Issue 275 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published June 2003 Copyright © Socialist Review
Books |
Review |
Reefer Madness
Eric Schlosser
Penguin £10.99
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When I was young I would happily sit listening to my nan's accounts of life in west London during the Second World War. Inevitably the discussion would move on to the question of rationing and the black market. She would recount how it was possible to buy anything--from meat, chocolate, cigarettes and the obligatory 'nylons'--from the spivs and black market racketeers. That was then. But how much have things really changed? Are the jeans you got down the market really Calvin Klein's? Have you paid the duty on your fags and what about the eighth tucked away in your bottom drawer? The truth is, in this era of free market globalisation, the black economy is alive and kicking.
According to Eric Schlosser's wonderful new book, Reefer Madness, these shadow economies range in size from about 10 percent of the US economy, 12.5 percent of the the gross domestic product (GDP) in Britain, 27 percent of the Italian GDP and a staggering 75 percent of the GDP of Nigeria. He argues that the size of black markets is not fixed, but instead rises and falls with the state of the economy.
The book can be divided into three essays. The first looks at the legal and economic consequences of marijuana use in the US. Did you know that Americans now spend more money on illegal drugs than the combined US earnings of Marlboro, Camel and all the other cigarette manufacturers? Schlosser demonstrates that those who suffer most from the so called war on drugs tend to be poor or working class people. Interestingly, while drug testing in the workplace has been used to systematically hound and control low paid workers, legislation to impose drug testing on members of Congress has repeatedly died in committee and never reached the floor for a vote!
Probably the most powerful essay is the one that addresses the harrowing plight of California's migrant agricultural workers. The hourly wages of Californian farm workers have dropped by more than 50 percent since 1980. Up to 60 percent of all Californian farm labourers are migrant workers. The average migrant is a Mexican male aged 29, who earns less that $7,500 for 25 weeks work and whose life expectancy is 49 years! Read Schlosser's accounts about the back-breaking work of the strawberry pickers, the camps they live in and how the Immigration Department kicks them out of the country as soon as the harvest is complete. You have to keep pinching yourself to remind you that this isn't a page from one of John Steinbeck's 1930s novels--this is George W Bush's America. This thriving black market in labour has enabled the Californian agricultural corporations to make massive profits. So called illegal immigrants, hounded and persecuted by the media and labelled as welfare cheats are in effect subsidising the most important sector of the Californian economy.
Finally, Schlosser delves into the world of the porn industry. He sees pornography rooted in a society fuelled by loneliness and frustration. But instead of writing an essay on pornography itself, this is very much an account of the underlying economics of the industry. Schlosser follows the porn industry's transformation from minor subculture on the fringes of society into the major business that it is today. Americans now spend as much as $10 billion a year on so called 'adult entertainment'. That is an amount roughly the same as Hollywood's domestic box office receipts.
Reefer Madness has the ability to both shock and make you angry at the same time. Linking all three essays is a belief that the underground is inextricably linked to the mainstream. Today's spivs don't lurk in corners, pockets stuffed with goodies--instead they come with their corporate logos and with the blessing and backing of our governments.
Martin Smith
Power Failure
Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins
Aurum Press £14.99
Sherron Watkins was an Enron vice-president who, as the company teetered on collapse, wrote a memo to her boss Ken Lay saying, 'We will implode in a wave of accounting scandals.' She met Lay and suggested more honest bookkeeping. Post-collapse, she cooperated with Congressional inquiries while most of Enron's management took the Fifth Amendment.
Watkins isn't really a whistleblower--she didn't tell the public about Enron's lies, she just met the boss and suggested he told the truth more often. Enron's management were so crooked that her mild protest stands out. Her memoir of the affair gives a feel of Enron from the inside.
Watkins failed to speak out more loudly, but this was part of a more general failure. Politicians took the firm's money and passed laws to help Enron cheat. Banks and accountants lined up to help disguise Enron's imaginary finances. Even now, prosecutors have failed to put Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling in the dock for their crimes.
