this says about the cluelessness of the ordinary American music fan is voluminous.  In fact, the last old ‘jook’ joint in Clarksdale (from a West African word ‘joog’ meaning disorderly, rowdy or wicked), Red’s Lounge, closed last year, according to reports.  Thanks a lot, America.

The book connects your favorite blues songs to who actually wrote them, not to who made them famous.  It digs up the origins of the blues around 1900 in obscure 12-bar songs with 3 chord changes and the first lyric repeated, played by unknowns.  It tracks the birth of rock and roll in 1949 or 1953 out of earlier styles like blues.  It details the different blues – country, folk-blues, Piedmont, rhythmic New Orleans-style, Chicago electric, West Coast LA blues, Mississippi Hill Country, highlighting the players.  Be they pioneering standout women like Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Ida Cox or Ma Rainey; country-blues performers like Charlie Patton, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson; the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King, the folk blues of Lead Belly & Josh White, or the guitar blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Joe Turner & T-Bone Walker, they are all here.  It describes the pioneering fusion of rock and blues by the Rolling Stones, the psychedelic blues of Jimi Hendrix, the blue-soul of Janis Joplin and the heavy blues of Cream & Led Zeppelin. 

Modern blues musicians like Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, Keb Mo, Susan Tedeschi, Joe Bonamassa and Gary Clark Jr. are mentioned as continuing the blues tradition into the present.  Hell, there is even an African blues genre. But none of these musicians has the weight that earlier musicians once had.

Among many different book sections, there is a one on the political nature of blues and one on ‘working man’ blues. Many players started by busking on the streets. Playing blues paid better than sharecropping or working on a plantation, or some shitty job in the city, especially if you were blind.  As a result, blues players had more money and dressed better than most.  After all, blues makers are known for their iconic clothes and hats.  The problems of the police or jail, the 1927 flood or bad bosses are accompanied by songs about racism.  These got especially pointed in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with the influence of proletarian leftists like Seeger and Paul Robeson.  Josh White was black-listed just like Seeger for being too political.  Here is a lyric from J.B. Lenoir:

“They had a huntin’ season on a rabbit

If you shoot him you went to jail

The season was always open on me;

Nobody needed no bail.”

J.B. Lenoir – Down in Mississippi, 1966

 “My brother was taken' up for my mother, and a police officer shot him down…”

            J.B. Lenoir – Alabama Blues, 1965

Ferguson is not new.  There is another section on ‘The Great Migration’ – when millions of black people voted with their feet and left the south to move to places like Chicago, Detroit and New York.  Pullman Train Car porters were key in this migration, and sneaked the banned ‘Chicago Defender’ newspaper back into the South.  The blues went on the trains north with them.

One of the arguments about blues is the appropriation of blues music by white musicians.  There is no doubt of this.  For instance, a white singer’s voice, Frankie Ford, was over-dubbed on top of a black backing band, replacing the black singer Huey ‘Piano’ Smith on the vocal of “Sea Cruise.”  Elvis Presley did Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s songs, “That’s All Right,” and “My Baby Left Me,” making them bigger hits, then copied Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog.”  Led Zeppelin made money off of “When the Levee Breaks,’ a song originally done by Memphis Minnie, long dead.

Yet what is ignored is that some of the white players and producers, at least in the 50s and 60s, brought the blues back from oblivion.  With that came money.  This volume notes the contribution of leftists around the Almanac Singers and the Weavers - principally Pete Seeger.  They touched off a folk-blues revival in the 1950s that fed into the blues revival of the ‘60s.  By bringing Lead Belly, Josh White, J.B. Lenoir, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to a wider audience - all of whom did some political songs - they laid the ground work for the huge blues explosion of the 1960s.  The efforts of Alan and John Lomax at the Smithsonian or Moses Asch at Folkways Records in recording and publishing original blues songs and lyrics helping bring musicians back into public view.  Sam Phillips at Sun in Memphis, Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic in New York and the Chess brothers in Chicago all played a role in early recordings.  Massive shows of blues musicians titled “The American Folk Blues Festival” toured Europe from 1962 to 1970, events that were never repeated.  After that individual blues players still found an audience in Europe and Japan for years.

In essence, there is no way to create a wall of separation between music styles, as music becomes an inspiration to whomever listens to it.  In a way, the ‘color barrier’ was partly broken around this music. It was born from black work songs, gospel and the problems of poverty.  It grew to encompass much more than that.

