In 1865 Marx had a passing fit of pedological materialism. The French naturalist Pierre Trémaux published a treatise explaining human variety in terms of soil characteristics. Marx was actually impressed by this and said ‘It [Trémaux’s theory] represents a very significant advance over Darwin [!!]…For certain questions such as nationality, etc., only here has a basis in nature been found’ . Luckily for all of us, as Nairn points out, Engels quickly ‘managed to cure Marx of the aberration’.
As historical materialists we should always apply a sense of the ‘historical’ and the ‘material’ to our founding fathers too. Outliving Marx by a good 12 years, Engels lived to see an altogether more advanced form of capitalism than Marx ever witnessed. This is clear from several passages of Capital volume 3 which were written by Engels himself, not least the important Supplement he added to the book in May 1895, two months before he died. Scales of production had expanded massively in recent years and given rise to ‘new forms of industrial organization’, he says, referring to the huge industrial combinations called “trusts” which were capable of setting up ‘giant enterprises’ straddling whole branches of industry under ‘unified management’ (that is, under a single firm). As Yergin points out in his brilliant book on the oil industry, ‘the movement toward combination really gathered speed in the 1890s’ (Yergin, The Prize, p. 100), and of course Engels might have cited Standard Oil Trust as the leading example of these developments (but chose a British example, United Alkali Company, instead).
As Engels draws closer to the end of his life, in the 1890s, oil, steel and chemicals become the typical face of capitalism (not textiles). But the same sense of a new capitalist modernity comes through in at least two admiring references to the way submarine telegraph cables, steamers and the completion of the Suez Canal had dramatically compressed the turnover of world trade (of commercial capital).
Again, Marx didn’t live to witness the expansion of French capitalism in Indochina (the massive concentration of French economic interests in rice, rubber, banking and minerals), so his image of colonialism retains the archaic stamp of Britain’s involvement in India. Take this example: from 1876 to 1914 the French financial conglomerate Banque de l’Indochine extracted cumulative net profits of 107.3 million gold francs on an invested capital of 12 million. No British firm in India could ever have matched that level of profitability, let alone the degree of concentration of capital involved here.
In any case, as the problem of Britain’s industrial decline became more obvious by the late 19th century, England could scarcely count as ‘the model country of economic development’ (Marx in vol. 3, p. 737). So here’s a thought experiment: had Marx written Capital c.1900, how different would the text as a whole have been?
118Matthew E
Strauss, Simon Klassenkampfand116
others
Bill Mullen doesn't mention that James' 1948 "essay" which he quotes from was created as a report to the 1948 convention of the Socialist Workers Party.
The impression i had through decades of pedestrian involvement in the U.S. left (early on with the YSA/SWP) was that James was invited to come to North America in 1938 by the SWP, when he met with Trotsky in Mexico in 1939 they clashed fiercely, then the following year James went with the Schactman/Workers Party split forever renouncing the orthodox 'Trotskyites'.
A few years ago when our reading group was reading James' classic "Black Jacobins" followed by the recent "C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism:
Selected Writings of C.L.R. James 1939-1949" edited by Paul Le Blanc and Scott McLemee (Haymarket 2018) i did some additional reading by and about James. I learned that Trotsky was a prime mover in getting James to travel to North America. In their 1939 talks James and Trotsky agreed on the priority strategic perspective that the SWP support building an independent Black political party. I learned that it was during the three years in the latter 1940s when James had rejoined the SWP that James made this presentation to the 1948 SWP convention, expressing views generally shared by the SWP leadership.
We say, number 1, that the Negro struggle,
the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of
its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America
and in present struggles; it has an organic political
perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or
another, and everything shows that at the present time it is
traveling with great speed and vigor.
We say, number 2, that this independent
Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the
general social and political life of the nation, despite the
fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and
is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or
the Marxist party.
We say, number 3, and this is the most
important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon
the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great
contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in
the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part
of the struggle for socialism.
James arrived at this
position through an application of both Marxist theory and
historical example.
Mark the date: 2 October 2020. North announces " industry-leading technology" an multiple articles per day. If they going to place more sophisticated ads or cookies, then thats the end of it for me. There is no reason to abandon the current format.
I guess we can expect a reaction on the transition from the oldskool northites http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/ . There where some interesting polemics on it a while a go, but haven't read it in ages.
In my
opinion, there
are the following problems in your argument.
1) You
say, rightly,
that Turkey is oppressing the Kurds. This is surely true and has
to be opposed
by all socialists and democrats. But in contrast to the
perception of you and
other supporters of the YPG, politics in the Middle East does
not circle around
the Kurdish question. It is rather the YPG which is circling
around U.S.
imperialism (and sometimes other holders of power like Assad).
You can
not and should
not judge all states and forces primarily by what they say on
the Kurdish
issue. It is an important issue but not the only one in this
region.
2) You
say: “Erdogan's
desire to make Turkey more influential in the Middle East - to
make it more
like an imperialist power.” We can discuss about Erdoğan’s
“desire”. But this
is not decisive for Marxists. It is the objective role of
different forces in a
given conflict. There have been national liberation movements in
history fighting
under the banner of Islam which might have “desired” to create a
“global caliphate”.
However, objectively they were fighting the occupation by
British, French or US
imperialism. Apologists of imperialism took this ideological
mantle as a
pretext to denounce such struggles. Communists don’t do this.
It is
necessary to
have not an impressionistic characterization of a state (“the
desire of its
head is …”) but an objective class analysis of its political and
economic
position. A brief summary of our analysis of Turkey can be read
in chapter V of
this book: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2018/
3) The
difference between
the Libyan GNA government and General Haftar is similar to the
difference between
Morsi and General Sisi in Egypt. Or, to give another analogy,
between the Erdoğan
government and the Turkish military dictatorships from 1980
onwards. Yes, they
are all bourgeois. Yes, they all collaborate in one way or
another with this or
that Great Power. But if you are blind to recognize the
difference between a
semi-democratic bourgeois parliamentary system and a full-blown
dictatorship,
you repeat the nonsense of the Stalinist “social-fascism” theory
of the late
1920s and early 1930s.
It is
because you are
incapable to recognize this difference that you put the foreign
intervention of
Saudi Arabia/UAE on the same level as Turkey’s. One attempts to
bloody crush a
liberation struggle. The other tries to exploit and manipulate
it (in order to
finally liquidate it). “In the end” it is all the same.
Likewise, “in the end”
we will be all dead. But in the meantime we can do a few things
if we are not
instantly killed! Serious political people must not ignore this
difference!
4) It is
a well-known
slander of pro-Gaddafi people to denounce the Libyan Revolution
as “anti-Black
racist”. Behind this is the claim that the Gaddafi dictatorship
had been somehow
better for Black people. There is no doubt, that there exist
(and always existed)
anti-Black chauvinist trends in the Arab world. But the Libyan
Revolution did
not centre around the issue of Black people and did not follow
an agenda of “anti-Black
racism”. This is Gaddafian slander of the revolutionary process
and a cheap
excuse for refusing to take sides in the civil war (see only
this e.g. the
second half of our essay: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/liberation-struggle-and-imperialism/).
Jenny Farrellintroduces the famous anti-war book, as we near the 50th anniversary of Erich Maria Remarque's death. Image by Photofest
World War I was termed the war that would end all wars, so great was the horror of this new, diabolical stage of industrial annihilation. We know now that without seriously addressing the causes of war – the imperialist greed for new markets and spheres of power – wars will continue, no matter what. However, WWI gave birth to a new genre of anti-war literature.