Enron grew because of privatisation and deregulation. Privatisation meant Enron could buy up public utilities. Britain was key to Enron's growth--the firm's massive Teesside electricity plant was an early 'bet the company deal' which could 'doom' the firm or 'make Enron an international player overnight'--it did the latter. Bringing Tory energy minister John Wakeham onto the board helped. Enron also grew when it bought Wessex Water while giving money to the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. Deregulation allowed Enron to build ever more complex trading business around their physical assets, unencumbered by government checks. Enron's business model was to break into markets by buying utilities, and then concentrate on trading in those markets. The trades were often essentially imaginary, with loans disguised as income and debts hidden 'off the balance sheet'. These phoney deals attracted investors and pushed up the share price.
Watkins gives a flavour of the culture of the firm. Internal competition was intense as Enron managers fought each other for the latest absurd 'financial engineering', grabbing bonuses for fraudulent schemes. Ken Lay laid the foundations for faking, when, in 1987, he found that Enron's New York trading operation was entirely fictitious. Traders booked sales from imaginary buyers like Mr M Yass (for My Ass). Lay sacked no one, hushing up the scandal. $150 million was lost, the traders continued cheating until they were sent to prison, but the story stayed off the front pages.
Scrabbling for deals and bonuses, managers tore at each other in the regular 'performance review committee'--which 'worked like a star chamber crossed with fraternity rush'. Staff called Enron the 'bizarre social experiment' for its endless reorganisations. At Enron's international annual meeting managers put on revues. Competition was so intense that they hired professional scriptwriters and costume designers. The African team entered on an elephant; the Middle Eastern team dressed as Egyptian slaves carrying their boss on a litter. Sherron Watkins herself played the 'wicked witch of the west' in a performance based, appropriately, on The Wizard of Oz.
'Special purpose entities'--fraudulent firms founded by Enron--were created to hide growing debts. Many were named after Star Wars characters, like Jedi. Chewbacca heads were handed out when 'Chewco' was founded. Accountants tied themselves in knots trying to understand and justify affairs. Watkins taunted Arthur Andersen staff, telling them to 'grow some balls' and say no to some of the proposed accounting tricks. They didn't.
Revealing, in a business-book kind of way, Watkins' memoir is very much a view from the inside. She describes financial problems on Enron's Dabhol power station in India. She does not say Enron hired thugs to attack local protestors against the plant. She does not mention the 33 people killed in Puerto Rico in 1996 when an Enron gas plant exploded because of poor maintenance and poor staff training. While the establishment were caught out by Enron's crimes, the left were on the case early.
Solomon Hughes
Race and Revolution
Max Schachtman
Verso £14
Lenin and Trotsky often raised concerns about the passivity of the US left on issues of race. Talking about the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1939, Trotsky stated, 'It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet nor even any articles.' This wasn't strictly true, as in 1933 Max Shachtman, a leading Trotskyist in the US, produced a pamphlet that Trotsky himself received a draft of. Never before published, Race and Revolution is an advance draft of Shachtman's work, originally entitled Communism and the Negro.
Shachtman, a full time Communist Party organiser in the 1920s, was expelled in 1928 for supporting the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky. It is in this context, the split between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, that Race and Revolution was produced. As a result a significant section of the pamphlet--and perhaps its raison d'être--is to tear apart the Stalinist position of 'self determination for the Black Belt'. This policy held that blacks in the southern US were an oppressed minority, with a common language, culture and territory who wished to have a separate existence from the racist US. The Black Belt extended like a crescent moon across the South where blacks were in the majority.
At the time there was great confusion about this new policy. Race and Revolution helps us to understand the context of the exchanges between Trotsky and US socialists on race, class and revolution, especially his discussions with CLR James in 1939. While Trotsky agreed that revolutionaries should not advise the establishment of a separate state, he concluded they should defend the right of blacks if they desired it.
Shachtman did not reject the right of self determination as a general principle, but he did not believe it applied to the race issue in the US. Blacks, although racially oppressed, did not constitute a separate nationality and Shachtman viewed this concept as artificial, unviable and one which had no legitimacy within the black population. He stated that the policy was 'guaranteed to produce the most harmful results in the fight to liberate not only the American Negro but the whole American working class'.