Surviving Delta bluesmen:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/12/lou-bopp_n_6445360.html

Mayday Books carries a good selection of books about music. 
Books that reference blues music that are reviewed below:  “Love, Janis,” “In Search of the Blues,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “Rising Tide” and “Life – Bio of Keith Richards.” Use blog search box, upper left.

Red Frog

January 6, 2015

Feminist Memoir-Travelogue

"Wild,” directed by John Marc Vallee, 2014

This film is hard to watch.  Even with Reese Witherspoon as ‘eye’ candy for male viewers, the dangers women face are only highlighted by being out in the woods or deserts or mountains alone.  It relates to the film “Into the Wild,” about a young man who camped out alone in the Alaskan semi-wilderness, only to die in a wrecked bus due to several small miscalculations. (Reviewed below. Use blog search box, upper left.)  Yet here we have more vulnerability and the chances of a small miscalculation are greater.  Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, who wrote a memoir about hiking most of the length of the Pacific Crest Trail, ("PCT") from the Sonora desert near Mexico to a bridge on the Columbia River gorge in Oregon. 

This film is not merely a travelogue of beautiful vistas, quirky characters, cold, heat and grueling trails, full of hunger, thirst, being lost and falling.  Strayed is fucked up due to her recent divorce because of her own behavior, her mother’s death from cancer, abuse concerning her father who she never sees, and her own inability to create a real life in Minneapolis.  Instead sex and heroin fill in the gap.  Between the bad boots, over-filled pack, inadequate preparation, over-determination and naiveté - plowing through mountain meadows of heavy snow with only a compass - this hike was a bold but also potentially suicidal move on her part. 

Yet it is as a woman that this hike resonates.  Strayed (her ironic made-up name) has no protection – no gun, hatchet, not even pepper spray.  No skill in self defense.  She is wary of men on the trail – and while friendly, always suspects something of them.  In one case, she is almost raped by a bow hunter packing a knife, but he is fortunately called away by his buddy.  She also takes advantage of being a ‘poor’ woman on the trail.  Some guys she meet call her the “Queen of the PCT” because many people go out of their way to help her – mostly men.  So it cuts both ways.  Beauty can be a disability - or a help.  She meets only one other woman on the trail, but does not hike with her.  She prefers to do it alone, and quite clearly it is a tremendous achievement to finish the trail, especially as a woman.  Women are many times not taught wood's skills, survival skills, physical toughness or being on their own.  This film proves that to be a form of chauvinist social and class conditioning that can be overcome.

Is Reese Witherspoon a good choice for this part?  Given her past performances as a chirpy, comedic light-weight, I’d have to say no.  To me it was always Reese Witherspoon on that trail, not Cheryl Strayed.  And nothing bad can ever happen to Reese Witherspoon.

Memoirs have been called the ‘neo-liberal’ format of choice, as they revolve around individuals, and usually involve personal addictions or disfunctionality of some kind.   The memoir format is especially pitched to American women by the ‘literary’ schools, I think as a way to short-change their experience and writing skills. This film partially recreates the memoir format, writ large.  Yet because it takes place along a physical trail greater than any individual, it allowed Strayed to extract herself from her own self-misery.  If it had only been a memoir, few would care as much. After all, we all experience death and many of us experience divorce and some experience family abuse.  Loss is essential to the experience of living, intrinsic to understanding reality.  Even addicts can recover.  Most of us go on, no matter what.  But few of us hike the PCT.

Books about survival issues – “Deep Survival,” “Into the Wild,” “All is Lost,” and “Five Stages of Collapse.”  Also recommended, though not reviewed, is the hilarious book, "A Walk in the Woods," by Bill Bryson, about walking the Appalachian Trail.
 

Red Frog

January 3, 2015

'The Sun Is God... heh huh'

"Mr. Turner,” a film by Mike Leigh, 2014

There are films to see on decent televisions at home, or in a pinch that small screen on computers.  This is a ‘big picture’ film that needs to be seen in a theater.  After all, a film about a painter will be ‘painterly.’  Director Mike Leigh attempts sweeping vistas of ocean or land, setting suns and steam, ships and seagulls, shorelines, farmer’s fields, lakes nestled in high hillocks or mountains, all back-grounding the sketch outings of J.M.W. Turner, the British romantic painter who lived from 1775 to 1851.  Turner himself cannot be bested on screen, at least in this film.  I would call Turner the first Impressionist, as he increasingly used light, natural phenomena and emotion, not always direct depiction, in his paintings.  He did not paint religious themes or burghers and royalty, or excel in clutter, and instead focused on nature and ‘maritime’ themes, including people ‘merry-making’ or working. 

