Hunts Point Market Worker on Strike Explains Why He Is Reading Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs

J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints

Cuba, Hip-Hop, and American Imperialism

COUNTERPUNCH, JANUARY 21, 2021

Cuban Freedom Fighter Denis Solis: “Donald Trump 2020! That’s my president.”

When Charles Post and other independent Marxists teamed up with ex-ISOers to launch Spectre Journal, it struck me as a welcome left alternative to Jacobin. Although I am a subscriber and have urged others to subscribe, I am deeply troubled by a recent article by Sam Farber that exploits the San Isidro controversy as part of his decades-long crusade against the Cuban government.

On November 9, 2020, Cuban rapper Denis Solis was arrested for “contempt” in the San Isidro neighborhood where artists and musicians had begun using social media to protest attacks on their right to free expression. The New York Times article on the arrest links to a Facebook video made by Solis while a cop was in his apartment. Lacking subtitles, it is not easy to make sense of the confrontation. I can assure you that Solis calls the cop a maricon, the Spanish equivalent of “faggot”. I also invite you to pay special attention to what Solis says at 3:10 into the video, namely his support for Donald Trump. Even the Times found this impossible to ignore:

In a country hammered by U.S. sanctions, the politics of some in the group have raised eyebrows. Mr. Solís is a die-hard Trump supporter: In the video he posted of his arrest, he screamed: “Donald Trump 2020! That’s my president.”

Continue reading

The White Tiger

There is a striking parallel between Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”, which received an Oscar last year for best picture, and this year’s “The White Tiger” that opens this Friday on Netflix. Both films have been widely described as “class struggle” thematically and both involve servants staging a revolt against their masters. In “Parasite”, a destitute South Korean family finagles their way into a wealthy household as hired help and uses their leverage to become the new masters. In “The White Tiger”, a Dalit named Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) from an even more impoverished family in rural India, maneuvers his way into becoming a chauffeur for Ashok, the son of a powerful landlord who has been oppressing Balram’s fellow villagers.

This is what happens in “Parasite” as well. The paterfamilias of the usurping family becomes a chauffeur after his offspring place soiled panties in the family’s car, thus leading to his dismissal for using the car for his sexual escapades. Balram uses a different ploy. When he discovers that the head chauffeur, who enjoys greater privileges and lords it over him, has been keeping his Muslim identity a secret, he rats him out and takes his place. It should be obvious at this point based on what you have read above that the subaltern characters have little in common with the revolutionary movement. The point of the films is more Hobbes than Marx. Society is a jungle and you have to become a wild animal to succeed.

Unlike the family in “Parasite”, Balram only resorts to the most immoral deed—murder—when he learns that his master has decided to replace him. (Spoiler alert) Driving him to make a hefty cash delivery to a politician, Balram pulls the car to the side of the road and asks Ashok, the privileged son with liberal pretensions, to help him change a tire. When Ashok is bending over examining the tire, Balram plunges a broken bottle into his neck and drives off with the fortune, thus allowing him to leave his Dalit identity behind and starting a new life as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, a city that is flush with leading-edge multinationals. Adopting the corrupt practices of his former employer, Balram pays off the cops to make sure that his bid to start a cab fleet has no competitors. In “The White Tiger”, there is not a soul with principles. That includes a “Socialist” politician who was a beneficiary of the landlord’s bribes. As a sign of the film’s distance from anything resembling true class struggle politics, there is no attempt to ground the character in India’s actual politics. She is basically a cardboard cutout.

Balram’s crime takes place close to the final fifteen minutes of a 125 minute film. Until that point, you have to put up with his obsequious posture vis-à-vis the entire landlord clan. Ashok’s father is a monster who curses Balram for the slightest infraction. I could not help but be reminded of “Gunga Din”, Kipling’s awful poem that was made into an even more awful film.

It was “Din! Din! Din!”
You ‘eathen, where the mischief ‘ave you been?
You put some juldee in it,
Or I’ll marrow you this minute,
If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!

Like Gunga Din, Balram wears a smile no matter how cruelly he is treated. Besides reminding me of “Gunga Din”, I could not help but think of poor Butterfly McQueen in “Gone With the Wind”. Balram is almost masochistic. Every slap, every curse, every betrayal only results in him promising his masters that he will do better in the future. In some of the more cringeful scenes, Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam (no explanation how she ended up with such an absurd name) defend Balram from his father’s abuses but cap it off by reminding him that they are for the poor and downtrodden. Their liberalism is ultimately undone when they make Balram the scapegoat for a vehicular homicide that took place when Ashok was behind the wheel.

“The White Tiger” was directed by Ramin Bahrani, a film professor at Columbia University whose previous films were as overrated as the latest. Like “The White Tiger”, his first film “Man Push Cart” appeared to be another “class struggle” film featuring a Pakistani character trying to make it as a street vendor in New York. It turned out that Bahrani had something else in mind as I indicated in my review:

“Man Push Cart” sounds like my kind of movie. It is a study of a Pakistani operator of one of those ubiquitous stainless steel coffee and donut carts all over New York, mostly run by recent immigrants from Asia. As someone with a long-standing curiosity about the hidden economic life of this city, I was anxious to see if the film revealed any deep secrets.

