Down The Ohio

Spent the holiday weekend in Ohio and took a day to head east on 52 away from Cincinnati.  The road follows the Ohio River and is dotted with wonderful old river towns, some of which are the earliest European settlements in the region.  Long before Europeans the Ohio, a Seneca word, and its tributaries were the center of a number of native societies.  Goods, people and ideas were transported on the river whose waters offered abundant resources in themselves.  Mounds and earthworks were once ubiquitous along the river and those that flow into it.  Now only a few remain.  We saw a small Adena conical mound near Edgington, a bit further down the route from where we ended are the great Portsmouth Works whose design spans the river.

The Ohio River was the way into the west once the Appalachians were crossed and for many years was the border between North and South; slave and free.  It is the Mason Dixon line here.  Everywhere along the river are palimpsests of that division.  The Rankin Home, near Ripley, was long a stop on the way north to freedom for escaping slaves and is just one of many places with underground railroad connections along the river.  While I am happy to see abolitionists recognized, one would think that Ohio was just one big anti-slavery camp.  It’s a wonder there were any slaves left to fight about if all of the stories of white folks helping slaves to freedom were true.  In fact, Southern Ohio was pretty butternut and Copperheads were a real force in Ohio throughout the war.

Cincinnati had racist pogroms and very contradictory loyalties during the war; folks with strong business ties to the south and those with strong business ties to the east.  Cincinnati had a large population of newly arrived German catholic immigrants, the natural base of the Democratic Party, along with a population whetted to the free labor ethos of those pushing west.  The city has had one foot firmly in the South since it was founded and has a history of unofficial Jim Crowism that has yet to fully die to this day.  Ohio certainly did have a proud history of abolitionism, especially in the northeast, and conspirators of liberty were active throughout the state with the river, the border, being a central focus.  The fact that militant abolitionists were organizing in the area brought plenty of slave-catchers before the war and raids during the war.  Oberlin, Ohio was famous for resisting slave catchers and providing John Brown, a sometime Ohio resident, with recruits for the Harper’s Ferry raid.

We stopped at Grant’s birth place near Point Pleasant, the son of a tanner would become General of all the Union Armies and victor in the Civil War only to be remembered as a failed president.  To me he remains endlessly fascinating and his memoirs are certainly the best of any US President or General.  On a personal level he is a very hard man to like as well as a very hard man not to like.  Never even hinting at greatness until tried by the greatest event in the life of the nation he should have stuck with his promise and his inclination to avoid politics.  He would have forever been the American Cincinnatus instead of the corrupt drunkard who squandered his glory.  Truth be told he was neither of those things.  Other Generals were greater than Grant, including ones he took credit for, neither was he personally corrupt.  Grant will only be refashioned in the eyes of history when the nation fully absorbs Reconstruction; which will take another revolution to put in perspective.

We crossed the Ohio at Maysville and returned to the city on the Kentucky side.  We climbed to the top of Cemetery Hill in Augusta, Kentucky where in 1862 the Confederates took over the heights to bombard the town below (still home to the Clooney Clan of George Clooney fame).  The Confederate guns on the ridge drove back the Union gunboats leaving the town to be defended by a heavily outnumbered local militia.  In house-to-house fighting which saw much of the town razed the locals defeated the Confederate assault at great cost.  I don’t know of many engagements of this size in the area and had never heard of this battle, though Kentucky and even Cincinnati were a sought after Confederate gain.  The forces that fought over Augusta were all mainly from Kentucky, further proof that in Kentucky as in Tennessee, the war was truly a civil war.  When we saw graves of Kentucky volunteers in the cemetery we weren’t sure if they fought for the North or the South.  Both are buried here on the ridge were they fought.

Those Confederate hopes of winning the border states were  dashed when the their northern push in the fall of 1862 was blunted at Antietam, Maryland and Perryville, Kentucky to the south of Augusta.  Perryville is one of the forgotten battles of the war.  Sloppily fought it ended the possibility of Kentucky joining the south.  The battle also saw the rise to prominence of the Union general George Henry Thomas, who went on to be the best Union Army commander of the war in my opinion.  This southerner and child of slave-owners was the only Northern leader of an Army to use black troops as leading elements.  Those black troops performed to great effect as at Nashville near the end of the war destroying Hood’s Army of Tennessee.  General Thomas’ record in the war remains one of the best and least known.  You can blame the image makers of Grant and others for that.