Argh, there be SPOILERS beelow.

The film finds Turner at the mid-stage of his career, when he is already an accomplished painter, part of the Royal Academy of Art.  He was inducted into the Academy at the ripe age of 14 years old by Joshua Reynolds, one of Britain's top painters.   Tim Spall, one of Leigh’s semi-permanent acting company, plays Turner as a gruff misanthrope who underneath is extremely perceptive and passionate.  At one point, he makes fun of the egocentric young critic John Ruskin by likening Ruskin’s artistic taste to whether he likes one kind of meat or another.  In this film, Turner sees himself visually as an ugly and obese ‘gargoyle’ – so the film suggests perhaps his life was an attempt to find beauty.  Spall is an excellent actor, nothing like the usual pretty-boys or muscle-bound oafs that become ‘leading’ men.   His grunts say it all, and there is a lot of grunting in this film.

Turner’s only real friend in this film was his father, who faithfully bought paint powder, stretched canvases and cleaned up after his son.  They both had very bad marriages, and commiserated over alcohol. Turner himself is shown in this film cruelly ignoring the two children he had with his angry harridan of an ex-wife, even to the point of not attending one of their funerals.  He also ignores a ‘tetched’ woman, Hannah, who acts as his life-long home servant – at one point shoving her against a wall for sex and then walking away.  She was incoherently in love with him and he was too self-centered and crude to notice.  Turner visited the sea at Margate in south-eastern England quite a number of times and fell in love with an inn-keeper, Mrs. Booth, who had lost her husband.  At one point, he too grabs her sexually, but in this case it leads to them living together in Margate and later in Chelsea along the Thames in London. 

Leigh is a political director and, while he has never done a film like this, politics lurks in the background.  Turner feels compassion for a broke painter who asks him for £100, a painter who is later cast out of the Academy after a very public argument.  He eventually cancels his debt after hearing the extent of his suicidal poverty.  Turner himself actually set up an organization to help painters with health or financial problems – something which even today is quite forward looking.  A key scene involves a wealthy man attempting to buy all of Turner’s work for £100,000 - paintings, sketches, water-colors.  Turner turns him down, saying that the work is to be given to the British public for free.  Some of the work still resides in the British Tate gallery, but it has been scattered among several museums, against Turner’s wishes. 

In Turner's spirit, the film also pokes fun at the Royal Academy – a set of mostly pompous upper-class twits in this depiction.  Philistine British opinion led by Queen Victoria, which disliked anything not sufficiently naturalistic, also comes in for a slam.  Of especial significance is Turner’s painting of a slave ship dumping sick slaves into the ocean.  There was a massive anti-slavery movement in Britain, which resulted in it being peacefully outlawed through out the empire in 1833, more than 30 years before the U.S.  This painting implies Turner was part of that movement.

Turner dies in Chelsea, and on his death bed utters a line, perhaps understanding his last words were to be remembered: “The Sun is God” … then chuckles.  This poke at religion is something to be expected from Turner, who seemed to be a man far ahead of his time.

Red Frog

December 29, 2014 

Not the Post-Gender Society

"Marxism and the Oppression of Women – Toward a Unitary Theory,” by Lise Vogel, 1983

The U.S. women’s liberation movement, which was strong in the 1960s and 1970s, became domesticated and dominated by corporate feminists in the 1980s or ‘radical’ feminists, who blame men and the patriarchy for all problems.  The main concerns of the former became formal legal equality, 'leaning in,' the ‘glass ceiling’ and now, electing Hillary Clinton as President. The latter were unable to take a systemic approach to oppression, and pursued a personal version of a cultural and sexual politics regarding identity.  In the U.S. abortion rights are disappearing in many states, rape is an epidemic in certain areas, the ERA was never passed and women still do not have adequate child care, wages, legal protections or equal jobs. Women all over the world, and even in the U.S., are still second-class citizens.  Why?

Vogel senses that corporate feminism has exhausted itself and that middle-class ‘radical’ feminism is losing theoretical traction too, which is why this book has been republished.  The book was written in the early 1980s when neo-liberalism and post-modernism were becoming dominant, putting an end to more radical perspectives among the feminists of the day – i.e. revolutionary and Marxist perspectives.  Vogel wants to bring back this kind of feminism, which looks at the material structure of society.

