Soviet Strike Film

 “Dear Comrades”directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020

This is a fictional, black and white account of the massacre of dozens of workers in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk in 1962 after a rate cut at the local factory and a nationwide hike in food prices.  Novocherkassk is just northwest of Rostov near the Don River.  The town was already struggling with food shortages.  It produces a strike of thousands at the massive Budyonny electric locomotive plant in the city, which spread to other factories.  In response the film pictures an almost comical mix of inept local bureaucrats and Moscow heavies who, in spite of some resistance, eventually do the wrong thing.

Dorogiye tovarishchi

One of the local Party leaders had cut piece-work wages at the same time as food prices were raised.  The stern regional Don Party leader is irritated by this, especially after he hears that many of the workers are supposedly former criminals - although there is no evidence of this in reality.  After strikes, the occupation of the factory by the workers, some rioting in the city and the escape of the local Party committee to avoid talking to the workers, the city is sealed off by the military and the KGB.

LYUDMILA

The key character is a local Party functionary, Lyudmila, whose young daughter Tamarka is among the strikers.  At the key meeting of the Moscow leadership’s Government Commission and the local Party to discuss the situation, Lyudmila blurts out that all the ‘hooligans’ should be arrested and dealt with severely. She is asked to write up her recommendation, which is where the title of the film comes from, as her recommendation begins “Dear Comrades.”  No one suggests reversing the rate cut or restoring old food prices, or any other amelioration.

 The local Army commander refuses to issue ammunition to his soldiers because the Army is for defense only and not allowed to fire on Soviet citizens.  He is chastised by the Moscow delegation, being ordered to do so. (He was punished for this later, but not shown in the film.)  Central Committee member Mikoyan attempts to get them to let things simmer down, then talk to the workers.  He is contradicted by Central Committee member Kozlov and goes along with the subsequent approach.  The approach was also approved by Khrushchev, though this is not shown in the film.

Lyudmila’s apartment is filled with several pictures of Stalin, while her aging father, who is living with them, is a former White Cossack.  Lyudmila says that price rises didn’t happen under Stalin.  Tamarka says they have the right under the Soviet Constitution to protest and speak, and that Stalin was a criminal, as shown by the 20^th Congress.  Lyudmila screams at her and the daughter storms out of the apartment. 

Thousands of workers march to the central Party headquarters in the central city, walking around and over tanks, sometimes helped by the soldiers.  They arrive and the military forms a line in front of the building, arresting some who get inside.  The KGB is in the crowd in civilian clothes, taking pictures of ‘instigators.’  Lyudmila notices a KGB sniper going up on the roof of the building.  The massive crowd is angry that no one has come to negotiate with them.  The military shoots over their heads as the crowd gets angry and then shots start hitting the workers.  According to later statistics, at least 26 workers were killed and 87 injured, although Solzhenitsyn’s figures from witnesses are higher, closer to a 100 dead. In the film we find out that KGB snipers in internal security did the killings, as the shots were well-directed.

The crowd stampedes, including Lyudmila who is looking for her daughter, and many are killed.  The bodies are thrown into the back of trucks and only a few are sent to the local morgue, while others are taken out of town and secretly buried in unmarked graves.  The square is repaved as the blood will not wash out.

The KGB gets everyone in the hospital and city to sign documents that they will never mention the ‘incident’ to anyone, on pain of prison or execution.  Only in 1992 was information about the shootings publicly released in Russia.

Lyudmila is distressed and eventually talks to a ‘friendly’ KGB agent, who had come to her apartment checking on her daughter, into finding her daughter’s body.  It was not in the hospital or local morgue and she seemingly discounts the idea that her daughter is hiding with a friend. At a local village cemetery she ‘thinks’ she has found the body, becomes distraught and drunk.  Later her daughter Tamarka appears on the roof of the apartment building, and they are reunited. Lyudmila pledges to ‘do better’ in the future, probably chastened about her idiotic and cruel comment at the meeting. 

Kazakh Oil Workers Strike

STRIKES and REPRESSION

This film is made in Putin time, still a period of nostalgia for the Czar, Kerensky or Stalin.  The most right-wing sequence is the grandfather reading a letter of how the Reds murdered White Cossack civilians in 1923 during the Civil War.  As is well known, the Czarist Whites were accomplished murderers themselves, but Lyudmila has an incomplete response to her father.  The military general admits, after a gruesome depiction of how to tie up a victim for execution, that if he was a worker, he’d have been in the crowd too.   Strikes were illegal in the bureaucratic workers state that was the USSR, but technically you could ‘have your say.’

While not in the film, over 200 were arrested, some sentenced to 15 years, while 7 more were executed.  On the internet, there is a picture of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin laying a wreath at a Novocherkassk memorial to victims of the massacre in 2008.  Irony!

Killing demonstrators in many capitalist countries is routine and has happened in the U.S. too, along with ‘pogroms’ against African-Americans and Chicanos.  Just this week the corrupt capitalist rulers of Kazakhstan killed and wounded around 200, imprisoning thousands in a strike wave led by oil workers, many of whom work for U.S. oil firms.  ‘Ironically,’ Putin is sending in troops to put down the Kazakh workers’ rebellion.  The military government of Sudan is shooting demonstrators week after week as it clings to power.  Israeli soldiers take out a Palestinian teenager every day it seems, when they aren’t bombing Gaza or Syria.  It’s all business as usual on the ‘fringes’ of the world imperialist economic core.