Ironically, the main practical effect of the policy was to highlight to blacks the centrality of the CP fighting racism. It encouraged action on black issues, not agitation for a Black Belt state. The CP became involved in campaigns with black sharecroppers and workers and led the defence for the Scottsboro boys, a group of nine young men accused of gang rape. As a result the CP recruited over 5,000 blacks to its ranks and became the first political organisation to be a significant force among US blacks.
The book does cover wider issues than just 'self determination', in particular the socialist position on race and class. Essentially Shachtman states that black freedom can only come about through joint action with the working class majority. Moreover, at a time when most white Americans were indifferent to tackling racism, Shachtman stated that emancipation of the working class depends on it attacking all forms of racism and white workers needed to take a lead on this. Shachtman contended that the working class and socialist movements in the US would never advance without ceaseless and uncompromising campaigns against racism. In many respects, Shachtman was right. However, given the minute size of the Trotskyist movement and later the Stalinisation of the CP, which threw away all the gains of the 1930s, the left was not in a position to forward black liberation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Shachtman's pamphlet undoubtedly adds to our understanding of the discussions on black issues on the US left in the 1930s.
Mubin Haq
Red Sky at Night
Ed: Andy Croft and Adrian Mitchell
Five Leaves £9.99
Socialist poetry: two words to conjure images of earnest but artless efforts by would-be Woody Guthries. But this is a collection to dispel such prejudices, with two centuries worth of poems ranging from the melancholy to the inspirational, the whimsical to the sharply satirical.
This is an impressively broad collection, which Andy Croft tells us aims to be 'representative and suggestive, rather than comprehensive'. His co-editor Adrian Mitchell, who describes himself as 'a socialist-anarchist-pacifist-Blakeist-revolutionary', is evidently trying to fulfil a similar role with a remarkably heterogeneous range of political influences.
The collection starts with William Blake, whose ability to resonate with a modern audience is attested to by the use of his second poem featured here, 'London', by the Verve as the basis for their song 'History'. Via Shelley, Dickens and William Morris we soon arrive at the First World War. One of the main themes running through the book is the horror of war. But unlike some collections it leads many of the poets to invoke resistance. Jonathon Denwood, for instance, wrote in December 1914, 'For whom and what is this foul slaughter done?/Tell us, ye rulers mighty in your seats--/And then shall people rising 'gainst their cheats/Drive you from senate, camp, and mart, and throne'.
Red Sky at Night really gives a taste of the inspiration of workers fighting back--from WN Ewer's promise that 'Our God-damned English gentlemen,/Shall find out what we are' to Andrew Salkey's comment that 'Giants can be surprised' in his injunction to 'Remember Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam'. The latter poem refers to 'our third of the world', and a number of the contributions show similar illusions in various state capitalist regimes. But that doesn't necessarily translate into dreary 'socialist realist' verse. Although William Soutar's 'To Karl Marx' only needs a whiff of incense to complete his most inappropriate of paeans, others, like Peter Blackman, in 'My Song is for all men', combines the appalling phrase 'Highest above all let me praise Marx Lenin and Stalin' with a truly beautiful celebration of internationalism and solidarity. Hamish Henderson, in the 'Ballad of the Taxi Driver's Cap', is either being very facetious or very misguided when his ditty proclaims 'your uncle Joe's a worker/and a very decent chap/because he smokes a pipe and wears/a taxi driver's cap'. Either way, the effect is memorable.
The book is full of such unexpected wit and satire. Bob Dixon, for instance, describes how he's burnt all his political books, got rid of his tools in case they're mistaken for weapons, made sure there are no Cubans or US citizens in his house (and put the cat out just in case), and wonders if the US will still invade it. Another favourite example is Osbert Sitwell's sardonic attack on the Amritsar massacre, whose ridiculous logic is like a John Bird and John Fortune sketch: 'A good General/Can usually/Kill most of the people/Who laugh at him,/Either on his own side,/Or which is more difficult/On the other side./The best General/Is the one/Who kills the most people;/Therefore, the best General/Is the one/At whom/The greatest number of people/Laugh.'