In this book Vogel carefully goes through socialist-feminists from the 1960s and 1970s who attempted to combine the various views of more modern feminism with the struggle against capitalism.  This also meant trying to theoretically analyze and absorb the issue of the patriarchy and sexual politics – a task which was impossible as Vogel found out, as they refer to two different sources of oppression.  Vogel in this volume comes up with what she considers to be a unitary theory of women’s oppression, thoroughly rooted in the writings of Marx (and Engels).  She says: “…his work provides the foundation for a theory of the relationship of women and the family to social reproduction in general and the capitalist mode of production in particular.”

As a consequence, Vogel locates ‘patriarchy’ in its proper historical place - ultimately an early stage of historical development, not a modern mode or relation of production, and later as a structure within families in capitalist society. Patriarchy overthrew ‘mother right’ - the matriarchy based on genetic inheritance - at the moment that property surpluses became inheritable and early class society began.  Engels called this the “world historic defeat of the female sex.”

What is perceptive about Marxism is that the family or marriage – so wrapped up with personal, psychological and emotional meanings – is seen for what it is at bottom, an economic construct.  Vogel’s key insight is that under capitalism it is many times the site of the literal reproduction and maintenance of labor power, unpaid work mostly by women  The working-class family structure – starting with the birth of children, which can only be carried out by females at this point – provides a locus for new generations of workers to grow up to work in the offices, factories, farm fields, mines, transport, schools, warehouses and shops of modern capital.  Without an institution like this, capitalism would crumble.  Vogel takes basic insights of Marx and Engels on women and the family and fleshes them out, or corrects them.  Marxism to Vogel is not a static theory to be studied like the Talmud and memorized.  It is a living theory based on a method – like learning to read, practicing the scientific method, or learning to ride a bicycle.  She calls it 'lens' with which to view the world.

Many bourgeois feminists look down on Marx and Engels, claiming they have little to say about modern issues.  In Vogel’s long review of Marx, Engels, August Babel, Eleanor Marx, Clara Zetkin and Lenin’s writings on women – worth the price of the book alone - she tracks some of their errors and omissions, perhaps reflecting a nearly all-male Victorian labor movement.  She especially targets the standard formulation of the “women’s question’ among socialists.  Her left-criticism of Engel’s ‘The Family, Private Property and the State’ is especially lucid.  She cites statements that reflect a ‘biology is destiny’ view about women regarding their ability to work outside the home or the division of labor – while being silent on some key specifics of the family.  In addition Marx and Engels both thought that capitalism was destroying the working-class family by employing women and children.  This process might not be halted by working-class action - which was one reason they saw the family structure ending.  This clearly did not come to pass so quickly, though family dislocation is still more common among the working class than other classes.  

Vogel points out that the poverty of most workers in those days created a marriage based on sexual love and self-help, not inheritance as in bourgeois families. Prostitution oddly enough plays a role in the narrative, as the bourgeoisie of the time accused the communists of wanting to legalize it, while the Marxists accused the bourgeoisie of making it inevitable – within the family!  The socialists understood that death-do-us-part monogamy itself was a product of property transmission.  They understood the importance of women escaping the isolation of family life to work in the public world. The First International of the 1870s called for protective legislation against the horrible conditions endured by women and children workers, the latter being ‘robbed of their youth,’ and the former, of having no protections during gestation, child birth or after. 

Vogel elucidates the emancipatory thread in Marx & Engels.  They emphatically championed women’s rights, repeating the utopian-socialist Fourier’s comment that the treatment of women is the measure of a society. As Marx put it in ‘The Holy Family,’ “The change in an epoch can always be measured by women’s progress towards freedom.”  Contrast this with recent statements by the present Muslim president of Turkey, Erdogan, who said women are not equal to men – this more than 150 years later!  In what condition do the women of Turkey exist?  In 1871 The First International adopted a new rule allowing the establishment of female branches. Marx & Engels put forward a program for the Second International that said, "The emancipation of the producing class involves all human beings without distinction of sex or race.” 

Vogel’s own contribution to socialist feminism is in drawing out Marx’s insights about the reproduction of the working classes.  She expands on the concept of the domestic labor carried out by women – the second shift and women's absolutely unique ability to have and nurse babies. Or as you might cynically call them, future wage slaves.

