A presentation by WSWS arts editor David Walsh

Tom Cruise as paraplegic Vietvet Ron Kovic, in Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July, one of the best films ever made on that conflict.  Too bad Cruise learned nothing from the character he interpreted. —Eds

By David Walsh (16 March 2010)

The following is an edited version of a presentation delivered by WSWS arts editor David Walsh in New York City and the Detroit area. (The second, and concluding, part of the talk ran on Wednesday, March 17, 2010).

When one considers the state of filmmaking, and art in general, one’s first response is, or ought to be, in my view, a profound sense of dissatisfaction. The spectator, or reader, or viewer, currently experiences a troubling lack of depth, texture, and social and psychological complexity. In short, there is an absence of the world, largely.

Certainly the world that great numbers of people know and experience on a daily basis: the world of work, or lack of work, the vast and complicated series of everyday social relationships, the startling changes in life in recent decades, the enormous inequalities and iniquities, the slipping into the social abyss of so many, the struggle to keep one’s head above water that characterizes the lives of tens of millions in this country, billions worldwide… and the emotional conditions, the drama, tragedy and comedy associated with all that.

Telling the truth is difficult, as George Eliot and Tolstoy both noted, but contemporary art and film, in our view, are failing badly in telling important truths, the truths that are vital to people.

No doubt there is a great deal of ideological and political, and even moral, confusion in this country—we aren’t mesmerized by that and struggle to overcome it on a daily basis—but one must say that the failure of film and novels and plays, in the first place, to hold up a mirror to the country adequately in recent decades, to expose American society’s crimes and injustices, to show the population its own shortcomings, is a factor in the confusion.

We’ve made the point before: the Russian novelists of the 19th century, by their combined efforts, contributed to the discrediting of official society and its eventual downfall. What should we say in this regard, by and large, about contemporary American filmmakers and writers? Have they exerted themselves, made enormous sacrifices in the struggle to clarify and demystify reality, the nature of American society itself? Have they helped the population understand its predicament? The answer is obvious, I think.

Representing the world more fully and richly is not a matter of mere surface details, or of passive recording. When we speak about “the presence of the world” in art, we mean its real presence, which includes centrally its social and historical character. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities) commented, creative effort involves not mere description, but an interpretation of life.

At present we lack serious artistic interpretation influenced by the most advanced understanding of reality. The emergence of modern art and culture was inextricably bound up with the growth of Marxism and the socialist workers movement. The decline in the influence of genuine Marxism—not academic leftism, postmodernism, the Frankfurt School, and so forth—has had a serious, harmful impact on art and culture.

A seriousness about showing life in art needs to be revived, for the sake of society and for the sake of art, and that requires the re-emergence of a consciously socialist current in art and filmmaking. That is one of the central themes of this talk. We argue that only the active presence of a critique that takes society down to its bones and holds out an alternative can encourage artwork prepared to tell the whole truth.

Film remains a powerful medium. Some 1.5 billion movie tickets were sold in North America last year, representing about a third of the global total.

However, changing what needs to be changed, I believe much of this discussion applies to fiction and theater relatively directly, and to the other art forms more indirectly—no medium has truly blossomed, except in the formal or technological sense, in the recent period, in my view.

We are confronted with filmmaking’s shortcomings as an artistic and social fact. In terms of mainstream movies, for example, one only has to turn to the mostly dreadful list of Academy Award nominations for Best Picture this year. Up in the Air has possibilities, about a man who lives without relationships and accumulates air miles instead, but it is weakly worked out, in the end. There is Quentin Tarantino’s exercise in historical falsification and sadism, Inglourious Basterds, “fighting fascism with fascism,” as we noted on the WSWS. And Avatar, directed by James Cameron, which offers fascinating technology and little else.

There are several intelligent performances that received nominations—Colin Firth in A Single Man, Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air, and a number of others—but, in general, the nominations are a miserable showing.

And this in 2010! What have we lived through in the first ten years of the new century?

The US media widely acknowledges that the first decade of the 21st century was a disastrous one for American society. Time magazine’s headline read, “Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell.”

In brief: a hijacked national election, or perhaps two, a major terrorist attack, two criminal wars, vast Wall Street plundering and a massive crash. To what extent, directly or indirectly, have these developments found expression in movies which tens of millions of people affected by these events go to see? Is there a film or are there films that sum up the 2000s in a conscious and meaningful fashion? I’m open to suggestion, but I can’t think of one.

In fact, what sort of a picture of the world could you assemble from the various images generated by most Hollywood films of the past 10 years? Reality as seen through a narrow prism, of people without financial cares, obsessed with trivial concerns; these are dull films by and large, with the great drama of life missing (and the life of the upper-middle-class has not been seriously depicted either, for that matter).

