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)
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)
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
(From MIM Theory 1)
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.
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)
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:
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:
(From MIM Notes 36, March 3, 1989)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution:
Germany 1918-
1919, Banner Press, Chicago: 1986
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life
and Law, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Harvard U. Press, 1987, 315 pp.
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.)
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
How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev, New
York: Routledge, 1995
Jazz, by Toni Morrison, 1992
Masters Of Illusion: The World Bank And The Poverty
Of Nations, by Catherine Caufield (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 432
pp.
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.
Resurrection: The Struggle For A New Russia, by
David Remnick NY: Random House, 1997, 398
pp.
The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets For Capturing The
Heart Of Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider, 174 pp. 1995
Shenfan, William Hinton, 1984, Vintage Books, 790
pages.
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class, By David R.
Roediger, London: Verso, 1991
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.
World Hunger: Twelve Myths, by Frances Moore Lappe and
Joseph Collins, Grove Press, 1986.
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Bebe Moore Campbell,
G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1992
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