Some of her salient points, in no particular order:   

1. The socialists of the day did not pay enough attention to the conditions of peasants and farm women. 
2. Labor power (the ability to work) is split into two categories by Marx – necessary labor and surplus labor.  Necessary labor leads to individual consumption by workers.  Necessary labor involves what a worker needs to live for him or herself and any dependents.  Surplus labor is work done for the bosses’ profit. 
3. Domestic labor is unpaid, and is part of the necessary labor used to maintain workers, children, the aged, the sick, the unemployed, etc. Having babies and nursing is ‘necessary labor.' 
4. Unpaid domestic labor is mostly performed by women, and is the main material root of women’s oppression under capitalism.
5. Migrant labor, prison & slave labor, off-shoring and the various strata of the reserve army of the unemployed allow a substitute for population growth.  So the family is not the only modern locus for gaining a new workforce.  However, overall, population growth is central to capitalist production. 
6. The tendency in modern society is for domestic labor to be privatized (restaurants!) and hence for wage work to increase for all.  There is also a tendency for all labor to be completely mobile, which also leads to the system extracting women from unpaid domestic work.
7. Domestic labor is not a ‘pre-capitalist’ or a separate form of production.
8. The capitalists do not like women taking time off work for child bearing or rearing, as it impedes their immediate profitability.  However, they also need to have workers in the future, so for them it is a contradiction.
9. Equality between the sexes under capitalism is a product of the commodity exchange of labor power for a wage, which disappears as soon as the bargain is struck. As Lenin put it, ‘formal equality and social inequality.’  It is rooted in the material relations of production.  But this right is not purely formal as it begins to affect the way women view themselves, which is why struggling for democratic rights for women is not a diversion. 
10. Vogel feels women’s organizations should involve all women, not just those of the working class.  She understands that women of each strata of society have different demands, so this might lead to a quite strange organization.
11. There is tension between the necessary, supplementary work done at home and that given to the capitalist. 

The more chauvinist a society is, the more the working man can sit in a coffee shop or bar while the woman ‘invisibly’ toils at home.  Male chauvinism and the ‘patriarchy at home’ is a gift that capital gives to some men as a consolation prize for their insignificance, and as a result, splits the working class and makes it weaker and more easily exploitable.  As she puts it, the ‘ruling class encourages male supremacy within the exploited class.’

Vogel does not address the gender difference of physical force, but I think the strength of most men allows them to use physical intimidation and recklessness as a trump card.  Younger women are becoming stronger, more physically skilled and even good at self-defense.  However the majority of women, especially older ones or those who are in more chauvinist cultures, are more vulnerable.  This imbalance in strength and skills is certainly partly due to culture, but it also frequently exists as a biological fact. 

This somewhat dry theoretical material is nevertheless rich in accidental insights into life in the U.S.  Ours is a period where marriage and the birth-rate are both in decline, divorces more common, where most women work outside the home, where it takes two incomes – or more - to maintain a household.  Gay rights are growing and pro-family religious dogma weakening, men are taking on more home responsibilities, reproduction has become a choice, abortion partially legal.  Struggling single parents or couples without children are more common, sexual relations are more free.  Formerly private tasks of a household like child-care, growing food, education, care of the aged and cooking have been partially or fully socialized on a capitalist basis. Of course, for wealthier families, nearly everything is outsourced.  Unemployment and precarious employment afflict the various strata of the reserve army of the unemployed, especially women.  

All of these contradictory issues impact the essential ‘reproduction of labor power.’ This is the reason why culture war issues have become so important, as the traditional capitalist family and a woman's traditional role is crumbling and something new is arriving.  Something that can perhaps be called the 'neo-liberal family' and at the same time, presaging another kind of social unit.  Marx called the goal to be a ‘higher form of the family and relations between the sexes.’  When women across the globe come to full liberation, the closer we all come to a socialist society, which will remove class & property as the gauge of humanity and human relations. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

December 27, 2014

The Russian Connection

Why Are U.S. Oil Prices Dropping So Far and So Fast?

Cold War III:  The Ukrainian economy is in free-fall, something the U.S. media never talks about.  Faith in the Ukrainian banking system and economy is disappearing, the hryvnia currency has been halved in value and Ukrainian industrial production is cratering.  Ukraine has no money to pay for Russian gas and its foreign currency reserves are very low.  In Russia due to the drop in oil prices, the ruble has dropped so low in value that efforts by the Russian government central bank might not stem the tide.  There are now runs on food and other tangible goods as a recession is taking hold.  Some are even speculating about a ‘palace coup’ in Russia, which is a goal of U.S. foreign policy.  This could destabilize 1/6^th of the globe if it came about, with no gain to the working classes.  The working classes of both countries are suffering due to the fight among the rulers.