Unfortunately, the director Ramin Bahrani, a 30 year old Iranian-American graduate of Columbia University, had very little interest in the underlying social reality. The push cart vendor was merely a convenient symbol for his own existential outlook, borrowed liberally from Albert Camus. In an interview with New York Magazine, Bahrani explained what inspired him to make “Man Push Cart”: “When Bush began to bomb Afghanistan, I realized that all the Afghans I’d ever known were pushcart vendors in New York City. Then I began to think of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, and pushing these carts seemed like a modern-day version.”

To help me get a handle on what was so wrong about the film, I decided to track down a review of the Aravind Adiga novel it was based on, which won the coveted Booker Prize in 2008. I found a review in the London Review of Books that was so good that it almost made the over 2-hour slog through the film worthwhile. Written by UCLA historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam and titled “Another Booker Flop”, it is both a review of the novel as well as the underlying social relations that make life miserable for the Dalit. Let me conclude with the final paragraph of Subrahmanyam’s review (contact me privately for a copy liberated from the paywall.)

Some two decades ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote a celebrated essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ At the time, a folklorist is said to have responded: ‘More importantly, can the bourgeois listen?’ We can’t hear Balram Halwai’s voice here, because the author seems to have no access to it. The novel has its share of anger at the injustices of the new, globalised India, and it’s good to hear this among the growing chorus of celebratory voices. But its central character comes across as a cardboard cut-out. The paradox is that for many of this novel’s readers, this lack of verisimilitude will not matter because for them India is and will remain an exotic place. This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down.

‘Til Kingdom Come

At the height of Tulsi Gabbard’s popularity with the “anti-imperialist” left, I was buying none of it. I had been following her pro-Assad propaganda since the civil war began, the main attraction to Grayzone, et al. What seemed to escape their attention was her close ties to the pro-Israel Evangelical movement that was on full display when she was a featured speaker at John Hagee’s July 2015 Christians United for Israel Conference. Just six months later, the Evangelicals took advantage of Trump’s election in order to put into place the facts on the ground that simultaneously satisfied Likud’s expansionist goals and the Messianic fantasies of Hagee, Pat Robertson, speaking-in-tongue madwoman Paula White and every other bible-thumping, white supremacist piece of trash.

Directed by Maya Zinshtein, an Israeli opponent of Netanyahu, “’Til Kingdom Come” lifts up a rock and exposes all the creepy, crawly Christians and Jews involved with the Evangelical/West Bank settler alliance. Although she is heard grilling some of her subjects in the film, she mostly allows them to hang themselves on their own petard. The documentary was written by Mark Monroe, who directed three terrific documentaries: The Cove, The Biggest Little Farm, and Icarus. This new film is up to his usual high standards.

The film begins with some guy hanging a metal target from the limb of tree and taking practice shots at it with a semi-automatic rifle. It turns out that he is Boyd Bingham IV, the son of Boyd Bingham III, the pastor of the Binghamtown Baptist Church that is a much smaller and much poorer version of John Hagee’s Cornerstone mega-church in San Antonio, Texas. Located in Middlesboro, Kentucky, a town long abandoned by the coal industry, Bingham feels sorry for the misery of his unemployed, poverty-stricken, drug-addicted townspeople but continues to urge them to donate money to the Evangelical project in Israel.

In addition to Boyd Bingham IV, the other chief subject is Yael Eckstein, the president and CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews—the most important wheeler-dealer in promoting settler interests within the Evangelical world. Her late father Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein founded the Fellowship in 1983, clearly anticipating the geopolitical forces that would reach fruition during the Trump presidency. She is loathsome.

One of the more eye-opening scenes—one that reflected the depth of research that went into the film—has Boyd Bingham IV visiting Israel where he sits down with a Palestinian Christian priest who tries to explain why Evangelical Christians are harming the interests of all Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike. Afterward, Bingham rants about how the priest was anti-Semitic. Hung on his own petard, indeed.

Virtual Live Premiere – 8 PM EST – February 25, 2021

Nationwide Watch Now @ Home Cinema Release – February 26, 2021

Minari; First Cow

This year various professional film associations, including my own, will have to reckon with the absence of major Hollywood studio product at their yearly awards meeting. The pandemic cleared the table of films that admittedly are of little interest to me but far more to my colleagues in NYFCO who work for commercial outlets rather than a radical magazine like CounterPunch.

“Tenet” was the only traditional big-budget blockbuster opening in theaters. It cost $200 million to make but ended up $50 million in the red. “Tenet”, however, is not the typical Academy Awards darling. Although Christopher Nolan is considered some kind of genius (except by me), most film groups are looking for something less geared to a juvenile audience. For example, “Green Book” got an Oscar last year depicting Black pianist Don Shirley’s reliance on a white chauffeur to help him circumnavigate the Deep South’s racist exclusionary practices. A very high-minded if patronizing film.

This year indie films are getting the kind of attention they’ve never had before. Yesterday I wrote about “Nomadland” that is 97 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, earning over-the-top praise. Peter Travers, who is one of the worst purveyors of such inflated reviews, described it as a “wondrous work of art (Oscar, please)” that “joins with a never-better Frances McDormand and a cast of real-life nomads to capture what inspires the human urge to roam. It’s a new American classic.” I found it to be a humdrum account of old folks traveling around the country in vans and trailers in search of low-paying jobs to help supplement meager Social Security benefits.

