This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Reviewed Books


Bad As I Wanna Be, Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown, NY: Delacorte Press, 1996

This autobiography of basketball star Dennis Rodman covers all the most titillating aspects of Rodman's life--sex, fame and money. He has a chapter about his romance with the music star Madonna and speaks freely about many famous people in basketball.

We at MIM do not find Dennis Rodman so very unusual. He is simply right about all the stupid conformity in basketball and life in general. With the huge sums of money infused into professional sports we find that the management of the San Antonio Spurs and the National Basketball Association (NBA) generally value conformity, and safe messages for its audience, more than winning the game or playing it with greater athleticism. As such, Dennis Rodman becomes a symbol of how ruling class demands for conformity stifle sports and the economy (through analogy).

We find that public attention to Rodman's supposed antics is in fact a means of control by the owners of basketball teams set on delivering non- controversial family entertainment--even if that means the sport of basketball should be damned. What we end up with is not the best basketball, but the basketball that generates the most revenue according to the guess of conservative entrepreneurs. Rodman spells it out that big money goes into hyping players such as Michael Jordan, Shaq and Grant Hill. The referees also know what entertains the public and they cut certain kinds of players slack to do certain kinds of thing in the game if the public will be more entertained. One job of the referees is to call fouls--to make those subjective judgments which nonetheless make and break careers.

Also important are the fines imposed by the organization of the league. Fines and bad press from owners are the ways in which basketball players come to go along with the charade of competitive sport. Dennis Rodman may not play any differently than anyone else, but he can be ejected from games, called crazy, have his capitalist lifestyle cut back and get condemned in the press. If a player gets ejected from the games or fouls out of the games, that player still gets his guaranteed salary but he may lose out on other perks and his next contract may be impossible to obtain. Meanwhile, players such as Shaq and Grant Hill who the NBA thinks will bring in the entertainment money have the way cleared for them to be stars before they leave college and join the NBA. Such is the influence of money on sport.

We at MIM believe in amateur sports over spectating. Too much energy of spectators goes into sports like football, baseball and basketball which the masses should be playing themselves instead of watching. That is not to say we oppose professional efforts at human achievement. Stalin believed that all kinds of sporting, science, art and other feats should be publicized and backed with state funding. For instance, the feat of trekking to the North Pole or climbing a mountain was something that Stalin believed in giving media to. This was Stalin's way of leading the people to understand their own capabilities in a concrete way.

Such feats can be organized and massively supported with resources without the spectator craze we have in the profit-mad entertainment industry in the imperialist countries. Currently the money and the sexual rewards for athletes and other famous entertainers take on a life of their own, as Rodman himself explains of both the case of basketball players and music stars like Madonna. Rodman correctly believes there are many sick aspects to such fame and fortune.

Rodman himself is cashing in on the decadence of imperialist society that leaves people searching for stars in sports and music to fill a gap in their boring lives. We do not believe there is anything particularly radical about anything he says about being bisexual-minded or wanting to play his last NBA game nude. He is just making himself more of a commodity with that and his colored hair and female clothing stunts. (We do applaud his speaking out against homophobia.)

However, he is astute in calling himself a "sports slave" and comparing himself to prostitutes and models (p. 81). In the imperialist countries, we have this phenomenon of the Madonna and the Rodman. While biological females dominate the modeling and prostitution businesses, biological males dominate the sports. In both cases the body is the center of attention for entertainment and in both cases the stars are selected for their unique or dramatic physical characteristics.

It takes the free time that goes with money in order to have physical characteristics become sexual privilege. Somewhere in our leisure-time culture Rodman goes from being a 220 pound 6 foot 8 Black man to being a sex symbol. Rodman and Madonna are not sexploited, but in fact they hold privileges connected to their own exceptional bodies and the imperialist system of gender oppression. The issues of able-bodiedness and access to the human body are important parts of leisure-time life that form the bulk of what we call gender oppression. Men in prison may have similar physical characteristics to Rodman, but they are gender oppressed because their access to sex and the human body is completely controlled by the state.

Other so-called communist parties shy away from saying that having a harem like Rodman or Madonna is sexual privilege. They talk about "bourgeois feminism" all the time without ever talking about gender oppression. For example, most phony Marxists side with the players in the sports strikes and believe Madonna is sexploited because she is a sex object. In fact Madonna is part of the ruling class in the sexual hierarchy; she has access to the human body in leisure-time and the means of production, both to the utmost degree.

(from MIM Notes 126, Nov. 1996)

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Between Feminism And Labor: The Significance Of The Comparable Worth Movement, Linda M. Blum Berkeley: University of Galfforaia Press, 1991

by MC17

The comparable worth movement merits Maoist attention. It could go the way of reactionary imperialist class interests, or revolutionary feminist interests. Revolutionary feminist influence is necessary to steer it on the correct course.

Comparable worth is a concept of equal pay for equivalent work. It is a method of evaluating jobs based on an assumption that equal pay is deserved for jobs that require equal training and labor.

Historically, women have been placed in a subordinate position in the labor force. Regardless of their job placement, they are paid less than men in the same or equivalent fields.

The effects of this patriarchal practice are different across classes. Those in the upper classes experience a far smaller wage disparity than do those in lower class positions. This is not surprising as upper class women often take the capitalists' side in reaping both class and gender privilege.

The movement for comparable worth has the has progressive potential of taking from the overpaid men to give to the underpaid women within each class. Obviously not an overall solution to economic economic disparity, this movement could strike blows against this the patriarchy and provide a context within which women will be educated in opposition to the concept of pay according to gender. This will make the problems of pay according to class barkgroundthe much easier to grasp. This could expose the benefits of socialist society and the detriments of capitalist society, if revolutionary feminist leadership takes the movement to its correct conclusion.

The benefit to Maoists, besides the raised consciousness of those activists, is the advancement towards communism that this movement could provide. Under socialism we will still have to battle the patriarchy, and the more of that battle that is won under capitalism, the easier the fight will be under socialism.

In the converse, comparable worth could mean taking more from the Third World in the form of superprofits to raise the status of women to that of men. This would only serve to strengthen First World women's alliance with the imperialists and increase the patriarchal and class oppression of the Third World.

This book review criticizes the comparable worth movement from the revolutionary feminist perspective.

Between Feminism and Labor describes white working-class women's attempt to become equal with white working-class men. Blum premises her book on the assumption that working women in this country are oppressed based on their class position as well as their gender position. The women she studies are in clerical, library or equivalent positions. They were mobilized to work with their local union over the issue of comparable worth. Blum offers no evidence for their class oppression, perhaps because there is no material support for this class analysis.

While the comparable worth movement has potential within the white working class, it is important that activists see this as a gender inequality issue and not a movement of the proletariat. Activists should also realize that this inequality is, in fact, rather insignificant when one considers that even First World women as a group are receiving more than the value of their labor-power.

MIM understands that there are pay inequalities between men and women across classes. But the movement for comparable worth Blum describes has the typical white feminist slant that Ignores the economic realities of the proletariat in and outside of this country.

White workers in the United States are receiving the benefits of the exploitation and superexploitation of Third World workers in the form of a wage higher than the value of their labor- power. The comparable worth movement Blum studies aims to raise Amerikan working women's benefits to the level of Amerikan men's. While a potential blow for the patriarchy, but no class victory, and certainly not a union victory for the working people of Amerika.

Organizing white people in Amerika around their class oppression will not create revolutionary consciousness. This activism will only result in struggle for a bigger piece of the pie. Ironically, Blum notes that the comparable worth movement could result in a loss of income or jobs for some women while benefiting others because of the limited size of the pie.

Blum sees comparable worth as a radical leap from the affirmative action movement. The difference is that comparable worth allows women to stay in their jobs, recognizing the social influences that keep women out of male-dominated sectors, instead offering them equality with men in equivalent male sectors.

On the one hand, this approach is good in recognizing that we have to do the best we can under the current system while we try to change it It also recognizes that placing women in male jobs is often only tokenism that does not offer them better pay or status than the traditionally female jobs, since they are placed in the dead end areas of these traditionally male-sector jobs. It is also a step in the direction of recognizing the inequalities created by the capitalist wage system of evaluating the monetary value of different jobs.

On the negative side, Blum points out that comparable worth will bring men into traditionally female-dominated sectors of the job market as it becomes more economically acceptable for them to join these fields. From her brief look at this phenomenon, Blum found that these men tended to create more prestigious positions within the female- dominated fields so that even there they would hold more authority and enjoy higher pay and create upward mobility.

Blum cites several successes of the comparable worth movement in which women were promised higher pay through periodic increases. She also noted a number of failed attempts.

The movement is hampered by a job evaluation process that assigns value to labor, and thus wages, based on capitalist values. These values are hierarchical, placing mental labor above physical labor, and traditionally male labor above traditionally female labor. But it is just this problem which could lead to a greater revolutionary consciousness among the women fighting for comparable worth. The women Blum studies recognize some of the problems with the job evaluation process and focus efforts on changing this system.

Even within the constraints, the job evaluations find significant pay inequality between female jobs and their "male counterparts" in male- dominated fields. Changing this inequality comes down to restructuring Amerikan wealth so that white women can get their "fair" piece of the pie.

While MIM supports women taking from the patriarchy to receive a higher wage, MIM also recognizes that this movement does not challenge the fundamental structure of the patriarchy, nor does it attempt to help the truly gender oppressed.

Blum found that the comparable worth movement often does not enjoy the support of union men because they recognize that the pay the women are demanding has to come from somewhere, and the most likely targets are their pockets These contradictions and difficulties the comparable worth movement faces are indicative of the capitalist system it chooses to operate under.

Blum's analysis of the movement paints a picture of internal struggle within the overpaid Amerikan "working class". The women of this class are trying to eliminate effects the patriarchy has on them while leaving its symbiotic structure of capitalism as well as the patriarchal oppression of the majority of the world's people intact.

Blum does not discuss a comparable worth movement among the Black or Latino proletariat in Amerika and MIM wonders if there is such a movement There is obviously little class value in the comparable worth movement for the proletarian women who would not be significantly improving their economic position if they were to win a battle to elevate their salaries to the level of "male-counterpart jobs."

MIM understands that the current comparable worth movement is incorrect both in its practice within the capitalist system, and in its identification of gender as the principal contradiction. With these incorrect practices it will never achieve anything more than relative equality for white women in the First World.

A comparable worth movement working to eliminate the patriarchy for all people must be a revolutionary movement that seeks to destroy all class, nation, and gender inequalities, focusing on the principal contradiction at this time--between oppressed and oppressor nations.

(From MIM Theory 2/3)

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Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of the New White Culture, By James Ridgeway, Thunder's Mouth Press: New York, 1990

By MC12

Blood in the Face is a book and movie combo about white supremacy under the direction of James Ridgeway, who writes for the Village Voice in New York City.

The book covers general trends in white supremacy over the last century, while the movie documents a single white supremacist conference held in rural Michigan in 1990. Between the two, the creators paint a sketchy picture of these movements which offers a lot of good information but not much understanding of the roots of racism, national oppression and the material basis for fascism in Amerika.

Taking something of a zoo-goer's approach, these efforts tend to look at the masses of white supremacists as alienated deviants, manipulated and duped by greater powers. According to this romantic (and common) view, working class whites don't benefit from white supremacy, but are themselves victims of it.

For example, the book emphasizes the leadership of powerful monopolists such as Henry Ford, who was the "main publicist" of Jewish conspiracy theories in the 1920s. Ridgeway quotes Adolf Hitler as saying, "I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections ... We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America...... (p.43)

Although Ridgeway & Co. place too much emphasis on the demagogic leaders of white supremacist movements, they correctly warn of the increasing tendency toward openly fascist organization among white workers, most of them originally "normal" people, not freaks.

One Nazi tool-and-die worker from a Michigan auto Plant tells the filmmakers: "We're just common people, working class people, everyday all-American people ... and we've realized that the only thing we've got to thank for the position we're in is our white culture, and we're not going to let it be destroyed by any sub-human trash."