The road back through the hills of Kentucky was just as nice.  Kentucky definitely deserves further meanderings.  Hopefully during Christmas we’ll do a jaunt.  If you’re ever in the region pull out your map and plan your own route 52 excursion.  Look for a ferry to cross the river and get lost if you can.  You never know what you mighty find.

Darwinism and Its Discontents

John McAnulty of Ireland’s Socialist Democracy reflects on Darwin’s anniversary year in a prequel to a longer study

The anniversary year of the ‘On the Origin of Species’ has seen a renewed interest in Darwin and in the theory of evolution and many celebratory articles have been carried in socialist journals.  Few go beyond celebration to look at the often strained relationship between Darwinism and Marxism or try to explain why, 200 years after the birth of Darwin and 150 years after the publication of the book establishing the theory of evolution, the majority of humans would still reject a rational explanation for their place in the world that has survived a century and a half of scientific study to emerge as the foundation of our understanding of biology.

Darwin’s theory of the origin of species is one of the fundamental and pivotal theories of modern science.  It presents a convincing mechanism for all the wide variety of living things, for their evolution over time, and for the interaction of living things and their environment that makes up modern ecology. Alongside its daughter science, genetics, it stands posed to massively increase our control over our own bodies, over disease and over the natural world in the coming century.

Yet it is in the 21st century that Darwinism has come under the greatest attack from the forces of religious fundamentalism and obscurantism.

The reason for this is quite simple.  Darwinism goes well beyond its status as a scientific theory.  By explaining the origin of species through a process of natural selection, Darwin removed the need for a god to fulfill the same function.  In the film “Creation” the point is dramatically underscored when Darwin explains the theory to a friend who exclaims in delight (and to Darwin’s horror) “wonderful – you’ve killed God!” The award-winning film has not been distributed in America.

Although it is not widely understood to be the case, support for Darwinism contradicts Theism – the idea of a God personally involved in creation and the day-to-day running of the world, and restricts the faithful to Deism – the possibility of a God as a vague ‘initial cause’  Not only that, the theory of evolution situated humans inside the animal kingdom, subject to the same evolutionary pressures as other living things. Understanding ourselves became a task for reason and rationality, rather than an appeal to religious obscurantism.

For much of the 20th century Darwinism was seen in opposition to Marx, as a defender of order against the opponents of capitalism.  Yet initially it was seen as a deadly threat to that order. These contradictory roles arose from the contradictory nature of capitalism itself.

Much of capitalist society rests on the application of rationality and science to production, to research and to the structure of society and the everyday working life of individuals.  At the same time capitalist society is dedicated to the irrational aims of defending class rule and subordinating human needs to the profit motive.

These contradictions lead to a contradictory approach to the question of religion.  On the one hand, application of rationality in the service of capital sweeps away all the pretences of social solidarity and of any obligation on the capitalist to treat the poor and oppressed as their brethren.  On the other hand, religions teach the poor to respect a class structure endorsed by god and to look for happiness and the satisfaction of their needs in the afterlife rather than the here and now.  The result is that capitalism tears down religion, and the background ethical issues that they distortedly express, only to support it as an abstract ideology. Religions themselves changed.  Protestantism arose partly from the need to break out of the constants of feudal society, especially the ban on charging interest on loans, and partly to free the merchants from being forced to donate to charitable works.

Today US Christian fundamentalism preaches that riches are a result of god’s favor, a message entirely opposite to the original biblical Christianity.  The role of religious obscurantism is seen clearly in the North of Ireland, where imperialism depends on the darkest forms of religious fundamentalism to form the leadership of the local executive and panders to their religious bigotry and kow-tows to their rejection of science in relation to both evolution and climate change.

Initially the origin of species was seen as too dangerous a threat to religion to be allowed to stand.  A sharp battle broke out between different factions of capitalism, with the most reactionary elements fighting to throw back science and impose biblical superstition.

The reactionaries were defeated and the victors immediately set about making Darwinism itself a reactionary ideology.  The new social Darwinism drew on the authority of Darwin to argue that unrestrained capitalist exploitation and savage repression of the working class were the result of our biological make-up – that society, like nature, is ‘red in tooth and claw’.

