The First Red Scare

“Struggle & Progress – Celebrating the 150^th Anniversary of Union Victory and Emancipation,” Jacobin, Issue 18, Summer 2015. 

The Civil War is still going on, in both an ethnic and a class sense.  That is why the anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history is worth understanding and not forgetting.  It is still going on in the sense that the South still acts as a reactionary political drag on the rest of the country.  It is the homeland of some of the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class – in defense; in oil; in coal; in retail; in construction.  These people are the spawn of the landed planter aristocracy that was expropriated at the end of the Civil War.  It is still going on in the sense that minorities and immigrants are still persona non grata in that region in a more intense way than elsewhere - though institutional racism elsewhere is no slouch.  

Black soldiers in the Civil War

Conditions in the South for black and Latino peoples are below most other parts of the country – in healthcare, education, wages and working conditions, government services, policing and ‘justice’ issues.’  It is still going on in the sense that even white workers in the South are also spat upon – suffering in less degree the same conditions as black and immigrant workers.  They take on a servility to the new southern capitalist aristocracy in exchange for their ‘higher’ standing vis a vis minorities, but this only prolongs their own oppression.  The official southern State antagonism to unionism is just one example. It is still going on in the sense that the same Southern bible-thumpers that justified chattel slavery now justify wage slavery and adoration of the market.

What is clear is that constant talk that ignores class in favor of only ‘race’ discussions avoids the centrality of economic roles in the nation and especially in the South.  Ethnicity is many times a dimension of class; it stamps those with different skin colors or languages as fit for certain jobs, certain wages and certain treatment, in spite of the ‘talented tenth.’  The constant liberal prattling about ‘diversity’ alone hides the economic component and imperative of profiteering  that underlies racism.   If ‘race’ is merely a political category, then why does it endure?  Just that people are ‘stupid’ or ‘mean?’  After all, the much heralded ‘Second Reconstruction’ during the 1960s has also failed to bring equality to the black strata of the working class even now.  

Anarchists and other ultra-leftists believe that the Civil War changed nothing.  Jacobin begs to differ. They, like many Marxists before them, consider it to be a ‘2^nd American Revolution’ which destroyed chattel slavery uncompensated.  Jacobin interviews Eric Foner, son of the famous left historian Phil Foner, who first gave this real understanding to Reconstruction.  Here Eric Foner carefully shows how the northern Republican capitalists under Johnson refused to alleviate the debts of southern small farmers and working men, which helped turn them away from Reconstruction.  The northern Republicans also instituted land taxes on small holdings for the first time, which increased the financial burden on poorer whites.  Foner says that the Abolitionist movement was small, and only increased in power as its views became confirmed by events.  Yet it ignored the plight of working men in the North, such as Irish textile workers, so he considers its leaders to be mainly moralists. 

Foner points out that ‘love’ is not the basis for a real politics, as you do not need to love people to work with them, you only need to have similar goals.  Foner has a ‘Let a 100 Flowers Bloom” approach to class struggle, but then points out that the myriad political groups and causes fractionate the left in the U.S.  He points to the role of the Socialist Party in the early part of the 20^th century that acted as a ‘big tent’ for every force – suffragettes, labor agitators, anti-war activists, anti-lynching partisans and socialists of every stripe.  Nothing like it exists today, and in my opinion, that is the reason the left is so weak. 

This discussion leads into Jacobin’s main point about the war, expanded on in several articles – that the Southern planter elite saw the anti-slavery movement as part of wedge to bring broader progressive changes that they understood as a ‘socialism’ of some type.  Jacobin calls it “America’s First Red Scare.”  Abolitionists or Republicans or free blacks were called ‘red Republicans,’ labor anarchists, Communards, even ‘communists’ by more astute Confederate polemicists.  Their point was that first you get rid of slavery – pretty soon you are going to have unions and labor strife!  They thought that slavery would keep blacks and whites separate – and hence easier to rule.  The anti-slavery role of socialist and labor radicals who had emigrated after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe confirmed this.  German socialists chased pro-slavers out of St. Louis.  German socialists in east Texas kept that area loyal to the North.  Marx himself supported the Northern side in the war.  Later the black vote in the South allowed the Populist movement to challenge southern businessmen and landed gentry.  This was intolterable to the KKK and the White Leagues.

Two articles talk about the agency of black slaves in the struggle for their own freedom – 200,000 black soldiers who joined the Union army, participating in 450 military engagements, providing 120 infantry regiments, 22 light and heavy artillery regiments and 7 cavalry regiments.   At Petersburg, 1 in every 8 soldiers besieging Richmond was black.  Or black women who organized for the right to marry their husbands in the army, which sounds trivial until you understand that slaves were forbidden to be married.  Jacobin also has articles in this issue on why there are so many pro-Confederate films about the Civil war and also one about Populist labor struggles in the South after the civil war that united blacks and whites. 

Adolph Reed corrects the black-nationalist myth that slavery was solely destroyed by black people themselves through a look at film.  This argument seems false on the face of it based on the numerous facts of the Civil war and Reed calls it the ‘James Brown’ theory of black liberation.  I.E. it is just up to individual black action, as expressed in fantasies like “Django Unchained.”  In the process Reed deconstructs various films that deal with the Civil War, like ‘Glory,’ ‘Lincoln,’ ‘Cry Freedom,’  ‘Mississippi Burning,’ ‘Driving Ms. Daisy’ and ‘The Help.’  Reed is tough on ‘psychobabble’ and multiculturalism.  Ultimately the Civil War was a joint white and black military project to end slavery and that cannot be ignored.  Reed was a supporter of the Labor Party in the 1990s.  

Another author, Kenneth Warren, takes black elites to task for only focusing on ‘race relations’ rather than inter-ethnic worker alliances as the best way to overcome institutional racism.  Ultimately at the time Booker T Washington became the standard bearer of integrating black labor into capital.  He also criticizes Michelle Alexander, writer of “The New Jim Crow,” for partially following a goal of ‘improving race relations’ instead of a broader social justice approach.  Warren makes the point that it was only after Populism was defeated that Jim Crow could rule unhindered in the South, as Populism motivated both black and white workers and sharecroppers in the South to oppose the southern oligarchy.  