After “Nomadland”, I saw another couple of indie films that have also received rave reviews and that are inside-track favorites for various awards ceremonies approaching nigh. Like “Nomadland”, “First Cow” is 97 percent Fresh. It is also brimming with indie cred. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, who makes films utterly devoid of Hollywood tropes, it is about the bromance between a Jewish and Chinese man in 1820 in the backwoods of Oregon. The two come together in a money-making scheme. Each night they surreptitiously milk a cow belonging to a rich Englishman to use for deep-fried biscuits sold to the locals. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, “Minari” is even more highly rated, 100 percent Fresh. Although it is a Korean-language film, it is much more about the American experience and even overlapping thematically with “First Cow”. Steven Yeun, of “Walking Dead” fame, plays a Korean immigrant with a wife and two children who buys land in Arkansas in the 80s in order to grow crops targeting the Korean grocery marketplace. Luckily for them, the locals welcome them in, especially since they are Church-going Christians.

Distributed by the Indie-oriented A24, both films depict immigrants scrambling to make it in the USA. Reichardt’s film is much more of a critique of the capitalist system even though the terrain it occupies is so remote from what we’ve grown to expect from classics like “Heaven’s Gate” (yes, you heard that right.) This is not about greedy ranchers trampling poor farmers underfoot. Indeed, some might walk away feeling that the bromance was the real story, not desperate men trying to figure out a way to survive sans property.

“Minari” is a bit of a Rorschach test. Some will see it as a tribute to the plucky Koreans who came to the USA to make it as small proprietors against all odds. For example, I received an email today from A24 tying a film screening to Korean American Day. It contained these words from Abraham Kim, the Executive Director of the Council of Korean Americans:

We celebrate the nearly 120-year history of Korean Americans in the U.S. and our community’s invaluable contributions to this country’s innovative economy, rich culture, and robust democracy. The Korean American immigrant story is one of hard work, resilience, and hope for the future. On this Korean American Day, we are honored to commemorate the values, the sacrifice, and the vision of this dynamic group.

Some reviewers saw “Minari” as a cautionary tale. While not using the word “capitalist”, they considered Steven Yeun’s character as someone willing to sacrifice his family for the sake of making it as a businessman. Slant Magazine, one of the more sophisticated in the world of film reviews, sums up the film’s contradictions:

This orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family is steeped in a truly messy situation. It also foregrounds the way that Minari fits into familiar structures—that it’s not aiming to do much more than give a specifically Korean American spin to a more or less standard cultural narrative about the struggle against the land to make oneself anew in America. Perhaps aptly, there’s something Reagan-esque about the ideals of an individualist America that underlie the story.

I don’t blame director Lee Isaac Chung for wanting to make a semi-autobiographical film. My problem is with making such a film that is so determined to leave out any hint that immigrants are being victimized so grievously in the recent past. The story of immigrants making it (it is left open to question whether they do in “Minari”) in the USA is burdened today by the state’s willingness to break families apart. Their only crime is making the same sacrifices as those of the family in “Minari”. The Arkansas country folk bend over backwards to welcome the family but this is a state that elected Tom Cotton to the Senate, a MAGA-type politician who backed Trump’s decision to ban Muslims from the USA. Is it possible that his views represent an Arkansas that abandoned the erstwhile friendliness to immigrants depicted in “Minari”? I tend to doubt it.

As for “First Cow”, the remoteness of the situation is far greater than that of “Minari”. The action takes place in a frontier village that seems as primitive as 8^th century Lithuania. The idea that people line up for biscuits friend in oil as if they were manna from heaven does not seem plausible. The whole notion of “First Cow” is that such an animal was about as rare in Oregon in 1820 as a bear would be wandering around in Central Park today. I have no idea when the first cow arrived but neither does Kelly Reichardt apparently, according to Portland Magazine.

“When did the first cow get here? Who knows? And does it matter? Not really,” Reichardt says.

I have more of an interest in Reichardt’s career than the average film critic because she teaches film at Bard College. I thought her early films “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy” were very good but have gone downhill ever since. Like “First Cow”, her “Meek’s Cutoff”, also set in frontier Oregon, was shockingly ignorant about American history. About which I wrote:

When I learned that Kelly Reichardt had made a Western about a wagon train in Oregon in 1845 relying on the help of an Indian, I had high expectations. Her earlier films, also set in Oregon, were penetrating character studies about contemporary life. “Old Joy” was about two men bonding in a hot tub in a forest retreat with homoerotic overtones, but more generally about the regrets of unfulfilled dreams. “Wendy and Lucy“ was about the struggle of a homeless woman to keep hold of the thing that she loved above all, her pet dog.

Unfortunately, “Meek’s Cutoff” is a complete disaster, a pretentious, boring, and insufferably “arty” work that gives independent film a bad name. I suppose that when I learned beforehand that Paul Dano was part of the cast, I should have avoided it. For my money, Dano is the worst actor in Hollywood since William Shatner who at least had the saving grace of not taking himself too seriously. Dano, like Reichardt, thinks he is involved with making a Big Statement. It is enough to drive one to spend a full day watching Adam Sandler movies.