The rise of mass working class organizations made it much more difficult to advance these ideas, but they remain the staple diet of right-wing movements today and have been reborn in new currents that preach genetic determinism – the idea that social problems such as crime are the result of faulty genes.

The latest edition from this perspective is the theory of sociobiology – the idea that the prehistoric environment in some way uniquely fixed human character for all time.

Marxists reject these views.  We believe that all human activity has a material foundation, but we reject utterly the view of mechanical materialism – that activity at one level of reality determines our behavior at another level.

The bestiality and massacre throughout our history are part of our biological capacity, just as the acts of solidarity and self-sacrifice are. Any explanation that claims that we are forced by our genes to murder and oppress others is nonsense.   The oppression must be explained in its own terms, by the political ideology that drives it, the class aims expressed by the ideology and the underlying economic forces.

Marxists support a dialectical view of the world.  Nothing is uniquely determined.  If economic forces give rise to our political consciousness, it is then possible for our political consciousness to change economic reality.

The Marxist response to ‘social Darwinism’ is to argue that the laws used to explain one level of reality cannot be extended to another.  The laws of Physics apply to living things, but they are of little use in explaining the development and behavior of living systems . In the same way the laws of Biology apply to society, but explaining social behavior in humans requires the sort of social and economic explanation offered by Marxism.

This sort of understanding enabled Marx to be amongst the first to welcome and support Darwinism and Marxism to be in the forefront in opposing social Darwinism.  It was a political sophistication beyond the Stalinist gravediggers of the revolution.

They opposed social Darwinism by opposing the biological theory.  Stalin’s henchman, Lysenko, faked experiments ‘proving’ that animals evolved due to direct environmental pressure rather than genetic change. The result was that under Stalinism science degenerated into a dogma that persecuted individual scientists and distorted science to support a corrupt bureaucracy.   This had disastrous outcomes for workers – dogma applied to agriculture meant inevitable crop failures.

The greater strength and self-confidence of capitalist society allowed for a wider level of individual freedom amongst scientists.  That individual freedom did not mean that science was free.  At one extreme there was the witch hunts and repression of the McCarthy era in America, designed to make sure that the scientists produced weapons of mass slaughter without expressing any concern about their use. At the other extreme was the social structure of science and academic life, holding scientists to narrow specialisms, advising caution about drawing political conclusions – all the forces that allowed capitalism to avoid the clear conclusions of climate research and environmental degradation.

Marxism claims to go beyond science.   Because science is a social construct in the service of capitalism it will always be constrained by ideology that reflects the interests and worldview of capitalism.  This is clearly the case in the ideas of social Darwinism and is even the case in discussions within science – ‘the selfish gene’ is an idea loaded down with social metaphor.

From a Marxist perspective the mechanism of adaptation is an extraordinary powerful one.  Its power does not end with biological evolution.  Adaptation may be the main mechanism organizing the basic neural elements of thought and identity and is clearly an important element in many aspects of our behavior as we unconsciously fit into different social milieus.

What an adaptive process cannot deal with is human intention.   If humans were simply biological units personal consciousness would be superfluous and we would act as directed by selfish genes or on the basis of habit patterns grounded in our history as hunter-gatherers.

Adaptative mechanisms also lack direction. People often speak of evolutionary progress but a more realistic picture is of the ‘tree of life’.  Life constantly adapts and changes.  All living organisms are the outcome of that process.  All are equally adapted – the buttercup just as much as the human. Evolution does not ascend to humans or plan to produce humans. Biological evolution simply makes human society one possibility among many . Intentions, purposes, goals – they all come from humans themselves.

Marxists believe they can deal with these weaknesses by advancing the concept of dialectical materialism.  Human consciousness and society rest upon a material base.  These material conditions determine the way in which we think and out picture of the world but, because the relationship is dialectical, humans are not simply passive objects formed by the forces of production but active agents who can struggle to change the world and society they live in and, in the process of struggle, can burst the bounds of existing society to create a new one.

If consciousness determined being then a clear explanation of the theory of education and a greater level of education would be sufficient to see it established.  If being determines consciousness without any restrictions then the slow decay of the capitalist mode of production would also mean a slow decline of scientific understanding and a descent into religious fundamentalism and barbarism.