You’ve heard of the somewhat bogus theory of ‘supply and demand’ – as if product over-production by firms is the only thing that drops prices.  Not really.  Over-production is built into a system of unplanned production – the capitalist market.  Which shows that the ‘magic hand’ of the market is really not very magical after all.  Government policy has a large role, as do the owners of those products and what they do in relation to production.  So does class struggle like strikes and the weather, war, advertising and lack of demand due to poverty, inequality or massive recessions.  Need we mention oligopolies and general price fixing, which has become the norm among world-spanning oligopolies.  OPEC is just such a world-spanning price-fixing cartel.   "Supply & demand" is pablum fed to the U.S. media and beginning Econ. 1001 students.

And when the geo-political aims of the dominant capitalist governments and the dominant capitalist ‘producers’ coincide?  Not hard to predict.  Patrick Smith is a former reporter for the International Herald Tribune and an active opponent of America’s aggressive foreign policy.  He was one of the first to point out that Kerry’s visit to Jeddah in early November came at the same time as a further hardening of U.S. policy towards Russia over the Ukraine.  Smith’s article appeared November 13 in Salon.com.  Kerry’s visit also came at a time when Russia had again proposed to process Iran’s uranium so it could not be used for weapons, a deal Iran finally accepted.  In other words, a deal over the Iranian nuclear issue was at hand.  A deal that would upset both the U.S. and the Saudis.  They don’t want a deal.

In Smith’s words, based on his inside source:

 

“…the visit had to do with Washington’s unabated desire to ruin the Russian economy. To do this, Kerry told the Saudis 1) to raise production and 2) to cut its crude price. Keep in mind these pertinent numbers: The Saudis produce a barrel of oil for less than $30 as break-even in the national budget; the Russians need $105.”

To this day, the Saudi Royal Family (and the little Gulf principalities that follow in their wake) are still refusing to cut production as they would normally do, because they too want to damage Russia’s economy – and Iran’s and Venezuela’s.  These are all countries that do not jump to the dictat of the U.S.  Just today the Saudi’s again denied a reporter’s question that they had an interest in undermining the Russian economy. 

The message from the blinkered American news media is that ‘oh, oil fracking is the source of overproduction and the low costs of oil. Ain’t cheap prices great?”  Oil fracking is only a small part of the world industry however.  And indeed, the U.S. fracking industry could become collateral damage.  Some companies are already producing oil they cannot afford.  If oil drops below $55 a barrel, Bloomberg sees a third of the industry shutting down.  Many firms started up due to the almost free-money policy of the Federal Reserve.  This has created the present oil and gas fracking bubbles, along with some others like in rental housing, and the stock market gas itself.  It has been recently reported by Smith that the gas fracking industry in the U.S. is really behind sanctions - as they want to separate Russian gas from Europe and take over that market.

If you remember in Chile in 1973 the American government, the CIA and the ‘intellectuals” at the University of Chicago promised to make the “Chilean economy scream.”  This was because a socialist, Allende, had been elected president.  Not long after that, a military coup sponsored by the U.S. occurred, and the Pinochet dictatorship was established.  This tactic has not changed 41 years later.  Now they want to make the ‘Russian economy scream.’  Just like they tried to make the Cuban economy ‘scream’ for 53 years.  Or the Iraqi economy ‘scream’ after the first Gulf War, which killing hundreds of thousands and went on until Bush II’s invasion.  Or the continuing boycott against Iran.  Or Yeltsin’s and America’s idea of introducing capitalism overnight in Russia, which created a 10 year depression after the Yeltsin-led counter-revolution in 1991.  This made Russian workers and farmers scream. 

It is people that they want to make scream.  That is the price for bringing Ukraine into the U.S. orbit.  Which is part of why Obama just signed a bill put forward by Republican hardliners to give military weapons to Ukraine.  This will aid the Ukrainian fascist militias fighting pro-Russian separatists.  Ukraine has now dropped its unaligned status.

The hardships these policies are having on the Ukrainian and Russian peoples is growing.  The working classes in these two countries need to organize themselves independently. But this is not a an even situation.  It once again proves that any time the U.S. comes around seeking to promote ‘democracy’ they are really there to destroy.  Beware of American governments bearing gifts. 