Theoretician Bob Miles--a former Republican party leader, insurance executive, and official in the George Wallace presidential campaign in 1968 (p. 22)--explains in the Film that white supremacist converts "will come from the working class, and that's where our strength is even today. When we had 2,000 members of the Klan in Michigan back in 1970, the bulk of our people came out of the auto factories ... that's not the upper class, that's the working class."

The book includes a fairly complete genealogy of supremacist groups going back to the original KKK, which, although useful, serves to create an artificially sharp distinction between the open white supremacists and the mainstream of Amerikan politics.

George Wallace was "pro-labor" for white people, and the Southern white working class supported him almost entirely. He won 77% of all working class votes in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1968 election. (That support was echoed by David Duke followers in last year's governor's race in Louisiana.) The failure of white industrial unions in the South is in fact largely due to the national leadership's shift toward integrationism during the Civil Rights Movement(1)

When the Montgomery carpenters' union in 1956 erected a gallows in the city's downtown, and hung the NAACP in effigy, the structure bore the sign, "Built by Organized Labor."(2)

The effects of openly white supremacist movements on the political mainstream are important, and for that reason it's not useless to document the groups and leaders Ridgeway & Co. focus on. Counting 3,000 violent racist incidents between 1980 and 1986--including 138 attempted or successful bombings (p. 24)--is worthwhile, even the producers and writers of Blood in the Face arbitrarily leave out countless acts of police brutality and common exploitation.

Ridgeway does deal with supremacist splits, especially over the issue of "going mainstream" as practiced by Duke. Some supremacists see Duke as a hopeless liberal sell-out, while others see his incursion into electoral politics as good strategy.

The relationship between openly fascist groups and mainstream politics is usually ignored. In the mid-1920s there were 3-4 million Klan members.(p.34) Now there are less. But is white supremacy any weaker? Ask Rodney King. That's the link missing here.

Notes:

1.Robert J. Norrell, "Labor Trouble: George Wallace and Union Politics in Alabama"; in Robert H. Zieger, ed., Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South. The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville, 1991, pp. 266-67

2. Ibid, p 254

(From MIM Theory 1)

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The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science, by Pat Shipman, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1994. 319 pp.

by MC12

By a paleoanthropologist, this new book brings debates and discoveries about human evolution to a non-academic audience. Readable and informative, Evolution runs from Darwin, through eugenics and Nazism, right up to the Human Genome Project and the Violence Initiative. Still, it's not as good as Stephen J. Gould's (less current) The Mismeasure of Man, which has a better analysis for political purposes.

Her biggest weakness is a naive liberal quest for value-free science, and bemoaning the fact that biological theories get caught up in the politics of the day. For her, power struggles belong outside the realm of science, and scientists can't do good science if they are going to be held accountable for the political implications of their work.

DARWIN BEATS THE CHURCH

While Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species (1859) struck a progressive blow against the hegemony of the Church, it did not undermine hierarchy among humans. It was falsely used (though not against Darwin's will) to explain differences in wealth and power between different human populations. Darwin himself thought non- Europeans were not fully human.(1)

One of the first widespread misuses of Darwinism was in its application to human society - for which Darwin had not offered any evidence, for there was none. In Germany this idea was developed by Ernst Haeckel, in Britain by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and applied it to all aspects of social life. This thinking - Darwinian evolution reflected through bourgeois ideology - obviously continues to the present.

The term "eugenics" (breeding to improve the human race) was introduced in 1883 by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" he asked.(2)

By the time Darwin died in 1882, he was convinced of the necessity of eugenics; and he was rehabilitated by the Church: "Once berated as an enemy of morality and religion, Darwin was now sanctified and transformed into an icon acceptable to all aspects of society," writes Shipman. Darwin's son Leonard went on to be president of the Eugenics Society in England from 1891 to 1928.(3) Darwinism had "adapted" to capitalist society.

Eugenics got a big boost in Amerika and Germany just after 1900 with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to research by big capitalists (Carnegie and Krupp).(4) Their goal was to collect records on individuals and families for the purpose of sterilization and matchmaking to improve their "race" (synonymous with nation, for them).

So they collected records for everyone they could find, on such "genetic" traits as: "insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, tuberculosis, goiter ... feeblemindedness ... nomadism, athletic ability, shiftlessness and thalassophilia (love of the sea)." All of these were assumed to have hereditary causes.(5)

This research in turn contributed to laws restricting immigration, and formed the basis for the first IQ tests, which were intended to identify the "intelligence" required for every different position in society - and then force children into those positions. Finally, the research led to forced sterilization, with the Supreme Court's blessing and laws in many states.

In both the United States and Germany, Shipman makes virtually no effort to connect these biological and medical theories to imperialism and the motivations of the capitalist class and patriarchy; without that analysis it becomes too easy to justify eugenics and genocide as "mistakes" based on primitive scientific understanding. In fact, the scientists were coming up with ways to justify actions that reflected the demands of the politically powerful at that time.

WHY THE "RACES" AREN'T

Visible (phenotype) traits used to define current "races" are not linked to each other at the genetic level. Someone can have the hair of one "race," the eyes of another, the skin of a third, etc. So "races" identified by visible features would be different from those based on blood types, for example.(6)

Evolutionary biology now recognizes that a species is any group capable of reproducing together, and "the action [of evolution is] at the species level," where genotype (underlying genetic traits), not phenotype, is what matters.(7) And contrary to popular belief, evolution is *not* the process of species becoming "more adapted" or "better" than they were before. While individual species adapt, life on earth is no better adapted overall.

In other species, races are frequently the precursors to splitting off new species; population separated geographically for long enough eventually develop enough differences to loose *interfertility* with the others. Since the early 1960s there has been a consensus in biology that, "Because the races are fully interfertile, because different races frequently live together in the same regions, and because humans are so mobile, pure races do not exist and the races cannot diverge into separate species."(8)

But genetic studies still threaten the oppressed in Amerika. The predominant recent example of this is the Violence Initiative, which tried to identify genetic "causes" of violent behavior, with the intention of identifying potentially violent children and "treating" them preventively. Shipman devotes the last part of her book to this controversy.

The proponents and followers of this research make the very common error of looking at a behavior that appears common in a certain group and assuming it has a genetic basis - rather than a social and economic one. If MIM behaved this way, we would be looking for a gene for imperialism or parasitic social behavior, and we would conclude - with strong circumstantial evidence - that white Amerikans have a genetic predisposition to oppress other people.

Frederich Goodwin, the highest ranking psychiatrist in the government (head of the Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration), said in 1992: "If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males .... There are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more ....

"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just a careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural..."(9)

In other words, without proper "social control," Black males "revert" back to a "nature" of behaving like monkeys! Goodwin's statement was too outrageous (it wasn't even true of monkeys). So, after much protest, he was demoted - to director of the National Institute of Mental Health!(10)

A University of Maryland professor, David Wasserman, was among those promoting this research. He tried to organize a conference called "Genetic Factors in Crime," for which he received federal funding, which he advertised with this text: "Genetic research ... gains impetus from the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime - deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation - to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent crime .... Genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct ... and of treating some predispositions with drugs and intrusive therapies."(11)

Apparently, for Wasserman, "environmental approaches" don't include self-determination, employment, education relevant to Black people's lives, etc. So it can be concluded that these approaches have failed! This also raised enough of a stir (including by anti-psychiatric medication psychiatrist Peter Breggin, some NAACP chapters and others) to cancel the conference. But the research continues.

Shipman does a good job of presenting the debates, but her opinion of them is liberal and idealistic. She is upset that "objective" research is being stifled because of the "volume" of the debate and the knee-jerk reaction to anything that could have racist implications. Readers of The Evolution of Racism should be prepared for some annoying anti- "politically correct"ism, as well as a useful presentation of the facts and issues.

NOTES:
1. Shipman, p. 1.
2. Ibid, p. 111.
3. Ibid, p. 121.
4. Ibid, pp. 123-132.
5. Ibid, p. 125-6.
6. Ibid, p. 148.
7. Ibid, p. 154.
8. Ibid, p. 195.
9. Ibid, pp. 237-8.
10. Ibid, p. 238.
11. Ibid, p. 246.

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Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918- 1919, Banner Press, Chicago: 1986

This is an excellent book published in 1968 [unsure if book is from 1986 or 1968--18] by a German journalist concerned with why Germany never had its often-prophesied proletarian revolution.

Haffner explains why the right, the Social Democrats and even the Spartacists (communists) wrote attempted proletarian revolution out of the history books.

The military and the Kaiser of Germany had nothing but disdain for the uprising of the masses of Germany at the end of World War I. It was only so much chaos and rioting to them.

Social Democratic leaders who came to rule civilian Germany shared the traditional ruling class's contempt for the attempts at governance by the soldiers, sailors and workers of Germany, but added the element of betrayal. Haffner shows in no uncertain terms how the Social Democrats paved the way for Hitler and saw to the assassination of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Finally, Haffner unintentionally detailed how Luxemburg and Liebknecht lagged behind the times. Despite a sympathetic after word by Richard Bruch, the overall impression of the book is that the Spartacists were too little too late. Nothing could be more indicative than that the party only formed after the initial events of the revolution.

It appears that Liebknecht in particular was in touch with the anti-militarist movement and even symbolized it, but he did not lead it, nor did his party.

The only hesitation that a Leninist could have with the book is Haffner's own tendency to see the period in terms of personalities, some more stupid than others. The book is excellent political history, but the underlying political economy of the period is left in the dark. On wishes there were a counterpart to Haffner's book on the political economy of Germany.

Overall Failure of a Revolution should be required reading on Germany because it teaches many political lessons chronicling a heroic but naive uprising against militarism and counterrevolution. (From MN 29, March 14, 1987)

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Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Harvard U. Press, 1987, 315 pp.

by MC5

The strength of this book is its examination of the structure of gender relations. Instead of examining issues on a personal level through anecdotes, as too much Amerikan writing does, this book analyzes and theorizes on the subject of women as a group.

Comrades should be aware of certain facts about the condition of women in the United States that MacKinnon makes constant reference to in this collection of slightly repetitive speeches: 44% of women in a San Francisco survey had been a victim of rape or attempted tape in their life time.(1) (People should keep in mind that that figure is probably higher because one can never get an accurate figure until a woman is dead and the women interviewed probably had many years of patriarchy ahead of them.)

  • Only 7.8% of the women in the survey said they had never experienced sexual assault or harassment.(2)
  • It is estimated that between one-quarter and one-third of married women experience serious violence in their homes---some studies find as many as 70 percent."(3)
  • Four out of five murdered women are killed by men; between one third and one half are married to their murderers.(4) The figure is 60 to 70% if lovers and ex-lovers are included.(5)
  • Modeling and prostitution are the only jobs in which women make more money on average than men in their field.(6)
  • 13% of women are or have been prostitutes.(7)
  • 38% of girls and 10% of boys experience sexual assault.(8)
  • Some 4.5% of all women are victims of incest by their fathers, an additional 12% by other male family members, rising to a total of 43% of all girls before they reach the age of 18, if sexual abuse within and outside the family is included.(9)
  • From these figures, one must conclude that while there are individual exceptions to every generalization, on the whole, women in the United States are oppressed by rape, sexual assault and job discrimination among other things. It is pointless to talk about individual experiences of people who say they are not oppressed. Whether an individual man or woman knows it or not, women are oppressed as a group in the United States.

    What does MacKinnon cite as the cause of this oppression?

    "The mainspring of sex inequality is misogyny and the mainspring of misogyny is sexual sadism."(10) According to MacKinnon, the standards of sexual sadism are established by pornography.

    "The first theme is the analysis that the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual--in fact, is sex. Men in particular, if not men alone, sexualize inequality, especially the inequality of the sexes. The second theme is a critique of the notion that gender is basically a difference rather than a hierarchy ... [T]he third theme identifies pornography in America as a key means of actualizing these two dynamics in life. Pornography turns sex inequality into sexuality and turns male dominance into the sex difference. Put another way, pornography makes inequality into sex, which makes it enjoyable, and into gender, which makes it seem natural. "(11) MacKinnon deviates from the accepted feminist line, which is implemented by sexual assault centers: that rape is an act of aggression, not a product of sexual frustration or an act of pleasure for the rapist. According to MacKinnon, men are encouraged by the system to enjoy dominance of women sexually and rape is part and parcel of that eroticization of power.