American filmmaking has been able in the past to think more critically, to grasp the whole, or important portions of it—consider these films from the mid 1930s to the early 1940s, just a few of the many extraordinary works made at the time:

These are arguably the three greatest figures in the American cinema, Chaplin, Ford and Welles. All, at the time, considered to be figures of the Left.

The FBI viewed John Ford as some sort of a subversive. The Informer is a magnificent study of treachery in the political struggle, with an atmosphere worthy of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Grapes of Wrath, despite its occasional sentimental streak, conveys tremendous sympathy for the characters’ plight. This story of suffering and resistance in the Depression made Henry Fonda himself a deeply beloved figure. Is there any equivalent today?

Or is there anything resembling Chaplin’s persona? Or are there personalities as profoundly worked out, as passionately portrayed as Welles’s Kane?

Where is the writer or director or actor today who has become identified with the plight of wide layers of the population?

We don’t feel a trace of nostalgia. There is no golden age we’re seeking to recreate—but there were periods in American filmmaking and individual works that were seen as offering a deep, universal insight into social life. Do we have that today? Or anything near it? Again, the question, I think, answers itself.

Also, it must be said, audiences were more knowledgeable and demanded more. We have to be frank about this: too many mediocre or worse films receive a free pass. American audiences at this point, sadly, ask for and expect far too little. It’s certainly not the fault of the individual spectators, but it remains a problem. We receive email: you don’t like anything, you’re too critical, you shouldn’t expect so much …

We don’t agree. Of course, we make mistakes—one might overvalue a certain work, and undervalue another. However, if we are critical in our appraisals, it’s not our fault there are so many poor and inadequate works, to speak more plainly, so much rubbish. To tell the truth about the problems in a sharp fashion is part of the process of changing things. The population, along with economic and political resistance, needs to build up its powers of cultural resistance.

I would suggest some of the same general difficulties hold true in fiction, drama. Consider this:

 

Where are the comparable figures and novels? Where are the strong and telling images, the unforgettable characters? The authors, especially Dreiser and Fitzgerald, attempted to make broad, universal statements about American life. Where is the sense conveyed today of a historical period and of important popular moods, reality caught at a very high level, in fact, at the highest level?

 If we turn for a moment to some of the films of the 1930s and early 1940s. This is not an exhaustive list, or a scholarly undertaking, but a sample of memorable works.

 

A good number of the movies come from Warner Bros., several are directed by Michael Curtiz, later joined by Raoul Walsh. Warners had James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni. The films, many of whose very titles are suggestive, are characterized by lively, fierce and snappy dialogue, unsentimentality, realism of a sort—they offer a feeling of the decade. One could learn something about the country, the times, the population, by watching these films.

There are also films on the list by German émigré Fritz Lang and John Huston. Lang’s You Only Live Once and Fury—the latter about a lynching—are frightening films about injustice.

High Sierra, with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, one of the most expressive performers of the era, is a particular favorite. It conveys a definite sense of the Depression years, their harshness, including their psychic harshness, but also enormous tenderness and sensitivity that somehow survive, like flowers growing through cracks in rock.

Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, of course, are well-known films.

In the end, these movies and others can only be accounted for by the fact that Hollywood had a large left wing and also a politically aware European émigré constituency in the 1930s and 1940s. The Depression, the rise of fascism, and the example of the Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on the film community. It is a very contradictory phenomenon, with many tragic aspects, because of the role of the Stalinist Communist Party, but it remains a fact that when the anti-communist purges came, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the authorities had to drive out, discredit or intimidate hundreds and hundreds of writers, directors, and actors.

The list of left-wingers in Hollywood included, as one work on the subject notes, “Lucille Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, Bette Davis, Lloyd Bridges, John Garfield, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, some of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers, and for that matter the wives of March and Gene Kelly along with Gregory Peck’s fiancée.” (Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner) Also, Franchot Tone—then married to Joan Crawford—Jose Ferrer and apparently Ronald Reagan, all of whom were in or around the Communist Party periphery.

As I noted a few years ago: “One could add Sterling Hayden, who turned informer later on, then regretted it, Sylvia Sidney, Shelley Winters, Lauren Bacall, and many, many others. Melvyn Douglas and Frank Sinatra were also named by an FBI informant, along with Paul Muni, born in Ukraine and a veteran of Yiddish theater in New York, whose career was wrecked by the blacklist.” John Ford, as I mentioned, was under suspicion at one point, and Chaplin and Welles were effectively driven out of the country.

The influence of the émigrés—many of whom had been raised in major cities, and were exposed to European culture and politics, in which the socialist labor movement played a central role—was a factor in giving Hollywood films a more sophisticated content in the 1930s and 1940s.