In the Novocherkassk case, the leaders of a ‘socialist’ workers society killed proletarians who carried banners of Lenin and the red hammer and sickle flag.  It is notable that in this time period massacres like this were a rare occurrence.  Shooting workers has also occasionally happened in other so-called ‘socialist’ societies as we know, with dire consequences.

(Note: The lead actress, Yuliya Vysotskaya, is originally from Novocherkassk and married to the director.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” and “War With Russia,” (both by Cohen); “Enemy at the Gates,” “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data,” “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “Ivan’s Childhood,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Women in Soviet Art,” “Life and Fate” (Grossman); “Soviet Women,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov); “Slavs and Tatars,” “Polar Star,” “The Red Atlantis,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle” (Lewin); “Fear” (Rybakov); “The Struggle for Power.”

The Kultur Kommissar / January 11, 2022

The Second Rehearsal - Part Duh

 “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age” edited by C. Barker, G. Dale, N. Davidson, 2021

Part II:

This is a follow-up to the prior review of this book on recent proletarian involvement in social upheavals, focusing on the theoretical conclusions of Neil Davidson, now deceased.  The book counters the narrative that the working classes are moribund, weak and no longer a possible revolutionary subject.

Tunisian political revolution.

This is Davidson’s analysis: 

Lenin pointed out that the moment of revolution is marked by 3 things:  1, a crisis, leading to fissures between the ruling class and the population and even within the ruling class; 2, increased suffering by the majority of people; and 3, increased activity by the masses of people. Trotsky maintained that it was not always ‘increased suffering’ but sometimes a lessening after a long period of oppression that stimulates opposition.  Gramsci added that a significant downturn in living conditions after a period of prosperity might function in the same way.  Althusser and others have pointed out that many contradictions and groupings have to cohere into a single oppositional / revolutionary current for any chance at success.

Trotsky’s concept of “uneven and combined development” is occurring all over the world still, as capital inserts itself into village, almost feudal, patriarchal, bazaar-based, theocratic, slavish, ethnic, war lord and autocratic social structures – just as Czarism or Chinese tribute society were grafted onto capitalist development in an earlier period.  This patchwork development can actually increase class conflict, as many of these ruling classes do not have the sophisticated economic and cultural flexibility of more mature capitalist economies.

Yellow Vests in Paris

Exploitation and Oppression  

Davidson addresses the question of how exploitation and oppression interrelate – i.e. the link between exploitation of the proletariat and damages to small holders or small businessmen - and the oppression of specific skin color, ethnic, national, religious or gender groups. The answer is that the capitalist mode of production produces exploitation and oppression in various forms, as it functions as a totality. Not all workers are even exploited in the sense of commodity surplus value, though their labor might be.  Davidson goes on to investigate this relationship between specific oppression and exploitation in detail.  In the process he quotes Terry Eagleton as to the limits of ‘classism’ – as class is an economic category, unlike skin color or gender.  People’s experience of class may be lived through skin color or gender, but that is a different thing.

Davidson discusses whether gender or skin color discrimination could ever be gotten rid of under capital – the Nordic social-democracies being the closest example.  He concludes that in practice and in history, no.  He also addresses the limitations of academic ‘intersectional’ theory, which does not treat society as a unified whole.  This is why arguments against identity politics and intersectionality are essential to unifying a revolutionary movement.  Marxism understands the world as ‘one.’

U.S. Anti-police racism Demonstration

Revolutionary Conjunctures

Davidson goes on to discuss his ‘4^th actuality’ – revolutionary conjunctures, where revolution is possible, but the issue of taking state power is not always advanced.  He thinks recent conjunctures happened in 1917-1923; 1943-1949; 1968-1976. These conjunctures are extended processes, are international, and give rise to a revolutionary situation.  Some crises, like 2007-2009, led to various partial international movements against capital, but he thinks not to a revolutionary conjuncture.

Davidson mentions the greater ability to use violence by present capitalist states; their surveillance powers; their hegemonic control of the narrative; their level of international organization – which are different than in the past.  But at the same time the enormous growth of the world proletariat, the maturation and decay of capitalist profiteering; the slow environmental collapse; the continued threat and reality of war; the exhaustion of the bourgeois democratic governing narrative; the rise of authoritarian ‘democratic’ governments; the issue of rising inequality and anti-competitive oligopolies; the necessity of mass migration – all indicate a weakening of the ruling classes and their system. 