I suspect Bertolt Brecht may also have been influenced by Sitwell's style. Unfortunately, this is one of many questions left unanswered by the absence of any biographical sketches to accompany the poems. Given the consensus among socialists about the need to contextualise art in order to understand it, this is a shame. Still, if it prompts readers to seek out more work by some excellent poets, this collection has served its purpose.
Andrew Stone
The Country Under My Skin
Gioconda Belli
Bloomsbury £7.99
This is a wonderful autobiography, which I unreservedly recommend as a great work of art. Gioconda Belli was an upper class girl living in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, who enjoyed all the privileges of her class. But then, in her early twenties, after a youthful marriage and two children, she broke from her family's political outlook, deciding instead to join the fight for her country's freedom from the dictator Somoza, and so joined the underground Sandinista movement in the early 1970s.
This she did with heart and soul, volunteering for and undertaking whatever hazardous tasks were necessary to further the Sandinistas' revolutionary cause, and using her class origins only if needed as a respectable cover for illegal activities. This alternative political quest engendered radical new thinking on personal ethics and morality.
Gioconda sought freedom on this front too, throwing herself, as with her revolutionary politics, heart and soul into extracting the limits of fulfilment from her personal and sexual life. Her husband did not join her politically and proved far too passive and unemotional a companion for her tolerance, but it still took a big psychological wrench from her Catholic upbringing to leave him and follow her heart, which, however, she did thereafter with utmost passion.
A third strand of her heart and her love was her commitment to her children, numbering four in the end. The details of the birth of the third, the only boy, in a public hospital are quite amazing. She was told he was dead, then alive, then dead, then alive--imagine her feelings. He still lives with her today.
The fourth strand concerns her poetry--she won an international prize for this--and later literary works, which she pursues with the same passionate intensity.
All these strands of her life, and many others are found in this book, such as her forced emigration to Costa Rica to avoid arrest in Nicaragua, and the important political jobs she was given there and elsewhere. Also the course of the civil war against Somoza, his fall in 1979 and the resulting exultation, then the sabotage of the revolution by the US, is told with passion and emotion, the detailed political and intimately personal aspects intertwining seamlessly and making up a whole that any radical left winger or revolutionary reader cannot but creatively identify with. It is as though she is speaking and fighting the struggles, political and personal, that all of us fight.
It is extraordinary for the reader of someone else's autobiography to feel so personal an identification with the author's life and struggles. Her beautiful descriptive poetic language, even in translation, goes some way to helping this happen. I came across this book accidentally. I'm glad I did.
Chanie Rosenberg
The French and Italian Communist Parties
Cyrille Guiat
Frank Cass £39.50
Totalitarianism was the term Cold War warriors used to describe various regimes the US did not like. It was borrowed from Mussolini, who used it specifically to describe his Italian fascist regime. For the cold warriors it became a term of abuse that could be thrust on fascist and Communist regimes alike, thereby blurring any differences between them. The term could also be thrown at parties and individuals whose views did not concur with Washington. Cyrille Guiat's study of the French and Italian Communist Parties stands firmly in this tradition.
From start to finish this study of the two parties stresses their links to Moscow and the old USSR, even though towards its end the Italian Communist Party had evolved into a classic Labour or social democratic party largely free from any links with--let alone control from--Moscow. In the 1930s and 1940s both parties had been firmly Stalinist. Both evolved away as the Stalinist monolith began to dissolve. In Italy the process went further. Guiat is right to attack those who portray both parties as organic products of French and Italian society but he never explains how both mushroomed in support. In France this started in the second half of the 1930s, but in both countries the key was the central role both parties played in the resistance to the Nazis and their indigenous fascist allies.
The book claims to examine how both parties used culture to buttress their support in two towns--Ivry-Sur-Seine in the Parisian suburbs and Reggio Emilia in central Italy. But the study of how they employed culture concentrates on municipal and party records from the 1970s, 80s and 90s and focuses on the use of council initiatives in the schools, theatres and libraries. By then both parties were entrenched in municipal power and both were in the process of decline.
How did the two parties gain a stranglehold on municipal power? Guiat does not provide an answer or give any picture of party life. Their role in the resistance was key. But in the Paris Red Belt and in the industrial cities of northern and central Italy the party did something else. It organised immigrant workers in the unorganised car plants and engineering firms and gave them a sense of community in the soulless neighbourhoods in which they lived. These immigrants were of course from rural France or Italy (though the French Communists recruited heavily among Poles and Jews who played a key role in the resistance).