The only real missing piece of information in this issue of Jacobin is how many white southerners actually opposed the war or supported the union.  This alone was a significant political fact which underscored the failure of Confederate ‘nationalism’ and provided a ready base for the subsequent Readjuster and Populist movements after the war.  

Jacobin ends with a look at how Reconstruction was killed by Southern violence and Northern hostility, starting with President Andrew Johnson – reflecting the renewed economic links between the southern capitalists and landowners and the northern bourgeoisie.  There was no widespread “Homestead Act” in the south and plantation properties seized by former slaves were returned to their original owners.  So most black people were deprived of land and ultimately after 30 years (and perhaps consequently) the vote.  This article points out that the myth of the lazy ‘welfare queen’ originated during Reconstruction as a weapon by southern racists to take back the South.  In 1875 the U.S. Supreme court even ruled that citizenship did not guarantee the right to vote.  By the turn of the century, Jim Crow was fully in control and black people had for the most part lost any power in the South.  Both black people and ‘socialism’ had been stopped.  

What is significant in all this is that the struggle against any form of ‘socialism’ in the U.S. has been going on far longer than the cold war that ended in 1989, the Red Scare of the 1950s, or the Palmer raids of 1919.  It is a target not connected to any nation, like China or the USSR, but ultimately aimed at the American and world labor movement.

And I bought it at Mayday Books’ excellent magazine and newspaper section.

(“The New Jim Crow,” and books that challenge the myths of Confederate nationalism, reviewed below.)

Red Frog

October 31, 2015

“Collateral Consequences”

"The Divide – American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” by Matt Taibbi, 2015

Taibbi is an easy-to-digest writer that zeroes in on one of the big problems of class society – the justice system for the rich and Wall Street, and the justice system for the various layers of the working class.   Unlike Gleen Greenwald, who wrote a similar book to this, he is not so arid and rationalistic, but instead takes you inside the lives of a number of people who have been victims of rich-class justice – a small Chinese community bank; a black man from the Bronx; a white homeless stoner in New York; ‘illegals’ in Gainesville, Georgia; the immigrant owner of Canadian insurance company; a Latino family on welfare in LA; a female whistle-blower at Chase. 

Goofy Cover of Lady Justice

Taibbi’s no leftist, just an enraged liberal.  He makes some excuses for the justice and capital system, focusing only on financial corporate crime and no other.  Yet what he pictures as a good journalist, in spite of his politics, is a corporate system rife with criminal firms and practices like rigging LIBOR.  Chase Bank, HBSC, BofA, Countrywide, Enron, AIG, Wells Fargo, Arthur Andersen, Goldman Sachs, Citgroup and many hedge funds all engage in criminal behavior on a regular basis.  It is the price of doing business.  He especially looks at the 2008 crisis, which he calls ‘the biggest white-collar crime wave in history.”  In 2008, he says that ‘Every major financial company had chosen to participate in this enormous fraud.”  He calls the forced sale of Lehman, “the biggest bank robbery in history” and shows you why. 

Taibbi, like many others, points out that no one has gone to jail, corporations (i.e. shareholders) just paid fines and signed non-prosecution ‘agreements,’ which are the new form of government deregulation.  But he goes further.  Intimately related to this lax environment for corporate crime is an absolutely lock-tight system aimed at ordinary people.  This encompasses New York’s stop and frisk / ‘broken windows’ policy; the mass incarceration state; the drug war; the war on immigrants; private prison systems; out-of-control police violence (although he does not talk about police shootings…); excessive fines; the deportation extravaganza; the development of civil debtor’s prisons; intrusive welfare inspections; excessive criminal prosecutions of welfare recipients; even those traffic tickets that are showered on the population like confetti.  All of it is connected, unlike what the politics of so many single-issue organizations would suggest. You cannot defeat these issues in isolation. 

So who are the villains, besides the gallery of well-known corporate criminals like John Mack, Jamie Dimon, Anthony Mozillo or Lloyd Blankfein that liberals so love to hate?  Taibbi instead focuses on Eric Holder, Bill Clinton, Lanny Breur, Mary Jo White (now head of FINRA), Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and the corporate-defense law firm of Covington and Burling, where both Holder and Breur worked before government.  Odd that the list is made up of Democrats, but they were the ones in charge of the aftermath of the 2008 crash.  After all, under both Bushes more financial crimes were prosecuted, especially in the big round-up around the S&L crisis in the 1980s.  Capital has a tag-team method of political control and the Democrats happened to inherit the mess when it was their turn.  So what happened to institute the rules of neo-liberalism? 

Taibbi starts with Holder’s 1999 ‘collateral consequences’ memo, written while he was first at the DOJ.  The memo was once intended to be ‘tough on banks,’ but later surfaced to provide a reason not to disrupt companies or ‘the markets’ by leaving executives and companies alone.  It became the legal rationale for doing nothing except collecting fines from corporations that could well-afford to pay them.  Lanny Breur carried out this policy in the fines levied on many banks, like HSBC, which laundered money for terrorists and drug cartels. Essentially 'crime' disappeared if committed by corporate figures and they became civil matters.  Not so for the population at large. 

Next up is Bill Clinton, who destroyed ‘welfare as we know it’ and turned it into a punitive and abusive paper-trap for the poor, instituting no-knock searches of welfare recipient’s homes.  Or Obama, the king of deportations, who broke Bush’s record, and while attempting to mitigate some tactics, hasn’t changed a thing. Then there is Mary Jo White, who was head of the SEC at the time and basically decided to go after ‘small companies’ or issues only.  This was conscious policy.  You can still see this in their and FINRA’s investigations of small fry.  Or padding their quota numbers with empty ‘paper’ investigations of bankrupt foreign companies that collapsed and did not file Edgar / SEC paperwork.