We observed as long ago as 1996, in the International Workers Bulletin:

Let’s consider this list of postwar films:

A film such as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, about returning World War II veterans and their discontents, dealt with experiences through which masses of people passed, the experiences of a generation. The title is ironic. The film takes an “unpatriotic,” realistic view of things. It is critical of the treatment of war veterans.

Or one could point to John Ford’s wartime film They Were Expendable (1945). The title refers to the US Navy’s attitude toward PT boats and their crews. Would anyone in mainstream Hollywood dare today to make a work critical of the military?

It is worth mentioning as well other wartime films such as Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (both from 1944), the latter a savage film about American lower-middle-class mores.

Or take some of the leading actors of the period. Simplification, caricature and emotional ‘rounding off’ were very much present, but, at their best, performers embodied something about the American personality, or personalities.

Take Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield, Jewish working class types, or working class intellectuals. Robinson, who met with Trotsky in Mexico, Garfield, a supporter of the Communist Party, essentially hounded to his death. James Cagney, born in the tough Yorkville section of Manhattan, anti-clerical and left-wing, at least until the authorities got to him.

Or Bogart, who grew out of the gangster parts in the late 1930s into something interesting in films such as High Sierra, Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo and others. In Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, in particular, he plays the pragmatic, efficient individualist, who initially rejects a political or social appeal, but, in the end, responds strongly to the plight of the oppressed, proves capable of solidarity and of democratic sensibilities.

Women’s roles expanded, and became more interesting, an important indicator of the relatively democratic, popular character of the films and filmmaking. A Barbara Stanwyck, for example, and numerous other tough working class or lower-middle-class girls, women—Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers (aside from her dancing pictures): prepared to go to nearly any lengths to survive. The pre-Production Code films are even more explicit. Stanwyck, the former Ruby Stevens from Flatbush in Brooklyn, who worked as a wrapper in a department store…

Women who are intelligent, quick-witted, no pushovers, like the population itself: Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Mary Astor, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc. In the 1940s, Lana Turner, Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall, Joan Bennett, Veronica Lake, Ann Sheridan, and many others.

Compare these personalities to the present state of things. There’s a George Clooney, for example, a talented performer. His characters are clever, but don’t take themselves too seriously, ready to improvise and roll with the punches, if necessary. Capable of showing a darker, tougher side. But his persona is far less defined so far, in social terms. Among female performers, there are even fewer figures who have been given the opportunity to represent something substantial. There are enormously talented actors, that’s not the issue at all.

The opposite today of a Henry Fonda—in You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln and Grapes of Wrath—might be the unfortunate Tom Hanks. Considerable effort has been made to turn him into an “American Everyman,” in Saving Private Ryan and elsewhere. In Forrest Gump, a terrible film, he was meant to represent that Everyman as an idiot. Hanks has lent himself to efforts intended to strengthen myths about America, about the Second World War, about the “Greatest Generation,” and all that. None of that, however, has won him spontaneous public affection.

Numerous titles on that list of postwar films are suggestive of nightmares and delirium, ‘whirlpool,’ ‘caught,’ evil, nighttime, haunted… Several factors come into play—in the first place, the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. But, as time passes, by 1948, let’s say, there is also the pressing matter of the reality of postwar America, which is revealing itself. One thinks of such films as Lady from Shanghai, Key Largo, Force of Evil, for example. An important new theme emerges: the powerful presence in postwar society of profiteers and criminals, including criminals in business suits.

Contrary to the illusions spread by the Communist Party and its periphery, the postwar did not mean the expansion of the New Deal, a flowering of democracy. This conception was bound up with entirely false conception of the war itself, which was not a war for democracy, although millions went to fight fascism, but a war between great power blocs, an imperialist war. The Stalinists ignored the brutality of the Allied bombings of German cities, applauded the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They and those around them were utterly unprepared for the Cold War, the anticommunist witch-hunt and the purges, with disastrous consequences.

If one turns to the films of the 1950s and 1960s:

Indeed, in the 1950s certain ‘classical directors,’ Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks and Raoul Walsh, along with Anthony Mann and others, did some of their best work. And there were new voices, such as Douglas Sirk and Robert Aldrich. The films later in the decade, referred to in the slide, indicate a degree of disappointment, disillusionment with the promise of postwar America. Also, of course, with the collapse of the blacklist and the dissipation of the worst anticommunist hysteria, certain things could now be said.

The 1960s witnessed the collapse of studio filmmaking and the emergence of independents, some of whom are or become identified with the radical wave of the latter part of the decade and the early 1970s.

The early part of the 1970s, connected to the anti-establishment mood among masses of youth in particular, produced some films that ‘got’ certain situations and realities, that still attempted to make wide-ranging comments about American life. Of course, one thinks of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The Polish émigré helped create a scathing indictment of American big business and politics. Francis Ford Coppola gave us The Godfather, which argued that in America crime is business and business crime.