Mainstream cultural life in the 21st century largely ignores wars, nor has it embraced the anti-war cultural heritage of the 20th century. But anybody who reads the novels and poetry, listens to the music, watches the plays, looks at the paintings or hears the songs of those who lived through the horrors of WWI and WWII, cannot fail to be profoundly shocked and motivated to finally put an end to war. Perhaps that is why they are all but absent from mainstream culture?
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, is arguably the most famous anti-war novel of all time. Published in 1928, the novel was one of the greatest book successes of the first half of the 20th century. The picture it paints, the inhuman reality of war, reflected the experiences of millions of soldiers.
At the heart of the story is a group of young soldiers who are sent from school straight into the battlefield. Their dehumanisation by adapting to industrialised slaughter becomes the turning point in their lives. They ask questions about who is responsible for the war, but have no answers. While Bäumer and his comrades do not believe the official propaganda, which blames the war on foreign powers, they turn their rage on the agents of power closest to them. These include teachers, officers, and armchair strategists at home, including Bäumer’s schoolmaster, Kantorek, who urged students to enlist, as well as the former postman, Himmelstoss, who torments new recruits. While the novel never exposes the imperialist interests which lay behind World War I, it nevertheless condemns the powers that criminally abused Remarque’s generation.
Bäumer’s group is primarily concerned with surviving the war. Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, a 40-year-old cobbler, becomes a father figure to them. He ferrets out food for them to pilfer, as the army provisions are abysmal. What holds them together is their camaraderie, a humanity they preserve. Ten years after the publication of this novel, this idea of camaraderie was to be exploited by the German fascists for their new war plans.
However, in Remarque’s book, this comradeship has nothing to do with leader and followers in an aggressive militarism. Rather, it is a sense of solidarity among those who need to support each other, even extending to the soldiers in the ‘enemy’ trench. They understand instinctively that the enemy is a victim of the same powers as themselves. In a memorable scene, Bäumer is caught in a shell hole along with the French soldier he has just killed. He says, “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade, how could you be my enemy?”
In 1930, the Nazis disrupted screenings of the film adaptation and attacked the audiences. In May 1933, they burned copies of the book and revoked Remarque’s German citizenship in 1938.
Remarque’s next book, The Road Back (1931), follows soldiers from the same company during the 1918 revolutionary uprisings in Germany. It is first and foremost the story of the dissolution of the comradeship of the front. Their attempt to hold on to the idea of comradeship leads to the militarist Freikorps, suicide and eventually even to the murder of workers. Remarque shows that war was not an ‘emergency’ but remains at the centre of imperialist, capitalist society.
Remarque was born in Osnabrück in June 1898 into a Catholic working-class family. When World War I broke out, Remarque was sixteen. Like so many, he fell victim to the jingoist propaganda and joined the Youth Corps, a militaristic cadet organization. Aged eighteen in November 1916, he was conscripted. Shortly after seeing action on the western front, he was wounded, in July 1917 and spent over a year recovering and was not sent back to the front.
Finishing his education after the war, Remarque briefly worked as a teacher, before he began writing for a living. In late 1927, Remarque wrote a first draft of All Quiet on the Western Front. He offered it to the most renowned publisher in the Weimar Republic, Samuel Fischer. Fischer rejected it, claiming that ten years after the war, nobody wanted to read about it anymore. The manuscript then reached the Ullstein publishers and Remarque was asked to revise his text, especially to tone down any anti-war statements.
On 10 November 1928, the Vossische Zeitung, part of the Ullstein group, published the first instalment of All Quieton the Western Front. Five days later Remarque was sacked from his job with the weekly Sport im Bild. However, the novel’s success exceeded all expectations. Thousands of readers’ letters reached the newspaper evidencing that Remarque’s book hit a nerve with the public: an unvarnished portrayal of the war. It became an immediate bestseller in Germany and internationally. In 1929, it was translated into 26 languages.
Today there are editions in 50 languages, with an estimated circulation worldwide of tens of millions of copies. It is considered the anti-war book of the 20th century, written by a German. The title has become synonymous with the senselessness of war, the senselessness of ordinary people dying in the interests of profit and power.
In May 1933, Remarque had to flee Germany for Switzerland overnight, having been warned by a friend that he was in danger. He left Switzerland for the USA on the eve of World War II, and became a naturalised US citizen in 1947. He wrote his last novel Shadows in Paradise while living at 320 East 57th Street in New York and his apartment building “played a prominent role in his novel”.
In 1943, the Nazis arrested his youngest sister, Elfriede Scholz. She and her husband had stayed in Germany with their two children. She was found guilty of ‘unpatriotic’ views and was beheaded on 16 December 1943. Remarque only discovered what happened to her after the war, and dedicated his 1952 novel The Spark of Life to her. West German publishers omitted the dedication, as Remarque was still considered a traitor by many Germans. Although Remarque’s German citizenship was reinstated after the war, he remained isolated from German cultural life and died in Switzerland 50 years ago, on 25 September 1970.
All Quiet on the Western Front has lost none of its power. It is an outstandingly sensitive depiction of the effect murderous warfare has on the human psyche. We need more books like this.
[Jenny Farrell was born in Berlin, and works as a lecturer in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. She is the author of Revolutionary Romanticism - Examining the Odes of John Keats, Nuascéalta, 2017, and editor of Children of the Nation,An Anthology of Working People's Poetry from Contemporary Ireland, Culture Matters. 2019.]
NY Times, Sept.
18, 2020, 7:29 p.m. ET
Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81
By Robert D. McFadden
Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and
commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism,
Kremlin dictatorships and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation
still struggling for identity in the 21st century, died on
Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
His wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and part owner of
The Nation, said the cause was lung cancer.
From the sprawling conflicts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution
and the tyrannies of Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union
and Vladimir V. Putin’s intrigues to retain power, Professor
Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals and the
passions and poetry of peoples that endured a century of wars,
political repression and economic hardships.
A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University
and New York University, he was fluent in Russian, visited
Russia frequently and developed contacts among intellectual
dissidents and government and Communist Party officials. He
wrote or edited 10 books and many articles for The Nation, The
New York Times and other publications, was a CBS-TV commentator
and counted President George Bush and many American and Soviet
officials among his sources.
In Moscow he was befriended by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail
S. Gorbachev, who invited him to the May Day celebration at Red
Square in 1989. There, at the Lenin Mausoleum, Professor Cohen
stood with his wife and son one tier below Mr. Gorbachev and the
Soviet leadership to view a three-hour military parade. He later
spoke briefly on Russian television to a vast audience about
alternative paths that Russian history could have taken.
Loosely identified with a revisionist historical view of the
Soviet Union, Professor Cohen held views that made him a
controversial public intellectual. He believed that early
Bolshevism had held great promise, that it had been democratic
and genuinely socialist, and that it had been corrupted only
later by civil war, foreign hostility, Stalin’s malignancy and a
fatalism in Russian history.
A traditionalist school of thought, by contrast, held that the
Soviet experiment had been flawed from the outset, that Lenin’s
political vision was totalitarian, and that any attempt to
create a society based on his coercive utopianism had always
been likely to lead, logically, to Stalin’s state terrorism and
to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse.
Professor Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Gorbachev,
who after coming to power in 1985 undertook ambitious changes to
liberate the nation’s 15 republics from state controls that had
originally been imposed by Stalin. Mr. Gorbachev gave up power
as the Soviet state imploded at the end of 1991 and moved toward
beliefs in democracy and a market economy.
Mr. Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with his
biography of Lenin’s protégé Nikolai Bukharin.