    In most cases, however, society accepts the inequality of the sexes because it appears consensual, even enjoyable.(12) MacKinnon's argument on this parallels Marx's analysis of exchange.

    "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism."(13) While it may seem that workers agree to a contract with capitalists in exchange for wage payments, in reality, such an agreement covers up coercion underneath. The consequences for workers not to work are more severe than for capitalists.

    This raises some difficulties in MacKinnon's arguments. While it seems reasonable to say that the eight-billion dollar a year pornography business, sexist advertising, etc. set standards for male plea sure, one has to wonder about this as an explanation for why women take part in romance.

    MacKinnon believes the issue is one of power. On the subject of lesbianism, MacKinnon says, "but so long as gender is a system of power, and it is women who have less power, like any other benefit of abstract equality, it can merely extend this choice to those women who can get the power to enforce it".(14) MacKinnon believes that most women are not in positions of power where they could abstain from sex or turn down sex.

    To MC5, this seems a little out of line with reality in Amerika of 1989. Women in the United States who choose not to have sex will not starve most of the time or die from other consequences. The life-and-death dependency of women on men has been severely undercut by women's entry into the work force.

    Now, one can say that women may be emotionally dependent." MacKinnon does speak of a continuum of coercion as if there were no fundamental difference between Playboy magazine and the production of snuff films. She states that "feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage and, sexual harassment."(15)

    Some feminists working against sexual assault in the United States say sex obtained by men through physical force and sex obtained through "emotional coercion" are the same thing. In arguing against calling rape non-sexual, MacKinnon says, "In other words, in all these situations there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of 'sex.'"(16) To MacKinnon all sex is roughly equivalent: "Maybe they were forced-fucked for years and put up with it, maybe they tried to get it over with, maybe they were coerced by something other than battery, something like economics, maybe even something like love."(17)

    On this point, MC5 deviates from orthodox feminism including MacKinnon because it is not useful to see "emotions" as the cause of oppression. Those who take the materialist approach to knowledge will immediately agree, but another way to examine the same question is to ask what would eliminate "emotional coercion" from society?

    On the social level, it is not really fruitful to just tell people that their emotions are wrong. Some will get the message, others will not. What needs elimination is the capitalist romance culture--the sick advertising, "love" songs, pornography etc.--which conditions people to have sick gender relations. This romance culture must be replaced with something that conditions people to have healthful social relationships.

    Yet, even seeing the need to replace today's romance culture is not enough. One must see that this will not be possible without overthrowing the interests that romance culture protects.

    While MacKinnon's theory is coherent, it is not in line with reality. Women's dependency on men in the United States is not strong enough to force them into being sexually available to men. (One might wonder if it is true the sexual availability of women is higher in countries where that dependency is greater.) Even if one were to say that dependency is of an "emotional" nature, one must still rely heavily on the argument of false consciousness to back it up.

    Why do women remain emotionally dependent on men if the result is sexual assault, rape, high divorce rates, etc? One could say that women have bought into this culture mistakenly, that they have false consciousness. "What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival."(18)

    This is as problematic as saying that Amerikan workers are conservative because of repression and false consciousness. In previous issues, comrades have argued that American workers are not proletarians because they have a material interest in allying with imperialism. Similarly, it is not useful to make assorted individual excuses for the majority of women who could choose to resist but do not.

    Parallel To Marxism

    "Sexuality is the social process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire. Desire here is parallel to value in marxist theory, not the same, though it occupies an analogous theoretical location. It is taken for a natural essence or presocial impetus but is actually created by the social relations, the hierarcincal relations, in question. This process cre ates the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. Sexuality to fem inism is, like work to marxism, socially constructed and at the same time constructing. It is universal as activity, yet always historically specific, and jointly comprised of matter and mind."(19)

    Thus, a woman is not someone with female biological characteristics. Women are people with a certain social role. Prisoners who are forced into sexual availability are women, whether or not they are biologically men. Defining women by their biological characteristics has little use to MacKinnon, or MIM. MacKinnon says that male students also identify with women because of their powerlessness in society and their ability to identify with others in a similar position.

    "Financial dependency, motherhood, and sexual accessibility (our targeted-for-sexual-violation status) substantively make up women's status as women."(20)

    By viewing gender as a social role, something that is part of a structure, MacKinnon is able to draw her most radical conclusions, many of which parallel Lenin's thinking. Her conclusions on what individuals can do about their sexuality are revolutionary and unheard of to the point that the off I out backs reviewer who asked where MacKinnon stood on lesbianism missed the meaning of the following, which is an answer to all individuals who ask if "'all women' are oppressed by heterosexuality."(21)

    "The question is posed as if sexual practice were a matter of unconstructed choice. If heterosexuality is the dominant gender form of sexuality in a society where gender oppresses women through sex, sexuality and heterosexuality are essentially the same thing. This does not erase homosexuality, it merely means that sexuality in that form is no less gendered. Either heterosexuallty is the structure of the oppression of women or it is not. Most people see sexuality as individual and biological and voluntary; that is, they see it in terms of the politically and formally liberal myth structure."(22) What MacKinnon means here is that no individual gets the choice of having correct sexual relationships in the current historical situation. Individuals' choices are constructed by the system/structure.

    On this structural outlook--looking at power relations between groups and the impossibility of individual choices that somehow reform the patriarchy--MC5 goes further than MacKinnon: No one in the United States is having "correct" gender relations. Revolution is the only answer.

    Parallels With Lenin

    MacKinnon is most well-known for her work to pass a city ordinance against pornography in Minneapolis. It encountered opposition from free speech advocates.

    In her book, MacKinnon reveals that she does not oppose free speech for the same reason Jerry Falwell does. According to MacKinnon, pornography promotes women's silence. "The First Amendment essentially presumes some level of social equality among people and hence essentially equal access to the means of expression."(23)

    MacKinnon reveals that the dominance of men is a matter of dictatorship covered up with the illusion of free speech. What is dictatorship? It is the repression of a group by another in deeds, not just words.

    As MacKinnon points out, the production of pornography involves dictatorship (a word she does not use) over women models. Some die in its production Others are forced into sexual acts for money, the way coal-miners are forced into contracting black lung for money.

    She also argues, perhaps with less evidence (she only footnotes it, but we are not reviewing all of MacKinnon's work here), that pornography causes violence against women. Leninists see that as an act of dictatorship also.

    Problems Of Methodology

    MacKinnon demonstrates the scientific thinking needed to liberate women. This makes her lapses into demagoguery clearer.

    In trying to demonstrate the relationship between pornography and violence against women, MacKinnon goes into graphic detail about the rape and assault of a 14-year-old. The assailant was found to have pornography on his person.(24)

    As MacKinnon knows, however, no length of details about the sickness of various rapes proves that pornography causes violence against women. It could very well be that the same people who would commit such acts also read pornography. Both pornography reading and acts of rape might be caused by the same thing--unemployment or other sick aspects of society.

    No protests by prostitutes, rape victims or police prove that pornography causes sexual violence. Real knowledge is not a privilege of any particular group. It is accessible to all.

    To answer this, MacKinnon indulges in a little me-firstism. She argues that the male dominated courts do not require causal reasoning to establish a case.(25) Men may establish in court that a damage is done through mere association, not causation, (This may be reasonable if it would take too long to come to a scientific determination of the question.)

    MacKinnon says that because men are allowed to use flawed reasoning, women should be too. This is fatal to the mobilization of a movement. The masses should not be confused by the crop that passes for reasoning in the status quo.

    In fact, one might speculate that MacKinnon may actually believe that pornography is not the cause of rape and sexual assault. She probably knows that in some countries the rape rates are a lot lower than in the United States, which is number one in the industrialized world in rape.

    MacKinnon sees her theory as a call to action against pornography. She admits that the op pression of women exists in societies without pornography. This is not a fatal admission: capitalist imperialism may be the cause of war in the 20th century, but not in the 1st century when capitalist imperialism did not exist. The causes of things may change over time and place.

    MacKinnon argues that even though eliminating Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan would not eliminate racism or anti-Semitism. no one would say that act.ion against them are unnecessary.(26) Yet, people taking action against the KKK do not claim that it is the source of racism. MacKinnon has accorded pornography a privileged position in her theory that is not accorded to the KKK in anyone's theory of racism.

    It seems that someone with MacKinnon's out look should have shown the reader more comparative evidence. Her theory leaves obvious questions unanswered. Although she claims to be a post Marxist, MacKinnon doesn't treat the simple theory that capitalism is the cause of rape.

    The final problem with MacKinnon's theory is that it does not fit her political practice. Many implications of her theory are easily construed as revolutionary. Yet while she is known for her work on a Minneapolis ordinance, she is not known as a member of any revolutionary organization. (One gathers that she goes to radical conferences.)

    She constantly complains (and rightly so) how the media have distorted her position on pornography. What did she expect? Does working through the legal system really work? Can her law be an educational tool if there is no appropriate organization and press to publicize its meaning?

    Conclusion

    MC5 agrees with much of what MacKinnon says. All sex occurs in the context of inequality between the genders. There is in some sense merely a continuum of coercion, It is important not to attribute the oppressions of gender relations to biological differences between men and women: that oppression is socially constructed.

    Just as consensual gender relations are a myth, free speech, the right to privacy--the whole Liberal framework--is a myth that conceals power relations underneath. Dead people have no free speech; that includes women killed by pornography. Male, bourgeois dictatorship is the reality.

    MC5 doubts, however, that there is as much false consciousness as MacKinnon says. Just as J. Sakai demonstrates in Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat the material basis for what appears to be the false consciousness of white Amerikan workers, there is a material basis for the behavior of Amerikan women. As class, nation and gender are often closely intertwined, Sakai's analysis should be a starting point to explain the apparent complicity of Amerikan women in their oppression.

    Anyone with a comparative analysis of women's oppression--for example rape and sexual assault rates, especially in China under Mao or in other socialist countries--is encouraged to enlighten MIM for future issues. The centrality of pornography in MacKinnon's theory should be held up to the test of reality.

    Future issues of MIM Theory will continue the discussion of MacKinnon's work. All are invited to contribute.

    Notes:
    1. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 23
    2. Ibid.
    3. Ibid., p. 24
    4. Ibid.
    5. Ibid., p. 52
    6. Ibid., p. 24
    7. Ibid.
    8. Ibid., p. 41
    9. ibid., p. 51
    10. Ibid., p. 5
    11. Ibid., p. 3
    12. Ibld., p. 7
    13. Ibid., p. 48
    14. Ibid., p. 14
    15. Ibid., p. 59
    16. Ibid., p. 88
    17. Ibid.
    18. Ibid., p. 61
    19. Ibid., p. 49
    20. Ibid., p. 72
    21. Ibid., p. 60
    22. Ibid.
    23. Ibid., p. 129
    24. Ibid., pp. 185-6
    25. Ibid., pp. 191-2
    26. Ibld., p. 222

    (From MIM Notes 36, March 3, 1989)

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    How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev, New York: Routledge, 1995

    review by MC5

    If this were a work of fiction, the character of John Binns would, along with other radicals, jump on the Jackson bandwagon when it made its first appearance in 1822, and be rewarded by a government post through which he dispensed public works jobs to working-class Irish while upholding the slave system and helping to subjugate the free black people of the North.

    -- How the Irish Became White, p. 70

    Ignatiev's book is a positive contribution to white labor history which serves MIM in a timely way as we expand our work in Europe. Our readers will recall that J. Sakai has already explained in The Mythology of the White Proletariat why Andrew Jackson's name is synonymous with anti- First Nation pogroms and racial hatred. Ignatiev is not as clear theoretically as Sakai or H.W. Edwards, author of Labor Aristocracy: Mass Base for Social Democracy. How the Irish Became White reveals some confusion surrounding race, nationality, bourgeois democracy and the state; but these concepts are not really central to Ignatiev's book. MIM recognizes this work as an important contribution because Ignatiev did much of the research we would have wanted to do on the question of Irish integration into the white nation.

    Ignatiev fills in the picture on how the Irish in Amerika maneuvered their way up out of the proletariat and in to the labor aristocracy. Some early Irish-Amerikan organizing was progressive. Later organizing was characterized by anti-Black chauvinism and opportunism.