Marx argued that once being determines consciousness it is possible for consciousness to determine being – that through struggle the working class could save humanity and establish a socialist society where the savagery of class struggle would be suppressed and rationality would rule over superstition.  Then at last people could see clearly their relationship with the world of life in the long history of planet earth and the book “Origin of species” would finally come into its own.

Solidarity Northeast Conference Vidoes

Here is Dave McNally of Canada’s New Socialist Group opening Solidarity’s Northeast Conference in New York City last weekend.  Many more videos from the event can be found here and are well worth watching.  NY Solidarity is here.

Big Takeover!

Sunday morning Bad Brains y’all….Wake Up!

California Students Revolt!

It’s on at campuses across the California as the state seeks to impose a series of steep tuition hikes.  Here are a few on-site videos that give a flavor of what’s going on.  These actions have made my week.  Much more at Student Activism.  One criticism: while “hell no, we wont go” retains all of its potency, the egregious chant “…ain’t no power like the power of the people, cause the people don’t stop ” just won’t die the death it so richly deserves.

Here’s a report and some links lifted from the Solidarity webzine and written by Isaac:

California knows how to party – students strike across UC system

Building on more modest actions one month ago, California’s statewide public university system has exploded in protest as thousands of students rally against outrageous tuition hikes. Tactics have ranged from mass rallies to five building occupations. At UCLA and UC Berkeley, the professional union UPTE staged a one-day strike Wednesday, followed a day later by a rally of 2,000 students encircling the Board of Regents meeting as they voted on the monster 32% fee increase.

Under a call for “No Business as Usual,” the student activists have united around several demands:

1. That the Regents vote no on the proposed fee increases.
2. That the UC stop cuts and layoffs, and end its aggressive union-busting tactics.
3. Transparency of the UC budget, including complete figures on how much of the additional revenue from fees will be diverted for construction and used as bond collateral.
4. Expand enrollment of underrepresented groups and ensure equal access to education for all by maintaining all educational institutions as sanctuary spaces for undocumented students and workers and by providing adequate financial aid for undocumented and underrepresented students.
5. An explanation for the failure of the UC leadership to make an effective case for public higher education. As both students and taxpayers, we demand leaders who can make that case, and an administration whose transparency can once again inspire the confidence of the state and its citizens.

Intimidation of the protesters has ranged from tasering of African-American UCLA students to slapping one demonstrator at Berkeley with the major charge of inciting a riot, and rumors of threats of tear gas. Student occupiers at UC Santa Cruz have included in their demands the disarming of campus police – which is the case in many countries throughout the world.

While this round of demonstrations is not yet concluded, the Regents decision is a real blow to education access. However plans are underway for more action this spring, as California students lead the way in refusing to pay for the fallout of the capitalist crisis.

For on the scene information:

• UC Strike
• Occupy California: UC Santa Cruz
• UCLA Resists

The Class War by Numbers

New reports speak volumes about the state of the class war in this country.  The news?  We’re losing badly.  While the capitalists are using the crisis to further consolidate their class power the working class has yet to act in its own interests at all (the Ford vote notwithstanding).  Often times, if the past is any indicator, a fight back lags well behind the crisis.  We’re hoping that dynamic in the context of the United States at the end of 2009 doesn’t mean a generational lag, but it might.

The first is the USDA’s Household Food Security Report for 2008.  Among the findings was that 14.6 percent of all households, comprising about 50 million people, were “food insecure” sometime during the year.  For food insecure read “went hungry.”  Reminder: The United States is, by a rather big margin, the wealthiest country in the world.  50 million hungry people? Goddamn Uncle Sam.  Of those 5.7 percent are described as having “very low food security.”  If you’ve ever been in a situation of “very low food security” then you know it’s a damn scary place to be and if you have kids, well is there a more terrible place for a parent to be then the inability to feed their children?

These numbers for 2008 are up dramatically from 2007 where rates of food insecurity and very low food security were up from 11.1 percent and 4.1 percent.   Rates are higher among black and Hispanic homes and households headed by single parents.  Hunger is much worse in the South and than in the Northeast even as much more food is produced in the South than the Northeast.  Gotta love the market.  At the end of 2008 the unemployment level was 7.2% now it’s well over 10%.  Certainly the numbers now, at the end of 2009, are much worse than those reported for 2008.  We are heading into winter where there will be extra heating costs and a new round of foreclosures.  Times look to get harder in the short run, not better.  Well, Wall Street is up and eventually that will trickle down, right?