Taibbi instead contrasts this process with depictions of the life of a homeless stoner, who is thrown in jail for 3 months in vicious Riker’s Island prison for a half a joint, while drug money launderers at banks go free.  Or a black man who stands in front of his apartment at 2 AM at night with a friend and is arrested by quota-filling NY cops for ‘blocking the sidewalk’ to non-existent walkers.  Those same arrests are not happening on the Upper East Side of New York.  Or the story of a small bank in Chinatown which was the only bank to be brought up on ‘mortgage fraud’ criminal charges, called by some the “Lee Harvey Oswald” of the banking crisis.  Or the lives of persecuted immigrants in Gainesville who are arrested for bullshit traffic issues and are deported into the private prison system and into the dangers of Mexico and reentry into the U.S.  Yet all the while Georgia businesses want them back. Taibbi’s descriptions of the difficulties of trying to apply for and collect welfare in LA, where you voluntarily put a target on your back for a tiny bit of money, are brutal.  Yet other corporations or people that get loans or grants from the government are not so treated.  A whistle-blower at Chase loses her job after naively pointing out illegal practices like robo-signing and no-document loans as the basis for securitized products.  Yet the Chase executives who OK this practice go free, even though they have committed tens of thousands of frauds re foreclosures.  And lastly, an insurance executive unjustly targeted by short-sellers at hedge funds who nearly loses his business, while the hedge funders walk free. 

Taibbi usefully answers all the arguments of the government types who defend these practices.  Ultimately non-prosecution and ‘too big to jail’ guarantees another corporate crime wave.  It’s not just ‘two Americas.”  It’s one America, with one slice of it enforcing rules on the majority, while they themselves skate.

Taibbi’s “Griftopia,” Greenwald’s, “With Liberty & Justice for Some,” and Lewis’ “The Big Short,” all reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at Mayday’s cutout rack

Red Frog

October 12, 2015

The Meritless Meritocracy

"Divergent – Insurgent,” 2015, directed by somebody…

This is a dumb-ass dystopian movie with a dreadful lead heroine who could put a zombie to sleep.  It’s number two or three in a series knock-off of “The Hunger Games,” where the female ‘action’ protagonist Tris is no Jennifer Lawrence.  It features idiotic CGI, the vague personalities of B-movie actors and an implausible plot written by another ‘Young Adult’ novelist, Veronica Roth.  Poor Kate Winslet plays the cold aspiring dictator Jeanine.  Yet there is something to behold here.  Yes there is.

Dystopian films always reflect on our own myopia, our ‘utopia’, the civilized craptopia of the present.  This movie’s society is structured by emotional ‘factions’ – Erudite (intelligence); Abnegation (sacrifice); Amity (peace and non-violence); Dauntless (bravery); and Candor (honesty).  Tris is a member of Dauntless, but she finds out in the first film that she – along with others – are ‘divergent’ from the factions, sharing capacities with other groups.  Divergence like this is seen as bad by this society led by Erudite and the divergents have to hide.  Being different!  Bad!  Erudite ultimately is trying to control everything and kills many members of Candor in the battle that develops against the divergents.
 

Cheesey Map of Chicago  in Future

The film takes place in a partially-ruined city like Chicago, with some woods and fields, all surrounded by a giant white wall.  The joint factional counsel recommends no one go beyond the wall, as it is ‘dangerous’ beyond it.  This wall is reminiscent of the “The Maze Runner.”  It is either a real or a metaphorical wall – perhaps the border of the U.S., our shoreline, perhaps the fear of the ‘other’ or the unknown or foreigners. Perhaps it is the ‘jail’ that life can become.

In the peni-ultimate scene, the rebel divergent Tris passes 5 gruesome tests to prove she has all the factional characteristics  of each group.  This opens a ‘box’ which announces that the whole thing was an experiment.  The experiment was meant to prove that ‘divergence’ is exactly what is to be desired – to transcend faction, to have as many ‘characteristics’ as possible.  The people who constructed the test live beyond the wall and then invite the lab rats out.  Oh happy day.

Let’s look at this idea of ‘factions.’  The faction that attempts dictatorship is Erudite – the ‘intelligent.’  Now we know that the ruling elite in the U.S. considers themselves smarter than everyone else – otherwise why are they in control and have all the money?  It is called Social Darwinism, the ‘meritocracy,’ the cream rising to the top – or perhaps the scum.   You might even know people who believe this.  “Intelligence’ in this scenario is supposedly reduced to a grasp of abstract ideas and ‘success.’  Yet as research by Howard Gardner has shown, there are many kinds of intelligence – emotional, social, mechanical, physical, artistic – that don’t fit the standard bourgeois definition.  Some of these forms of intelligence cannot always be monetized.  This film backs that up.  Here is Gardner’s original chart, which I don’t think is complete or extensive enough even now.  He’s even added another category from his original 7:

Intelligence	Examples	Discussion
Bodily-kinesthetic	Dancers, athletes, surgeons, crafts people	The ability to use one's physical body well.
Interpersonal	Sales people, teachers, clinicians, politicians, religious leaders	The ability to sense other's feelings and be in tune with others.
Intrapersonal	People who have good insight into themselves and make effective use of their other intelligences	Self-awareness. The ability to know your own body and mind.
Linguistic	Poets, writers, orators, communicators	The ability to communicate well, perhaps both orally and in writing, perhaps in several languages.
Logical-mathematical	Mathematicians, logicians	The ability to learn higher mathematics. The ability to handle complex logical arguments.
Musical	Musicians, composers	The ability to learn, perform, and compose music.
Naturalistic	Biologists, naturalists	The ability to understand different species, recognize patterns in nature, classify natural objects.
Spatial	Sailors navigating without modern navigational aids, surgeons, sculptors, painters	The ability to know where you are relative to fixed locations. The ability to accomplish tasks requiring three-dimensional visualization and placement of your hands or other parts of your body.

As you can see, many so-called intelligent people in the present definition don’t actually have the full range of possibilities.  The ‘idiot’ savant, the autistic genius, the socially awkward mathematician, the professor who can’t use a screwdriver come to mind as extreme examples.  In a way, this movie undermines the traditional belief in a narrow form of ‘intelligence’ as the fount of all wisdom.

In the process of the rebellion, Tris and her cohort come upon “Factionless,” a rough and hidden group led by a woman, Evelyn, who wants to unite with them to kill Jeanine.  Factionless are the outcasts, the homeless, the bottom line.  What is interesting is that even though the divergents share characteristics, they also are stamped by their prior factional membership.  Some even return to the fold.  So they mistrust the factionless, who have no pedigree at all.  One quote in particular has a subtext, as Tris’ partner Tobias warns Tris that Factionless wants to overthrow Erudite, but won’t say what comes next – hinting that they want a dictatorship too.  Factionless is the most revolutionary of the groups and the most outside the system.  Yet where did they come from? This dig at them, which will probably be continued in another film, is subtle ‘red-baiting’ and ‘poor baiting’ to my mind.