The Meek referred to in the title is Stephen Meek, a character in a ridiculous looking buckskin fringe outfit who has been asked to lead a small wagon train into Oregon along the famous Oregon Trail. Unlike Daniel Boone or any other legendary mountain man, Meek could not find his way out of Grand Central Station even if you drew a path in red paint along the floor for him.

Nomadland

Generally, I try to read as little as possible about a film before I watch a screener in order to avoid the possibility that I might be influenced by other critics. All I knew about “Nomadland” is that it starred Frances McDormand as a sixtyish woman, who after losing everything in the 2008 financial crisis, becomes a “nomad”. This means that she travels around the country in a van taking menial jobs like in an Amazon warehouse or scrubbing toilets. With this in mind, I wondered if I was about to see a “Grapes of Wrath” updated for our epoch.

The film begins with a Steinbeckian touch. We see Fern (McDormand) loading her van with her belongings after the only employer in Empire, Nevada—a sheetrock factory—has closed for good. Like the Joads in “Grapes of Wrath” being foreclosed, she is forced by economic circumstances to look for salvation elsewhere. Like the Joads with their loaded jalopy, her road to a better life is filled with potholes. Her first job is working in an Amazon warehouse, where we expect her to end up either injured or too exhausted to keep up with the pace. To my surprise, she and other elderly women lugging cartons onto conveyor belts appear to be holding their own. After work, she retires to her van, eats a rudimentary meal, and prepares for the next day. So, I wondered when was the clash with the capitalist class going to begin.

It turns out that the film had less in common with “Grapes of Wrath” than it does with road movies like “Easy Rider” or “Five Easy Pieces”. The nomads in “Nomadland” are men and women who travel around the country in RVs or vans rather than motorcycles but with the same sense of wanderlust. Since many of you are probably not familiar with “Five Easy Pieces,” this stars Jack Nicholson (who was also in “Easy Rider” as a companion to the two motorcycle road warriors) as a man working on oil rigs in the southwest, who lives in cheap motels, and hangs out in tawdry roadhouses just like other roughnecks. It turns out, however, that this is just an appearance. In reality, Nicholson is from a wealthy family and a trained classical pianist running away from his past.

Shortly, I will explain how this connects with McDormand’s character but first I will point out that director Chloé Zhao never had the slightest interest in agitprop. In a note attached to my DVD screener, she revealed her intentions:

Having grown up in big cities in China and England, I’ve always been deeply drawn to the open road — an idea I find to be quintessentially American — the endless search for what’s beyond the horizon. It’s filled with stories of hardship, perseverance and co-existence — people helping each other, working together to survive when they disagree on almost everything. It was the spirit of the Old West and it’s still the spirit of the road today.

The open road? That’s what Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s characters sought in “Easy Rider”. Instead of horses, they rode Harleys. Likewise, the elderly men and women wandering around the country for dead-end jobs have their own steeds: vans, trailers, and RV’s. In “Easy Rider”, the two heroes stop at a hippie commune to enjoy drugs and sex. As for Zhao’s nomads, including Fern, they end up at a rent-free trailer park where communal meals are shared. No drugs, no sex, but the old folks get by drinking beer and making small talk.

As for the comparison with “Five Easy Pieces”, we learn (spoiler alert) that Fern has a wealthy sister who has invited her numerous times to come live with her. But Fern prefers to live in a tiny van without running water and heat. The closest the film comes to depicting the miseries of being homeless (the nomads like to describe themselves as houseless), we see Fern with an onset of diarrhea that she relieves by crapping into a bucket in her van.

The film is based on a nonfiction work of the same name written by Jessica Bruder in 2017. I have no idea whether Bruder downplayed the miseries of the people she interviewed, but a NY Times review by Arlie Russell Hochschild cannot help but question the lack of a class perspective. Hochschild is the author of a book titled “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” that tried to get to the bottom of why people in Louisiana voted for rightwing politicians despite being screwed by them through low-paying jobs and exposure to toxic chemicals. Like Bruder, she lived among the people she interviewed and tried to bond with them. This was her perceptive take on something that was missing in the book and, more egregiously so, in the film (the Linda mentioned in the excerpt is a character a lot like Fern):

What forces set these nomads in motion? Here I wish Bruder had given us a view from beyond the driver’s seat. For years, stockholders have taken the lion’s share of rising corporate profits, leaving a shrinking share to the middle- and working-class worker. The current administration and Congress aim to cut the nation’s safety net and to loosen regulations on banks, stirring fears of another devastating crash. The stage seems set to leave Americans on their own to travel a potentially bumpy economic road, a scene that would seem to fly in the face of the picket-fence stability and localism bandied about in conservative rhetoric. Republicans like to talk about “freedom,” but the tax reform they’re currently proposing would most likely widen the gap between rich and poor even further, reducing Linda’s freedom to stay put if she wanted to.