What Guiat cannot seem to grasp is how in the 1930s and 40s the Communist Parties recruited the cream of working class fighters and still maintained a rigid loyalty to Stalin. Anti-fascism played a part, as did admiration for Russia (hard to imagine but Stalin's armies had played the key role in defeating Hitler). But both parties also sank real roots in the working class, being at the cutting edge of agitation on the shop floor and in the communities (except when it ran counter to Moscow's interests).
The French Communist Party is described as both Leninist and revolutionary despite the fact that if Lenin had reappeared in Paris he would have been hounded out of the party, and that any revolution in France would have involved a head on clash with the Communist Party (witness May/June 1968). For Guiat the lazy equation between Lenin and Stalin is accepted as a given fact.
Perhaps I should have been warned, as this volume is part of a series on 'Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions'. At the end I was left wondering why working class people in Ivry or Reggio voted Communist year after year and what the party meant to them. Why did immigrants from the countryside rally to the Communists and why, in the case of France in the 1970s and 90s, did not the new wave of immigrants from North Africa? And how did the parties in both localities rise to the challenge of a new more radical left in the late 1960s and 70s? Alas, answers there were none.
Chris Bambery
Shooting People
Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen
Verso £12
'I'm a socialist...get me out of here!' was the Guardian TV critic's verdict on 13 May, writing about Clare Short's resignation performance in the House of Commons. In the self consuming world of print and electronic media this was the umpteenth pun on the title of LWT's latest variant of the 'reality TV' strain. It became a toss up as to which was more infuriating; the I'm A Celebrity... show itself, or the lazy journalism which sought to bathe, pathetically, in its referential glory.
Shooting People is a short but worthy attempt to explain how popular viewing has become dominated by the likes of Survivor, Temptation Island, and I'm A Celebrity... Some of the authorial disdain is admirable. How about this on the biggest transgressor of all, Channel 4's Big Brother: 'This dandruff of selfhood, elevated to the status of a worthy subject, rushes in to fill the space vacated by overarching narratives that once extended the range of their followers' vision, however imperfectly, beyond the little facts of individual existence.'
'The "self" has always been a brand, part of a constructed reality separate from the body', declaims Gary Carter, executive at Big Brother producers Endemol. Brenton and Cohen retort, 'The white heat of technology gives off intoxicating fumes, and such rhetorical flights of fancy show a certain delirium.'
Nevertheless, the genre bears closer examination and the authors are careful to avoid a 'golden past' approach to popular culture when tracing its antecedents. For example, they remind us that the patron saint of documentary realism, John Grierson, used filmic and editing techniques devised for fictional purposes to reconstruct a mail-train sorting carriage in a studio for the infamous Night Mail of 1936.
Other traditions of 'cinema verite' in Europe and the 'direct cinema' of Frederic Wiseman and DA Pennebaker in the US benefited from lighter, cheaper and more mobile technology. On British TV the largest steps in this direction were made not by ITV shows like World In Action, but by the BBC as early as 1974 with Paul Watson's The Family, a tetchy, 'fly on the wall' snoop inside a Reading home.
In 1999 the BBC ran as many as twelve 'docusoaps' with humour as the value-added ingredient. We could guffaw at the antics of a batty learner-driver, a camp airport official or flummoxed hotel workers. In the US Fox TV's Cops set the mould for a feast of 'emergency service docs'. MTV, narcissistically, stuck a slice of its own target audience in a shared apartment to watch how the egos landed, and called it The Real World.
Chuck into this mix the ubiquity of surveillance technology, a cultural and political hegemony of 'me, myself and I' aspiration amplified by a dubious fashion for social psychology, and an economy gasping to produce the surplus profits needed to infuse a radically deregulated broadcasting environment with advertising spend, and we start to understand the fascination 'game-docs' undoubtedly hold for British audiences.
The trump card which lifted most of the commercial-channel products above the meagre ratings of, for example, BBC's Castaway is the democratic and multi-mediated pull of interactive voting. More viewers voted for 'Big Brother' evictions than watched the BBC ten o'clock news just before the 2001 general election.