The rebellion succeeds when Factionless works with the divergents to flood Erudite’s headquarters with fighters.  The film ends with the leader of Factionless, Evelyn, putting a bullet through Jeanine’s head. I think we are supposed to be angered by Evelyn doing this.  Yet Jeanine was not going to abide by any directions to abandon the faction system, and Evelyn knew it.  Not to mention the fact that Jeanine had just killed or tortured a bunch of people. The last scenes are of the former ‘factions’ walking to meet the people outside the wall who stuck them in this ruined city as an 'experiment.' 

These factions are pale reflections of aspects of our class and ethnically stratified society, absent the economics, as no one works in this world, nor is there any apparent source of food or energy.  There is no proletarian faction, though Factionless comes closest and Amity next.  Amity is a group of mellow rural hippies living around a large Geodesic dome, raising crops by hand and horse.  They actually are the only people seen working at all.  Dauntless is a Spartan military strata that does the will of Erudite. Sound familiar? Candor is the middle class strata, led by an Asian with a judicial robe.  Abgenation must be people who work for non-profits, staff churches or do volunteer work – sensitive souls out of their league.

The use of the word 'factions' might strike Marxists as familiar. Why that word?  There are so many factions of the modern leftist movement that any message that they transcend their differences must seem really utopian.  Marxists have been accused of 'utopianism' before, so they we might want to reflect on that and perhaps see that that 'transcendence' is the way out.

So the message is that psychological – and by implication social factions - can be transcended.  Given this film is directed mostly at young people, is there some kind of social message here that goes beyond high-school cliquism?  Or is it just the rank idealism that they sell young people, only to tell them later when they get their corporate jobs that that is all bullshit.  And its just time to make money.

Reviews of all 3 ‘Hunger Games’ films, below.  Also a review of “The Maze Runner,” below.

Red Frog

October 6, 2015 

‘The Ruling and the Ruled’

"CitizenFour,” a documentary by Laura Poitras, 2014

This documentary revisits the high-profile events surrounding Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. government spying through the NSA.  It is ultimately a human portrait of people doing the very right thing under high pressure.  The documentary has got some great ‘gotcha’ moments, as if Poitras studied the Michael Moore method.  Snowden says at one point that this secret program shows there is a ‘ruling and the ruled.’  It is very clear from the evidence and from the conversations in this film that the surveillance piece of a U.S. totalitarian police state is in place and already being activated. 

The Blue Screen of ... Code

The film opens with computer code and typing on a black screen as if MS DOS were still in use. It is Snowden initially attempting to reach Poitras.  These scenes are interspersed with appearances by NSA head Keith Alexander and DNI head James Clapper, who both lie to Congress about the NSA’s collection efforts.  Clapper in particular is the definitive picture of a liar, given his body language and fidgeting.  It is a great moment.  William Binney, an NSA whistle-blower, talks to a group about what happened after the terrorist attack on 9/11, saying the NSA decided a few days after 9/11 to ‘collect everything.’  The FBI showed up with ‘guns drawn’ at his house in 2007 after he protested warrantless eavesdropping.  They pointed them at him while he toweled off after a shower.  

The first setting is a bland hotel room in Hong Kong.  Snowden has asked for Poitras and Glenn Greenwald’s help, and they are both there in the room.  Snowden and Greenwald, the ace reporter for Salon, then the Guardian and now the Intercept, come off as quite similar personalities and click well.  Snowden is very smart and knowledgeable - an absolutely familiar and calm person.  At one point, Snowden hides under an anti-surveillance hood to mask his passwords from spy satellites or imaging.  At another, he gives sardonic ‘expert tips’ to Greenwald and Poitras about how to really do passwords and encryption.  He takes an e-mail from his girlfriend Lindsey at one point during that week, as she tells him NSA cops and NSA HR are now in his house (where she was living), and later, that ‘construction’ trucks are parked all around the neighborhood and on his street.  The hotel fire alarm starts ringing repeatedly during one session, and everyone gets nervous.  Even innocent phone calls from the Mira Hotel front desk are cause for concern.  Eventually the data is downloaded to Greenwald and another Guardian reporter and Snowden makes it clear that it is up to the journalists to decide what to publish.  

It is all filmed in real time, as it happened.  Poitras herself, even before these events, was constantly stopped by TSA in airports, showing that the ‘terrorist watch list’ is really also a dissident watch list.  Greenwald’s partner David Miranda is filmed after being detained in London’s Heathrow airport for possibly carrying data.  At that point, neither Poitras nor Greenwald wanted to risk entering the U.S.

Other scenes show Greenwald testifying before a Brazilian inquiry, speaking in Portuguese (this is not an untalented fellow) about the NSA revelations, making the point that the surveillance is not really aimed at terrorism alone, but are used for U.S. national and industrial espionage against other countries and corporations.  In another, Binney testifies in front of a German inquiry after revelations that the NSA tapped Merkel and also Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff’s phones, along with others, saying that the NSA is a ‘threat to democracy.’  Another scene shows the head of Lavabits, an encrypted internet provider used to Snowden, explaining to an EU meeting why he shut down the firm rather than comply with NSA demands to give them a back door to his encryption.  

The film shows the familiar details of the NSA program – gathering all meta-data from every person in the U.S. from Skype, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Apple, AT&T, Century Link, etc.  All of this is warrantless, allowed by rubber-stamp secret courts run by friendly judges.  The collection of non-American information, or information between U.S. and foreign citizens communicating, does not even have to pass that ‘test.’  The British version of the NSA, GCHQ, collects the most in the world via their Tempora program, which is an all-encompassing ‘data’ collection program for text, pictures, video, voice - not just metadata.  British law has fewer privacy protections that U.S. law.

Snowden and Greenwald discus when to go public, after the inevitable question of ‘who’ leaked the info becomes important.  Snowden makes the point that he wants to make it clear by going public quickly that he is saying to the NSA “I am not afraid of you.”  However, given he makes this announcement in the 8 days he’s sitting in 2 hotel rooms in Hong Kong, this brings on immediate U.S. action.  Sure enough, the U.S. demands his extradition from Chinese Hong Kong.  Snowden goes into hiding immediately with the help of the UN Committee on Human Rights and Hong Kong human rights activists.  Then with the help of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, he is smuggled out of Hong Kong and ends up at the Moscow airport, where he later gets asylum.  