He ends with the watchword:  “Be ready for the unexpected” as a revolutionary situation might evolve out of something quite unpredictable…  The benefit of this book is that it takes seriously the issue of revolution – a topic ‘mentioned’ but not really investigated by many.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these words or names mentioned in the book: The word ‘revolution’ or “McNally,” “Lukacs,” “Trotsky,” “Althusser,” “Harvey,” “Lenin,” “Roediger,” “Graeber,” “Marx,” “Jameson,” “Gramsci,”  “Du Bois,” “Butler,” “Moody,” “Fisher,” "Klein," “Berger.”   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 8, 2022

Rehearsals and Rejections - Part I

 “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age - 1989-2019," edited by C. Barker, G. Dale, N. Davidson, 2021

This is an almost excellent account of certain class struggles since the late1980s, best for those socialists, unionists and activists stuck in the past.  It tracks the involvement of proletarians in uprisings across the globe. It is a follow-up to a prior book that covered the period prior to 1987 in the same way.  While marred by a Schactmanite ‘state capitalism’ analysis, its real focus is on how workers and proletarians became active in political upheavals within the context of capitalist and workers’ states. It is also an indirect criticism of ‘movementism’ – which has no broader goals or organization, just immediate actions based on ‘throwing the bums’ out.  Movementism essentially relies only on ad hoc organization and reformist demands.

The great interest of this book, no matter your politics, is that it investigates recent world social struggles in some detail – including unfamiliar ones.  It is really quite enlightening and optimistic.  It shows how the struggles nearly always went only so far - let’s say getting rid of a dictator or corrupt imperial lackey, but not his system, cronies, economic relations or ideas.  Or why an anti-bureaucratic labor struggle turned into a pro-imperialist and capitalist one, as in Poland.

INCREASE in SOCIAL UNREST

One of the key points the editors make (who, as of publication, were connected to the International Socialist Organization, (ISO) a Schactmanite Trotskyist group) is that research indicates there has been an increase in social unrest across the capitalist world since the onset of neoliberalism.  This includes demonstrations, riots, street battles with police, strikes and general strikes, occupations, the taking over of squares, cities and geographic areas, council formation, communes, insurrections, political revolutions and attempts at dual power.  Almost none have come to the point of a successful social revolution - as yet.  They do not analyze rural struggles like Rojava, the Naxalite areas in India or Chiapas. 

In the context of dialectics, the increase in quantity is significant.  Their analysis agrees with the ‘protest’ tracking of John Bieber, Mark Buchanan, Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone. Their methods jive with complexity analysis and the ‘power law’ – which says the frequency of smaller events are inevitably followed by larger and even larger ones, though with less frequency as size increases.

In a certain sense, they note the victory of imperialist-led bourgeois ‘democracy’ as a template across the world in this period weakened some capitalist autocrats, but not others.  Some of these mass movements forced ‘duly elected’ capitalist presidents out of office, sometimes replacing them with reform governments.  Business electoralism is a fraught system, even in the U.S., which is why there is now a bigger rise in corrupt authoritarian ‘democracies.’  The general degeneration of ruling-class electoralism is not covered in this volume.

CENTRAL EUROPE, AFRICA, ASIA, MIDDLE EAST

This book, written by various comrades in each country, starts with the reactionary rejection of the bureaucratic workers’ states in the former USSR and Central Europe, focusing on Solidarnosc in Poland, so the numbers are somewhat off.  But they do include the purely proletarian demands against the bureaucracies versus later Solidarnosc demands for a ‘free’ market, privatization and bourgeois democracy. 

It continues by looking at mass ‘extra-parliamentary’ labor, union and people’s involvement in the somewhat familiar events in South Africa, concluding in the defeat of apartheid in 1994 and the continuing struggle against capitalism there.  They track the political upheavals and experience in the Congo/Zaire from 1991 to 1997 and the overthrow of Mobutu; in Zimbabwe in 1996-1998 and events that eventually led to the unseating of Mugabe; in Burkina Faso in 2014 against a military dictatorship; the overthrow of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998 by a mass movement.  Moving to Latin America, they analyze the overcoming of the Bolivian conservative government by social movements in 2000-2005, that led to the election of Evo Morales; the violent mass upheaval in Argentina in 2001 which threw out an elected president over years of neoliberal IMF and ‘structural adjustment’ programs; in Egypt in 2011, in a tragic political revolution that threw out Mubarak only to end up with a ‘restoration’ coup and the elevation of Abdel al-Sisi in 2014.   

These mostly mass-based left-wing upheavals clearly show an intimate connection between economic, social and political demands, not their separation, contrary to syndicalist or economist ideas.  It also shows that the involvement of a significant or overwhelming mass of proletarians is essential to any significant change.  A simple lesson, but one lost on many activists.  Picket lines of 50 go almost nowhere.

Bolivia 2003-2005 

LATIN AMERICA

As a specific example, the authors track the 2003 & 2005 ‘gas wars’ in Bolivia, which led to Morales’ win.  The resistance was based on thick networks of unions, indigenous proletarians, former miners and peasants who called for a transitional demand: re-nationalizing Bolivian gas, along with a broad left program.  The authors take a careful look at El Alto, a proletarian suburb near La Paz that was the seat of this class struggle. In order to succeed, the movement united every ethnic and labor sector, from local neighborhood councils to national labor and peasant groups.  It represented the actual creation of a mass ‘workers front,’ something the great Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui advocated.  However it has not expropriated the bourgeoisie, even though Morales’ MAS calls itself socialist. 