    Early Oppressed-Nation Consciousness Yields Split With White Chauvinism

    Daniel O'Connell founded the Catholic Association, which Ignatiev says was the first mass political party. O'Connell toured making speeches against slavery, saying he didn't want any support for Irish nationalism that was not against slavery. Despite wavering on this commitment at one time, O'Connell remained fairly true to that idea until he died. Furthermore, 60,000 Irish in Ireland signed a statement opposing slavery in 1841.(p. 6) Thus while fighting for their own parliamentary government independent of England's, many Irish saw themselves as allied with other oppressed peoples.

    O'Connell's dividing line, that Irish nationalism must be anti-slavery,(p. 24) was a high standard. As a result of this, organizations stopped their contributions to the Irish nationalist cause. One explained that "'as we must choose between Ireland and South Carolina, we say South Carolina forever!'"(p. 26) Lacking confidence in the possibilities of change outside the existing national institutions, many argued that Irish- Amerikans had to be more careful and couldn't afford to be seen as opposing U.S. government institutions with the wishes of foreign countries. Those making such reformist, assimilationist statements of strategy were outdone in the streets where Irish-American mobs attacked Blacks, as in Philadelphia in 1842.(p. 23) The mob "heroes" later became important politicians.

    Slavery Question Reveals Assimilationist Treachery

    After O'Connell died, a new generation of pro-U.S. leaders reflected what was going on in the United Snakes, instead of what was going on in Ireland. One such leader, John Mitchell, led a revolt in Ireland in 1848, only to fail and go to the United Snakes where he supported slavery and had a son die on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Irish nationalist organizations in the South and Midwestern United Snakes thought it wise to side with the slave owners and obtain their support for the Irish cause against England. Later, after the Civil War in a crucial moment of history, a congressperson put in power by Irish supporters ended the progressive phase of Reconstruction.(p. 173-4)

    Irish-Amerikans made a deal with the Democratic Party to oppose Black people's rights in exchange for jobs and a pro-immigration policy.(p. 76) The labor unions were important institutions for the Irish: "From 1850 to 1859 the total was 2,700,000. Of these, the Irish formed the largest group, 41.4 percent of the total immigration. If the unions of the 1830s headed largely by native-born and British Protestants, functioned at that time as schools for teaching the Irish the meaning of whiteness, the unions later were to become to a considerable extent Irish institutions."(p. 116) Sadly, the major Euro-Amerikan labor unions famous for their assistance to the CIA in the Third World also created much of the chauvinist image of all oppressed nation people as strikebreakers.(p. 119)

    It is true that the Irish arrived in North America by the millions at a time when the Irish themselves were starving in famine. A good portion died on the trip over to North America and another portion shortly after arriving. It has been pointed out that the Irish felt the whip to conform immediately in order to feed themselves. When the Irish first arrived many white Amerikans believed the Irish to be lower than Blacks, because they were more poorly dressed and were starving.

    This historical reality of the predominantly lower- middle class Irish who made it to North America reinforces the thesis of the difficulty of maintaining a proletariat where there is a larger mass of workers influencing them towards assimilation. It is difficult for a pocket of exploited workers to maintain its identity and uniqueness as a class. When the Irish arrived they were indeed proletarian, but as they looked around they saw adequate examples of why they should conform to the white ethnicity. Ignatiev's book demonstrates that they also found adequate opportunity to assimilate.

    (from MIM Notes 107, Dec. 1995)

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    Jazz, by Toni Morrison, 1992

    Jazz, Toni Morrison's latest book, will not disappoint her fans. In her fast-paced narrative style, Morrison continues to write captivating novels wound around the everyday life and history of Blacks in America.

    There is much historical significance in this novel that a reader unfamiliar with its setting will miss. This review will proceed directly to the politics of the plot that people (such as this reviewer) from this uninformed perspective can glean.

    Set in New York City in 1926, the novel centers on the lives of a married couple, Joe and Violet. Joe is one of the few faithful men in his neighborhood -- until he has an affair with the 18-year-old Dorcas. Fearing he will lose her, Joe kills Dorcas, making his already suffering marriage intolerable.

    But Morrison's story is not one of sensational infidelity and sex. Instead she explores the effect that individuals' upbringing and history have on their everyday lives and relationships. "Jazz" is a novel about people who take control of their lives, overcoming the passivity that could keep them slaves to their environment and history. Morrison celebrates the ability of two people who turn their relationship and their lives around.

    Morrison notes Blacks' well-founded fear of white people, the hypocritical but popular rigid religious morality, and the eroticization of male power taught by society -- all integral parts of Black urban life in the 1920s and very relevant today.

    Dorcas has left Joe for a man closer to her age who tells her what to do, making her change everything from the way she laughs to the way she dresses. Joe just wanted Dorcas to do whatever made her happy, and Dorcas decides that the young man must like her more because he cares enough to tell her what to do. Best of all, other women want to have him too.

    While most of her characters are unwilling to learn new ways to live and take control of their lives, Morrison's main characters change their lives against strong social pressure. This personal revolution falls a bit short of the social revolution that MIM might conclude its novels with, but it has the correct materialist understanding that people create history and need not be pawns to passing circumstances.

    --MC17

    (from MIM Notes, Issue 69: October, 1992)

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    Jean-Luc Godard Interviews, David Sterritt, ed. (Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1998) 203 pp. pb

    MIM begins this review by making self-criticism for passivity with regard to work in film. While MIM has known of Godard's work since before MIM's existence, it never got around to engaging Godard even on a theoretical or public opinion plane. This has set back the proletarian art movement even more than necessary.

    Jean-Luc Godard was a French Maoist in the 1960s and 1970s and he was also the most influential imperialist country director-producer outside of Hollywood.

    Godard's political line

    Middle-aged Godard did much for the Maoist movement. Reading these interviews is like reading the autobiography of David Hilliard, because the trajectory is the same. Godard was wildly successful as a Maoist and then later in life could not quite hang on to his Maoism, much the way the Black Panthers did not. While Godard made his greatest contributions in his thirties and not his twenties, the old adage about selling out with older age seems to ring true and by the 1990s, reviewers were calling his work post-modern.

    Godard as a persyn in the 1960s and 1970s backed Mao while criticizing Stalin, including "Stalinist" art, which we gather Godard believed was just state- sponsored art and hence evil. This caused Godard to say good things about Yugoslavia where there were some independent film producers. Obviously in China's Cultural Revolution, there was also an emphasis on amateur art, of the workers and peasants producing their own art. Nonetheless, while we note the distinctions Godard makes we continue to defend professional state-sponsored art under the dictatorship of the proletariat and we anticipate its necessity until at least the lower stages of communism.

    Our only other possible complaint about Godard would be his gender line. Since sex is so important in the imperialist country movies, Godard did develop a razor-sharp gender line. Some of it is feminist and some of it evokes the split between Marxist males and apolitical or reactionary females that Clare Duchen talks about in her book about why French pseudo- feminism arose in reaction to Maoism. On the other hand, parts of Godard's gender line may be considered to be walking that fine line between revolution and macho misogyny. We must point out though that MIM has no right to criticize Godard, because we have not led any filmmaking efforts, so we haven't proved that we would have handled the gender question any better. We salute his efforts to make movies that do not rely on romance to sell.

    In truth, it would be a disservice to review all Godard's films here, so we will not even try. Perhaps other reviewers could step forward after seeing all his films made between 1962 and 1976.

    As a persyn, Godard punched his producer at a film showing once and called on the audience to pay to see his version of the film with the money to go to a fund for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.(p. 52) Moreover, Godard spoke for "Third World cinema" as the correct phrase for what he was doing instead of "underground." (p. 11)

    Godard also hooked up the Rolling Stones to his Maoist film. The active support by the Rolling Stones of Maoism in France is an example of the kind of times the late 1960s and early 1970s were.

    Although Godard championed industrial workers in France on occasion, as far as his art went, he had the correct line on the labor aristocracy. In the first place, he criticized the labor bureaucrats for interfering with his low-budget work, requiring him to use four people instead of three behind the camera as an example.(p. 18) He said the unions were more reactionary than other people and were economically strangling his independent filmmaking.

    Much more importantly, Godard had the intuitively correct line on the approach of artists to the labor aristocracy, one that is even more correct for our times than for the 1960s. His advice to the revolutionary artist in the imperialist countries was to hold the line: "'Worrying about distribution patterns affects the kind of pictures people make. Only by concentrating on production without any thought of distribution can we create the kind of film that will change distribution.'"(p. 57)

    Godard on art: lessons for PIRAO

    Perhaps what Godard is known best for is being a "high-brow" "artsy" film director. He did not like the "art" label as a contrast with other films, but he also spoke of the idea as a reference point to make himself understood on the relationship of artists to finance capital.

    Godard's most enduring insight is to defeat the "masses-are-asses" line in art while combining that view with a strong orientation toward building independent institutions of the oppressed. In 1962 he hadn't made any Maoist films yet, but he was already a Brechtian. That means he sought to change the world by engaging the audience in his art. In fact, in 1968, he correctly said "we have to fight the audience." (p. vii, 15) That to MIM is an accurate statement about the imperialist country audiences, which are bound to be a majority petty-bourgeoisie and encrusted with reactionary ideas.

    We believe Godard is correct that there is no essential difference between film and theater, so Bertolt Brecht's theories of engaging audience participation and not encouraging passivity are correct for film as well as the theater Brecht worked in. In 1962, Godard said of making films, "One must be sincere, believe that one is working for the public, and aim at them. In my early days I never asked myself whether the audience would understand what I was doing, but now I do. If Hitchcock, for example, thinks that people will not understand something, he will not do it. At the same time I feel that one must sometimes just go ahead-light may always dawn in a few years time. But of course one must be sure of what one is about, because if one just goes ahead and does something, saying 'They won't understand but it won't matter,' one may be disastrously wrong and that it does matter."(p. 5) To MIM's knowledge, while he gave up Maoism, Godard continues to hold this view. In fact, he argued that filmmaking should be film criticism at the same time, so there continues to be a self-critical view in Godard's work and he continued to believe such criticism is a matter of science, at least as late as 1981.(p. 120)

    Because Godard was willing to put together art that the masses would not always understand, he received the label "abstract," but he also opposed that label. He considered himself explicitly Marxist-Leninist. Much of the masses' rejection of Godard stems from his unwillingness to utilize sex and violence the way mainstream imperialist producers do. MIM believes it is unreasonable in an ultraleft or right opportunist way to expect proletarian filmmakers to have success any greater than that of proletarian newspaper distributors relatively speaking.

    Godard had a firm grip on the influence of finance capital on filmmaking. For this reason, he likened himself to a whore. It was not the whore he opposed but the pimp--the finance capitalist in the guise of the producer as usually distinguished from the artist who is the director.

    Unwilling to work for Hollywood no matter how much they offered him, (p. 21) Godard correctly avoided pie-in-the-sky idealism. He realized he would be making "low-budget" films. On a related note, filmmaking was also brief with only short periods of time requiring professional actors.

    For the MIM-led army called PIRAO that has responsibility for financial and infrastructure work this all makes sense on how to build an infrastructure for independent filmmaking. Right opportunists in film art capitulate to the demands of Hollywood finance capitalists and sell out. Ultraleft opportunists cling to a non-existent independence of art as if talking about it and waiting for manna from heaven were as good as making art and distributing it. Even in 1980 and 1996 Godard correctly warned artists that "Art and economy are always related."(p. 101) Along these lines, Godard warned that television is absolutely the worst medium, because it is state and monopoly controlled, whereas filmmaking even in Hollywood had slightly more autonomy. We believe this insight continues to this day, where the main television channels in the imperialist countries are the worst purveyors of reactionary drivel. Even attempting to work from within television backfires miserably as the example of the Archie Bunker character in "All in the Family" proves so well. Since television offers no audience interaction with the directors, there is the definite risk that the audience will identify with and glorify the reactionary characters of television scripts, no matter how bluntly depicted. There is no quick and dirty way to subversion of our video culture, so we must not expect or attempt overnight success.