As for our own nomads, I recommend Marxmailer Michael Yates’s “Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue”. After retiring from decades of teaching economics, Michael and his wife Karen became nomads for many of the same reasons as the film’s subjects. They enjoyed being footloose and were open to taking low-paying jobs that were often the only kind available in the rugged back country they hoped to see in their peregrinations. Also, they always stayed indoors even if it was in a cheap motel! At Michael’s blog, titled the same as his book, you can read a chapter. From what I’ve read in this book, it would have made for a much more interesting film:

Again in Flagstaff, we were enjoying the exhibits in the Museum of Northern Arizona. We ended our visit with a stop at the museum’s bookstore. We were admiring the Indian-made works of art for sale when an Indian artist came in and showed the manager some of his jewelry and asked if the museum was interested in buying his pieces. Apparently the craftsmanship was good, but the Indian had been drinking and was known to the manager. The manager and his assistant treated this man as if he were a pathetic drunk unworthy of their time. He kept lowering his price, giving up whatever pride he had to these white people with money. A few minutes later, he was dismissed. After he left, the two museum staffers mocked him. The assistant, not realizing her ignorance, said that perhaps it was time for the Indian to join AA. We left the museum with heavy hearts. It was as if the history of white oppression of Indians had been reenacted in microcosm before our eyes.

In Estes Park, people smugly said about a group of shabby riverside shacks not far from our cabin, “Oh, that’s where the Mexicans live.” The local peace group didn’t bother to solicit support from local Mexicans because “They probably wouldn’t be interested. They have to work too hard and wouldn’t have time.” We were talking to a jewelry store owner who, after remarking on how much safer (often a code word for “whiter”) Estes Park was than his former home in Memphis, Tennessee, said that the Estes Park crime report was pretty small and those arrested always had names you couldn’t pronounce. (Those damned Mexicans again.) In the laundromat we met a woman from the Bayview section of Brooklyn, and she said that she had moved here because you couldn’t recognize her Brooklyn neighborhood anymore. She told us, without I think realizing how racist she sounded, that there were so many Arabs there now that locals call it “Bay Root.” “Get it?,” she said, “Bay Root.”

No, America has not entered the Weimar era

Long before Trump became President, I noticed that some on the left were confusing contemporary America with the Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany. In 2010, I commented on an interview that Chris Hedges did with Noam Chomsky that encapsulated this misreading of history. Hedges starts off:

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

As I have always tried to do when encountering a blinkered take on Weimar, I introduced some economic data:

To start with, the economic situation during the late Weimar Republic was far worse than today in the U.S. In 1932, there were 5 million unemployed German workers out of a total population of 66 million, an unemployment rate of 30 percent–twice what we are suffering in the U.S. today. Also, keep in mind that unemployment insurance, which had been introduced in Germany in 1927, was the victim of fiscal austerity after the 1929 market crash. All public funding was suspended, which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.

After Trump was elected in 2016, the Weimar analogies increased dramatically for obvious reasons. Trump was widely perceived as the second coming of Adolf Hitler (or Mussolini) and as such it was incumbent on the left to study what happened in Germany in order to prevent another 1932. Both Ted Glick and Harold Meyerson tried to scare voters into pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton by bringing up the Weimar bogeyman. In my reply, I took exception to their notion that Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy had anything to do with the German Communist Party’s insane ultraleft policy that equated the Socialist Party with the Nazis. I added that if there was any analogy, it was with the SP’s centrist politics that lost the votes of workers in the same way that Hillary Clinton’s continuation of Obama’s pro-Wall Street presidency made it possible for Trump to demagogically attack her Goldman-Sachs speeches. It was doubtful that either Glick or Meyerson had given much thought to SP policies in the 1920s:

Like the Democratic Party, the German Socialists cut deals with the opposition rightwing parties to stay in power. In effect, they were the Clinton and Obamas of their day. In 1928, the Socialists were part of a coalition government that allowed the SP Chancellor Hermann Müller to carry out what amounted to the same kind of sell-out policies that characterized Tony Blair and Bernard Hollande’s nominally working-class governments.

To give just one example, the SP’s campaign program included free school meals but when Müller’s rightwing coalition partners demanded that the free meals be abandoned in order to fund rearmament, Müller caved in.

My last reference to the Weimar Republic was a CounterPunch article last October that recapitulated previous articles and added:

Attempts to liken the Proud Boys or the Boogaloos to Hitler’s Brownshirts fall apart when examined under a historical spotlight. By 1932, it had 400,000 men that had years of experience attacking working-class demonstrations and rallies. By contrast, antifa confrontations with Trump supporters are skirmishes that generally do not involve casualties. When one happens, as was the case with Kyle Rittenhouse, the left must express outrage while it puts his actions into perspective. Like the driver who plowed his car into Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, this was an exception to the rule. America’s would-be fascists are primarily looking for fist-fights, not to commit homicide—at least for the time being.

For obvious reasons, the Weimar card is being played again after Trump supporters swarmed into the Capitol. Walden Bello has an article in Foreign Policy in Focus titled “America Has Entered the Weimar Era” that warns:

Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the U.S. goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of crises to come.

You get the same thing from blogger Kenn Orphan whose post “Warnings from Weimar” is long on rhetoric but sketchy on the historical details:

There are many similarities of current day American politics to the final years of the Weimar Republic of the early 20th century: a bureaucratic plutocracy governed by out of touch liberal capitalists, incapable of understanding, let alone meeting, the needs of ordinary working people, in a nation where factions of the left foolishly downplayed the looming threat of the far right. This terrible recipe created the conditions that led many Germans to feel increasingly alienated from public life, and thus easily manipulated by nationalism, racism and the scapegoating of all of their problems.