A prolific writer who mined Soviet archives, Professor Cohen
first came to international attention in 1973 with “Bukharin and
the Bolshevik Revolution,” a biography of Lenin’s protégé
Nikolai Bukharin, who envisioned Communism as a blend of
state-run industries and free-market agriculture. Critics
generally applauded the work, which was a finalist for a
National Book Award.
“Stephen Cohen’s full-scale study of Bukharin is the first major
study of this remarkable associate of Lenin,” Harrison
Salisbury’s wrote in a review in The Times. “As such it
constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the byproduct both of
increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials
and also of the very substantial increase in basic information
which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin’s
death.”
After Lenin’s death, Mr. Bukharin became a victim of Stalin’s
Moscow show trials in 1938; he was accused of plotting against
Stalin and executed. His widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, spent
20 years in exile and in prison camps and campaigned for Mr.
Bukharin’s rehabilitation, which was endorsed by Mr. Gorbachev
in 1988.
Ms. Larina and Professor Cohen became friends. Given access to
Bukharin archives, he found and returned to her the last love
letter that Mr. Bukharin wrote her from prison.
In “Rethinking the Soviet Experience” (1985), Professor Cohen
offered a new interpretation of the nation’s traumatic history
and modern political realities. In his view, Stalin’s despotism
and Mr. Bukharin’s fate were not necessarily inevitable
outgrowths of the party dictatorship founded by Lenin.
Richard Lowenthal, in a review for The Times, called Professor
Cohen’s interpretation implausible. “While I do not believe that
all the horrors of Stalinism were ‘logically inevitable’
consequences of the seizure of power by Lenin and his Bolshevik
Party,” Mr. Lowenthal wrote, “I do believe that Stalin’s victory
over Bukharin was inherent in the structure of the party’s
system.”
As Professor Cohen and other scholars pondered Russia’s past,
Mr. Gorbachev’s rise to power and his efforts toward glasnost
(openness) and perestroika (restructuring) cast the future of
the Soviet Union in a new light, potentially reversing 70 years
of Cold War dogma.
As Mr. Gorbachev arrived in Washington for his 1987 summit with
President Ronald Reagan, The Times wrote, “With an irreverence
for precedent and an agility uncommon in Soviet leaders, he has
disrupted old assumptions about Soviet impulses, forced
reappraisals of Soviet purposes and rendered less predictable
the course of East-West competition.”
To widen the focus, Professor Cohen and Ms. vanden Heuvel
published “Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s
Reformers” (1989).
Professor Cohen affirmed his support for Mr. Gorbachev in a
March 1991 Op-Ed article in The Times. “He has undertaken the
most ambitious changes in modern history,” he wrote. “Their goal
is to dismantle the state controls Stalin imposed and to achieve
an emancipation of society through privatization,
democratization and federalization of the 15 republics.”
As 1991 ended, the Soviet Union was dissolved and Mr. Gorbachev
resigned, giving way to Boris N. Yeltsin’s tumultuous elected
presidency. Mr. Yeltsin tried to transform the state economy
into a capitalist market by imposing a “shock therapy” of
nationwide privatization without price controls. Inflation and
economic calamity ensued.
By 1997, as Professor Cohen saw it, the Russian economy had
become “an endless collapse of everything essential for a decent
existence.” He became a persistent critic of Mr. Yeltsin, who
survived an attempted coup and tried to promote democracy but
resigned in 1999 amid growing internal pressures. He was
succeeded by his deputy, Mr. Putin.
In his book, “Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of
Post-Communist Russia” (2000), Professor Cohen laid the blame
for Russia’s post-Communist economic and social collapse on the
United States, for providing bad advice; on academic experts,
for what he called “malpractice throughout the 1990s”; on
Western journalists; and on Mr. Yeltsin, for a range of sins:
abolishing the Soviet Union, creating a bureaucratic vacuum and
generating hyperinflation with his economic shock therapy.
“Cohen’s thesis is that Yeltsin, rather than Russia’s first
democratic leader, was a neo-czarist bumbler who destroyed a
democratization process that, in fact, should be credited to
Mikhail Gorbachev,” Robert D. Kaplan wrote in a Times review.
“Cohen is particularly scathing toward American journalists,
whom he depicts as overly influenced by the prosperity of a
small, rapacious upper class in the major Russian cities, and
who seldom ventured out into the countryside to see the terrible
price of the reformers’ handiwork.”
Stephen Frand Cohen was born in Indianapolis on Nov. 25, 1938,
the older of two children of Marvin and Ruth (Frand) Cohen. His
father owned a jewelry store and a golf course in Hollywood,
Fla. Stephen and his sister, Judith, attended schools in
Owensboro, Ky., but Stephen graduated in 1956 from the Pine
Crest School, a private school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He loved the novels of Hemingway. As an undergraduate at Indiana
University, he went to England on a study-abroad program. He had
saved $300 for a side trip to Pamplona to run with the bulls.
But an advertisement he saw for a 30-day, $300 trip to the
U.S.S.R. changed his life.
Back at Indiana University, he gave up plans to be a golf pro
and took up Russian studies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in
economics and public policy in 1960 and a master’s in Russian
studies in 1962. In 1969, he received a doctorate in that
subject from Columbia University.
Professor Cohen’s marriage in 1962 to the opera singer Lynn
Blair ended in divorce. He married Ms. vanden Heuvel in 1988. In
addition to her, he is survived by a son, Andrew, and a
daughter, Alexandra Cohen, from his first marriage; another
daughter, Nicola Cohen, from his second marriage; a sister,
Judith Lefkowitz; and four grandchildren.
His Columbia dissertation on Mr. Bukharin’s economic ideas grew
into his first book, copies of which reached Soviet dissidents,
the K.G.B. in Moscow, and eventually Mr. Gorbachev, who put
Professor Cohen on his guest list for the 1987 Gorbachev-Reagan
summit in Washington.
Professor Cohen taught at Princeton from 1968 to 1998, rising to
full professor of politics and Russian studies, and at New York
University thereafter until his retirement in 2011. His last
book, published in 2019, was “War With Russia? From Putin &
Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.”
Many journalistic colleagues accused Professor Cohen of
defending Mr. Putin, who curtailed democratic freedoms but
boosted the economy, which grew for eight straight years. Wages
for ordinary Russians tripled, poverty was reduced, and national
growth jumped fivefold as rising prices of Russia’s plentiful
oil and gas overcame a depression.
In a recent interview for this obituary, Professor Cohen denied
that he had “defended” Mr. Putin.
“He holds views that I also hold,” Professor Cohen said. “It’s
the views that I defend, not Putin.
“From the moment Yeltsin came on,” he continued, “Americans
thought the Cold War was over. There was disappointment with
Putin as a more rational leader. I see him in the Russian
tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet. He
frightens some of our observers, but I didn’t see it that way.”
Yes, this is how it has been and how it could be in the future; if it is done well then such movements are worth supporting and helping to grow.
But to say how something is and how something has been done well in the past is not to say how something should best be done in the future.
Ultimately, in order to carry through a socialist revolution and have it succeed, it would be best to have a united working-class party led mostly by people of color. A working-class party with a Black leadership of all the oppressed would be the best way to accomplish the ultimate goal of a workers democracy and a socialist society in this country.
Also, I believe James was arguing that one way to get to the best kind of leadership of a working-class party is through the historically independent movement of radical Blacks. What he argued may be true but it is an empirical question that must be answered in practice it can't be set beforehand.