The most interesting group of films, in my view, may be Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and Nashville. The latter, even if it is confused, makes an effort to link politics, celebrity and business in America.

Later in the decade there is Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which, despite its occasional absurdities, is a remarkable film, expressing something of the horror and revulsion of a generation against the crimes committed in Vietnam by American imperialism. As we commented when it was re-released in 2001, an atmosphere of menace prevails throughout. We wrote, “One has an uneasy feeling that every time a group of Americans forms, violence will erupt.” Coppola’s ambitious film is an indictment of colonialism and its catastrophic consequences.

It seems worth noting, however, that the socially critical films of the 1970s, as valuable as some of them were and remain, generally lacked something present in earlier left-wing American filmmaking, with all its contradictions: a substantial interest in and the presence of the working class, or wide layers of the population, and their lives and problems in general. There is also a noticeable lack of interest in the great historical events of the 20th century. These limitations speak to the nature of the radicalization of the time and all the complex questions it left untouched.

In the 1970s too, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen made some of their best films. Sidney Lumet as well. Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick and Michael Cimino arrived with interesting, if flawed, works.

In the 1980s, in the face of the Reagan administration’s attacks on the population, carried out with the collaboration of the Democrats, and a sharp turn to the right in the American elite, the films that stand out are those that resisted the generally reactionary tide:

Warren Beatty’s Reds, about John Reed and the Russian Revolution, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, on the ruthless selfishness of New York’s upper-middle class, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a criticism of the prevailing worship of greed, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a view of bitter class struggle in the 1890s in Wyoming, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, about the criminal element rising to the top in American financial circles. Stone, to his credit, also made important films about the Vietnam War, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Later in the decade, Michael Moore made his first feature, Roger & Me, about the decline and fall of Flint, Michigan.

There were numerous serious or well-intentioned efforts, including Edward Zwick’s Glory and John Sayles’s Matewan, but one must say: given the character of the assault on the population begun by Carter and undertaken vigorously by Reagan and the first Bush, the cinematic and artistic response overall was very weak and limited. By and large, the population was not clarified, whereas in Britain, in the work of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears and numerous others, there was a more concerted and conscious response to Thatcher, although one would not want to idealize the situation there either.

 DAVID WALSH is WSWS.ORG‘s senior arts, culture and film critic.

To be continued

 

 

 

 

 

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By Phil Dickens, Property is Theft

In any case the biggest difference of opinion we hold with Dickens and his line of thinking is that we, as a rule, consider the birth of a genuine vanguard party of the people a necessity to move the masses toward a genuine anticapitalist process. The fact that such a party faces enormous obstacles in its path, especially in the United States, the citadel of global capitalism and the see of the most brainwashed population on earth, does not, per se, constitute a disqualifier.  In that regard, Dickens forgets how an objective revolutionary situation can overturn in a relatively short period of time what looked impossible merely a few years before. —PG

It is a long-established truism that anarchists are opposed to electoralism. A myriad of slogans such as “whoever you vote for, government wins,” “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards,” and “if voting changed anything they’d abolish it” have entered the public psyche. So much so, that they are taken up by cynics and the disenfranchised as well as by the anarchist movement.

The downside is that, by most people across the political spectrum, not voting is seen less as a conscious withdrawal from the framework of mainstream politics and more as apathy and ignorance. Anarchism, by extension, is dragged into the same category. It only helps reinforce – in the minds of our detractors – the myth that we are just mindless hooligans out for a riot, who neither have nor want a positive alternative to the status quo.

As such, there is one anti-voting slogan which remains exclusive to anarchists: don’t vote, organise!

It’s simple, to the point, and emphasises the bit that advocates of the electoral system always gloss over. Not voting is not proof that we don’t care or have no answers. Anarchists do espouse an alternative to the present system. As that alternative is one wherein people take control of their own lives, the ritual of picking someone to govern you is entirely contradictory.

Making this argument is often self-defeating. The usual forum for such a debate is some kind of gathering of various left-wing tendencies, where the idea of not going to the polls and marking an “x” in a box is vociferously attacked by somebody of a Leninist (or even left-liberal) persuasion. It is not so much a case of preaching to the converted as preaching to those not for turning. It is tiring, and our zeal for it is soon sapped by the self-defeating repetition of left-wing political circles.

But those who are working tirelessly to increase their numbers, fill their coffers, and get people to sell their papers build up the “new workers’ party” or a similar electoral vehicle were never our target audience. The people we need to be making this case to are the voters themselves. We need the rest of working class on side, not those who profess to be our revolutionary leadership.

It is with this in mind that I delve back into an argument as old as democracy itself.

The principles of electoral abstention

Before anything else, there is one important point to get out of the way. Anarchists are not against voting in all situations.