3 felonies hang over Snowden’s head.  The charges are based on the 1917 Espionage act, which was aimed at foreign spies, not whistleblowers or opponents of conscience.  Obama self-righteously says that Snowden ‘is not a patriot” and instead of going outside the system, suggests that Snowden should offer himself up to the gentle and generous arms of the U.S. justice system.   Luckily Snowden is not so naïve.  

At the end of the film is a pile of torn yellow notepaper on a table in Snowden’s Moscow apartment, where he is now living with Lindsey. Poitras and Greenwald are again there.  Afraid to talk out loud, Greenwald informs Snowden via these notes that a new informant has told him that 1.5 million people were added to the watch list since 2009, and there might now be up to 2 million people on it.   Even Snowden is stunned.

The ‘terrorist watch list’ is a misnomer.  It should be called the ‘citizen watch list.’

Greenwald's book "With Liberty & Justice for Some," reviewed below.  Assange's book, "Cypherpunks," reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

Red Frog

October 1, 2015

The Children of Time

"The Beach Beneath the Street – the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International,” by McKenzie Wark, 2011

This is a curious bunch.  Leaving little trace, the Situationist ‘International’ (“SI”) was mostly based in Paris, with comrades in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Italy.  By no stretch was it actually an international, just a conceit of an international – a group that totaled 72 people all told, from beginning to end.  Like many other currents, it was made famous in the fires of the general strikes and street battles of May-June 1968 in France.  When that ‘situation’ ended, the SI disbanded in 1972.  Some architects and artists still take inspiration from it, even citing it as the source behind the temporary ‘Burning Man” art village in the Black Rock desert in Nevada.  Now Burning Man has been invaded by wealthy libertarian techies, so perhaps, like the hippies of Haight-Ashbury once did in 1967, a funeral can be held for Burning Man too.  Capital can co-opt most anything cultural, as Thomas Frank noted in the ‘Conquest of Cool.”  The SI would have no doubt agreed.

Parisian Children at the Barricades in 1945

This book is a small history of certain intellectual, political and artistic figures in Paris and Europe, as well as a group of intellectual movements that percolated there after World War II.  It covers almost every significant figure that was involved with ‘Situationism’ at any point. Wark is an erudite fan of the SI and in this book traces their history back to the “Letterist” International, which was based on the bohemian / existentialist atmosphere of several square blocks in the Saint-Germain, a quarter of Paris in the 1950s.   This is the book’s primary value - not as a work of complete philosophy or politics, but as a recreation of a fertile European artistic and intellectual sub-culture.  

In a sense the SI began as a lumpen art-life movement – drinking and dancing in bars to ‘avoid boredom.'  Or as one put it, “Cursing is the work of the drinking classes,” a play on a quote from Oscar Wilde used by Wark.  As Guy Debord, their most well-known proponent first said, the point of life was to ‘never work.’  Later Debord spent many hours editing the ‘Internationale Situationniste’, organizing the SI and writing several books.  As Debord later admitted, writing, painting and collectivity are work and necessary work at that.  The SI borrowed from romanticism, Dadism, anarchism, Marxism, the Beatniks and bohemia, drug and café culture - but now influenced by the enormous disaster of World War II.  They might be considered a forerunner of the ‘new urbanism,’ performance art, free software hacker culture, ideas of the ‘creative class’ and deconstructionism.  They attempted to forge a collective negation to the conventional middle-class and ruling class views of how to live life.    

Perhaps most interesting is their notion of ‘psycho-geography.’  This is the effect that architecture and city planning have on human and class life within the city. Different ‘cityscapes’ evoke different human interactions and feelings.  Cedar Riverside in Minneapolis, with its somewhat shabby human-scale buildings and loitering hipsters, old hippies and Somalis creates a different mood than the corporate glass skyscrapers of downtown and it’s hurrying white-collar workers, or the effect of a neglected suburban mini-mall fronted by an arid parking lot and empty stores.  The LI and SI were fervent opponents of the architectural ides of Le Corbusier – the geometric fashion of glass and steel buildings lining wide, straight streets that became the template for corporate building.  In a sense the ‘New Urbanism’ movement in the U.S. is attempting to take their views into account – yet ‘new urbanism’ is still controlled by capital - and the SI proclaimed itself communist.  The SI also proclaimed ‘literary communism’ and ‘architectural communism,’ based on a collective approach to these areas. 

And that is the problem here, as the SI were not Marxists, although they were anti-capitalist.  They sought to define themselves against the Communist Party orthodoxy which dominated French intellectual life at the time due to the CPs role in the Resistance.  They also took on Surrealism, various leftist intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre and the Trotskyists, Maoists and Guevaraists who crowded Europe. Through it all, they did not succeed.  The reason is perhaps the disparate oddness of their ideas.  As Wark puts it, the SI collapsed ‘beneath the weight of its own incoherence.” 

From what I can tell their philosophy was based on 6 primary notions:  1. To wander the city (the ‘dérive.’); 2. to borrow from prior writers, artists, thinkers and turn it into something new (in French, ‘détournment’); 3. to give gifts, which was their idea of funding the SI or each other; 4. Potlatch, an extension of the ‘gift’ which borrowed from the native American idea of free labor in trade, an act which enhances the reputation and repute of the giver; 5.‘unitary urbanism,' also referred to as psycho-geography; 6. and to create or find ‘situations’ – rare but memorable events like festivals, riots, occasions, real 'situations.'  The latter is what gave its name to the SI.  The SI took over the pulpit at Notre Dame, crashed bourgeois art shows in Venice & London and removed the head of the “Little Mermaid” in Copenhagen.  Later echoes of these actions are Jerry Rubin throwing money to the floor of the NYSE, Pussy Riot invading a Russian Orthodox church in Moscow or PETA throwing blood on rich people wearing furs.  In effect, performative politics.