I don't understand the exclusivity and reductionism of the argument on all sides. Movements for liberation, whether they are for national liberation, or sexual liberation, or liberation based on overcoming ethnic or color-based oppression, are what they are. What needs to be thought through is how to make them into revolutionary socialist movements.
We say, number 1, that the Negro struggle,
the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of
its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America
and in present struggles; it has an organic political
perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or
another, and everything shows that at the present time it is
traveling with great speed and vigor.
We say, number 2, that this independent
Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the
general social and political life of the nation, despite the
fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and
is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or
the Marxist party.
We say, number 3, and this is the most
important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon
the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great
contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in
the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part
of the struggle for socialism.
James arrived at this
position through an application of both Marxist theory and
historical example.
Re: book review from Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism -- "You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance"
Reading things like these brings out Forest Gump syndrome. Something of a participant; something of an observer. Now, mere commentator.
SDS was a key element of the alliance that the Black Students union had pieced together at LACC by Spring of '69. Other valued members were, most importantly, the Mexican American Students Union and the Vietnam Vets Against the War; there were also members of community based black nationalist orgs, e,g, Panther Party, US Organization, Nation of Islam; even members of CORE and SNCC and the SCLC; and, with these organized fractions, various hippies, bippies and assorted free spirits. It was a grand coalition within which none of the strife between outside campus organizations penetrated. And this is little more than 2 months after Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were assassinated at UCLA by members of the US Organization.
The BSU was large. And it was powerful having won black (and brown) studies classes, black (and brown) administrators and faculty appointments. We had won control of the student government with that alliance we called EPIC. Additionally we had won college finance, yet editorial independence, of The Black Call and El Machete, respectively the newspapers of the BSU and MASA (also called United Mexican American Students Association which then became MECHA). SDS so far as we knew were one organization with rifts, if they existed, were not obvious on campus.
So the cops beat up middle schoolers at Carver Jr High and the Black Students Alliance (mother body of all BSUs in the greater LA area) ordered student strikes. We did at City College and held and closed down the school for 3 days with that alliance.
Fast forward a couple or three years to UCLA and I'm there. The BSU there wasn't shit (campaigning for some shit like black cheerleaders) and so my efforts were mainly in the neighborhood as a member of the (black in fact but not in essence) Socialist Collective a localized org with an internationalist attitude.
So One-eyed Moshe Dayan gon speak at Pauley Pavilion (famed home of John Wooden's 10 time national championship teams with luminaries like Louis Alcindor (nee Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and current completely and totally dominant center-in-residence, Bill Walton. Here there is a second story that ought be told but this has gone on long enough.
Anyway me and 4 or 5 other SC comrades, yes we were unapologetically communists, are there and there is obvious a mainly verbal strife between two groups of, all I saw was, white people. I spotted Barbara Hertz who knew and respected me from LACC and I knew she was in a leadership role in PL. I asked her what was the problem and she indicated that 'the problem' was the RCP, who I had no knowledge of. I then asked her loud enough for soldiers on both sides to hear "Why the fuck are communists talking to this way to other communists". So my SC comrades took up a 5 man line in between the two and held it...for a minute or two. Finally one rather large RCPer broke through and I turned and hit him straight on the jaw. I didn't weigh 130lbs untiI was 30. He didn't blink. He was about to return the favor when my brother, Les Daniels RIP, swung the cane he had so wisely brought along along with a feigned limp, in an arc across the asshole's head. That still didn't seem to faze him either but...he went the other way. We gave up on the truce keeping and let the silly, sorry-assed mfers go at it.
That is sectarianism. And it was, is and most unfortunately will be an inherent weakness in this our great struggle for the human rights of all. And all of this stemming from the pursuit of 'the correct line'. Which is nothing but a manner of saying a desire, a need, to lead. A desire that, at bottom, is a desire to tell others what to do. Like you somebody's Daddy or something.
A couple of remarks on Partland’s documentary, #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump. I endorse the Goldwater rule which which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give an opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person. This documentary violates this code of conduct for obvious reasons. They are scared as hell. I think they also got their diagnoses all wrong, because what we see with Trump is only certain 'behaviour' and not a disorder. It is pointless to psychologise Trump and stick pejorative labels to it. He has his clique of yes nodding figures, so his mental health is probably still stable although his rhetoric, lies and bullying may indicate otherwise. That this will make me not popular, because it does not suggest an anti-fascist attitude, I don't care. There are other ways to beat them, to which I'll probably return in a separate post. Trump wants to be a king, the revengeful and omnipotent sovereign, a 'nuclear monarch', a term mentioned in the documentary. Schmitt famously said that he who decides on the state of exception is the definition of a sovereign. But the definition implied here is that he/she is sovereign who can give the launch command, without imposing the state of exception. A slightly different definition, which is probably false. There are many fingers on the button, so his power is not absolute. Missile operators could refuse just like Stanislav Petrov did in 1983 (The Man Who Saved the World, 2013) who violated military protocol because he thought it was a nuclear false alarm, which was correct. Trump wants to be a king by subverting the constitution and put his royal name in it, which he probably will try to do by creating mayhem during the upcoming election. Secondly, the documentary does not state other purposes a president should be fit for other than being commander in chief and being able to handle a pandemic. In fact he does not have to be fit at all because he is elected. Another reason to question representation in politics and democracy. It always ends up in autocracy, said Plato. Would Partland have made the same documentary on King Trump if the US was not a nuclear armed power? Probably not. #Unfit is psychiatric propaganda.
book review from Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism -- "You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance"
This book is the short memoirs of a couple of dozen ex-Progressive Labor Party and/or Worker-Student Alliance folks from the 1960s to the early 1970s. It reads well and their take on their experience is varied. Most have no regrets and believe that PLP was doing good work in that period against racism and the Vietnam War, but that it became increasingly sectarian and that their version of Leninist organization was strictly top-down authoritarian. Most of the contributors have become progressive activists and only one seems to be currently in a different socialist organization, although a few passed through others. I would love to have seen people contribute who stayed in PLP much longer, but the longest anyone seems to have remained was 1975. It would, in my opinion, be interesting to see similar books recounting the personal experience of people in other 60s and 70s organizations (and later decades for that matter). The format is an intriguing and revealing one that helps one get more inside the heads of the people who went through these events within an organizational framework.
The WSA was a major faction in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was blamed by many for the break-up of SDS in 1969. However, while some of the memoirs think that PLP's politics aided the break-up, none blame it solely on PLP and recall the fact their opponents soon split to form what was to become the Weather Underground and the Revolutionary Communist Party. https://forhumanliberation.blogspot.com/2020/03/3327-book-review-you-say-you-want.html?spref=pi
Louis Proyect's review in CounterPunch: "a must-read book" https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/
book is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/You-Say-Want-Revolution-Worker-Student/dp/0578406543
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: September 18, 2020 at 11:58:37 AM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-Buddhism]: Burton-Rose on Dai, 'The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China' Reply-To: h-review@...
Yingcong Dai. The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China. seattle University of Washington Press, 2019. 664 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-74545-9.
Reviewed by Daniel Burton-Rose (Seoul National University Language Education Institute) Published on H-Buddhism (September, 2020) Commissioned by Jessica Zu
With _The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China_, Yingcong Dai provides the definitive history of a key juncture in the trajectory of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Scholars have long identified the uprising of White Lotus sectarians and the prolonged campaign to squelch it as the pivot between eighteenth-century florescence and nineteenth-century declension. Before the rebellion, the Qing ranked along with the Habsburgs and the Ottomans as one of the early modern world's most capable empires. Under the energetic management of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95), they vastly expanded the boundaries of the preceding Ming dynasty (1368-1644), incorporating broad swaths of Inner and Northeast Asia into a self-consciously multiethnic empire. After the rebellion--with a depleted treasury and Qianlong's son, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796-1820), chastened by the failure of his early reform efforts--the internal dislocations and foreigner-inflicted humiliations to come gradually shifted from inconceivable to inevitable.