    In conclusion, Godard has a very realistic notion of what is possible with imperialist country art. We must steer between capitulating to Hollywood (which is pervasive to Godard the way pornography is to Catharine MacKinnon) on the one hand and blaming all evil on Hollywood on the other hand in order to justify our own economic and artistic passivity. Leadership at this time means challenging thoughts and not gaining popularity.

    A call to action

    A minority of Hollywood films and independent documentaries is progressive. To reach the next level of building public opinion and independent institutions of the oppressed, we need more than to cull the best of Hollywood. We need our own proletarian filmmakers, theaters, bands and other artists.

    "And so for a young movie maker, if he really wants to make a film, it is very easy to do. The problem is getting it shown after you've made it."(p. 19)

    MIM calls on all young, old, aspiring and existing film artists to be the early Jean-Luc Godard and work with us. Already we have the independent party press. We can assist in publicizing the works of Godards, so all you Godards out there, please step forward!

    We recommend the following:

    Since MIM has not worked closely with filmmakers, our first efforts will likely be severely flawed. As materialists we believe any effort is better than nothing and after some years we may hope to surpass Godard. At this time, we believe we must recognize that we would do very well right now just to copy what Godard said in the first 84 pages of this book.

    (from MIM Notes 176, Dec. 15, 1998)

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    Masters Of Illusion: The World Bank And The Poverty Of Nations, by Catherine Caufield (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 432 pp.

    Book review written by a MIM comrade

    Upon the recommendation of Dennis Brutus, MIM reviewed Masters of Illusion. We recommend this book as if it were an extended and thorough journalistic account of the World Bank from its beginning. Learning about the World Bank from this bourgeois source should be eye-opening to anyone considering communism.

    The World Bank is an institution funded by the industrial countries to lend money for large projects in the Third World that no commercial bank would loan money for. The plurality of its staff is Amerikan economists.

    Environment not counted Catherine Caufield correctly points out that bankers and economists by training and predisposition naturally incline to giving the environment short shrift. If there is no price on polluting or even killing, then economists do not usually take pollution or premature death into account. As a result with is large capital for large projects, the World Bank is behind some of the world's most destructive economic projects.

    Throughout the Third World, bourgeois ideas of development have come along with environmental catastrophes sponsored by industrial country "experts" and bankers. Caufield provides the details and shows how difficult it is for the World Bank to change.

    Agency of neo-colonialism The World Bank is to neo- colonialism what the missionary was to colonialism. Unwilling to work with local experts and government officials in the Third World, the World Bank provides the funding to establish entirely new agencies that fill the role that governments usually do in industrial countries. "By the early 1970s, more than half of all its loans went to autonomous agencies it had helped to establish in scores of countries."(p. 60) For this reason, some have seen the UN as a competitor of the World Bank, because both organizations set up their own branches in the Third World and both have pretensions of being world governments.

    Theoretical Problems

    While we recommend this book sheerly on a journalistic level, it has numerous theoretical flaws. The most grating flaw is to read this book as an indictment of the intelligence of bourgeois economists and Third World government officials, as if becoming a wealthy country the way these economists want is just a matter of applying the expertise of a handful of people.

    MIM has to agree with Caufield that the Harvard, MIT and Oxford trained economists at the World Bank are especially stupid, because they tend to have little creativity and confuse their theories with the scientific and mathematical methods they learned in graduate schools. However, the ultimate underlying problem is the system arranging economic education and rewarding it to be removed from practical reality. Otherwise, these economists would notice that capitalism has a far bigger record of failure than socialism.

    Based on the reports of World Bank staff, Caufield's report never rises to the level of thinking of systems that influence the behavior of large numbers of people. Hence, she lightly reports that bank insiders believe they undercut themselves by having quotas of loans to make. These quotas reduce their bargaining power with regard to the strings attached when it comes to working with government officials in the Third World. We are asked to be concerned that the "true rate of erosion in the Bank's bargaining power was more like from 50 to 35 percent [of what they want-- ed.]."(p. 103) This is despite the fact that no systematic evidence comes forth to show that increasing the Bank's power would be good for anyone but the Bank.

    Even more neo-colonial in outlook is her comment that the Peruvian people were victims of demagoguery when some protested ceding control of the economy to the World Bank. (p. 136) Here the obsession with intelligence applied to rational policy merges with neo-colonialism of the sort that says the Peruvian people should just accept the supposedly more intellectually sound leadership at the World Bank.

    Elsewhere Caufield sides with the bankers wondering if investments in education, housing and health pay off.(p. 125)

    Typical of her whole atheoretical approach to development is her statement quoting one World Bank officer on why education projects fail : "'The best and the brightest' in government end up in the finance ministries and not in the education ministry." (p. 295)

    Lenin Vindicated

    If the reader reads Lenin's Imperialism before reading this book, the reader will see Lenin's theory vindicated by the facts throughout the book. Most interesting is the picture of commercial banks in the Third World, begging to make a loan, so that they can collect interest, and then having multi- lateral agencies like the World Bank clean up after them. According to Lenin, the capitalist system develops into finance capitalism and the finance capitalists must find some outlet for their surplus capital. It turns out that the World Bank annual meeting is a great chance for commercial bankers to meet Third World clients.(pp. 136-7) Observing one such meeting gives the reader the sense that Lenin had about what imperialists with surplus capital lying around have to do.

    Even the World Bank itself feels pressure to release capital to the Third World, and its top leaders have adopted a sham planning system to reach their goals of loans made. Seeing this, the far right has labelled the World Bank a socialist plot. Caufield caters to this militia-type rightist throughout the book.

    In reality, the World Bank is not just an "adjustor" for Third World economies: it is a central actor in rationalizing the flow of capital from the industrial countries (imperialist) to the Third World. According to one Kidder Peabody executive, the World Bank "earned its keep" during crises of the private sector.(p. 143)

    While some right-wing militia types may not like being involved in multi-nation organizations like the World Bank, the truth is that Amerikan corporations are even more involved abroad than the World Bank and they are the ones requiring the World Bank to go on. In this way, taxpayers of the imperialist country middle-classes subsidize the failures of the bankers. After all in 1977, the top nine U.$. banks received more than half their profits from loans to the Third World.(p. 128) Moreover, "By 1982 Citibank's loans to just five of its Latin American clients amounted to twice its net corporate assets."(p. 129) On account of these profits sometimes the private bankers complain about the World Bank's stealing business, but on the other hand, the World Bank is bailing out the commercial banks and spurring economic infrastructure projects that the commercial banks would be afraid to undertake. Nor is it just U.$. capital at stake. The Bank of Tokyo has the equivalent of 80 percent of its net assets at stake in Mexico. (p. 138) From the point of view of these banks, the World Bank may be a failure, but not relatively speaking. The bankers themselves know what it is like to have to find large profitable outlets for their capital or accept losses, and they cannot think of any better way to do what the World Bank does within the existing system. If the World Bank is eventually replaced, it will be by an institution that is very similar.

    The World Bank is also a means of outlet for the overproduction of capital goods in the imperialist countries: "Most of our money doesn't go to the South, it goes straight from Washington to Pennsylvania, where they manufacture the turbines, or Frankfurt, where they produce the dredging equipment."(p. 242) For this reason, the World Bank has its patrons in the super-elite.

    Despite all the efforts of the bankers both multi- lateral and private, the capitalists fail to export away their crisis. "In 1994, for example, the developing world received $167.8 billion in foreign loans and paid out $169.5 billion in debt service - - a net transfer from the poor to the rich nations of $1.7 billion."(p. 335) This is a small token of the imperialists' worst nightmare -- surplus capital lying around with no profitable place to invest it. This sort of mechanism is typical of why imperialism is always in crisis.

    Adjustment Failure

    Caufield has the facts showing that World Bank economic policies imposed on Third World countries do not work. So-called adjustment loans have failed. Such loans go to countries willing to change their economic policies to the likings of the World Bank.

    In Mexico where the money has been dumped by the international banking community, economic growth is only keeping pace with population growth. Thus Mexico has stabilized for now to the likings of the banking community, but it has not accomplished anything worthwhile to the proletariat by following the imperialist-dictated course: "In 1992, average wages were - in real term - half what they had been ten years earlier. . . Investment in health, education, and basic physical infrastructure was cut roughly in half, with predictable results. Between 1980 and 1992, infant deaths due to malnutrition almost tripled."(p. 153) The poorest 20 percent of Mexico receives less than 5 percent of the income. "The country's richest man, Carlos Sim, had more money than the country's 17 million poorest people combined."(p. 153)

    In conclusion, we do not agree that hiring more staff at the World Bank or increasing the number of ecologists there is going to help the systematic problems underlying the World Bank. It should be abolished like many other imperialist entities that block the initiatives of the toiling classes for their own economic well-being.

    (from MIM Notes 146, Sep. 15, 1997)

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    The New Financial Capitalists: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts And The Creation Of Corporate Value, by George P. Baker and George David Smith Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 257 pp.

    reviewed by MC5

    Two rent-a-nerds have written a book claiming to have a new argument why finance capital is not parasitic and in fact plays a very productive role in the economy. The book that came out this year is based on a study of the 1980s mergers and acquisitions craze with a focus on the investment banking firm known as "Kohlberg Kravis Roberts" which is just the names of three partners in the New York and California based business.

    The ghost of Lenin

    Karl Marx came up with a scientific distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor. It is a little different than the popular concept.

    Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin believed that the popular concept of unproductive labor was quite relevant when capitalism came to be dominated by finance capital in the age of monopolies. MIM believes we are still in the stage of capitalism Lenin called the "final stage."

    The book we are reviewing is substantially an argument with Lenin's ghost without naming him. Lenin held that capitalist imperialism was the decadent phase of capitalism, the stage where capitalism could bring no more progress to the world, only world wars. According to Lenin, "coupon-clippers" in imperialist countries were people who lived without working by owning stocks, bank notes etc.

    Baker and Smith admit that even parasite-friendly Amerikans have never viewed finance capitalists like J.P. Morgan or Michael Milken with the same respect as business leaders like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford who seem to be connected with invention and massive reorganization respectively. "The essential populism of American culture is uncomfortable with financial schemes, which have so often been associated with venal fraud and scandal, or worse, unfruitful labor. In the common caricature, the great practitioners of high finance have made their money without producing goods, extracting 'paper profits' as if by sleight of hand, wringing fortunes from transactions that have no direct connection to anything productive. This view is hardly limited to the uninitiated; it is shared among highly sophisticated business people."(p. 2)

    Baker and Smith seek to champion the finance capitalist.

    Sycophantic business pulp fiction

    Not only does this book squarely address Lenin without naming him, it also claims to know that most business writing is shallow cheerleading of no intellectual depth or consequence. For this reason we call Baker and Smith "rent-a-nerds." They are not the kind of intellectuals who sit in ivory towers. They are the kind that go to the highest bidder and perform the functions of corporate public relations departments but with more intellectual depth than usual.

    Baker and Smith are fairly accurate in their self- assessments. They do a better job than most business writers. They have some background.

    On the other hand, MIM is disappointed that the premier ivory tower of political economy - Cambridge University Press - published this book, because it really does not engage the issues it raised.

    For example, if leveraged buyouts linking management to ownership by giving executive managers stock in the company are so important, then why did Japan do so well economically? Japanese companies have always had abysmal profit rates and their executives are paid a fraction what U.$. executives make. Baker and Smith raise this subject in one sentence (p. 36) and they fail to address it with relevant facts from both the U.$. and Japanese economies.

    A book mainly based on the press releases of a single investment bank still has a cheerleading feel to it, no matter how many connected issues are raised, because the evidence that Baker and Smith concern themselves with simply cannot address the subjects they raise. For MIM, this is a basis of some celebration, as another example of the incompetence of the ruling class and why capitalism is likely to fall sooner than later.

    From the point of view of Baker and Smith and most business writers, changing one or two executive managers makes a big difference. It is one of the essential ingredients -- retaining or changing the executives-- that KKR looks at before conducting a leveraged buyout of a company. Thus much of the book is talking about how to be more competent members of the capitalist class -- paying more attention to loopholes in the tax code, deciding how many workers to lay off and coming up with a composition of the company's debt structure -- how much in junk bonds, how much in bank loans etc.