A vote is neither a good nor a bad thing in and of itself. In certain situations it can be useful. For example, when an organisation needs to make a collective decision, or choose a delegate to carry out or voice such decisions at a federal level. This is part of the practice of direct democracy, and thus of the way anarchist organisations are usually run.

What we are opposed to is not the very act of voting, but the practice of electoral politics. That is, the system wherein a cross-section of the public gets a say in who runs a given body – party/union executives, local councils, national governments, etc – but that body, once elected, holds autonomy to make decisions as it sees fit, regardless of the will of those it theoretically answers to. This is bourgeois or parliamentary democracy, and to anarchists it isn’t actually democratic at all.

What it boils down to is not decision-making by the people, but the people delegating that decision-making power away to persons assumed to know better on such matters. This is not exercising power, but surrendering it.

Those who get this power from our ballots operate within the framework of a system built and fine-tuned to serve a specific class interest in our society, and it is not ours. The differences between the various mainstream political parties, in any country you care to pick, are strategic – reflecting differences of opinion amongst the ruling class. Those who diverge from this narrow spectrum are sidelined and condemned, ultimately either pressured into conformity or forced to abandon the political arena.

The same is true of individual candidates from beyond the mainstream spectrum. That is, if they are elected. Most voting systems are set up in such a way that such third-party candidates don’t stand a hope in hell. And where that’s not the case, coalition – thus sell-out and compromise – is required for a taste of power.

As to the common refrain from socialist organisations about building “a new workers’ party?” Forget it. Firstly, the realities of secularism and the continual, infantile squabbling amongst different sectors of “the left” makes such a dream unlikely. Then there is the point that, in most capitalist countries, the heavy weight of the free-market propaganda model is against a mass embrace of socialism. Especially since there isn’t much active organising going on. Where significant resistance movements do spring up, their success is entirely separate to the ballot box and lies in their being built from below. The kind of leadership required for a party or electoral front is almost universally a demobilising factor.

This is not to mention the practical experience of parties on the authoritarian left gaining power. “Democratic centralism” is autocracy by another name, and the workers’ party does not serve the interests of the workers but rather puts a different ruling class in charge of them.

The slogan “whoever you vote for, government wins” is entirely true. Ultimately, the working class remain under the yoke of one or other set of bosses out for themselves.

Where voting leads us in practice

This is not just fine rhetoric, asserted a priori. Anarchist arguments against parliamentary “democracy” have only been strengthened by its practice. Taking Britain as an example, it is now clearer than ever that, whoever is in power, working class people face the same attacks.

Labour, in opposition, are on the warpath against “Tory cuts.” But in power all they offered was a different time frame. The Tories blame Labour for making the cuts necessary, but they’re the ones implementing them – and this is not the first Tory government to do so.

Many people voted Liberal Democrat as the “nice” party, in contrast to Labour and the Tories. But even before the election they were a pro-business, anti-worker party. In 2009, they were the first to argue for a public sector pay freeze. They support even tougher anti-strike laws than those implemented by Thatcher. Their councils are fond of using scab labour to break strikes, and their Welsh Assembly members condemned those who respected PCS’s picket lines.

Looking across Europe, we can see that even greens and socialists – once in power – defend capitalism as ruthlessly as liberals and conservatives.

As the Brighton Solidarity Federation argue, in relation to Green Party leader Caroline Lucas entering Parliament;

It is true that Caroline Lucas shows her face at campaign meetings for more than just a photoshoot and some self-promotion (yes, we’re looking at you Nancy Platt), but history shows that wherever the Greens have got into power they have behaved just like any other capitalist party.

In Germany, the Green Party in government sent riot police against protesters trying to stop nuclear waste being transported through their communities – precisely the kind of green activism they had once supported. In 2001 they supported the invasion of Afghanistan as part of a coalition government. In Ireland too the Green Party went from vocal supporters of the ‘Shell to Sea’ movement against the Corrib gas project to actually implementing it. Green minister Eamon Ryan is now in charge of the project, the Greens having dropped their election promises in order to enter a coalition government.

Much the same can be said of the new Trade Union and Socialist Coalition. We all know what happened the last time a party of union bureaucrats got into power: the Labour Party. And we should dispel any nostalgia for ‘Old Labour’ from the off – they supported imperialist wars, opposed strikes and imposed austerity measures on the working class from their very inception: just like every other party that finds itself trying to balance the budget of the capitalist state.

The closer politicians get to power, the more like the rest they become, however well-intentioned and full of integrity they may start out. If Caroline Lucas does get in, she’ll be a lone voice of dissent. This will do her credibility on the left a lot of good, but will mean she’s not able to actually deliver any of her election promises. That would require a larger contingent of Green MPs… and if we got that, we’re back to the ‘power corrupts’ German/Irish scenario.

In short, the reality of political parties – including “workers’ parties” lives up to the principles which anarchists cite for not voting. But, of course, if voting will ultimately fail to bring about the changes we want to see in society, we need something else that will.