Dai performs an autopsy of unprecedented precision, laying bare the exact combinations of personal interest and institutional vulnerabilities that catalyzed the rupture in the capacity of Qing rule. As is often the case with Qing history, a surfeit rather than deficit of sources has been the obstacle to past scholarly efforts. _The White Lotus War _does an immense service in combing through the vast material produced by the Qing state during the war and its contentious aftermath. It details with clarity the complicated interface of moving parts, from emperors and metropolitan officials to imperial kinsmen and Mongols in the banner armies, Green Standard Army fighters, and locally raised troops deployed outside their own region, down to the provincial and county officials charged with provisioning the soldiers.
Challenging conventional wisdom at every turn, Dai consistently highlights the import of her own findings while providing minute details of the campaign. Her most significant contribution is convincingly demonstrating that the greatest damage inflicted on the Qing imperial apparatus during the conflict came not from the sectarian partisans, but from the Qing's own generals in the field and officials in the impacted provinces. Wartime salary hikes and ample opportunities for embezzlement effectively disincentivized decisive victory for the generals and their civilian collaborators. Dai concludes counterintuitively that it was precisely the lack of military threat posed by the rebels that permitted Qing generals to focus on their own self-enrichment. Dai's other significant interventions in the existing scholarly literature include: an assertion of primacy of economic interest over devotional fervor as a motivating factor for sectarian organizers; explanation of how late-Qianlong-period efforts to formalize procedures for military spending prompted fiduciary workarounds that spiraled out of control in the White Lotus conflict; documentation of the prominent role of militias _qua _mercenaries paid by the state--rather than self-defense troupes mobilized by local elites--in conducting the campaigns and complicating the demobilizations; and demonstrating that construction of fortifications was _not _a decisive factor in resolving the conflict.
_The White Lotus War_ consists of seven chapters bookended by an introduction and conclusion. The chapters effectively fall into two parts: a chronological narrative of the campaign (chapters 1-5) and diachronic analyses of military staffing (chapter 6) and a tally of the overall expenditures in the conflict (chapter 7). Fourteen maps provide welcome guidance in the geographical contours of the conflict, which centered in the topographically and administratively challenging mountainous regions of the shared border between Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Hubei.
The account of the campaign itself begins with the clandestine organization of multicentered uprisings, proceeding through the quasi-coordinated outbreak of the rebellion and its quick descent into quagmire. It continues with a discussion of the reform efforts Jiaqing implemented after his father's passing, including the removal of his father's notorious favorite, Hešen, and Jiaqing's own failed effort to create an analogous figure for himself in Nayancheng, whom he dispatched to the front to acquire military experience. Jiaqing's reforms soon failed; Dai attributes this to the power of vested interests and Jiaqing's own indecisiveness, which caused a rapid loss of credibility with those serving under him. The first part ends in tapering anticlimax, with Jiaqing declaring a definitive victory after years of blown deadlines and with pockets of rebels defiantly unpacified. Educators considering this book for classroom use should not be dissuaded by its length: these first five chapters can stand on their own and are within the upper limit of a week's assignment for an upper-division undergraduate course or graduate seminar.
Given the nature of the primary-source base, there is little in the way of impacted civilians speaking for themselves in _The White Lotus War_. Those arrested as sectarian partisans were often interpellated as the enemy the Qing state told itself it was fighting: the inappropriateness of the White Lotus moniker to the groups involved in conflict is ample testimony to the extent to which lay Buddhists were and remain defined by others. Dai does not convey a vivid sense of what it felt like to live in the tidal zone of conflict, a perspective that has become increasingly visible in recent works on the Taiping Civil War (1851-64), such as Stephen R. Platt's _Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War_ (2012), Tobie Meyer-Fong's _What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China_ (2013), and Xiaofei Tian's translation of Zhang Daye's _The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath_ (2013). Dai does convey the brutality suffered by the noncombatants caught between dueling forces prone to conscription/kidnapping and mass executions. Many battles were waged with cushions of civilians protecting sectarian and Qing forces; as Jiaqing was well aware, the dead then bolstered the Qing generals' headcounts of slain rebels. To the index entries "women, roles in sectarian movement" and "women, sale of," one could also add "women and children, violence against," as fleeing sectarian partisans often abandoned or slaughtered their own intimates, while sexual violence was also committed by Qing militias. In terms of human-scale perspectives on this conflict, Dai's remarks on injured and wounded soldiers raise the possibility that her sources could be used for a needed cultural and social history of disability in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China.
_The White Lotus War_ builds on Dai's previous monograph, _The Sichuan Frontier and Tibets: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing _(2009), in enhancing the vitality of the field of Qing military history in a manner that will be of interest to anyone whose work deals with Qing studies, early modern empires, and military modernization.
Citation: Daniel Burton-Rose. Review of Dai, Yingcong, _The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55361
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Bolman on Chez, 'Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture' and Sorenson and Matsuoka, 'Dog's Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations'
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: September 18, 2020 at 12:22:12 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Bolman on Chez, 'Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture' and Sorenson and Matsuoka, 'Dog's Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations' Reply-To: h-review@...
Keridiana Chez. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Columbus Ohio State University Press, 2017. 212 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8142-1334-6.
John Sorenson, Atsuko Karin Matsuoka, eds. Dog's Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations. Montreal McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019. 400 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7735-5906-6.
Reviewed by Brad Bolman (Harvard University) Published on H-Environment (September, 2020) Commissioned by Daniella McCahey
The last thirty-plus years bore witness to a remarkable flourishing of humanistic and social scientific studies of dogs, a "turn" neatly paralleled by increasing dog ownership across the globe and the pet industry's own explosive growth. Following early works like Harriet Ritvo's _The Animal Estate _(1989), which concerned the cultural importance of dog ownership and much else besides, a second generation of popularly focused, synthetic histories appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These dogged histories, such as Marion Schwartz's _A History of Dogs in the Early Americas _(1997), Mark Derr's _A Dog's History of America _(2004), or Laura Hobgood-Oster's _A Dog's History of the World _(2014), offered alternate versions of our received historical narratives by forefronting the role of man's supposed best friend. Much of this work, as historian Chris Pearson summarized in 2013, emphasizes the "agency" of dogs in hopes of "allow[ing dogs] to enter history as active beings rather than as static objects."[1]
There is much to be gained from these explorations into history's wagging tail, research highlighting what Donna J. Haraway called the "significant otherness" of a beloved companion. Yet reading back through the accumulating pile of dog books also proffers a vague sense of déjà vu. "Neither humans, as they currently exist, nor dogs would be here without each other," writes Hobgood-Oster.[2] "The one thing of which I am sure," explains Derr, "is that dogs will be around if we are."[3] "Dogs are not surrogates for theory," Haraway herself wrote. "They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote."[4] Dogs and humans, so conceived, are each other's sine qua non, a point which now appears, in its repetitions, less provocative or groundbreaking than it may once have. Although scientists still vigorously debate the exact origin of the human-dog bond (is it thirty thousand years or far less?), dogs unquestionably witnessed much of history's great drama. Yet the continuous procession of canid-ates raises anew a basic question: What are the stakes of studying dogs? Are such books the academic reflection of our personal and social investments in canine companionship, or do they offer something more?