In Argentina in 2001, the struggle introduced highway barricades manned by the unemployed; factory occupations and takeovers as collectives; popular assemblies that formed a sort of dual power and united left formations (Trotskyists and the Communist Party) that contested for electoral power. Autonomists (anarchists) and Maoists refuse to participate in the political struggle, even with flawed but successful examples like Lula, Morales and Chavez in front of them.  The significance of united fronts among leftists becomes more apparent in Latin America.  Presently in Argentina the actual Marxist left is once again a large force, as part of a proletarian united front.  What follows is a discussion of the first reformist ‘pink tide’ in Latin America, which was turned back.  A second – in Chile, in Honduras, in Peru and Bolivia, the survival of Venezuela, even the weakening of Bolsonaro in Brazil, is upon us again.

THEORY

Neil Davidson ends the book with a theoretical take on these experiences, citing Engels and Marx on the alternative outcomes to a victory of the working class:  a, war, b, “the ruin of the contending classes” and c, permanent economic collapse.  Now we have somewhat different negative consequences according to Davidson:  an environmental holocaust; global corporate autocracy or nuclear war.  He does not mention a key role for the issue of falling profit rates, world-wide debt levels and economic stagnation / depression.

The steps and 'stages' towards revolution

Davidson discusses Lukac’s reconception of Lenin’s approach to revolutionary logic, based on 3 ‘actualities’: 

    A. Material pre-conditions.  Davidson thinks these conditions are absolutely present now, across most of the world.  Instead reformists grasp the 2^nd International / CP / Kautskyist idea of stages or phrases which must be gone through - until capital controls every nook and cranny of the world.  Then the time will be ripe … in that distant future.  This was also the position of Samir Amin and some others who follow Mao Zedong.    

    B. Revolutionary preparedness. Davidson considers voluntarism and Guevararist guerillaism as failed approaches to revolution, but neither is passive waiting.  He quotes Gramsci as being only able to predict ‘the struggle’ - not when it will mature into a revolutionary situation.  It is the linking of partial struggles in a transitional, empowering way, which unites the working class towards the broader goal of social revolution.  This ‘linkage’ is the prime problem for the Left.  It does not involve either shouting ‘socialism’ at every moment or wearing out cadre in tailist and unfocused hyper-activity around every single issue. 

    C. Revolutionary situation.  That short period of time – that moment - that actually would allow a powerful and united working class to overthrow a weakened capital.  It might only be a matter of months. Lenin in 1917 saw that the post-Czar provisional government was capitalist, and turned against it.  It continued the war, stood up for the landlords against the peasantry and starved and exploited the workers. At the same time the Party still worked with other left forces.  Yet when the masses turned to the Bolsheviks, he knew the moment had come.

(Review to be continued…)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive: Use terms like “Lenin,” “Samir Amin,” “Che Guevara,” “Karl Kautsky,” “Lukacs,” “Mariategui” “South Africa,” “Poland” or the word “revolution.”    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 4, 2022   

Satiric Space Trip - Why Not Bring It Back Down to Earth?

 “Don’t Look Up” directed by Adam McKay, 2021

This obvious political satire and allegory is about climate change and how it is being handled presently in America’s shallow, social-media packed lives.  Instead of global warming the world is facing an impending collision with a very large comet, which will destroy almost everything on earth. The film is loaded with current and past references and jokes, which is why many on Facebook are hailing the dark hoot.  We have touches of the desperately angry anchor of Network and the right-wing Southern bomber pilot in Dr. Strangelove, who is also a replacement for the elder gang in Space Cowboys or the blue-collars in Armageddon.  The young and nerdy astronomers appear to warn the public on a TV show like The Morning Show, full of light-weight chatter and obliviousness.  There is even a slobbish presidential aide straight out of Veep.

Doomsday Infotainment

The worst character is a creepy techno-positivist hybrid between the leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult and Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. The president is a blend of the smug ignorance of Sarah Palin and the cold profiteering outlook of Hillary Clinton.  She gets caught in a scandal sending pictures of her ‘cooze’ to some lover.  We see a Texan in a big black cowboy hat being sworn into the Supreme Court.  The President’s aide is a shallow hack who thinks wisecracks are the essence of politics.  A general scams the civilian visitors to the White House out of a $20 bill…though usually it is billions.

The screenplay was written by David Sirota, a left-liberal who worked for Bernie Sanders. The slogan ‘Don’t Look Up” comes from the president’s Party after the scientists tell people to ‘Just Look Up’ - since the comet is now plainly visible in the sky. This is relevant because the ersatz America News wing was saying that the comet was a hoax or no big deal.  The title is an obvious play on “Make America Great Again” and climate or vaccine denial.

With only six months to act, a government official at NASA with no background in astronomy rejects the scientists’ finding. A famous New York newspaper then kills the comet story, based on the official’s claim. But then all other scientists agree the comet is heading towards earth.  The government finally decides to send a rocket to blow the comet out of its path due to scandal and re-election concerns.  However, at the last minute the flight is diverted on the recommendation of the techno-positivist billionaire, who is also a large political donor to the president.  That rocket was filled with a nuclear warhead, so I hope that landing was ‘soft.’