Debord, while being the ‘secretary’ of the SI, is not the focus of this book.  His policy of expelling people from the SI comes up regularly, at it created splits to the point where there was even a ‘2^nd SI’ led by a young woman, Jacqueline De Jong which lasted from 1962 to 1967.  They opposed the ‘sectarianism’ of the original SI and did their own artistic praxis.  Debord would expel people without consulting anyone – usually because the people were not contributing anymore, but sometimes for their ideas.  Debord took more political and anti-art positions and kept the organization functioning due to that and Wark praises him for it.  Debord felt that without expulsions membership would mean nothing.

Of the sample of individuals discussed in the book two are of note:  Henri LeFebvre and Asgar Jorn.  Jorn, a painter, criticized Marx and created his own ‘theory of value’ which hypothesized that there were two creative classes, not one – the proletariat and a ‘creative class’ of artists and intellectuals.  Jorn maintained that an ‘aesthetic economy’ should replace the Marxist political economy.  This notion has reappeared in the U.S., as the development of capital in various cities attempts to attract the ‘creative class’ - which is really a strata of self-employed artisans making money like any strata of the petit-bourgeoisie. This group of people stimulates real estate values in run-down or neglected areas, and keeps corporate workers entertained.  Jorn wrote a psycho-geography of Paris and an enormous history of Scandinavian folk art and became a profitable painter.  LeFebvre fought in the Resistance, then left the CP and moved to the left. Lefebvre wrote the book, “The Critique of Everyday Life” focusing on politicizing the normal day, which capital has culturally colonized for its own purposes. He probed the issue of ‘time’ which has also been colonized by the time clock of wage slavery.  These are ideas Debord also held.  Both LeFebvre and Jorn were ultimately thrown out of the SI by Debord. 

The book ends by briefly covering the events of May-June 1968 in France, indicating that the SI was active in Paris, convening their own ‘general assembly' at the National Pedagogical Institute on the Rue d’Ulm.  The slogan, "the beach beneath the street" came from this period, created by a working-class member of the SI.

Wark is a fertile writer with many good quotes.  Here is one favorite: “If there is one purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them.”  Yet Wark throws so many ideas and people into the hopper in sequential sentences that the book itself seems contradictory, opaque or wandering at times.  But that is a reflection of Situationism itself. 

“The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy DeBord, reviewed below.  Prior books on Paris and France reviewed below include “The Coming Insurrection” and “The Conspiracy.”  A film and a book about 1968 - “Something in the Air” and “The Merry Month of May” are also reviewed.  Use blog search box, upper left. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

September 26, 2015

‘Creative Destruction’ and Capitalist Disruption

"Illegals,’ Migrants and Refugees

The humanitarian crisis in Europe over refugees from the American and European wars in the Middle East is a part of blow-back.  Hillary Clinton’s ‘clean’ war in Libya has resulted in boat people trying to reach Spain and Italy.  Haven’t things become so much better in Libya since Khadafy was shot in the head (some say by French intelligence) thrown in a ditch, then publicly displayed?  Actually not.  In Syria the same might be said.  The statist dictator Assad throws barrel bombs, the criminal Daesh of the Iraqi prisons destroys cities and kills anyone they don’t like in bulk, the U.S. and its allies drop bombs that are not so precise.  I won’t mention Afghanistan and the 15+ year U.S. occupation or the U.S. years-long destruction of Iraq starting in 1990 - both more 'success' stories.  To date things are so bad in Yemen, where U.S. reactionary ally Saudi Arabia is indiscriminately bombing cities and town, that no one can even leave!   You can say the same thing for Palestine and especially Gaza. 
 

Syrian Refugees attempting to get to Greece.

This is all well-known, at least on the left.  The U.S. has its our own reflection in this situation - Haitian boat people, desperate Central American children, Mexican laborers – the orphan children of our empire.  Not quite the same, as economics here plays a more direct role, but still many fleeing from warfare or dictatorships supported by us.  This is also not news on the left. 

The U.S. has offered to take all of 10,000 Syrian refugees.  To put that in perspective, here in Minneapolis there are 65,000 Somalis alone, along with some Ethiopians and Eritreans.  Somalia is another country we helped destroy, with help from the Ethiopian army, although the forces of petit-bourgeois Islamic politics played their role too.  10,000 is probably the number of innocent people American coalition bombs have killed or injured in Syria by now.

What does capital want though?  In Minneapolis male Somalis are the taxi drivers of the city and some now work in temporary-tier post-office jobs or in factories.  The females work in parking garages and as bank tellers or retail clerks.  A few start small businesses and dominate the community, along with the inmans who are numerous.  As you can see, most Somalis are taking working class, low-end jobs.  The woman are allowed to drive at least, unlike Saudi Arabia, the ‘home’ of Islam, so they are able to get around town more easily.

Mexican green-card holders and migrants work as cooks, waiters, janitors, roofers, construction helpers, factory, warehouse and slaughterhouse workers – just about any working-class job they can get.  Nearly all of these people do not have union protection and are paid the least a businessmen can get away with – and sometimes nothing at all!  Wage theft and failure to pay overtime are common.  Illegality helps because it further intimidates immigrant workers to demand anything. Illegality is really ideal for capital.

So capital in the U.S. is very happy to have immigrants – better illegal than legal.  And Europe?  France’s colonial occupation of Algeria has resulted in many Algerians living in France doing the same kind of working class/low-skilled jobs we see here in the States.  In Germany the Turks fill the same role.  In the UK, almost everyone - central Europeans, Africans, Pakistanis and Indians – are all doing that work.  That was one of the reasons behind the hostility to the former workers’ states – their labor was off-limits.  Not any more.  Now London is one of the largest Polish cities in the world and is the second most populous Hungarian city.  Today there was even a story in Bloomberg about how Denmark needs more skilled labor and more consumers. The story credits their slowing growth rate to their tight immigration policies.  So really, what are more Syrians, more Afghans, more Libyans? More cheap or skilled labor! The benefit of many Syrians is that they are already very educated, so Europe can freely poach their talents – a real plus.  The U.S. and other countries did that to central Europe as well.  It’s called ‘the brain drain’ in the common parlance, but it is really the appropriation of other countries' educational investments. 