If anecdotal evidence is any indicator than the long lines at the too few Ypsilanti food banks tells a grim story.  I occasionally volunteer at a food bank that I have had to go to in the past and unscientifically I can tell you that need is through the roof in my town all the while there are fewer donations and resources available.  When I am at the DHS to sign in for my stamps the office is not crowded, there is a crowd in the office.  Rising prices, declining wages, underemployment and other factors all combine to create this crisis.  People who work, even full time, are not making enough to feed their families.  No wonder the schools are a mess; we’re sending kids to school with empty bellies.

Banks fail through their own fault and billions from the public purse gets thrown into their laps.  Apparently it worked pretty well for them since Wall Street is going on to record profits this year according to a new study.  That’s right, in the midst of the recession the banks are set to make more than they did at the height of the bubble.  While you are going to bed with a growling stomach Goldman Sachs is putting money into piles too big to count.  The top six banks have set aside 112 billion for salaries and bonuses this year.  Class war?  Is it really a war if only one side fights?  Yeah, we’re getting the shit kicked out of us big time and we better start kicking back or we’re going to be knocked unconscious.

A look at the state of the unions bodes poorly for such a fight back.  A recent study by the Center for Economic Policy Research on the state of trade unions in the country should be required reading for leftists and trade unionists.  In 1983 over 20% of all workers were in unions.  Now that number is 12.4%.  Unions in the private sector have fallen even more dramatically.  The most disheartening number from the perspective of future struggle is that the lowest rates of unionization is among workers aged 16-24.  There only 5.7% are in unions.  With numbers like that we will continue to see hunger among millions along side the fat bellies of a handful of billionaires.

It should, by now, go without saying that the Obama administration is not interested in the plight of those peckish millions.  No, their interest lies with the bloated bankers.  It took no time at all for Obama to find the will to funnel billions to the fat cats and yet there is not even a hint of that same urgency to fight the food crisis.  Of course not.  And yet folks still seem to think that Obama is some sort of closet New Dealer who only needs to be pushed a little to unveil himself.  He is not; nor is he a blank slate.  This administration has proven, and some of us would like to say “we told you so”, that it is a firmly neo-liberal one.  And neo-liberal in the face of the of the failure of neo-liberalism!  We should base our tactics on that reality otherwise “the left” will always be chasing the wind with this guy.

More numbers: 30-40,000.  That’s what is being reported as the number of additional troops Obama is about to sign off on for Afghanistan.  While it might be too late to join the current escalation, if you’re hungry and out of a job I believe that there will be a whole lot of new openings in the armed forces over the next few years as last year’s poor return from the mountains of South Asia in boxes.  Where’s my torch and pitchfork?  Where’s yours?

Mavis!

I’ve seen some good shows this last month.  Bob Dylan was as good as I’ve seen him the last couple of years and Wilco channeled Television (the band) at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium which is home to the best acoustics of any venue I’ve been to.  But it was Mavis Staples playing a benefit at the Michigan Theater that really stands out.  She gave the finest vocal performance I’ve had the pleasure of attending in as long as I can remember.  And they were freedom songs.  She had more energy at seventy than most musicians a third her age and sang every word as if she meant it, because she did.  When any kind of authenticity in our culture is undermined by commodification the real stands out more starkly.  If Mavis comes to your town see her.  It was as close to church as the Rustbelt will allow himself and I’m still humming the hymns.  Above is Mavis and her band testifying with Down in Mississippi.

We Only Want the Earth!

Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene’er they speak
That we demand too much.
’Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

“Be moderate,” the trimmers cry,
Who dread the tyrants’ thunder.
“You ask too much and people By
From you aghast in wonder.”
’Tis passing strange, for I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

Our masters all a godly crew,
Whose hearts throb for the poor,
Their sympathies assure us, too,
If our demands were fewer.
Most generous souls! But please observe,
What they enjoy from birth
Is all we ever had the nerve
To ask, that is, the earth.

The “labour fakir” full of guile,
Base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we’ll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
To realize its own, the earth.

For labour long, with sighs and tears,
To its oppressors knelt.
But never yet, to aught save fears,
Did the heart of tyrant melt.
We need not kneel, our cause no dearth
Of loyal soldiers’ needs
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be we want the earth!

James Connolly 1907