The billionaire has come up with a plan to ‘mine’ the comet for trillions of dollars in valuable rare minerals, useful for his cell phone company and the capitalist (and green…) economy. The plan is not peer-reviewed, just a crack-pot scheme by private enterprise. When one astronomer challenges him, he resorts to personal attacks, which seems to be the standard method of deflection.  This about-face is a poke at disaster capitalism, which is orienting towards profiting from climate change.  It is also a commentary on geo-engineering, vanity space flights and asteroid mining.  Of course the president goes for the new plan… announcing it in a front of a battleship and fireworks, like some “Mission Accomplished” scene we know well.  The plan eventually goes awry.

The Russians, Indians and Chinese attempt to launch a diversion rocket of their own, but somehow that explodes.  They had been cut off, along with all other countries, from the benefits of the mining operation by the U.S.  Sabotage?  It is not clear from the brief bit.

In the process one of the astronomers has lost her temper on TV and she becomes a ‘meme’ for getting hysterical in public.  The other is co-opted for a while, but then can’t do it anymore and blows his top too. They work on a ‘Just Look Up’ political group out of some store-front office in D.C., but their efforts are insufficient. A lame Geldorfian “Live Aid” pop concert doesn’t work either. Eventually they decide to go back home to Michigan and Illinois. One visits her parents.  At the locked screen door her mother tells her that she “supports the jobs the mining operation will bring”…probably the saddest line in the whole film. The two of them have a ‘last supper’ with family and friends.  Oddly, this ends with a sad ‘prayer’ mumbled by a skater punk played by the worst actor in the world, Timothee Chalamet.  They all hold hands while the earth crumbles. The film ends with a riff on the Garden of Eden and cryogenic freezing.

In the last conversation at the last dinner, the astronomers said ‘We did all we could.” Well, no.  There was no mass movement to stop the government plan, just chaotic rioting. You would think there would be an armed revolt, but certainly among the U.S. population or action by the EU.  Everyone all over the world just watches the comet approach, passively.  Which does mirror the majority of humans at this point regarding climate change, who are directly affected, feel angry or worried but are helpless given the failing approach of governments and political movements.  This government won't save us, technology won't save us, the 'market' won't save us.

Actually, Look Around!

A flack film reviewer at the Guardian, Charles Bramesco, trashed the film as ‘preaching to the choir.’  As if a well-reasoned or heartfelt film would convince any climate change denier! What Bramesco doesn’t want to know is that at this point it’s a war, not a debate club.  And the ‘choir’ includes the overwhelming majority of the congregation. His favorite film is listed as Boogie Nights and he’s written for Forbes, so consider the source. His take is the aesthete equivalent of the slogan “Don’t Look Up.”  45% of critics on that Tomato site were thumbs down – which says more about what a crowd of useless middle-class fucks they 

really are.The film is marred by too many well-known mega-Hollywood stars, which undermines its message, but that is situation normal and probably a popularity tactic – for some. I imagine the Fox News crowd doesn’t watch Netflix as they’re too busy eyeballing every sporting event they can handle. Which is why Netflix thought the movie might be profitable in the urban culture sector, driving subscriptions to the site.  There is money to be made on either side of this aisle, unfortunately.  The real problem is - why hide behind a comet?  A satire of current climate denial by capitalist governments, businesses, politicians and media would be far more direct, sharp and funny.

I have noticed that the more culturally conservative people are, the less they watch films, just as they read less.  Is it just me?

At any rate, crackling laughs, a few sharp pokes, but no solution, as its a bit too Hollywood.  Changing the minds of climate deniers is not really the task – it is to build a movement that brings power to an anti-capitalist solution to the climate crisis.  Laughing at government, at capitalists and at their fools is essential.  Humor and tough satire are more corrosive than a well-written, peer-reviewed research paper.  In this case, the ‘fuck your lying ass’ meme eats the movie… as it pulls a much bigger joke than any tiny Twitter twerk by a denier troll.

(The director McKay also did Talladega Nights, Anchorman and The Big Short, which made fun of NASCAR, local TV news anchors and Wall Street, in that order.  I imagine those didn’t convince anyone either.)

P.S. - Guardian writer slams the critics who reject, basically, the existence of satire:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/01/lighten-up-satire-tall-order-life-out-crazying-even-science-fiction

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use the blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “This Changes Everything” and “On Fire” (Klein); “A Redder Shade of Green,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”(Lovelock); “Blue Covenant” (Barlow); “Extreme Cities,” “We’re Doomed, Now What?” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers – Again,” “The Collapse of Western Civilization.” 

The Cultural Marxist

December 30, 2021

Philosophy Primer

 “The History of Philosophy – A Marxist Perspective” by Alan Woods, 2021

I read Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in high school, which pointed me to the actual writings of philosophers who made sense, like Socrates, Nietzsche, Voltaire and Spinoza.  Unfortunately that book was written in 1924 and had a conventional angle, ignoring Hegel and Marx among others.  I didn’t know about Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, as that would have been better.  But it put me on the trail, eventually leading to existentialism and then Marxism.  Now that Woods has published his history, this is definitely the place every leftist, no matter their age, could start.

Woods openly says the book is a Marxist look at mostly western philosophy, so unlike people like Durant, he’s not hiding his perspective.  Woods, like Marx, Engels and Lenin, tracks the development of philosophy as a battle between forms of materialism and forms of idealism, linking it to class struggle and the historical / economic context of each period. As is clear from history, philosophy begins where religion ends.  This is a sketch of Wood’s narrative.