Governed by out of touch liberal capitalists? Well, not exactly. More to the point, unless you get into the nitty-gritty realities of 1920s Germany, you might as well just say nothing since spouting glittering generalities does not help the left prepare for the possible emergence of a genuine fascist threat. In this post, I want to dig deeper into the concrete realities of Weimar that should make it obvious how different our situation is today. We have plenty to deal with but mostly it involves trying to build a socialist movement that in the final analysis is the best defense against fascism as opposed to voting for someone like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.

To start with, the conditions facing Germans immediately after WWI were disastrous. Forced to sign an onerous treaty imposed by the allies, the country suffered a precipitous drop in economic well-being. On one hand, it led to revolutionary struggles that failed to take power as I have outlined elsewhere. On the other, it spawned a far-right movement led by the Freikorps that had no parallels with today’s Proud Boys or any other white supremacist militia.

Between 1918 and 1922, 354 German politicians of the left had been murdered by the Freikorps or other rightwing militias that predated the Nazi Party. To give you an idea of the social weight of the Freikorps, over 1.5 million men joined for the sole purpose of beating up or, less frequently, killing leftists. Given the precarious position of the Socialist Party government in the immediate postwar period, it is not surprising that it relied on the ultraright militia to maintain “law and order”. It was SP President Friedrich Ebert’s decision to give the Freikorps the green light to murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.

By 1925, conditions had stabilized in Germany to the point where the Freikorps had outlived its usefulness. Another rightwing terrorist group called the Organization Consul continued assassinating leftists but less frequently and with less mass support.

But in only four years, conditions reverted to the early 20s as a consequence of the Great Depression. Millions of Germans were plunged into poverty to the point that they’d rally behind any group on the right or the left that could “make Germany great again”. Unlike the largely middle-class MAGA cap wearing louts that invaded the Capitol, the Germans susceptible to Hitler’s demagogy were driven by economic misery rather than nationalism for the most part.

A brief article from the June 19, 1932 New York Times should give you a feel for the desperate situation in Germany:

In the Bischofshem forest hikers found the corpses of a family of five—father, mother, and three children from 3 to 7—a brief note in the man’s pocket stating that economic misery had determined him and his wife to commit suicide, and take their children with them. “The courageous don’t grow old,” the note concluded. Its writer was 35 years old, a World War veteran, out of work, trying to eke out a living selling newspapers. He had shot his wife and children, and then himself.

Eighteen thousand people killed themselves in Germany last year, according to the provisional figures. Berlin alone had nearly seven hundred suicides the first four months of this year. The suicide curve seems to be rising steeply, and common sense interprets this as the reflection of constantly increasing economic pressure.

This time, however, it was Adolf Hitler’s Nazi stormtroopers that were targeting the left, Jews and Roma rather than the Freikorps. His party grew but so did the Communist Party. The Nazis had 107 seats in the Reichstag but the CP had 77. More importantly, the SP had 143. Added together, the two nominally socialist parties had twice as much political clout than the Nazis but their failure to unite against the fascists led to a tragic defeat. As stated above, the SP urged a vote for capitalist politicians like Bruning and von Hindenburg while the CP carried out a sectarian “united front from below” that went so far as to back a Nazi referendum that would result in the unseating of an SP governor in Saxony. How does this compare to the USA with zero socialists in Congress except the squad that has little influence over national or international affairs.

Having almost zero resemblance to the street fights between antifa and the Proud Boys, et al, the battle for control over the streets between Nazis and Reds after 1929 were bloody battles that took the lives of 155 and injured another 426 in Prussia. Most of the casualties, of course, were Reds who had to face the combined forces of cops and fascists.

On January 2^nd, I posted a link to an article by Jairus Banaji titled “The Political Odyssey of Arthur Rosenberg, Germany’s Forgotten Marxist” that appeared in Jacobin. It refers to his most important work, “A History of the German Republic” that fortunately can be read on Marxists.org.

The final paragraphs of the concluding chapter titled “Chapter IX: The End, 1928-1930” will put Hitler’s rise into context. You had a Socialist Party with millions of members that makes the American left today look like a flea next to an elephant. While not quite as large as the SP, the CP was far more militant and far more willing to battle the Nazis in the street. It is our misfortune that the self-styled antifa has little understanding of why punching Nazis, or even killing them, would do little to block Hitler’s rise to power. Let Arthur Rosenberg explain why:

A united front SPD – KPD that ruthlessly waged war upon Brüning’s dictatorship and capitalism might still have decided the destiny of the German republic by compelling the new Nazi electorate to decide between capitalism and socialism. The necessity for any such decision would have broken up Hitler’s following and deprived the counter-revolution of its popular basis. Since, however, the KPD leaders did not want a revolution, but only wished to follow the easy road of making propaganda against the SPD, and since the right-wing Socialist leaders mistrusted the power of the proletariat and preferred the ‘lesser evil’, no such united socialist fighting front came into existence. Moreover, left-wing Socialists were hemmed in between the majority in their own party and the official KPD, and therefore rendered incapable of action.