Building the alternative

One other problem with electoralism is that the associated campaigning – for certain political parties or candidates, or even to get people to vote at all – takes an enormous amount of energy, time, and resources. All of this effort could be much better spent building practical alternatives to the current system.

No doubt, that is why politicians and the ruling class are keen to encourage voting. (Or to ensure that abstention is only of the apathetic kind.) For those of us who want real change there is a better option.

In a pamphlet (PDF) produced for the 2010 general election, the Anarchist Federation explain what this means;

So what alternatives do anarchists suggest? Most of what we propose can be described as “direct action”. This is exactly what it sounds like: people acting together to solve their problems directly, without relying on anyone else to do it for them.

Perhaps the best-known and most obvious type of direct action is the traditional workplace strike. There are many examples of strikes winning real victories quickly, from the Tower Hamlets College staff who saved jobs through strike action last year, to the low-paid tube cleaners who managed to win a living wage by bringing the London Underground to a halt in 2007. How many examples can you think of where people have improved their pay or saved their jobs by asking a politician for help?

Traditional strikes aren’t the only way to take direct action in the workplace. There are also “good work strikes”, which are designed to minimise disruption to the public while putting as much pressure as possible on employers. At Mercy Hospital in France, instead of endangering patients by going on strike, staff just refused to fill in the paperwork to charge them for treatment. The hospital’s income was cut by half, and the bosses gave in to all their demands in three days. In New York, restaurant workers took strike action and lost, so instead they started giving customers double helpings and undercharging them for their meals, until the restaurant owners gave in to some of their demands.

But direct action isn’t just something that happens in the workplace. For example, when the local council threatened to close down a school in Lewisham, parents reacted by taking direct action: they occupied the school building and forced the council to back down. Another example of direct action is when people refuse to put up with unaffordable rents and decide to squat instead. Direct action can also be taken against high prices, such as in Italy in the 1970s when people in large groups would go into supermarkets, take what they wanted from the shelves, and pay what they considered to be a fair price instead of what the supermarket was asking. And one of the most famous examples of effective direct action on a massive scale here in the UK was when Thatcher’s poll tax was beaten in the 1990s. Many people at the time were claiming that the only way to stop the poll tax was to vote Labour, but it was scrapped years before Labour got in, thanks to a massive campaign based around people simply
refusing to pay.

Everything I write on this blog, and everything I do as an activist, is built around the presumption that ordinary people do not need to look to politicians, bosses, or other figures of “authority” to take care of our problems. By organising together and taking direct action, we can fight our own battles. That, indeed, is the basis on which 150 years of class struggle has shaped the world we live in today and the (relative) freedoms we enjoy.

But as long as people continue to participate in the electoral system, they are validating the same governance that we are fighting against. If voting changes nothing, and that is exactly the point I have been arguing, why freely offer the ruling class the pretence of a democratic mandate? Why expend so much energy on the process?

Electoralism is nothing but a dead-end road. Especially now, as we once more face a heightened period of class struggle and austerity measures, it has the potential to be the pressure-release which completely derail active resistance. If people want change, they need to reject the ballot box and get on the street to make it for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

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SPECIAL
For The Greanville Post—
A Comment on “Left Anticommunism: the Unkindest Cut”

Wherein one of our senior editors weighs in on a topic that never quite goes away, the frequent expression of anti-Sovietism and even anticommunism by people who define themselves as “left” (not merely liberals) in the United States and other parts of the developed capitalist world. As Michael Parenti and others have noted, the practice is so generalized as to constitute at times active de facto collaboration with the global imperialist system, and some of the biggest voices are not exempt:

Genuflection to Orthodoxy

“Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).”

By Steven Jonas, TGP

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Greanville Post has recently re-published an excellent (and lengthy) column on “Left anti-Communism” by historian and political scientist Michael Parenti (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2012/01/01/left-anticommunism-the-unkindest-cut/),accompanied by a short but as always to-the-point introduction by our Editor/Publisher, Patrice Greanville. (There are also some very enlightening comments [and a few not-so-enlightening ones] at the end of the column). Prof. Parenti deals with those self-styled “anti-communist” leftists, such as Noam Chomsky, who, when presenting critiques of such subjects as U.S. imperialism never fail to inform their readers that whatever else they say, they have no use for any part of the Soviet experiment as a possible solution to the crisis of capitalism and that no one can outdo them in their condemnation of Stalinism. I do not have to repeat Parenti’s excellent critique of so-called “Left anti-communists,” who are actually allies of the Right. But let me add a few thoughts to that critique, and to his analysis of the Soviet experience.