    Rebutting journalists

    Baker and Smith attempt to rebut Susan Faludi who won the Pulitzer Prize for writing about corporate raiders like KKR. A study of companies bought out by KKR between 1977 and 1989 shows that employment increased; capital spending increased and research and development increased three years after takeover.(p. 37)

    The unscientific nature of this argument comes out in that Baker and Smith felt no compulsion in the book to come up with statistical generalities about companies that did not get taken over with leveraged buy outs. (A leveraged buy-out occurs when a capitalist successfully offers to buy a company with money he or she borrowed from others. In the case of KKR leveraged buy-outs, it also means that the new capitalist in control gives an ownership stake to executive management and allows management to run day-to-day affairs without interference. Managers are given the goals by finance capitalists, but how they achieve them is up to them.

    The goal that guarantees management performance is paying off the debts incurred in the purchase of the company at its new higher stock price.) Hence, we do not know if employment, capital spending and research and development increased even faster in companies not taken over. They only pointed to a study done elsewhere that shows that layoffs are less frequent after leveraged buyouts than in the industry as a whole (p. 218) and that research and development may or may not have suffered after leveraged buyouts (p. 219). Baker and Smith themselves had no evidence to bring to bear. That's another reason we call these business school professors "rent-a-nerds."

    New arguments?

    We do not believe the authors succeeded in presenting anything new. They claim that the leveraged buyout the way KKR does it has never been seen before, but that is just more marketing hype. Always the hired prizefighters of the ruling class glorify the most obvious of profit-oriented decisions as if they were the brilliance of God. In the case of this book, the extended press release includes a chapter on the glories of working for KKR.

    The two most important arguments that Baker and Smith make are these: 1) Ownership and control separated in Amerikan corporations such that executives and stockholders had conflicting interests. Baker and Smith were not the first to argue this as they acknowledge. 2) The leveraged buyout was not a short- term profit orientation, but a long-term strategy increasing stock prices.

    What is unique about this book is its portrayal of diverse labor unions, journalists and executives as being opposed to finance capitalists. There is a strong element of truth to this.

    Most interesting of all is the claim that executives managed to run the ship without paying attention to shareholders -- the exact opposite of what people studying Japan conclude about the U.$. economy. According to Baker and Smith, it was the leveraged buyout that made executives more accountable to shareholders. Before KKR came around, executives supposedly sought aggrandizement of their own power through conglomeration and decadent perks, not profits for shareholders: "Rank managerial opportunism was reflected in the erection of monumental corporate headquarters, the purchase of executive airplanes, stretch limousines, yachts and resorts, and the sponsorship of lavish trips and celebrity sporting events that did nothing to contribute to the bottom line."(p. 14)

    According to Baker and Smith, the law made it difficult for shareholders to exert direct influence in companies. In fact, even boards of directors were usually just the creations of CEOs before the mergers and acquisitions trends of the 1980s.

    By buying a company and then giving managers stock in the company, KKR supposedly healed a schism in the capitalist class. Such executives were more willing to lay off workers or do what it takes to pay off corporate debts and see themselves to profitability.

    Without any proof or evidence about companies not involved in mergers and acquisitions, Baker and Smith claim that KKR strategies that influenced the whole business world are what laid the basis for prosperity in the 1990s. "In a more fundamental historical sense, KKR's legacy is this: its management buyouts breathed new life into a moribund system of financial capitalism, which in turn stimulated a new era of sustained economic growth, vibrant securities markets, and at this writing, nearly full levels of employment."(p. 206)

    As MIM has detailed in "Imperialism and its Class Structure in 1997," the U.$. boom of the 1990s is dependent on a massive transfer of surplus-value from the Third World, especially the increase from East Asia and Latin America. The paper-shufflers simply like to claim credit.

    Capitalism as a system

    KKR is essentially correct about how capitalism works. Capitalism is a system, not a collection of sentimental people. If one executive will not obey the dictates of profit, another will come along and replace him or her. Hence, the intentions of the individual executive hardly matter. For a period of time, KKR was able to make huge profits from reflecting this truth more accurately than other capitalists. Then conditions changed.

    Capitalists about to lose a fight may agree to be bribed out by the other side, which is what KKR generally tried to do: bribe the executive already there. Other capitalists afraid of losing power or money will side with labor unions, local communities threatened with business closings and journalists against "sharks" and "corporate raiders." This coalition also succeeded in passing laws and regulations that made leveraged buyouts more difficult. The money for junk bonds and this sort of acquisition pretty much dried up by the early 1990s.

    "During the 1980s, the mere specter of the corporate takeover was prodding more and more executives to undertake internal reforms-- in some cases for no better reason than to defend against unwanted buyers."(p. 43) Although this had struck Baker and Smith as news (p. x), Marx had already elaborated this economic law 150 years ago.

    (from MIM Notes 177, Jan. 1, 1999)

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    Resurrection: The Struggle For A New Russia, by David Remnick NY: Random House, 1997, 398 pp.

    review by a comrade

    This book is a dialogue with the petty-bourgeoisie of the old pro-Soviet communist parties. Much journalistic information can be gained with a view to the petty-bourgeois struggles in the Cold War that were aimed at aiding the new bourgeoisie in the USSR.

    Remnick notices a lot that could vindicate the revisionists of the Soviet Union. First, the Yeltsin regime and some others replacing the USSR (p. 4) he admits are more "authoritarian" and use much more force than the recent patsy revisionist regimes. Having tanks fire at the Parliament in 1991 was revealing for most of Russia on Yeltsin. It is also clear that Yeltsin roughs up political opponents in the streets. (p. 191) He admitted he would not honor a "communist" election victory; (p. 338) and he banned the social-democrats calling themselves communist from the airwaves during the campaign. (p. 336) Secondly, Remnick notices things in the conditions of the common person, including that life expectancy for men fell to 59 in 1993 from 65 in 1987 under revisionism. (p. 46) Thirdly, when it comes to writers, the perennial complaint was that they were suppressed. Today they are starving, because there is no money for writers. (p. 222) Hence, there is no intellectual life anymore just the mad-dash for profit in a free market system. One writer admits to wishing for Brezhnev suppression back, because then there was intellectual life. (p. 227) The whole book is about the bourgeois democrats and the wistful petty- bourgeoisie like this writer who wish for the old state-capitalist system back.

    When it comes to the coup of 1991 that supposedly was a hard-line Marxist-Leninist coup, it turns out the coup had many more people in the streets supporting it than the Yeltsin regime had supporting it. Furthermore, contrary to images, the coup plotters were the ones unwilling to use extensive violence and it was only the military that finally bailed out Yeltsin. Backing MIM's line on the pull of the gender- aristocracy is an interesting tidbit Remnick found. Who is running Cosmopolitan magazine in Russia? A degenerated Maoist turned capitalist is. (p. 162) We see thus the pull of the patriarchy's privileges and its widespread support amongst the gender- aristocracy that makes it difficult to attack the patriarchy. We communists have not paid enough attention to this issue and have lost many to the patriarchy's snares.

    Remnick helps us to understand the combination of mafia and monopoly capital that is Russia today. "If it were to be ranked by the Global Fortune 500, Gazprom would be second in profits, behind only Royal Dutch Shell. Gazprom is responsible for 5 percent of the entire Russian economy and is the country biggest taxpayer, pouring $4 billion annually into the state. In fact, Gazprom does not pay nearly the amount of taxes it should." (p. 178) Of course, it has bought-off key government officials.

    The war to suppress the Chechen ethnicity is also covered in depth. Here is a gem: "'During the Cold War, you Americans used to go wild over one or two political prisoners,' one man said. 'But when an entire city is wiped out there is hardly a word from you! Would President Clinton have come to Moscow for the V-E Day parade if Sakharov were alive and in prison?'" (p. 284) Such comments abound in the book. There is no lack of reason for cynicism about Russia. People are seeing through the many cheap political stunts of U.$. imperialism in its Cold War.

    Remnick is aware of the grist for those with "something of the social democratic orientation." (p. 296) He understands and mentions Zyuganov who ran for president and got 40 percent of the vote. Zyuganov sought the coalition with the fascists and came up with the traditional Nazi garbage about finance capital being Jewish. (p. 315) Fortunately, Remnick informs us that the more hard-line communists distance themselves from anti-Semitism, and not just Molotov's circles either. (p. 325)

    Also, Remnick interviewed another person whose parents were killed by Stalin but who considered himself a staunch communist not unfriendly to Stalin. (p. 327)

    The petty-bourgeoisie does not understand the essentials of class politics and is distracted by the mountain of lies it has to dig itself out from under. To avoid a simply cynical type of politics easily manipulated by fascists and bizarre nationalists, the Russians must return to an understanding of the proletariat, Lenin and Stalin. Most of what passes and has passed for communist politics is not.

    (from MIM Notes 147, Oct. 1, 1997)

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    The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets For Capturing The Heart Of Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider, 174 pp. 1995

    According to USA Today, The Rules is 20th on its best-sellers list. The book has sold over 455,000 copies and constitutes a statement about the realities of gender in a system incapable of real progress.

    There is not a single fact in the book about the subject of romantic relationships. It consists entirely of 35 rules of dogma concentrating the nature of the romance culture. Among the points of advice -- never ask men out, never stare at men or otherwise indicate attention, never return phone calls, never spend more than 10 minutes with a man on the phone and always be the one to end a date. These kinds of pseudo-power games are a reflection of the fact that power is considered sexy, that we adjust to the fact of domination in society more generally and find it pleasurable thanks to the culture of the dominators.

    There are about two rules that MIM agrees with: 1) Men don't change. 2) Don't talk about the book with your therapist.

    MIM knows that men don't change, because that's the system we live in. Efforts of individual biological wimmin to get individual men to change are indeed futile. Men as a group are in a constant flux, but they do not change on account of individual efforts.

    MIM thinks that people shouldn't talk about this book to their therapists because no one should be talking about this book to anyone, which is less useful than toilet paper. The authors do not want psychologists to challenge their book, recognizing that even though psychotherapy is about convincing women into being happy with their gender roles in relationships, even therapists find their drivel manipulative beyond the pale.

    Most of MIM's readers will immediately scoff at The Rules and some will wonder why MIM takes it seriously. We answer that this book has sold more copies than any MIM book; it has received serious reviews and is in no way meant as a satire of our culture. The book is written by the Archie Bunkers of the gender aristocracy and the authors mean what they say; they spend much of their book talking about the need for determination to follow The Rules to the end.

    Even the richest of people are no exception in their culture. In fact the romance life of Charles and Di or Donald Trump is the poor example that the ruling class sets for the people in the capitalist system. Indeed, following the romances of the ruling class is itself a multi-million dollar tabloid and television industry in itself. We cannot be surprised that the media conglomerate Time-Warner -- which is also the money and power behind pseudo-feminist leader Gloria Steinem -- published The Rules.

    In an interview with USA Today, famous imperialist wimmin's author Erica Jong could not find the strength to condemn the book and admitted she had ambiguous feelings about it because she believes "it works" in finding Mr. Right and that men have always been "predators." Erica Jong should have developed this excellent point about the book: it sanctions men as predators. This would not be very important to MIM in itself, because dating culture is not inherently a life-and-death issue. It's a subject of leisure time activity. (But somehow our romance culture has managed to become the single largest cause of murder as defined by the FBI.) Of course, relative to other kinds of imperialist murder through starvation, war and environmental destruction, "relationship" murder is unimportant, but MIM still does not sanction it. MIM is concerned with toppling the patriarchy, not with making dating more fun or productive under capitalism. What should not be at all important involves antagonistic contradictions between the people and an enemy that is very difficult to pin down -- all men and the biological wimmin socialized to be men.

    According to Fein and Schneider, men who really love their wimmin will chase them with dogged determination, and they should be forced to prove that obsessive determination or they are not worth wasting time on. The marrying kind are the ones who seek a "challenge" -- the "impossible" womyn that is "hard to get."

    MIM translates: don't bother dating anyone who isn't stalking you.