The new Reichstag was composed of 150 supporters of the Hitler – Hugenberg block, 220 Marxists and about 200 supporters of Brüning’s government. The Conservatives did not fear either the SPD or the KPD, but the competition of the Hitler – Hugenberg block, which had scored such a notable success at the polls. The struggle between the Conservatives and Hugenberg’s supporters was, however, a domestic concern of the great capitalists and their friends among the territorial magnates. The SPD regarded the Conservative government as the lesser evil, and therefore gave its support to Brüning in his struggle with the Hitler – Hugenberg block and the KPD.

On 18 October 1930 the majority in the Reichstag composed of Brüning’s supporters and the Social Democrats resolved to refer the question of the emergency decrees to a special commission of the Reichstag and to pass to the order of the day without discussing the proposed vote of no confidence that lay upon the table. The Reichstag thus abandoned the struggle with the unconstitutional dictatorship of Brüning and his friends by a majority vote. The same hour saw the death of the Weimar Republic. Since then one dictatorship has succeeded to another in Germany.

The leading Social Democrats, who were convinced that the socialist proletariat was too weak to embark upon open warfare, indulged themselves in hopes that the existing crisis would run the same course that had been followed by the crisis of 1923. They were prepared to ‘tolerate’ the emergency decrees in a similar fashion to that in which they had formerly ‘tolerated’ the enabling act. If Brüning in his struggle with Hitler and Hugenberg only contrived to avoid making any really serious mistake, it was possible – so they argued – that some fortunate concatenation of circumstances would permit of the resuscitation of the Weimar Republic. These men forgot that in 1924 democracy in Germany was not rescued by their endeavours, but by the intervention of the New York Stock Exchange. In 1930-31, American financiers were neither willing nor able to rescue the Weimar Republic for a second time.

The middle-class republic established in 1918 in Germany was the creation of the working classes. The middle classes themselves had either fought against it or only half-heartedly supported it. The middle-class republic collapsed in 1930 because its destiny had been entrusted to the middle classes, and because the working classes were no longer strong enough to save it. Although the working classes comprised three-quarters of the entire nation, they were unable to unite either upon their political ideals or their political tactics. The counter-revolution triumphed because the working classes squandered their immense forces in internecine warfare.

Marighella

COUNTERPUNCH, JANUARY 8, 2021

“Marighella” hearkens back to the best political films of the 1960s like Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” and Costa-Gravas’s “State of Siege”. Set in 1968, it tells the story of Carlos Marighella’s desperate struggle against the military dictatorship in Brazil. Founder and leader of Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN), Marighella was just one of many revolutionaries in Latin America who broke with the Communist Party to launch either an urban or rural guerrilla group hoping to emulate the July 26^th Movement in Cuba. Unlike “The Battle of Algiers,” this story does not have a happy ending. The film concludes with the Brazilian cops firing dozens of rounds into Marighella’s body as he sits in the driver’s seat of a parked VW Beetle. Like Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” it is a tragedy about the failure of the revolutionary left in Latin America to help realize Che’s call for “Two, Three, Many Vietnams.” There were many embryonic Vietnams but they all aborted. Unlike Cuba or Vietnam, there was never a social base adequate to the revolutionary goals. To the credit of director Wagner Moura, this is the overarching theme of this film that will be of supreme interest to CounterPunch readers.

Continue reading

Lars Lih, Revolutionary Continuity, and Permanent Revolution

Lars Lih

In the latest issue of Historical Materialism, there’s a Lars Lih article titled “Why Did Marx Declare the Revolution Permanent? The Tactical Principles of the Manifesto” that is his latest salvo against Leon Trotsky’s singularly most important theoretical contribution—even if it does not mention Trotsky once.

Despite the association that Trotsky has with the term permanent revolution, you can also find it in Marx’s writings. The goal of Lih’s article is to prove that Marx had something completely different in mind than Trotsky. Instead of being a call to bypass a bourgeois revolutionary stage, Marx was advocating a class alliance between the workers and their class enemies in order to create the democratic conditions that would allow for the construction of a workers party, trade unions and the constitutionally protected rights allowing progress toward socialist transformation. Two works are singled out by Lih to make his point, the March 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” and the October 1850 “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850”. The first states:

While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.

The second has the same kind of insistence:

…the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

Notwithstanding their fiery rhetoric, Lih assures us that you have to look closely at the context in which they were written. They were mostly about overthrowing absolutist states, roughly equivalent to Czarism in Russia. Germany was rotten-ripe for its first bourgeois revolution while France, its birthplace in 1789, was struggling under Napoleon III, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew.

According to Lih, there were some who were fooled into thinking that Marx was advocating socialist revolution. He singles out Hal Draper as an example: “According to Hal Draper, these passages outline a scenario of immediate transition to a proletarian revolution: ‘the idea of immediacy is stressed three times. The revolution is to move uninterruptedly from the bourgeois state into the proletarian revolution’.” So, you get the picture. Draper, a member of Cannon’s SWP who hooked up with Max Shachtman in the 1940 split, serves as a proxy for Leon Trotsky—Lars Lih’s nemesis.

In going back to 1850, Lih is trying to establish what we used to call “revolutionary continuity” in the SWP. That’s a kind of red thread that connects Marx’s 1850 writings to Kautsky and then Lenin in his eyes. In the SWP, our red thread was a bit different. It went from Marx to Lenin and then from Trotsky to James P. Cannon. When I joined in 1967, I was told that Jack Barnes would be the new James P. Cannon thus continuing the ideological legacy that would help ensure the future socialist victory. All that was cast aside when Barnes decided that the new succession would be from Lenin to Fidel Castro. To continue to uphold Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory would be grounds for expulsion.