First, I have never liked the work of Noam Chomsky, precisely because of the reasons that Parenti lists so well. Further, it is fascinating how Chomsky’s thinking about socialism in the Soviet Union (all bad, as if by doing so he could thus curry favor with anybody to his right — not a chance) cripples his own thinking about capitalism and imperialism and what to do about them. He is a great fact-gatherer. But then he hardly ever comes up with solutions. Why? He cannot because the facts he marshals lead one invariably to the necessity of socialist revolution of some sort and since he thinks that the Soviet model was the only possible one, he is crippled in his thinking.

Second, as to the Soviet experience, it did have major successes, as described by Parenti. But it did have its failures, to be sure. They had multiple causes. But very importantly in my view, as Parenti says although he does not characterize it in exactly this way, the Soviet experience must be seen in the context of what be described as the “Seventy-Five Years War Against the Soviet Union 1917-1992.” It began with the Intervention in the Russian Revolution at the end of 1917. It did not end until the Soviet Union was brought to its knees in 1992 by, to be sure, its own inner weaknesses, but also very much by the Arms Race, by its enforced isolation from normal commercial and diplomatic relations with the West, and by the U.S. created “Afghanistan Trap.” In fact, the latter’s inventor, the Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, has boasted of being its original creator in 1978-79 with the specific aim of creating “The Soviet Viet Nam.”

As to the horrors of Stalinism, in 1926 or so, Trotsky was supposed to have described Stalin as the “grave-digger of communism,” should he ever become General Secretary. In my view, the most important failure of the Soviet Union was indeed the failure to ensure the survival of socialism in it. Perhaps Trotsky was right when he said that there cannot be socialism in one country, precisely because of what became the 75 Years War. But it was Stalinism, economically, governmentally, socially, and politically, as extended by Brezhnev et al after the overthrow of the sort-of-Bukharin heir, Khrushchev, in 1964, that did eventually lead to the collapse of Soviet Socialism, whatever there was left of it. Was there an alternative to the horrors, and they were horrendous horrors, of Stalinism, that would have led to the survival of the Soviet Union for as long as it did make it against the constant imperialist onslaught? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that history proceeds in stages. Socialism failed in the Soviet Union for both external and internal reasons. An important contributor to the latter set was the dearth of second-generation truly socialist leadership. This followed the murder of the best Communists in the Purges and the deaths of many of their best potential young successors on the Front Lines in WWII, both as soldiers and as Party members specifically sought out for murder, as is well known, by the Nazi Einsatz Gruppen. However, does that failure mean that socialism can never succeed anywhere (including China, which may yet follow Lenin’s “two steps forward, one step back” dictum with another two steps forward following the current one step back at some time in the future as the Chinese working class, not the peasants, organizes itself)?

Just look at the historical development of capitalism. After the failure of the first (mercantile) capitalist revolution, that of Oliver Cromwell in England, a pro-capitalist could have said “well, that’s it, he didn’t make it so we’ll never get there. We‘ll never get beyond feudalism and the feudal relations of production. And boy, he was a really bad guy. Look at what he did in Ireland.” Capitalism didn’t get its next push, still mercantile capitalism of course, until the United Kingdom was formed in 1707 and then some years later began its mercantilist exploitation of the new colony in North America. Then for its truly big expansion it had to wait until the explosion of the Industrial Revolution and that itself took how many years after the first invention/discovery of the steam engine by James Watt? One failure, as big as it was, does not mean the end of history.

Last point. One other interpretation of the Soviet experience that I have thought of after reading the very interesting (and sympathetic) recent biography of Engels, Marx’s General, by Tristam Hunt, is that perhaps what happened in the Soviet Union was actually the stage of capitalist accumulation that Engels said Russia would have to go through before socialism could be successful there. After all, a capitalist-like ruling class, running the state apparatus as in State and Revolution (oh that Lenin, again) did eventually arise in the latter days of the rule of Brezhnev and his successors, becoming the open capitalists, the “Oligarchs,” (one of whom actually owns the Brooklyn (NY, USA) Nets pro basketball team) of current Russia. If looked at that way, the horrors of Stalinism, as bad as they were, don’t look so bad when compared with the horrors visited on their own peoples, the peoples of the colonial world by the capitalist imperialists, and the civilians caught in capitalist war, as capitalism proceeded to its maturity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Jonas’ protean output comprises many fields from book authorship (The 15% Solution, soon to be republished in a revised edition by Punto Press, and more than 30 other titles), to frequent political and historical commentary in many leading online venues including (Buzzflash/Truthout, TPJMagazine, Dandelion Salad, and of course, The Greanville Post. Jonas is also a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY)

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⁽¹⁾ (M. Parenti, Left Anti-Communism, The Unkindest Cut, TGP, 1.12.12)  An extremely useful set of audio lectures by Parenti can be examined in our audio section, including his classic, “The Overthrow of Communism.”