    We must state firmly that these Feins and Schneiders of the world should be busy working to overturn the laws against stalking passed this year. They won't, because to them it's the men who will risk crossing the pseudo-feminists and other p.c. fascists that are the most determined suitors worth settling down with. Instead of working to dismantle the patriarchy, Fein and Schneider are holding seminars on The Rules so that they can provide personal instruction to wimmin desperate for a "real" relationship. All the women participants interviewed for a Washington Post article Style section (Oct. 21, 1996) refused to give their names for fear that their potential dates would find them out.

    Capitalist romance culture teaches people that love is worth risking stalking/being stalked and killing/being killed over. That is the reason this book has sold so many copies. There are tens of millions of people so lacking in any absorbing and worthy goals -- thanks to the profit-mad capitalist-system which sets people's sights so low -- these people actually go out and buy books like The Rules.

    The wimmin who buy into The Rules tend to be gender privileged -- so gender privileged they won't rock the boat on even the smallest points, to the point where they can't even ask men out. The petty nature of these concerns combined with their doggedness reminds MIM of the labor aristocracy and its outlook against the proletariat and lumpen- proletariat.

    Tens of millions of people absorb books like The Rules, but these same people are no where to be found with such a passion attacking the causes of disability preventing romantic life. Physically disabled and diseased people have their sexual privilege curtailed. Other millions of people wrongfully imprisoned also have their "rights" to access to the human body for leisure time drastically cut back. These are the kinds of people who want to change the patriarchy. Children (or young adults) who are owned by their parents until they are 18 are also an especially important vehicle of change under imperialist patriarchy.

    (from MIM Notes 126, Nov. 1996)

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    Shenfan, William Hinton, 1984, Vintage Books, 790 pages.

    This is the sequel to Fanshen which was about the liberation of China from landlord and Japanese imperialist rule. Shenfan is primarily about the Great Leap through the Cultural Revolution. There is a sprinkling of material both before and after this time period. William Hinton stands out above other China scholars for the length of time he has spent in China. He has lived in one village called Long Bow at various time periods for years at a time.

    The work is dense with empirical detail and insights into everyday concerns of Chinese peasants. Aside from his descriptions, Hinton's interviews and reporting of conversation is excellent. He reports what the peasants say, what the Communist Party says and what the highest government officials say. By asking his questions at different time periods, he manages to obtain different answers from different people for each question. Even within each time period, he shows the lines of controversy.

    Hinton is of Marxist inspiration and has some strong words for the current regime. On the other hand, he spends several hundred pages detailing the Cultural Revolution as a merely opportunist power struggle among individuals and ultimately factions of millions of people. This book is not appropriate for special distribution efforts. His analysis of power struggle is rather too simple and does not offer an alternative. Still, Shenfan is very valuable for the reader interested in China. (from MN 31, July 7, 1987)

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    The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, By David R. Roediger, London: Verso, 1991

    By a comrade

    Historian David Roediger has contributed to the trend in academia to identify the creation of racism as twofold, with the white working class helping the bourgeoisie to make it happen. For Amerikan academics, this is a pretty big leap, which leads them to give themselves labels such as "post-marxist," based on their false interpretations of Marxism as static and reductionist.

    The step is important to escape the mis-notion that "bad" ideas adopted by relatively subordinate groups are the product of simple domination by the ruling classes. It begins to get beyond the "false-consciousness" interpretation of history. The book goes along with recent work to emphasize the active movement of oppressed groups in creating their own ideologies and forms of resistance--to see culture and ideology as the dialectical creations born out of class struggle, not just imposed by rulers.

    But Roediger keeps the "false consciousness" myth alive. He assumes, but can't prove, that white workers in the nineteenth century were hurt by racism. To Roediger, the highest price paid by the white working class for racism was "the wedding of labor to a debased republicanism." He describes the tendency of "the payoffs of whiteness ... to prove spurious," because racism supposedly undermined white working class efforts to eliminate wage labor altogether.(p. 55)

    He can't accept that white workers in Amerika simply got paid enough to come around to see that capitalism wasn't so bad (for them) after all. When they stopped the attack on wage labor itself, they fell in step with budding imperialism and started fighting for a piece of the pie. Ignoring this reality, The Wages of Whiteness is typical settler-leftist day-tripping, and not based in fact.

    Roediger and his academic cohorts are stuck in what is really a reductionist theory based on false Marxism. Under imperialism, there is not just one working class, "falsely" divided by race. Instead working classes are by necessity allied with their nations--the international proletariat has split from the First World scabs who make up the labor aristocracy in oppressor nations like the USA.

    There is nothing false about it. The white working class went where the money was, tying themselves to imperialism in the process: to imperialist profits, and ultimately to imperialism's collapse.

    (From MIM Theory 1)

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    The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich And Some So Poor, by David S. Landes, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998 650 pp.

    reviewed by MC5

    David Landes is a retired Harvard professor aiming squarely at an issue we Maoists see underlying what we call the "principal contradiction" between oppressor nations and oppressed nations. He claims to examine the last 1000 years of history and finds that Europe is the main contributor to economic and technological progress, modernity.

    Review of reviews

    MIM's glee over the publication of this book is also connected to all the ivory tower leading lights willing to go down with Landes' imperialist chauvinist sinking ship. As Reason Magazine's contributing editor Deirdre McCloskey practically admitted in a review of the Landesí book, the field of economic history is dominated by Marxism even in the ivory tower. Rarely do we find anything that the bourgeois economists (and Landes claims to be one) will hoist as their banner and be accountable for.

    In the case of this book, we have Nobel Prize winners Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow in addition to John K. Galbraith lined up to champion Landes' book. In addition we have the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times singing the praises of Landes. As such, the book is irresistible target practice for us Maoist scientists.

    Generally, Landes received favorable but lightweight reviews. We will add a few remaining points of agreement with these reviewers. Landes indeed has launched a very lucid attack on post-modernism and Marxism. Partaking in frequent sentence fragments, Landes clearly indicates a willingness to pay the price for clarity. We agree with him and his reviewers who pointed this out.

    However, we find it regrettable the Kirkus Review could only say the book borders on the chauvinist. Landes has long been about as conscious an imperialist chauvinist as there can be.

    Third World anecdotes, not systematic evidence

    What Landes does say about Third World societies is either stereotypical or ad-hoc. It takes little analytical effort to say that Third World culture must be holding back industrial development, because the Third World is relatively underdeveloped compared with Europe and Amerika. Such becomes a circular argument when the details of Third World society are either unknown or not gathered up in systematic ways.

    J. Bradford De Long points out that Landes talks about China being the most scientifically advanced in the earlier part of the millenium but fails to offer a convincing reason for why China lost its edge. Relying on the academic work of others, Landes puts forward that China's Confucian culture vested business and state power in one place and thwarted the efforts of a potential business class to innovate.

    In contrast, Marxism does not attempt to explain development by timeless cultural arguments. Marxism refers to modes of production that change over time. We Marxists also do not feel compelled to justify European superiority on the basis of evidence that does not exist.

    Landes and many others in the tradition of "cultural" explanations cannot explain why Confucian culture was the most advanced scientifically at one time, because Confucianism is a constant and China's global scientific leadership role has been a variable. Furthermore, since Landes believes that Taiwan, Hong Kong and southern Korea have "made it," he has no explanation there either. They should still be stifling under Confucian mores against profit.

    Other reviewers gave Landes credit in the sense that we are "all postmodernists now." He admits that European civilization was inferior to Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations for thousands of years. The reason he gives is that Europeans didn't have the tools to handle Europe's dense forests (p. 19) and today many tropical countries still do not have the tools to deal with their environment. Landes does not tell us whether other societies were ahead in their forest-chopping technology, but he only asks to be accountable for the last 1000 years of history anyway.

    Also in the everyone-is-post-modernist-now spirit, Landes trots out a story about a fabulously wealthy African king (p. 73-) without ever explaining the details of how this African king and his culture failed along the criteria that Landes say are necessary for development.

    In the case of India, Landes tells us that Hindu religion saw no need to minimize the use of labor.(p. 227) He does not connect that to anything specific in the culture, so it is a fairly circular argument buttressed by ad-hoc arguments, such as that India had no screws.(p. 228) What is more he misses a chance to discuss diversity within Hinduism along the lines of his own concepts of "openness" and "tolerance" of discussion. Instead, what Landes does is explain the trivial with the trivial on an ad hoc basis.

    He admits that when it comes to India and its relationship to British imperialism, he found published works lacking. "Almost no written documentation comes down to us from the Indian side."(p. 163) It seems to Landes that even Indian scholars base their books on Western documents.

    While Landes bashes the post-modernists, he is simply the twin evil of post-modernism. Landes conducts poor science or pseudo-science in the name of not having to study or know much about Third World society. The post-modernists point to those like Landes and conclude (correctly) that we must study Third World society as part of "diversity." Yet on account of poor science by the likes of Landes, post-modernists reject all science.

    Accelerating inequality

    "The difference in income per head between the richest industrial nation, say Switzerland, and the poorest nonindustrial country, Mozambique, is about 400 to 1. Two hundred and fifty years ago, this gap between richest and poorest was perhaps 5 to 1, and the difference between Europe and, say, East or South Asia (China or India) was around 1.5 or 2 to 1."(p. xx)

    Landes himself raises the fact of accelerating economic inequality, but none of his arguments address that acceleration. He contents himself with pointing out differences, differences that have been more or less constant and hence not useful to explain larger and larger gaps. In fact, the differences Landes notices have gotten smaller over time while the economic gap between imperialists and oppressed nations has gotten larger.

    Readers can judge for themselves whether or not Landes' own criteria have become more true or less true in the time that acceleration of inequality took place:

    "If I had to single out the critical, distinctively European sources of success, I would emphasize three considerations: (1) the growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry; (2) the development of unity in disunity in the form of a common implicitly adversarial method, that is, the creation of a language of proof recognized, used, and understood across national and cultural boundaries, and (3) the invention of invention, that is, the routinization of research and its diffusion." (p. 201)(italics removed)

    In other words, Landes says Europe took up science and engineering and had the openness and freedom to do so. Science led to overall economic leadership, he says.

    Readers need to ask themselves if it is not true that more of the world has been exposed to science and even the Anglo view of things than ever before. Yet just as Anglo "openness" and media and demonstrations of science and engineering reach more people more often in faster communication than ever before, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

    Ironically, Landes does acknowledge the obvious facts of the situation. Science has made the rounds globally now. He derides those who believe China still needs to be cheer-led into science.(p. 349)

    Even more telling is some evidence he presents from Africa in 1962: "Without significant exception, all African leaders . . . share the passionate desire to acquire all the good things which western civilization has produced in the two millennia of its history. They want especially to get the tehnological blessings of American civilization, and to do so as quickly as possible.(pp. 499-500) Despite this fact, Africa is where the most countries with negative income growth can be found. Once again, if it is true that scientific method and Anglo influence are global now more than ever, why is the gap between rich and poor expanding if Landes is right?

    For us Marxists with the labor theory of value, it is not difficult at all to come up with a theory about an exponential growth rate in one group of countries and stagnation or regression in another group. Quite simply, the surplus-labor of one society contributes to the wealth of another. Even only a few percentage points of the total labor being appropriated from the Third World will explain European growth the same way a savings account grows exponentially in size over decades and centuries.

    In addressing similar arguments from the "dependency" school of thought in Latin America, Landes said that even if foreign interference is the real reason for poverty, it would be better to "stow" the theories that were true and concentrate on self-improvement.(p. 328) On the last page of the book, he returns to this theme talking about the need for an optimistic and striving culture and not a pessimistic one.(p. 524)

    To the extent that talking about imperialism is an excuse for whining, MIM has to agree with Landes. However, his remark on this in all italics shows an improper understanding of the importance of science. A bleak theory blaming foreign influence of imperialism, if it is true, means that development can only occur by destroying the link to imperialism. In other words, there are practical implications of "science" and they cannot just be "stowed." An accurate view of a problem is necessary before one solves it with the least waste of energy.

    Social-democratic view of imperialism

    In reply, Landes says that the imperialists already withdrew from the colonies. The reason they leave is that the cost of administration of colonialism became too expensive.(pp. 393,423)

    Social-democrats have always differed with Lenin's theory of imperialism. According to the social- democrats, when imperialism becomes too costly, policy changes. Landes accepts that view.