Red Frog

December 22, 2014

No Island is a Man

Cuba Libre?

Cold War II:  After 53 years of U.S. hostility to Cuba, something may be changing.  A policy held hostage by supporters of Batista in Miami, moronic anti-communists and the full weight of the U.S. military and CIA is now challenged from within part of the U.S. ruling class.  The Right's visceral hatred of Castro and Che led to plots against one and the death of the other.  After all, no country in the world except Israel supported the cruel U.S. boycott of Cuba.  Obama is desperate to do the things he only talked about 6 years ago - due to the mass refusal of voters in the 2014 elections to back the Democrats.  He  perhaps realized he does not need to continue to pander to all forms of Republicanism - just most.  Well and good.  It is time to celebrate Cuba’s resistance to the imperial colossus to the North.  ‘David’ has won.

Yet there is a hook here.  Obama said the obvious – "why keep doing something that has failed…”  What has failed is regime-change.  This statement reveals that the real goal of ‘normalization’ is counter-revolution - by other means.  The Cuban Communist Party is aware of this, but they too are still to be subjected to the siren song of privatization and capital intrusion.  IF this policy is fully enacted, which is doubtful at this point given the strong reactionaries in the U.S.  Ironically, it was a 1996 law enacted under Clinton that will give them the most ammunition to stop normalization.

U.S. corporations are salivating at building more internet architecture and tourist hotels, creating agricultural and energy dependencies, gentrifying Havana’s aged Malecon and the like.  Not to mention importing the best cigars and rum in the Caribbean, or using Cuba as a cheap source of cane sugar and manufacturing labor. Or prying Cuba away from Russia. Obama glorified getting the U.S. version of the internet – and the NSA - into the Cuba.  It might not be that easy...

The Caribbean sea was named for the Caribs, a tribe who were exterminated by the Europeans.  Let that be a warning.  If the travel restrictions actually go away, visit Cuba.  This tropical Atlantis is worth the trip.  If the forces of corporate capital remake the island into a neo-Cancun, the Cuba of today will be a dim memory.  Let us hope the Cuban working classes are strong enough to resist the road of Poland or Hungary.  Cuba should remain an independent country with a nationalized economy, and an organized working class able to go forward to real socialism in league with others in Latin America. 

That is the final Cuban liberation.  Let’s drink to that.  That would be a Cuba Libre without the Coca-Cola.

Red Frog

December 21, 2014 / Happy Solstice!

No Justice, No Peaceful Shopping

"The Whole System is Guilty as Hell!”

This is one of the chants at today’s civil disobedience at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA.  Led by a young black-led group – “Black Lives Matter” – it garnered perhaps nearly 2,000 people interested in disrupting the orgy of commercialism that is the Mall and Christmas.  The protest was against racist police brutality and the legal system that supports it. 

One side of this huge mall was shut down – 3 levels of one side of the ring of shops – for nearly 2 hours.  The mall cops, city cops and State troopers walled it off after the crowd left.  This mall is a hard place to control, as there are many entrances, and protesters more or less look like shoppers.  Perhaps with a fewer bags in hand and more youthful.  It was reported that 20 people were arrested. The TV press naturally started to focus on shoppers whose experience was disrupted.  Or demanded to know why more weren't arrested, given this was 'private property.'  The Bloomington city attorney promised prosecutions to the 'full extent of the law.' While they released 20 with citations, they may go after organizers.  December 23 the city attorney confirmed the would go after the organizers, proving that she really works for the Mall of America and no one else.

Most of the crowd were young white people.  The local organizers had guts to target a national mall like this.  Their violation of the ‘sacred right’ of private property was intentional.  They were first offered a cold parking lot a block from the mall, which was an insult.  So, like Occupy, which thought that public parks actually ‘are’ public (and we found out that they are not…) the organizers made the Mall, which hosts thousands of people each day, an actually ‘public’ place for a brief period of time.

Red Frog

December 20, 2014

Happy Coming Solstice!!!!

The Real Korean Comedy

The End of Free Speech for Sony Pictures, Seth Rogen and America!

Cold War I:  The American media just can’t get enough of the tempest in a teapot that is the ostensible North Korean hacking ‘scandal’ into Sony Pictures.  The female anchors of the smoothly sonorous and righteously indignant National Government Radio (“NPR”) are having a shit-fit over North Korea supposedly messing with Sony’s internal intranet.  Propaganda?  What propaganda?  They certainly didn’t spend this much time on the epic U.S./Israeli malware hack into the Iranian atomic program.  And, as some techies have pointed out, the evidence of North Korea's involvement evidence is thin.