Keridiana W. Chez tackles the issue in her new book, _Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men_, a literary analysis that leads affect studies into the dogpile. Chez's book distinguishes itself from some earlier dog histories by being explicitly globally minded, if Anglophonically focused. Across five chapters, the book explores how a contradictory, transoceanic "imagined community of humane people," opposed to inhumanity both at home and abroad, was constructed and buoyed through literary dog culture (p. 12). For Chez, dogs played a crucial role in Victorian culture as "emotional prostheses" (p. 17), a term which is conceptual kin to Ivan Kreilkamp's "anthroprosthesis" and gels with a broader approach in recent decades to study the dog-as-technology.[5] Where Kreilkamp saw anthroprosthesis as a way of conceptualizing the use of "animals in order to define the non-animality of the human,"[6] Chez is particularly interested in the way dogs served to mediate relationships and define "humaneness" in the Victorian period. In chapter 1, for instance, she shows how Dickensian "happy families" rely on the prosthetic dog to construct the normative "home." Drawing on George Eliot's _Middlemarch _(1871-72)_ _and_ Adam Bede _(1859), chapter 2 on the other hand reveals how the dog's otherness allowed it to serve as a key agent in a character's emotional growth: "_Adam Bede _and _Middlemarch _show how the animal could act as an appropriated, incorporated part of the human, shaping the proverbial course of human events and narratives. Human events were human because they were also dog events, and stories were more human because they included the stories of dogs" (p. 75). One step removed, Chez's insight might be revealing about the genre of dog histories itself.
The second portion of the book turns more explicitly to the creation of something like a "humane public sphere" in literature, emphasizing the connections between dog-prosthesis and Victorian masculinity. Chapter 3's engagement with Margaret Marshall Saunders focuses on the way that mastery over dogs became central to definitions of masculinity for a period in which the sense of control over God's creation was shaken (due to the writing of Darwin, in particular), while chapter 4 reads Bram Stoker's _Dracula _(1897) against fears of rabies in order to reveal the elaboration of a masculinity grounded in "paranoid love" (p. 104) for one's domestics and dependents. The book ends, close to the start of the twentieth century, with literary death knells for early Victorian optimism about the man-dog relation, reading Jack London's evocation of the (satirically Agamben-inspired) "bare-dog" in _The Call of the Wild _(1903) and _White Fang _(1906). For Chez, London's texts reveal a backlash to earlier discourses of humaneness: here, the man-and-dog story transforms into one of the individual man mastering an independent, individual dog, symptomatic of the "disconnection" and "isolationism" of a coming era (p. 149).
Although the book feels abbreviated at times (its conclusion is a brisk four pages), and its argument about a globe-spanning humane imagined community would benefit from both geographical and temporal expansion, _Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men_ makes a compelling argument for continued study of the literary canine, particularly given our "profligately" Victorian approach to pet ownership (p. 152). As Chez notes, the period under study reveals a crucial transformation of a dog's purpose from explicitly physical labor to an emotional work. The dog as emotional prothesis worked to construct the "humanity" and "humaneness" of its people, rather than run their treadmills.[7] Further studies in this light, Chez hopes, might reveal the dog as a bridge not to our own human(e)ness, but to itself. Whether this is simply the "bare-dog" otherwise or something else entirely remains uncertain.
If _Victorian Dogs _was forced to justify and at times atone for its narrow period focus, _Dog's Best Friend? Rethinking Canid-Human Relations_, a new collection edited by John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka, offers a wildly heterogeneous counterpoint. An explicitly activist text framed by the "critical animal studies" approach that its editors have played a key role in theorizing, much of _Dog's Best Friend? _is an attempt to answer its titular question. If domestic dogs are characterized as man's best friend, the introduction asks, how could wolves and other canids be vilified for so long as savage monsters and demons? What does the coexistence of these opposing perspectives mean? As in _Victorian Dogs_, the editors wonder "how representations of various canids function in the social construction and performance of human self-definition and boundaries in terms of class, family, gender, nation, and race and how they are used to assert power, prestige, and status" (p. 9). Here Sorenson and Matsuoka fluidly encapsulate what we might call a central vein of the "new" dog studies approach. Yet in seeking to give the reader a bit of everything, _Dog's Best Friend?_ ends up, like many edited collections, an imbalanced product. The blending of methodologies and styles, a kind of accidental reflection of the mixed stray dogs championed in many chapters, leaves some portions of the text far smoother than others.
The book's first section offers three interesting case histories of human-canid relations that take us from the gendered implications of ancient Greek and Roman views on dogs to the class-structure of England's early modern dog laws before ending with the contradictory role of dog and fox lure in Tokugawa-era Japan. It is an appealing and insightful jaunt through dog history that nonetheless leaves many questions, periods, and places out of sight. England is well-trod dog history territory, at this point--Martin Wallen's chapter, "Well-Bred is Well Behaved," makes for a nice companion to his own _Whose Dog Are You? _(2017) as well as the excellent _The Invention of the Modern Dog _(2018)--and many readers will leave curious about dog culture elsewhere in Europe, in less-studied parts of Asia, or on the African continent as a whole.[8]
Section 2, "Dogs in Space," which is by far the longest portion of the book, soothes some of these curiosities by exploring contemporary sociological and anthropological questions about dog ownership. Karla Armbruster analyzes the lingering dilemmas over a dog's "proper" place in public space, while Chia-ju Chang unpacks the fascinating kin relations of dog-protecting "Gou Mama" in Taiwan. Across these chapters, the focus is squarely on the plight and significance of "stray" or "mongrel" dogs. As Chang writes, "the story of dog mothers and their fur-kids demands that we think about what it means to be a stray and to go stray in a capitalist society" (p. 227). Because most of these chapters take place outside the "West," however, the section somewhat unintentionally situates "strays" as a non-Western problem and "purebred" dogs as a uniquely Western concern. Further efforts to complicate this dichotomy would be of great utility in future studies.
Section 3 is a truncated look at "Exploitation," with one chapter on the consumption of dogs, by John Sorenson, and a second chapter about the American nongovernmental organization Beagle Freedom Project (BFP). Sorenson does a skillful job of disentangling "cultural" discourses over the consumption of dogs, walking a necessary tightrope between condemnation and acceptance while articulating the genuine ethical complexities over consuming other animate creatures. Tim Fowler's exploration of the rhetorical strategies of the BFP is valuable as one of the first scholarly engagements with a project that has seen surprising legislative success in recent years, but the chapter relies heavily on the self-presentation of the BFP and its allies. This leaves space for other scholars to more critically examine how groups like the BFP, controversially supported by Lara Trump, fit within a broader activist milieu focused on the plight of experimental animals, including the (thus far) unexplored "White Coat Waste Project."
Finally, section 4 brings us to the plight of wolves and coyotes. Here Rob Laidlaw's extensive study of the umwelt of wolves and his analysis of new scientific research into wolf movements is the standout contribution. Laidlaw makes a powerful case for the failure of zoos to give adequate space for wolves to be themselves (bare-wolves, perhaps) and ends with a call to rethink received ideas about wolf dangers and captivity: "Perhaps it is time for zoos to phase out, with few exceptions, the keeping of grey wolves and other wide-ranging carnivores altogether," he writes (p. 333). Stephanie Rutherford's chapter gives us a history of wolves in the Canadian imagination with many excellent nuggets of insight, particularly concerning the historical role of wolf bounties in relation to settler colonialism. "Some wolves became dogs, and others remained resolutely part of the wilderness that needed taming," she writes, rearticulating the collection's central paradox (p. 349).