IONIA, GREECE & ROME

Western philosophy (philo-sophos – ‘lover of wisdom’) originally came about around the Ionian Sea in Turkey as a break with religion and superstition.  The first Ionian philosophers were materialists, dedicating to understanding the world through their senses, through reason and logic, through observation and experimentation. Later Greek materialists developed dialectics by understanding the role of contradictions in everything (dialectike – art of discourse and discussion.)  The dialecticians, early sophists, atheists, materialists and atomists developed many basic principles of the physical sciences, reasoning and argument – Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, Epicurus, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Lucretius.  

Philosophy’s goal is the closest perception of reality, and they took giant steps towards understanding the real world.

On the other side of the tracks, Woods traces the first inspiration for idealist philosophy to Pythagoras, who thought reality consisted only of numbers derived from math, a math which was based on a supra-normal reality, not on our 10 fingers and 10 toes or our feet. He inspired Plato, who considered reality to be a shabby version of pure forms, archetypes and ideas residing in some ethereal location. Aristotle broke with Plato, pursuing actual investigation of reality, but not completely from idealism. These two philosophic schools were not equal, as the subjective idealists were supported by the rulers and the religious – and still are. This was in the context of slave revolts, which gave a push to their intolerance.

Some of the ideas developed by Ionian materialists and dialecticians:  the idea of atoms; the concept of infinity and the infinite universe; the role of contradictions; opposition to dualistic thinking; the sun as the center of the solar system; induction and generalization; the limitations of formal logic; understanding motion as a contradiction; knowledge coming from sense information; matter could not be created or destroyed; evolution of humans out of fish; geometry; a primitive steam engine; that matter is invested with energy; that the earth was round. 

MEDIEVAL TIMES

The Roman Emperor Constantine incorporated Christianity into his rule, deciding on the content of the Bible at the Council of Nicea.  This changed Christianity into an ideology in league with ignorance and the colonial and slave economy.  The last philosopher and scientist of the Greek/Roman period, a woman named Hypatia, was executed by a mob of fanatical Christian monks in Alexandria for her alleged paganism on orders of the local Bishop.  They also went about destroying the Library of Alexandria.  During the subsequent Dark Ages based on feudalism, the only relief from the cruel and backward obscurantism of the Catholic Church in Europe were the Islamic Moors of Spain, who kept alive Greek philosophic gains, materialism and continued to develop astronomy, math, medicine, science and practical arts like irrigation, glass-making, weaving, metal and leather-work. They tolerated other religions and were eventually crushed by cruel Christian crusaders. This dark period in Europe lasted 1,000 years. 

Feudalism did not demand many scientific improvements, only a rigid ideology adapted to a rigid economic pyramid. St. Augustine was the first theoretical pillar of this Church, decreeing mystical and neo-Platonic idealism, the ‘truth’ residing in the mind of God and nowhere else. As feudalism reached a high point and the productive forces – mercantilism – began to develop, debates occurred, first only about religious ideas, then about the validity of Augustine’s philosophy, led by Abelard.  Thomas Aquinas attempted to forge remnants of Augustinian thought with distorted ideas of Aristotle, and to this day the Catholic Church is still based on his Thomism… an ideology from the mid-1200s.

Some Want to go Back to the Dark Ages

SCIENCE and PHILOSOPHY REVIVE

A philosophy that understands reality will result in scientific and social advances.  One that has no relation to anything but groundless ideas will not. As capital developed and feudalism/Catholicism became stagnant and defeated, scientific methods and inventions multiplied with a return to materialist and rationalist solutions.  English utilitarianism, empiricism (much of which was imported into the U.S.) and the ‘industrial revolution’ led to mechanical materialism in the philosophic realm – Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton. They were theists who believed perhaps God got the ball rolling, but then became a bystander. Theism has always been a cover for thinkers who do not want to be accused of the dangerous ‘heresy’ of atheism.  Many of the founders of the U.S. were theists.

The idealist and religious counter-attack was by Bishop Berkley, who claimed that all knowledge of the world was subjective and that nothing existed independently of the human mind - except in God’s ‘cosmic mind.’  Sound familiar? Hume later announced that causality itself was impossible to verify, just unconnected facts, supporting the idea of pure skepticism and anti-science attitudes.  The English were then over-shown by the revolutionary materialists and rationalists of France – Descartes, Voltaire, Diderot, Concordet.  Their ideas led to the French Revolution and the formal overthrow of the monarchy, feudalism and it’s Church.

THE FRACTURED BATTLE CONTINUES    

Baruch Spinoza studied Descartes but unlike him, theorized that mind and body were the same and so were ‘God’ and nature, all of which were eternal and could not be created or destroyed.  This undermined the political and religious authorities.  Leibniz brought these unified thoughts down to the almost atomic level, but with the understanding that every ‘thing’ was in flux and motion.  Both were still imbued with idealist metaphysics, but scientific discoveries were beginning to undermine metaphysics.