    From the Leninist view, the imperialists only withdraw when the cost to them is too great. The imperialists hardly care if the exploited or the oppressed bear the costs of empire. A war may be very expensive, but if the imperialists are not paying the taxes, then they see benefit in that war for colonial plunder.

    It is also important to point out in this context that Lenin never said a system had to export capital steadily without crisis to be imperialist. If a society is characterized by export of capital but more capital flows back as accumulation from foreign investments, then that is exactly what we Leninists believe. Lenin's theory of imperialism is a theory of crisis. Certainly there is much capitalism that never reaches the multinational corporate stage, but once it does reach that stage, we Leninists never claimed it would be stable or successful.

    Pre-capitalist militarism

    Although Landes does discuss the genocide committed against indigenous peoples, he is untroubled by the possibility that militarism might have been the real reason some societies failed or ceased to exist while the Europeans went ahead. Perhaps development has not much to do with protecting private property and quite the contrary many societies more advanced perished on its account already.

    The discussion of militarism by Landes is totally lacking. He is irked that some progressive historians treat European military superiority as an accident of history.(p. 89) He knows that all of European progress can be linked to the use of force against Third World peoples, so he goes to great lengths to show that Europe was already more advanced than the Third World and that is why it had military superiority.

    His own story on the Chinese undercuts him. The Chinese invented gunpowder; yet they did not plunder the world with the invention. In fact, Landes implies the Chinese didn't really understand their invention and mystified themselves with war as if it "were a display of recipes."(p. 53)

    This observation and many similar ones did not stop Landes from saying later that imperialism "is the expression of a deep human drive."(p. 63) A mere 12 pages later, he quoted Columbus on how the natives of North America did not covet property and "they know nothing of killing one another."(p. 75) So much for Landes's "deep human drive" idea.

    Landes admits that the white man was baffled by the indigenous people and that contributed to genocide, but Landes seems unwilling to consider the possibility of peoples more restrained than Europeans and also perhaps less restrained in militarism and now gone forever.

    On the other hand, Landes also never tallied up all the imperialist military aid from Anglo-Amerikan imperialism to pre-capitalist ruling cliques. Even mentioning the global military aid of U.$. imperialism to repression would have undercut the European tradition he wants to credit for economic progress. Thus, if openness is crucial to development as Landes said, then U.$.-backed military repression throughout the world is a perfect explanation for lack of Third World development.

    No Soviet Union treatment

    It appears that at least in the case of the Soviet Union, the more Western openness, the slower the economic growth. Economic growth was fantastic under Stalin and has steadily decelerated since his rule. The more capitalism the Soviet Union took up, the worse its economy became. Now in this last bit of Yelstin-era capitalism, the economy has shrunk 40 percent.

    The success of Stalin and the failure of Yelstin is something Landes does not even attempt to address. What little he says treats the Soviet Union as one thing from 1917 to 1986.(p. 497) We Maoists say it went state-capitalist after Stalin died in 1953.

    Points of unity with LandesDavid Landes is an historian who attacks Marxism as "too simple." When he needs to use a little Marxism, he uses it, but in an explanation with several other chains of reasoning as well.David Landes rejects Marxism as too simple essentially because he rejects the discipline of science. That is why he is unable to sustain his own comparisons and analysis throughout the world and the book he wrote.

    Thanks to his deliberate eclecticism ("Monocausal explanations will not work." (p. 517)), it is necessary to point out those snippets of work he did that we do agree with. Examples would include his admission of genocide by the white oppressor nation against the indigenous peoples of America and his admission that slavery also killed millions even just in the voyage over. This kind of thing that is impossible for the slightly-read historian to ignore anymore without looking dumb in front of the masses -- Landes is inclined to concede.One of his theses going along with Western Liberalism is that societies with religious restrictions fell behind economically. Landes's message is tolerance of Jews and Protestants. Islam and the Inquisition and other religious intolerance cut into business and technology. According to Landes, religious bigotry is such a problem that Portugal and Spain started out leading the quest for empire in the last several hundred years, but they lost on account of their reactionary religious views.(e.g., pp. 134-5)MIM agrees with Landes on this point. He serves as the memory of the bourgeoisie and we agree that capitalism is superior to pre-capitalist modes of production, so his pointing to pogroms holding back economic development -- we see this as a case of the superstructure holding back the mode of production. Historically the bourgeoisie is correct about its struggles against pre-capitalist societies in which religious authority was higher than business authority.

    Landes did not discuss British intolerance of Catholicism. His book is solidly pro-Protestant and he admits to adhering to Max Weber's theses on the Protestant Ethic; (p. 177) although they have been disproved specifically with regard to Protestantism many times since Weber wrote his theses.

    Overall amongst religions and cultures, the book is most favorable to the Jews, Anglo-American imperialism and Zionism as contributors to modernity. He notes correctly that the Catholic Church squelched the famous scientist Galileo 400 years ago and is only now getting around to rehabilitating him. (p. 181) For the Germans, he mentions their racial intolerance.(p. 467)

    Thus, the typical bourgeois view includes tolerance -- gender, race and religious tolerance. Another important thing is "openness." Japan ordered its people not to travel in the 1600s.(p. 356) Ocean vessels have been put under restriction many times in history. Yet opposing immigration, emigration or foreign travels is just another way inquiry falls down and contention of views is diminished. According to Landes, and we believe he is correct in the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist, lack of openness will lead to lack of development.Another area we agree with is Landes's attacks on post-modernism in defense of science: "One must reject the implication that outsideness disqualifies; that only Muslims can understand Islam, only blacks understand black history, only a woman understand women's studies, and so on. That way lies separateness and a dialogue of the deaf."(p. 417)

    (from MIM Notes 178, Jan. 15, 1999)

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    World Hunger: Twelve Myths, by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Grove Press, 1986.

    This book seeks to prove that there is enough food in the world to end world hunger, but political structures perpetuate mass starvation.

    In a brief 149 pages, the authors bring potent facts to bear to support numerous theories of theirs (taken from others) that could fill several books. For example, Lappe cites a World Bank study to show that overpopulation results from the conditions of the poor. When the poor enjoy a secure life, they no longer have so many children. (p.27) Another example used to criticize export-led development is that Kenyan export income quadrupled between 1970 and 1980, but malnutrition increased. (p. 87) Also, Lappe and Collins make an interesting feminist observation that where women are central to the economy and enjoy reproductive rights, hunger is lower. As such, women oppose the trend towards the cash- crop economy in their own subsistence interests. (p. 90)

    Ultimately though, the book does not deserve to be on the MIM literature list in this author's opinion because it has a worked out line on capitalism and socialism. The Lappe and Collins support a populist capitalism against landlord oligarchies. They do not oppose private property, but only want the peasants to be able to use the land as part of their right not to be hungry. They do not oppose market society, but they support income redistribution so that the world's half a billion starving people can eat. (p. 81,82)

    They have praise for Nicaragua, Mondragon and China. They side with the Eritreans. They criticize the struggle between the East and West blocs as detracting from efforts to end world hunger. Their line on the Soviet Union is that it is a "statist" society.

    Lappe and Collins consciously oppose state intervention in the market except where necessary to save the market from statist revolution. They view "statism" as an "economic dogma" and they support civil liberties as necessary to ending world hunger.

    If there is such a thing as progressive capitalist revolution against feudalism anymore, Lappe and Collins would be spokespeople for the ascendant capitalist class. On these grounds one could argue that the book deserves MIM's support as part of the two-stage revolution still required in parts of the Third World. Perhaps this review is only the beginning of a debate within MIM about the book. If so, cast this vote against distributing it. (From MN 30, May 29, 1987)

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    Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Bebe Moore Campbell, G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1992

    by MC12

    Here is a novel that gains its power from the assumed authenticity of its portrayal, its attention to details of daily life, and its supposed basis in historical events. Despite writing that is at times powerful and provocative, the book is ultimately a fraud, as much for its phony depiction of Black helplessness and white helpfulness - as for its mistelling of history.

    The novel is based on the killing of Emmett Till by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955. The killing is at the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the story makes up the lives of those involved from 1955 to the present.

    The real lynching

    The Supreme Court had just released the Brown v. Board of Education decision that supposedly ended school segregation, and the white yahoos of Mississippi were pissed. They lynched Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. On a dare from friends, he had called a white women in rural Mississippi "babe" after bragging about a white girlfriend up North. A few days later, he was abducted from his family's home, driven around and threatened for hours, beaten and finally shot. His body was found several days later in a nearby river, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his testicles cut off, his head crushed, and one eye gouged out.(1)

    A white man's jury - who in real life (though not in the novel) drank beer in the jury box - returned a verdict of not guilty against the known perpetrators after an hour's deliberation.

    Campbell moderates the lynching markedly. Her Till ("Armstrong Todd") is beaten and then shot right in the yard of his relatives. His body is not sexually mutilated or dumped in the river; he is not taunted and terrorized for hours.

    Campbell is intent on humanizing all the players in the story, on making them real and likeable. She even paints the murderer himself as an emasculated poor white man who really only gets dragged into the crime by his goading older brother - a brother who has always held his father's attention more, who always seemed to do everything right.

    While Campbell's murderer is dirt poor and only gets poorer after the crime, the real criminal was paid $4,000 by a white journalist to tell the true story after the trial, an event that doesn't fit into Campbell's scheme of things.

    The killer's helpless wife, a crucial martyr in the story, is also a kindly and likeable woman, who really wants to be friends with Black people. Everything she says and does toward them is friendly except that she says "nigger" a lot. She is abused by her husband (not unlikely) and eventually moves in with her daughter, who by the 1980s is an integrationist labor activist.

    In this depiction, the only benefit gained by white women from lynching and white supremacy is a fleeting sense of importance that is quickly dwarfed by guilt and humiliation. In words right out of a women's studies textbook, the white women in this story wake up and realize that white men don't lynch for them, but for themselves. This is to make clear that white women are really in the same boat as Blacks, and just need to get over some cultural barriers before getting down to some serious integration.

    In real life, however, white women gain a whole system of privilege by virtue of their position on the elevated end of white-supremacist chivalry - even as they remain subordinate to the white men who wield the whips.

    Perhaps worse, however, is Campbell's transformation of Blacks into emotion-dominated victims incapable of rational collective action. Local Blacks and national organizations, and even family members, militantly fought the Till lynching and others like it. Till's cousin's grandmother put her body between the lynch mob and the young man, before she was knocked out by a shotgun butt - an incident that also doesn't make it into the book. Because rather than take advantage of that militant history to turn the novel into an inspiring tribute to their heroic efforts, Campbell writes it out of the story to create needy and self-absorbed Blacks.

    Till's mother, Mamie Till, fought to have an open-casket funeral for her son, so his mutilated body would be a signal to the world. In the novel, she sneaks his body out of town under cover of night.

    Mamie Till spent several years touring and speaking on her son's death. In the book she becomes a recluse who devotes herself more than anything else to replacing her son. The most public thing she does is show up at memorials for her son and cry.

    Black effort betrayed

    In 1955, Medgar Evers of the NAACP and other anti-lynching activists dressed as sharecroppers to talk to local Blacks and collect evidence to be used at a trial, at great personal risk. They also worked to drum up support from the Black press to get the case publicized.

    But in the novel a single white journalist, who happens to be the son of a rich plantation owner, takes it on himself to call the New York press and convince them to send reporters, which sparks nationwide press attention.

    The kind-hearted liberal goes on to spend thousands of dollars helping local Blacks over the rest of his life, and even runs a small school out of his office. The white journalist who in real life paid the murderers $4,000 for their story somehow doesn't make it into the novel.

    In the end, Campbell's Blacks emerge as weak and disorganized, incapable of escaping personal angst and their own rage in the face of overwhelming oppression.

    Campbell is too concerned about bringing the Blacks and whites in the story back together to pay attention to the historical imperatives of the period and the events she treats. Historical fiction can be a great tool for changing reality. But in this case readers who want to learn from history would be better advised to read factual accounts and devote their imaginations - and their efforts - to making a better future more reality than fiction.

    Notes:

    1. This account of the killing is from Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam 1990. pp. 1-15. And from Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press 1984. p. 29.

    (from MIM Notes 82, November 1993)

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