Where do our studies of dogs and other canids go from here? As Sorenson and Matsuoka note in _Dog's Best Friend?_'s conclusion, much research remains to be done in offering a genuinely comprehensive account of human-canid relations. Here and elsewhere, many peoples, places, and times are absent. So, too, are many kinds of canid: Dholes or African wolves, for instance, or a variety of less-studied dog breeds. But _Dog's Best Friend? _is particularly valuable for centering capitalism in our stories of the human-canine bond, offering in-depth analysis of what Haraway called the "encounter-value" of dogs.[9] Future scholars now have a variety of openings through which to problematize and further scrutinize how the pet industry has supported and constrained various forms of canine interaction and study. Such analysis offers a valuable path which might circumvent some moldier platitudes about human-canine connections in favor of the sort of questions that Chez and others have raised concerning how emotional connections themselves have been utilized and, occasionally, weaponized. There is, additionally, room for further studies on the role of dogs in a variety of scientific disciplines, a curious oversight in the current collections considering the importance of canine research not just in the past but also the present. If numerous theorizations of the human-canine bond have relied on new genomic or neuroscientific approaches, extended examinations of those sciences might reveal even more about the cooperative and combative relationships between humans and their barking comrades. Dogs are now unquestionably agents of history; the exciting question is what comes next.
Citation: Brad Bolman. Review of Chez, Keridiana, _Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture_ and Sorenson, John; Matsuoka, Atsuko Karin, eds., _Dog's Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations_. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54997
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Review of *The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA—1939-1956* by Aaron J. Leonard | Tony Pecinovsky | People's World
The Almanac Singers in New York about 1942, from left: Woody Guthrie, Millard lampell, Bess Hawes, Pete Seeger, Arthur Stern, Sis Cunningham. | People's World Archives
Musicians Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, among others, helped to mold and shape generations of music lovers. In many ways, their impact on the folk and popular music genre cannot be overstated.
However, Seeger, Guthrie, and Cunningham weren’t just musicians. They were political radicals. And their political, satirical and witty working-class music and lyrics provided food for thought for millions of activists throughout the 20th century.
They were partisan. They chose sides. Their politics were well known, including to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At different times, and in their own ways, Seeger, Guthrie, and Cunningham—as well as many other folk musicians—associated themselves with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
Paul Robeson at the 1949 Peekskill Concert-turned-riot. | People’s World Archives
Some, such as Seeger, would continue a relationship with the CPUSA and individual Communists well into the 2000s. Others, such as Oscar Brand, denounced the CPUSA and communism during the emerging McCarthy-era Red Scare. And still others simply distanced themselves and moved on to other avenues of political engagement as the Civil Rights era emerged.
In The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists, and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA—1939-1956, author Aaron J. Leonard provides an illuminating glimpse into the world of radical folk music, the CPUSA, and the FBI’s efforts to infiltrate, discredit, and sow division among what was for a brief but long resonating moment in history a vibrant political-cultural collaboration.
As Leonard notes, “In the decade of the 1930s and 1940s there arose a movement that tapped the rich vein of American folk music and would forever transform the U.S. cultural landscape. At its core was a group of folk music enthusiasts, many with deep and abiding ties to the Communist Party, USA.”
Some historians and biographers have argued that these ties to the CPUSA were fleeting or passing. Leonard, however, has a different take. “Their association with the Party was neither accidental nor capricious; it was rather a conscious choice,” he writes.
Leonard highlights a few of the best-known folk musicians, including Alan Lomax, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, Burl Ives, the Weavers, and the Almanac Singers, among others. Leonard also includes Paul Robeson in his list of folk singers. “Robeson is not largely remembered as a folk singer, though folk music was at the heart of some of his best work—a listen to ‘Old Man River’ or ‘No More Auction Block’ is a testament to this.” Further, “While Robeson himself was not at the core of the left-wing folk circle, he was a central figure in the larger left-wing cultural mix and as such intersected with it in important ways,” as we will note below.
Woven throughout Leonard’s book are a handful of FBI reports and index cards on prominent folk musicians as part of the FBI’s campaign to document and justify its political surveillance, intimidation, and repression known as the McCarthy-era Red Scare. One such report on Agnes “Sis” Cunningham noted an attempt to arrest her, along with other Oklahoma CPUSA members and supporters, during a raid of the party’s Oklahoma City bookstore. It was added that Cunningham was “SUGGESTED FOR CUSTODIAL DETENTION.” At that time, numerous government detention camps had been constructed to house known Communists and their allies in the advent of a war with the Soviet Union.
To understand the FBI’s surveillance and investigation of folk musicians, it is important to also understand the larger political context of the late 1940s into the 1950s. According to Leonard, “the rulers of America” were “[c]onfronted by a world in which communism was ascendant,” and as a result “they began an initiative to neutralize” the CPUSA and the various union, mutual aid, fraternal, civil rights, youth, and cultural organizations Communists led, including People’s Songs and People’s Artists.
The attacks levied against cultural artists, such as Robeson, were central to this campaign of neutralization. The 1949 Peekskill Concert-turned-riot, in which thousands of racists, white supremacists, American Legion, and VFW members attacked Robeson and other artists—while the police did nothing—was illustrative of the forces then being unleashed to attack the CPUSA, and those within its orbit, as a precursor to destroying the Bill of Rights.
The concert, originally organized by People’s Artists as a benefit for the party-led Civil Rights Congress, was quickly rescheduled and despite the repression drew at least 15,000 people.
Like the CPUSA itself, it wasn’t long before folk musicians would also be called before the inquisitors of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Coupled with FBI surveillance and intimidation—along with possible “CUSTODIAL DETENTION”—folk musicians were now being coerced into testifying. Interestingly, future turncoat and disgraced FBI informant Harvey Matusow would initially find a welcoming political home and full-time employment at the People’s Songs Music Center prior to being approached by the FBI.
Ultimately, as Leonard notes, “the FBI was eager to latch onto anything—including hearsay—in order to bolster its justification for monitoring Seeger, Guthrie, and others.”
Of course, after the Khrushchev revelations of Stalin’s crimes in 1956, like much of the CPUSA’s membership generally, many folk musicians left the party. Many went on to have long professional careers. Some continued to associate with leftist, labor, civil rights, and peace organizations. A few remained within the CPUSA’s orbit. Some, like Seeger, were not shy about their continued support of the CPUSA.
For anyone interested in folk musicians, the CPUSA, and the FBI, Aaron J. Leonard’s informative, readable study is a welcome introduction.
The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA—1939-1956 By Aaron J. Leonard Repeater Books, 2020 323 pp., $16.95 paperbound ISBN 9781913462000
[Tony Pecinovsky is the president of the St. Louis Workers' Education Society (WES), a 501c3 non-profit organization chartered by the St. Louis Central Labor Council as a Workers Center. His articles have been published in the St. Louis Labor Tribune, Alternet, Shelterforce, Political Affairs, and Z-Magazine, among other publications. He is the author of "Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA," and is available to speak at your community center, union hall or campus.]
The host of “Ultra Strips Down” is Jannik Schow, left. Credit...Betina Garcia for The New York Times
COPENHAGEN — “OK, children, does anyone have a question?” the TV show’s host, Jannik Schow, asked. Only a few in the audience of 11- to 13-year-olds raised their hands. “Remember, you can’t do anything wrong,” he said. “There are no bad questions.”