Woods then tackles Kant and Hegel. Kant, an idealist, believed time and space were ‘a priori’ – known separate from experience and matter, at birth.  He also postulated that the out-there ‘Thing in Itself’ could never be known by the cognizant mind.  This reintroduced an alienation between the world and human cognition, a cognition which actually forms a bridge between them.  Kant tried to ban contradiction in his theory, claiming they were only part of the sensual world, separate from the judgments of the mind, which were based on an absolute unity. 

Hegel corrected Kant’s empty abstractions but used the dialectic, though on Kant's idealist basis, seeing it as only operating in thought, not in everything. He determined the difference between the base level of sense impressions, the medium level of understanding and the highest level – the use of reason – in which dialectics was the most explanatory form.  This refuted abstract logic, which he saw as limited.  Hegel backed the concepts of unity of opposites, the universal presence of contradiction and quantity into quality, based on his accurate study of the history of philosophy and science.  Just as an example of the first, how did organic life occur out of inorganic compounds? Yet it did.  Even chaos hides organization, perhaps at another level, but it is there.  A north demands a south, a positive electrical pole demands a negative.  And so on.

GWF Hegel - All but Forgotten Until ...

Marx ‘right-sided’ Hegel, basing dialectics instead on material developments, not just thought.  He could not accept Hegel's "Absolute Idea" behind realty. In the process Marx and Engels had to combat the "Young Hegelians" and later Feuerbach, who, while a hard atheist and materialist who challenged Hegel, still endorsed individualism and solutions like 'love.' Here we reach Marx and Engels great achievement and method of understanding the motion of reality and thought, based on the development of philosophy, science, history and society since Ionia – dialectical materialism.  As Woods puts it, abstract philosophy is superseded by practice as a "non-philosophy" philosophy - by the scientific method and the entrance of the conscious human majority into history.  Thought is not a separate strand, it is a function of the whole body, of social development.  It is a product of practice, of human labor, not of abstractions.

The one drawback to this book is the somewhat giddy and positivist tone about how science will always continue to illuminate the dark corners of existence and the universe.  Given an understanding of history, it is quite possible that we can also be thrown back into a 'new dark age'  where science is again an outcast from society.  Given science has also been used for reactionary purposes, that also gives pause.

The book is a clear, fascinating read, which gets a bit repetitive at times towards the end in dealing with Hegel.  It is not really a history of all philosophy, but a history of the battle between idealism and materialism up to Marx.  It ignores certain philosophers not germane to the main subject matter, like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche or those who came later, like Dewey, Russell and Sartre, on up to the movement of post-modernism.  Woods says that Kantian subjective idealism is still current in various 'wordy' modern philosophic forms in bourgeois society like post-modernism. Or as the Bush administration once said, "...we create our own reality."

So these issues are still hugely relevant, especially regarding the current and openly reactionary role of religion in society, whether we are talking about the U.S, Hungary, Poland, Myanmar, India, Israel, Brazil or Saudi Arabia.  Religion functions as idealism's bedfellow and prop, and a prop to the very real ruling classes.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Reason in Revolt” (Woods/Grant); “The Philosophy of Space/Time” and “The Einsteinian Universe”(Malek); “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukacs); “Marx and Human Nature,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek); “The Young Marx,” "Spinoza Lives!" "Ubiquity," "Monsters of the Market" (McNally).         

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 26, 2021

Slings and Arrows and Lawsuits

 “Goliath,” Seasons 1,2 & 3 out of 4, 2016-2019

This LA noir kind of legal drama is the West Coast version of The Wire – showing the corruption of various players in L.A. and California through the lens of one pugnacious and alcoholic lawyer – Billy Bob Thornton, aka Billie McBride.

At the Law Office

Season 1 (2016) centers around a large criminal ‘defense’ contractor whose illegal weapon kills one of their engineers, aided by a top-end tassled-loafer law firm that covers for them.  Season 2 (2018) takes on prominent real estate developers and a Latina running for mayor of Los Angeles, all involved with a Mexican drug cartel.  Season 3 (2019) is like a re-run of the film Chinatown, this time involving billionaire growers in the drought-stricken Central Valley, their water theft and the support they get from the newly elected mayor of L.A.  Season 4 (2021) is set in San Francisco and the target is a Big Pharma opioid producer.

The obvious parallel here is a “David” and his small raggedy band of allies – two female paralegals, one hilarious female lawyer, one solicitous daughter, one neutral ex-wife, one FBI agent and a grizzled, short investigator – against various ‘goliaths’ of U.S. capitalism. One of the paralegals is a heavyset woman who actually works, while the other is a beautiful ex-prostitute and fuckup who still has a crush on Billie.  Billie’s secret investigator is a brilliant former lawyer who now lives in a shabby trailer like Rockford.  His co-counsel is Patty, a loud, aggressive DUI/real estate lawyer who becomes a perfect ally for him, while getting some of the best lines.  Her refusal to date the FBI agent is classic.  She looks at him and just says “No!”  Women flock around Billie in this series, even when he’s an asshole, just like the 6 marriages Thornton’s had in real life.