Unfortunately, the brevity and density of prose restricts the readership potential for this work. On the one hand some holes in the history remain unfilled--like accounting for the spectacular cruelty inherent in much pop culture from boxing and wrestling, to slapstick and Jackass TV. On the other a lack of illustrations and the rarified vocabulary puts it beyond a school or college media studies market.
That said, it concludes with some very prescient comments on 'militainment' US shows like Profiles From The Front Line, which are 'no more than high production value bunting, a flattering backdrop for the new imperialism'.
And it did leave me creased up with laughter on one point. It describes how Charlie Parsons, Labour Lord Waheed Alli and Sir Bob Geldof are growing fat on the proceeds of their Planet 24 company and its Castaway Television Productions subsidiary. Survivor was their brainchild, developed from a skit on Breakfast TV. They are now suing LWT and the producer of I'm A Celebrity's Natalka Znak, claiming intellectual property rights. Exactly what intellectual property does Celebrity or Survivor contain that anyone would want to claim?
Nick Grant
One No, Many Yeses
Paul Kingsnorth
The Free Press £10
This is an exploration and a celebration of the anti-capitalist movement or, as Kingsnorth prefers to call it, simply 'the movement'. It is based on a tour through some of the iconic locations and events, from the Chiapas heartland of the Zapatistas to the smoke-filled streets of Genoa in July 2001.
Kingsnorth is a good, chatty writer and he conveys a keen sense of place. The people he meets--landless peasant activists in Brazil, the freedom fighters of Papua New Guinea--are inspirational and often thought provoking. Overall the book evokes a sense that in every corner of the world there are networks of people who can't and won't continue to live in the same old way. However, as an assessment of today's global movement One No, Many Yeses is seriously deficient.
The most obvious problem is that although the book was published this year, and although it covers recent events, it feels like it ends with the Genoa protests in 2001, or more precisely on 20 July 2001, the day Carlo Guiliani was murdered by the police. This is a bit odd. The next day some 300,000 people poured onto the streets of Genoa, the day the trade unions joined the movement in Italy--it was a day that sparked the revival of the Italian left. Incredibly, despite clearly being in Genoa, Kingsnorth never mentions this demonstration, and he doesn't mention the series of mass actions that followed in its wake--the general strike in Italy, the monster anti-capitalist demonstration in Barcelona in 2002 and the anti-EU strikes and demonstrations that followed all over Spain.
Even more startling, Kingsnorth barely considers the way the movement has responded to the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. He ignores the crucial contribution that anti-capitalists have made to the global anti-war, anti-imperialist movement, and he doesn't consider the implications for the future.
Maybe this is an accident, but unfortunately I guess not. Kingsnorth's take on the movement is that its strength comes from its spontaneity, its lack of 'big ideas and big schemes', its localism and its refusal to openly challenge the centres of capitalist power. On this basis Kingsnorth devotes two pages of his book to a vitriolic attack on the British left (including the SWP) which completely contrast with his generally inclusive and uncritical approach to the movement.
Of course the diversity of the movement is its necessary strength, and its successes have depended on a series of innovations, like the summit protests, the World Social Forum, creative use of the internet and so on. It is vital that the movement continues to open itself to new initiatives, new ideas, and new activists. At the same time, after the police repression in Genoa, after the US state has shown it will use overwhelming force to back up its interests anywhere round the globe, it is plain irresponsible to ignore the big 'ideological' questions.
All over the world people are discussing how we can challenge imperialism, what kind of organisations we need to best work together and extend our coalitions, how we can use elections to build the movement, and what we do about state power. Even many of the activists Kingsnorth talks to are grappling with these issues, if only he would listen. Early in the book a Zapatista activist complains about state repression: 'What we want is for the government to let us speak, and to let us live... They promised us an indigenous law, but the law they have passed treats us like objects, not subjects... How long do they expect us to wait?' Later MST activists from Brazil discuss the need to move beyond localised action and draw up a national programme for a progressive government.
The idea of a movement today which doesn't have these strategic, political discussions is a daydream.
Chris Nineham