After I quit the SWP and started thinking about it critically, I couldn’t help but think that this notion of “revolutionary continuity” had a lot in common with the bloodlines for thoroughbred horses and the kinds of dogs seen at the yearly Westminster show. Except in our case, it wasn’t blood that mattered but doctrine. Maybe a more useful analogy would be with the Vatican that had doctrinal continuity going back to the Apostles. I often wondered if Jack Barnes fantasized about being the Lenin of our age, with the kind of power a Pope enjoyed except involving revolutionary rather than eschatological hopes.

Unlike Jack Barnes, Lih is a far more modest thinker. Keep in mind that he has never been part of any movement and probably puts as much time and energy into Gilbert and Sullivan productions as he does for writing paywall articles accessible mostly to university employees or a retiree like me. Lih has largely been responsible for the Karl Kautsky revival that has provided the theoretical basis for Jacobin’s stubborn support for the Democratic Party. In an article titled “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)”, Eric Blanc said that reading him would help the left get over dogmatic assumptions such as “whether it’s okay to ever use the Democratic Party ballot line.”

Returning to what Marx wrote in 1850, you have to wonder if Lih was characterizing Hal Draper’s views accurately. If you keep in mind that his purpose in writing his 3-volume classic was to explain what Karl Marx stood for rather than Hal Draper, a review of the chapter Lih referenced will reveal little of the Trotsky/Proxyism. Instead, Draper makes it quite clear that Marx did not project much more than a bourgeois democratic republic with workers in the driver’s seat—not that far from what Lih advocates as did Lenin until the April Theses.

The second version involves a simple change: since the bourgeoisie refuses to take political power, the Democracy must strive to capture political power directly for itself. What remains unchanged is this: the perspective is still to accelerate bourgeois economic development (modernization and industrialization) under the aegis of the new revolutionary power to the point where the next stage—proletarian power—goes onto the order of the day. The bourgeois-democratic stage is to be telescoped under a political power which is not that of the bourgeoisie itself. (Looking ahead, we can see an analogy: under Bonapartism the bourgeois stage is also going to be carried out under a political power which is not that of the bourgeoisie itself).

Take note of Hal Draper’s reference to accelerating bourgeois economic development. In distinction to Lih, Draper’s understanding of the bourgeois revolution is not based on democratic rights, etc. alone. It is joined at the hip to capitalism’s ability to develop the forces of production that are necessary to create a socialist society in the future: a proletariat and  modern industry. Since Lih’s focus is on politics rather than on economics, this is something that he either missed or, perhaps, decided to sweep under the rug.

In Frederick Engels’s 1895 introduction to Marx’s “Class Struggles in France”, you’ll see how preoccupied Marx’s partner was with the forces of production:

History has proved us wrong and all others who thought similarly. It has made clear that the status of economic development on the Continent was then by no means ripe for the abolition of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has affected the entire Continent and has introduced large industry in France, Austria, Hungary. Poland, and, more recently, in Russia, and has made of Germany an industrial country of the first rank-all this upon a capitalist basis which, reckoning from 1848, implies great expansive capacity. But it was just this industrial revolution that has everywhere introduced clarity in regard to class relations, which has eliminated a mass of hybrid forms taken over from the period of manufacture and, in Eastern Europe, even from guild handicraft, which has produced a real bourgeoisie and a real industrial proletariat and forced both into the foreground of social evolution. Thereby has the struggle between these two great classes, which in 1848 existed outside of England only in Paris and, perchance, in a few large industrial centers, been spread over the whole of Europe, and has attained an intensity unthinkable in 1848.

Engels refers above to how the industrial revolution created a powerful working class only in England and Paris by 1848. Later in the article, he refers to the Paris Commune that Marx regarded as the incipient dictatorship of the proletariat, which Lenin cited as a precursor to the infant Soviet republic in “State and Revolution”:

After the war of 1870-71, Bonaparte disappears from the stage and Bismarck’s mission is finished, so that he can subside again to his status of an ordinary Junker. The termination of this period is formed by the Paris Commune. A surreptitious attempt by Thiers to abstract from the Paris National Guard its cannon, caused a victorious uprising. It was again shown that, in Paris, no revolution is possible other than a proletarian one. Government fell, after the victory, into the lap of the working class, all by itself.

That hardly conforms to the Kautskyite formulas spread through Lars Lih’s body of articles and books. I am hesitant to think in terms of red threads nowadays but it doesn’t seem far-fetched to connect the dotted lines between the Paris Commune, the USSR prior to Stalin’s rise, Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, and Lenin’s April Theses.

We have reached a stage in human history when all the old gradualist schemas seem utterly ill-suited to the collapse of capitalist society all around us. With pandemics and ecological collapse threatening our very existence, the need to construct a mass, internationally-based revolutionary party is more urgent than ever. Lih’s pleasant existence as a Musicology Professor at McGill University and his inexhaustible appetite for picking fights with revolutionary socialists make you wonder what makes him tick. After reading most of everything he has written for the past twenty years, I can only say that I am finding him terminally pernicious.