The immediate setting is Santa Monica, where McBride lives in motel rooms near the pier and beach, while drinking at the darkened Chez Jay, a real bar next door to his motel.  You can’t get any more noir than having your office on a barstool. Scenes of him downing whiskey as the troubled lawyer, while sitting against the life guard stand near the pier are frequent.  He drives a red convertible Mustang to make the retro angle complete.  Scenes on the famous Santa Monica pier or in Venice, outside the Capitol Records roundhouse, up at the Griffith Observatory, at the downtown courthouse and the Gehry concert hall remind one you are in Los Angeles. 

Unfortunately Goliath Usually Wins

There Is A Season

The 1st season’s story concerns a law firm that McBride helped found, now helmed by a crazed boss, Donald Cooperman, who lives in a darkened office wired for secret video surveillance.  Cooperman hates McBride, especially for burning half his face long before.  Cooperman is a lawyer who is aware of the crimes of his war-profiteering ‘defense’ client, but does not report them.  He recruits a hungry, mousy lawyer to his bed and finally as first defense counsel, fighting a lawsuit McBride brings against the weapons manufacturer for helping kill one of their employees on a boat.  They claim the man committed suicide, using as proof what seems like suspicious suicide notes. They use patriotic ‘war on terror’ rhetoric in court to hide the specific facts.  Cooperman is aided by a thug who kills witnesses, intimidates Billie through a bought-and-paid-for cop and sets up other witnesses with drug raids.  Cooperman’s lead, a vicious careerist lawyer, has the job of slinging personal mud at any surviving witnesses and McBride while back-biting the mouse.   

The 2nd season’s story is about Marisol Silva, a look-alike clone of  Penelope Cruz who is running for mayor of L.A.  When she finds out Billie is representing a young Latino protégé of hers falsely accused of a gangland murder, she literally gets into bed with him.  However she is intimately and secretly tied to a notorious Mexican cartel which is backing her mayoral bid, along with two large real estate developers in L.A.  A hit man for the cartel was actually behind the killings, while two cops cover up the actual murderer.  One of the real estate moguls, an overly-talkative twit dressed in ugly leisure wear, reputedly built ‘half of downtown’ and has the most twisted sex predilection ever…something that is so repulsive and cruel I question whether they should have included it.  If Silva wins, they will be able to operate freely in the city. These murderous scum hide behind her pretty face and vapid community concern rhetoric, but she’s in on it too.

Let the Desert Bloom

The 3rd season’s story takes a surreal turn, perhaps copying The Big Lewbowski.  The tipoff is a casino lounge singer belting out “Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In,” a song that accompanied the Dude’s dream sequence in Lebowski. Aggressive crows, mysterious grinning adopted sons, blackouts, weird dreams and drugs follow. It involves a cabal of opium-smoking almond farmers in the parched, dusty landscape of the Central Valley.  This time McBride takes up residence at the local casino after being comped a room by Blackman, the largest grower.  Blackman’s sister is illegally pumping water out from under other’s lands, including Federal Land, similar to the oil ‘straw’ in the California film There Will Be Blood. This bunch controls the local county water board and have lowered the water table under a whole town and outlying houses, so bottled water has to be used to replace the ground water. (This is the actual present  situation in Teviston, CA.) The town is a company town where most of the jobs hinge on the water-stealing growers.  Another consequence of ground-water pumping is the settling of the soil.  A woman has died in a sinkhole and this sets off the case.

One of the themes is that ‘relationships,’ especially romantic ones, are deceptive and serve more as opposition research. McBride himself gets in the face of his enemies or reluctant witnesses, as he shows up to talk up front.  But behind his sometime geniality he doesn’t claim to be their buddy.  The other theme is that the 'bad guys' lose - which happens rarely in real life.

The film industry hasn’t been included as one of the local ‘goliaths’ – perhaps because they produced the series and that wouldn’t be prudent.

This is a legal drama that has to go somewhat by the rules of the court system, but shows prejudiced judges, obnoxious court behavior by attorneys, obvious missing evidence and facts, flawed witnesses, prison and police corruption and jack-shit rulings.  It makes you question the legal system, given it is actually part of a bigger ‘goliath.’  The role of attorneys in U.S. law is not to find ‘the truth’ but to defend their clients no matter what.  Mostly the legal system, FBI, prosecutors and even judges come out looking good in the end. After all, McBride believes in the law.  Though its so bad in a state court in the Central Valley that he has only one alternative.

So far this series is a piecemeal but excellent attempt at looking at various goliaths, without seeing the larger Goliath behind its plagued manifestations.  Los Angeles or California itself might be the goliath in this series, much as Upton Sinclair saw society and Chicago as The Jungle or as David Simon’s The Wire identified Baltimore.  Viewers could put the whole picture together, but odds are this is just more entertainment, not affecting politics at all, just verifying that there are definitely “some bad eggs out there!”  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, with these terms:  The word “streaming” for prior streaming series political reviews or: “Ozark,” “American Made,” “Drug War Capitalism,”  “Vulture’s Picnic,” “The Latino Question,” “Los Angeles Stories”(Cooder); “Camino Real”(Williams); “In Praise of Barbarians”(Davis); “War is a Racket” (Butler); “The Wire,” “The Jungle,” “Oil / There Will Be Blood.”    

The Kultur Kommissar

December 20, 2021

Happy Solstice! (4 PM Greenwich Mean Time)

U.S. – 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 9 AM MST, 8 AM PST