You can’t blame the children if their thoughts were elsewhere. On a stage before them in a heated studio in Copenhagen stood five adults in bathrobes. There was a brief moment of silence, as faces turned serious. Having discussed it for days before in school, the children knew what was coming next. Mr. Schow gave a little nod, and the adults cast off their robes.
Facing the children, and the cameras, they stood completely naked, like statues, with their hands and arms folded behind their backs.
And so began a recording of the latest episode of an award-winning Danish children’s program, “Ultra Strips Down,” which is shown on Ultra, the on-demand children’s channel of the national broadcaster, DR. The topic today: skin and hair.
The show’s producers say the program is meant as an educational tool to fight body shaming and encourage body positivity. And so first reluctantly, later enthusiastically, the children from the Orestad School in Copenhagen asked the adults questions like: “At what age did you grow hair on the lower part of your body?” “Do you consider removing your tattoos?” “Are you pleased with your private parts?”
One of the adults, Martin, answered that he had never had “negative thoughts” about his private parts. Another adult, also named Martin, admitted that when he was young he had worried about size. “But the relationship with myself has changed over time,” he said.
With serious looks on their faces, the children nodded.
The program is now in its second season, and while perhaps a shock to non-Danes, it is highly popular in Denmark. Recently, however, a leading member of the right-wing Danish People’s Party, Peter Skaarup, said he found “Ultra Strips Down” to be “depraving our children.”
“It is far too early for children” to start with male and female genitalia, he told B.T., a Danish tabloid. At that age, he said, they “already have many things running around in their heads.”
“They have to learn it at the right time,” he added, saying this information should be presented by parents or schools “so that it is not delivered in this vulgar way, as the children’s channel does.”
For the most part, though, Danes have long been comfortable with nudity, at public beaches, for instance.
Mr. Schow, 29, who helped develop the concept of the show after a producer came up with the idea, said the point was also to counter the daily bombardment of young people with images of perfect — unrealistic — bodies. The adults are not actors, but volunteers.
“Perhaps some people are like, ‘Oh, my God, they are combining nakedness and kids,’” Mr. Schow said. “But this has nothing to do with sex, it’s about seeing the body as natural, the way kids do.”
Many Danes believe children should not be shielded from the realities of life, giving them a lot of unsupervised time to play and explore, even if they might hurt themselves.
“We recognize the significance of a bruise,” said Sofie Münster, a nationally recognized expert in “Nordic Parenting.” “Danish parenting generally favors exposing children rather than shielding them.”
One famous example of how far the Danes take this philosophy was the euthanization and dissection of a giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014, where children observed from the front row.
Abroad it was seen by many as a nightmarish spectacle, topped off by the feeding of the carcass to the lions, but in Denmark people shrugged their shoulders. The children in the audience that day had asked “very good questions,” one zoo official told CNN.
“While some may prefer to be overcareful, we may prefer to be under-careful,” Ms. Münster said. “It’s about being free and finding yourself.” If a child falls from a tree and breaks an arm, that might not be “ideal,” she added, but it can serve a larger purpose.
A children’s program featuring naked adults might be taking the Danish approach to the extreme, she admitted. But the Danish way of dealing with easing children’s anxieties over body issues is “to expose them” to naked bodies.
“This is how we educate our children,” she said. “We show them reality as it is.”
Asked during the program on skin and hair why she decided to take part, one of the adults, Ule, 76, said she wanted to show the children that perfect bodies are rare and that what they see on social media is often misleading.
“On Facebook or Instagram, many people are fashion models,” she said. “Us here, we have ordinary bodies. I hope you will understand that normal bodies look like this,” she told the audience, pointing at her naked self.
During the recording, when one of the Martins told the children that when he was their age, boys and girls used to share the same locker room and showers, Mr. Schow intervened, asking them if they would find that awkward.
“Yessss,” they all responded. “It feels more safe to shower with others of the same gender,” a boy explained on camera.
Shame of being imperfect comes from social media, Mr. Schow said.
“Ninety percent of the bodies you see on social media are perfect, but that is not how 90 percent of the world looks,” he said. “We have extra fat, or hair, or pimples. We want to show children from an early age that this is fine.”
In its first season, in 2019, “Ultra Strips Down” won an award for the best children’s program of 2019 at the Danish TV Festival. In the 2020 season, the show, which is produced by the Danish branch of Warner Bros. International Television Production, will offer five new episodes on a variety of topics, each to an audience from mostly different schools.
The children’s safety comes first, the show’s producers said. Parents must consent for children to be on the program; the producers do not show the children and the adults in a single shot; and the children are asked frequently if they feel comfortable.
If a child does become uncomfortable, she or he can join their teacher in the studio. “But we have had over 250 children in our audience,” Mr. Schow said, “and this has never happened.”
Rasmus Engelhardt Gundersen, a graphic designer who is the father of one of the children participating, said, “We had no reservations.”
“The notion that people are different and have different bodies is something we’d like children to experience,” he added.
The recorded episodes, now available in censored clips of the program on YouTube, feature adults with different body types — white, Black, fat, thin, short, tall, old and young. There was John, a person with dwarfism, and Muffe, a man who had small horns implanted under the skin of his bald head.
Complete inclusiveness is one of the show’s key objectives, which is why the children were also introduced to Rei, who is transgender, had a vasectomy and testosterone treatment, and who identifies as they/them.
“I’m not a boy, not a girl, I’m a bit of everything,” said Rei, showing a tattoo-covered chest and a shaved head. “I have seven hairs of beard now,” Rei said.
The children wanted to know if Rei had “felt different in school,” what bathroom they use and what swimwear they chose for the beach.
After the show, three children sat cross-legged in the grass outside the TV studio to discuss the experience. At first, they said, they had giggled at the idea of the show. But they had learned something useful, they said.
“It was funny,” said Theodore Knightley, 11. “I liked the advice they gave us.”
Ida Engelhardt Gundersen, 13, said she had been nervous at the start. “I’m not used to seeing volunteers butt naked and asking them questions,” she said. “But we learned about the body and about how other people feel about their bodies.”
Sonya Chakrabarthy Geckler, 11, said that she hadn’t been sure what to expect. But, she said, she “felt more confident about her own body now.”
//Louis, I’m not deleting all below per your instructions because I want to re-show what’s good to know//
so:
every reply I make to a biden pitch I’m going to add “only because he supports banking at the P.O. and Fed guarantee all Americans a bank account.” Might help if I’m not alone.
On Sep 18, 2020, at 8:33 AM, Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
WILMINGTON,
Del. — When Joe Biden releasedeconomic
recommendationstwo months ago, they
included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers:
allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having
the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account.
But in
private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign
made it clear those proposals would not be central to
Biden’s agenda.
“They
basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise tokeep the
Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into
it,’ ” said one investment banker, referring to liberal
supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private
talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls.
Working my way through
John Bellamy Foster’s magisterial “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology,”
it dawned on me that there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew that
Marx and Engels were consumed with ecological problems, even
though the word wasn’t in their vocabulary. To a large extent, my
awareness came from reading another great Foster book, “Marx’s Ecology.” However, I couldn’t help
shake the feeling that in between Marx/ Engels and Rachel Carson
it was mostly a blur. The failure of the socialist states to
support Green values reinforced that feeling. From Chernobyl to
the shrinking of the Aral Sea, there was not much to distinguish
capitalist and socialist society.
After finishing “The
Return of Nature,” that blur gave way to clarity. Foster’s
intellectual history shows a chain of thinkers connecting
Marx/Engels to today’s greatest ecological thinkers, from Rachel
Carson to Barry Commoner. To use a cliché, they stood on the
shoulders of giants.