The argument over population started with Malthus but it has not finished with him.  At the time Malthus wrote in 1798, the world population was smaller – a bit less than a billion.  Now 200 years later it is 7.3 billion and growing exponentially.  Leftists who cite Malthus as reason not to be concerned with population should instead look at what has changed since he wrote his reactionary script.  First, the finite and failing environment.  Second, the objective development of world capital.  Third, the women’s question.  Remember someone named ‘Margaret Sanger?’  Family planning and economic planning but no ,,, population planning?  Really? 

As Piketty pointed out in “Capital,” low birth rates in Europe (and places like Russia) lead to lower revenues for capital, as there are fewer people to buy products and fewer people in the reserve army of labor, thus bidding up the price for the remaining labor.  Growing populations are one key to capitalist ‘growth’ in a stagnant economy.  Which is why no capitalist country has legal controls on population anywhere in the world.  Only China does, which I do not consider a capitalist country.  Which is why the Catholic Church and other religions and governments even oppose birth control or abortion in many places, as do the most retrograde elements in the U.S.  This attitude is also partly behind the hostility to gay rights. 

Which is why immigration is essential to low-birth rate economies.  You know, those places where every woman isn’t having 4 babies.  Is this why capital is destroying so many countries in the Middle East?  Hmmm.

On the question of culture, there is something else going on too.  It has not escaped the Republican Party in the U.S. that their supposed ‘ace in the hole’ was to appeal to the Catholicism of Latin American immigrants, whom they could enlist in the culture wars on the side of conservatism  Even though the Republicans are making a hash of that with their virulent nativism, religion is something the more sane right-wing and governments rely on.  Religion makes the majority of people more docile and more conformist and many times more conservative.  They sometimes follow their religious leaders and mostly stay away from radicalism of ANY kind, as it is an ideology opposed to real change.  Europe has the same problem, as Christianity and religion, not to mention marriage, are dying there too. Bringing in many Muslims can revitalize religion in Europe and increase the birth rate.  Maybe it doesn't prop up Christianity, but it all basically boils down to the same thing.

The right-wing populists across Europe are attempting to take advantage of this situation by demonizing immigrants as a way to pretend they care for workers.  However that is a transparent sham, as they never care for workers anywhere else.  Sort of like the Christian fundies who appreciate ‘life’ in the womb, then forget about the kids once they are born.  Opposing immigration is like opposing sex – good luck with that.

So what is the left to do? At one time in the 1980s under more conservative union leaderships, U.S. unions avoided organizing unorganized immigrant workers.  However, eventually the unions realized capital relies on the portability of the labor commodity across national lines.  Now they and everyone else in the labor movement understand that this is a ‘one-world economy’ and the best course is to organize Latinos and other immigrants, no matter what.  This will improve wages for everyone and put the pressure where it belongs – on the capitalists. The same is true in Europe.

But there is even a higher logic here that the left has yet to grasp on the immigration issue.  Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadorean people do not want to leave their homes and come to the U.S.  Really!  We’re not that great!  Nor do Syrians or Libyans.  However the U.S., through its policies, has made their homelands into something they almost have to leave.  For Mexico, the U.S. ‘war on drugs,’ NAFTA, support for a long string of conservative Mexican PAN and PRI governments, privatization plans pushed by international lenders like the World Bank and IMF, GMO seeds and the ‘free-labor’ maquiladora zones have all decimated the Mexican economy.  Mexican immigration is the result.  Slowing Mexican immigration would benefit Mexicans the most because they do not want to be forced from their homes.  The first step would be to change these policies and work to remove the corrupt and criminal Mexican government and state.  But will the U.S. change its imperialist spots?  Will it refuse hegemony?  Doubt it.  Bloody events in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador still echo to the present – all because of our past and present support to the military and fascist right in those countries.  Same perspective needs to be applied there. 

Do we even have to mention the European and U.S. role in what has happened in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine?  No doubt the criminals in Daesh are also responsible – but would they exist without the Iraq war?  I don’t think so.

Capital is counter-revolutionary in a violent, abrupt and basic way. Their ‘creative destruction’ and corporatist enthusiasm for ‘disruption’ and disaster is guaranteed to continue and worsen.  And it will affect us all sooner or later.

Red Frog

September 22, 2015

Capital has Reached the Outer Limits

"The Necessity of Social Control,” by István Mészáros, 2015

This book is a disdainful explanation of how capital has reached its global limits, and can now only create more destruction and death.  The options of unexplored areas of expansion or a world war or a vast discovery of commodities or new technology that might give capital breathing room are vanishing.  This is why more war, more environmental destruction, more unemployment, more intense labor exploitation and more austerity and dictatorship are what are in store for the workers of the world.  Mészáros thinks there is no reforming this expansive profit system – so the only alternative is the dialectical growth of a global self-managed social movement in opposition to it -  a ‘New International’ that intends to replace capital on a global scale.  He calls the period we are in a “structural crisis of capital.” 

Hungarian children work together!

As you can see, Mészáros, a former Hungarian who worked with György Lukács, takes a global view at all times.  Now living in the U.K, he left Hungary after the 1956 insurrection.  This book is a series of his essays, with the first one published in 1971 and since added to.  The essays are undated, which makes it difficult to gain context for each one  Since the book contains much repetition, many $25 words and mostly theory, I will distill some major points that I see.  Unlike most book reviews, I am not interested in some vague, gauzy description of the text, as the specific ideas here are key. 

1.                   1.  Global capital means a world-wide ‘leveling’ of labor costs.  Different rates of exploitation still exist obviously, but they are giving way to “the equalization of rates of exploitation” across the whole world. The totality of the labor force’ – skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor – are all under attack by capital.  As a result, Mészáros does not spend his time guilt-tripping European or American labor, because he knows what is in store for them. 

              2.                  It is not enough to ‘expropriate the expropriators’ and institute a nationalized economy run by a bureaucracy, as was proved by the Soviet example.  The revolution must continue until the “second order mediations” of capital are also overcome by the organized “self-management of the freely-associated producers.”  Socialism means “social ownership of production;” “workers control of production” and “consumption based on communal needs.” This did not happen in the USSR or China.

            3.                Capital’s “second-order mediations” include:

    a.       the nuclear family

    b.      alienated means of production

    c.       money

    d.      sterile production objectives

    e.       labor divorced from control

    f.       capital / state form

    g.      the world market

    h.      culture

4.                  Socialism in one country is impossible.  The choice is on a global scale - now more than ever. 

5.                  ‘Precariousness’ is the leading character of labor in our time.