I only have to laugh. 

Remember, the U.S. government has several hundred nuclear missiles pointed at North Korea.  We also invaded north Korea at one point, and keep thousands of troops across a thin border with them.  Sony Pictures, which I might remind you, is a JAPANESE company, approved a ‘comedic’ film featuring the assassination of the present leader of North Korea.  Ha Ha.  Japanese colonialists occupied Korea from 1876 until the end of the Second World War – an event that led to the formation of North Korea through a partisan struggle. Sony was formed right after World War II and today is headquartered in Tokyo.   

Now who directed this unseen film?  Seth Rogen.  Is he a famous comedic actor involved in hysterical and political films as his bread and butter?  Well actually, no.  Rogen has been involved in a slew of main-stream comedy fare on TV and films, (The Mindy Project, etc.) mostly very juvenile stuff.  Seth Rogen’s main film list: 

1. This Is The End – Drunken party in LA ends in massive earthquake.

2. Pineapple Express – Stoned Westerners ride Indian trains and transport.

3. Superbad – Navigating the last weeks of high school through a booze-soaked party.

4. Knocked Up – Immature guy decides to help raise child after one-night stand.

5. The 40 Year Virgin – Predictable dumb-ass comedy about some poor guy who hasn’t had sex.
6. Neighbors - Immature parents deal with drunken frat boys next door.

7. The Interview – comedy about assassination of leader of North Korea. 

Now, the Pineapple Express was funny.  Yeah, but that last jumps out, doesn’t it?   You can expect a funny film from Rogen, Franco and Sony on the assassination of Barack Obama – produced in Iran - at any time.  How about a film about the assassination of Vladimir Putin?  Hey, a film about the assassination of Raul Castro would have been funny too! (Oh wait, not timely…and more like a documentary.)  Or a film on racism or capitalist exploitation of workers?  Killing the head of Saudi Arabia? Don’t hold your breath. 

Kim Jong-Un is a soft target in the comedy world – the same weak target that corporate comedy shows like Saturday Night Live love.  If you can’t make fun of a homicidal spawn with a funny haircut, what can you do?
Can't you see the Hollywood pitch session?
   "Seth, you need to do something with gravitas, to up your cred."
   "Oh?"
   "Yeah, you know, take on the big issues.  Look, you heard of that goofy dictator kid in Korea?
   "Maybe."
   "Its a slam dunk.  We'll bring in all that old classic Commie poster stuff, and you'll be like Charlie
    Chaplin."
   "Yeah.  I've always wanted to be like Charlie Chaplin, except I want to talk.  Wait, wasn't he a
    Commie?"

So why would Rogen decide to make a comedy about killing the leader of North Korea?  Did the U.S. State Department put him up to it?  The CIA?  We know they work with Hollywood.  Well not necessarily -  heavy Hollywood hitters like Rogen and Franco know that they won’t ruffle any feathers at all in the U.S. by taking this angle.   And a major film company will back them.  However, 'Democracy Now' has reported that this film was done with cooperation of the State Department.  Rogen?  The best description of this guy is a trivial, conformist comedian.  Sort of the stoned Seinfeld of post-modern comedy.  Rogen will have to find solicitude with a comfort woman.  Can’t you see the presentation from Sony?  “So sorry for what happen to movie.  Here ... Korean Lady for you!”

I have no love for the crude militarized dictatorship that is North Korea.  But the people of North Korea will one day deal with their rulers – not the U.S.  In fact it is the aggressive posture of the U.S. which has helped justify the north Korean police state (and the south Korean version.) Just take a step back and look at this pathetic spectacle for a minute.  Jesus.  It’s not like the hypocritical U.S. doesn’t constantly spy on and hack their enemies.  What they really hate is that someone else’s hack worked.

Coming soon - Cold War II: Cuba outlasts imperial colossus!  Cold War III: Oil prices & Russia;

P.S. - With Sony's announcement that they will now show the film in selected theaters, could this be the most 'viral' marketing campaign for a probably quite mediocre comedy?  Only the viewers will tell.  However, early reviews by film critics indicate its the same lame ass jokes.  It's no new "Ulysses." 

Red Frog

December 19, 2014