6.                  The 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th Internationals failed for different reasons. The 1^st International in retrospect was premature because capital was still expanding worldwide.  The 1^st International failed through defeat; the 2^nd by the adoption of the ‘evolutionary’ road to socialism and national capital’s ballot box; the 3^rd was dissolved by Stalin after being turned into an arm of Soviet national policy; and the 4^th because its ideas did not grip the masses.  According to Mészáros: ‘Today the situation is radically different.’ He thinks it is time for a “New International” based on a global confrontation with capital from a general socialist perspective, not on the basis of some narrow ideological purity.  In American terms, the ‘hatchet must be buried’ – just not in each other’s skulls.    

7.                  Issac Deutscher wrote, “Humanity needs unity for its sheer survival; where can it find it if not in socialism?” and Mészáros agrees. 

8.                  Present science is embedded in capital.

9.                  ‘Free time,’ increasing skills and education are threatening capital and are a form of social dynamite, turning the subordinate/ruler dialectic into an anachronism.  Religion and the ‘cell of the family’ are also disintegrating – two more pillars of social control.

10.              All-out world war is off the table, thus hampering capital’s ability to destroy the means of production and reinvent itself.  The many small wars are not sufficient.

11.              Capital’s state intervention in the economy actually hastens the ‘maturation of contradictions.’  It reveals that the state is not neutral and drags the state into the contradictions of the economic system itself.

12.              Marx was not an ‘economic determinist.’  His whole point was to free human life from being determined by economics. 

13.              Parliamentarism in Europe made both the Social-Democratic and the Communist parties into accessories of the capital system.  In response, Mészáros believes the labor movement must have a strong ‘extra-parliamentary’ approach too or it's leaders will be bribed and co-opted.

14.              The future of socialism will be decided in the U.S.

15.              Capital breaks down at the moment of its supreme global power, because it cannot control or restrain itself.  Capital is not future-oriented, but only reactive and retroactive.  Capital has reached its world-wide limits and the limits of its system of “social metabolic control.”

16.              The situation of women in the world is an “Achilles heel of capital” because women are everywhere, in every class, ethnicity and nation, and they still sit at the bottom of each social layer.

17.              The public purse is not bottomless.  Public debt went from 35% to 71% from 1974 to 1994.  It is much greater now.

18.              There can be no world government under capital.  As Clinton put it, the U.S. is the only ‘essential country’ in the world.  This is the essence of the imperialist attitude.

19.              China is the largest target of U.S. military and political efforts.

20.              Mészáros praises Sartre, Diderot, Rousseau, Babeuf, Bolivar and Deutscher. Like many thinkers, he admires French intellectuals.  He spends a lot of time debating Hegel, which I find somewhat unnecessary at this point. 

21.              Environmental sustainability must involve a planned economy and controls on production.  No other path will work.  He mentions the environmental crisis a lot.

22.              Keynes prediction that everyone would have so much leisure time they wouldn’t know what to do with it has not come true.

23.              The collapse of the USSR has instituted a “new historical epoch.”  Its collapse was a by-product of the crisis of world capital.

24.              Capital attempts to control, not just economic processes, but all areas of human activity, up to “the most sophisticated intellectual and cultural domains.”  Take note, professors.

25.              The national question has been neglected.  Mészáros sides with Lenin against Stalin in the last debate about the national question in the USSR, in which Lenin understood Stalin was pushing Great Russian chauvinism.  As a humorous aside, Rakosi, the party leader in Hungary before the 1956 insurrection, said that “the criterion of Hungarian patriotism … is our love of the Soviet Union.” That is 'socialism in one country - the USSR.'  In a world context, national resistance to U.S. imperial domination should be understood and supported, as a socialist global response is based on equity, not any great nation’s chauvinism. 

26.              The left needs to unite and the world labor movement needs an international organization.  I.E. we have to ‘act globally’ - unlike the lame bumper-sticker.  The “multi-faceted groups of protest” and the “great multiplicity of social groups” need to unite on the ‘emancipatory side of the class divide behind labor’s hegemonic alternative to capital.’  I.E. a broad class front.  The new international cannot succeed as a “self-oriented sectarian organization.”  Mészáros points out: “…the adherents of the much needed socialist alternative are fragmented and divided among themselves, instead of internationally combining their strength for the cause of a successful confrontation with their adversaries.”

27.              Marx said in the 1850s that “the historic task of bourgeois society is the establishment of the world market.”  However Marx continued that a revolt may “be necessarily crushed in this little corner of the world…” In 1870 the Paris Commune was crushed, with German capital supporting French capital. Marx understood that capital was a world-wide phenomenon even at that point.

28.              Liberalism is the method by which workers in one core capitalist country are galvanized to support their own bourgeoisie in its rapine attacks on the rest of the world.

It is hard to miss that Mészáros opposes ‘socialism in one country,’ (an idea invented by Bukharin); supports the ‘continuation of the revolution’ (the ‘permanent revolution’ of Marx); calls the caste in the USSR a bureaucratic one overseeing a non-capitalist society (very similar to the ‘degenerated workers state’) and opposes Stalin’s Great Russian chauvinism. These were all positions taken by Trotsky at the time of their occurrence - but Mészáros is evidently content to elide over the disagreements of the past in pursuit of future unity.

Mészáros understands that without a strike/occupation/street/counter-institution movement, no electoral work can succeed.  He also understands the reverse, as the capitalist state is essential to the defeat of strikes and other struggles.  Ignoring the state and politics is fatal to any real strike or occupation movement.  He contends that the state and capital are completely connected and few would argue with that except anarchists and libertarians.

It is also hard to miss the fact that Mészáros abhors ‘single-issueism,’ of which the left is inundated.   The fact that social struggles are disconnected; that the multiplicity of organizations have few bonds with others; that no common ideas or ideology connect the various fights (which ARE connected); that people view the world from their little rabbit-hole – all this radiates pathetic weakness.  Yet it is only through world-wide working class unity that the capitalists can be defeated!  This means that the oppressed have a long way to go to understand what is necessary, and frankly, the ‘left’ in many of its recent forms has been of little help. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

September 18, 2015