 

 

 

 

 

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In Darkness

In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, screenplay by David F. Shamoon, based on the book by Robert Marshall; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, directed by Lasse Hallström, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel by Paul Torday

In Darkness chronicles the harrowing story of Polish Jews who hid for 14 months, until the end of the war, in the sewers of the then-Polish city of Lvov. Based on a book by Robert Marshall that compiled memoirs of the survivors, veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s gripping film dramatizes the plight of a band of Jews who escaped into the network of tunnels in 1943, enduring, with the help of a sewer worker, the waste, darkness and despair.

Leopold Socha (the remarkable Polish actor Robert Wieckiewicz) is an inspector in Lvov’s sewers. He struggles to support his family in the German-occupied city, supplementing his meager income with petty thievery and stashing the loot in the underground sewer system. The Nazi liquidation of the Lvov ghetto offers Socha and his friend Szczepek (Krzysztof Skonieczny) a broader field for their unsavory operations. In addition, a former Ukrainian jail-mate of Socha’s who is now a Nazi enforcer wants to partner with the sewer worker to earn cash by hunting down Jews in the underground waterways.

After discovering a group of Jews who have already found refuge in the tunnels, Socha initially agrees to help them for money, and later, for more altruistic reasons. Among the exiles is Mundek Margulies (Benno Fürmann), a suspicious man who nonetheless encourages the others, including men, women and children, to follow Socha into safer parts of the system.

The film shows the immense pressures on Socha and his family to evade scrutiny above ground, as well as the shocking fight for survival among his charges below ground. Holland brings out the complexities of people in unbearable settings, both their nobility and failings. Many of the Jews die, some falling into the sewer’s waters and others from sheer exhaustion. A baby is born and murdered by its despondent mother. There are quarreling factions and threats at gunpoint.

When the Nazis are defeated, those of “Socha’s Jews” who emerge from their cavernous hell are emaciated and near-blind. Movingly, they are aided by the townspeople, including Socha’s wife Wanda.

In Darkness is an intrepid effort by Holland who is best known for features such as Europa, Europa (1990) and Washington Square (1997). She has also directed several episodes of HBO’s The Wire and Treme.

As the director explains in the movie’s production notes, one of the biggest challenges in filming was contending with the darkness of the sewer setting. The Jews “live in the dark, stink, wet and isolation for over a year. We knew we had to express it, to explore this underground world in a very special, realistic, human and intricate way. We wanted the audience to have the sensual feeling of being there. And to maintain tension as the viewer slowly becomes attached to the story.”

Illuminating the underground scenes almost entirely by flashlight, the filmmakers created a suffocating, subterranean environment for a viewing audience 99.9 percent of which “has never been in a sewer,” according to editor Michal Czarnecki. Portraying people who are trying to hang onto some thread of humanity in the indescribable filth, among rats and vermin, was a dramatic feat for the actors. The sudden flooding of the sewers due to a rainstorm is one of the film’s most terrifying moments.

When the Jews finally crawl out of the sewer, the audience has shared with the film’s characters something of a visceral experience with Nazi terror. Actor Wieckiewicz’s performance as Socha, but many other leads, such as Fürmann, Maria Schrader as a Jewish mother of two small children and Kinga Preis as Socha’s wife, amplify the film’s realism. Adding to the project’s complicated logistics was the use of six different languages and one dialect—Polish, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Russian and Balak (which is a dialect of Polish spoken in Lvov at the time).

All concerned in the production of In Darkness exerted a colossal effort in rendering this bleak historic episode. The desire by filmmakers to continue to expose the Holocaust is entirely legitimate and necessary. But it must be said that the individual journeys and attendant moral choices, such as those in In Darkness, have a built-in limitation.

It is a much more difficult task for artists to analyze the social and political circumstances that gave rise to a state dedicated to such horror. Relatively few filmmakers, such as Luchino Visconti with his 1969 masterpiece The Damned, have attempted a serious artistic analysis of the rise of fascism.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Salmon Fishing in Yemen—an idiotic film— is a glaring example of the repulsive bourgeois indifference to historical events and conditions afflicting ordinary people. Why are millions invested in such crap? Need we ask?—Eds

Swedish-born director Lasse Hallström has been making English-language films since the early 1990s, including What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and Casanova.

In general, his work (including the earlier My Life as a Dog, made in Sweden in 1985) has been rather inoffensive, albeit well-intentioned. While eschewing the great issues of the day, Hallström has exhibited a certain sensitivity to the mildly marginalized, preaching his brand of tolerance, but with increasing toothlessness.

With his latest movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, one wonders if the director is seriously paying attention to anything going on in the world. The title pretty much sums up the story. A Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) is a “visionary” and avid fly fisherman who wants to bring salmon fishing—and irrigation—to his desert country. A billionaire with unlimited funds and an ancient Scottish castle, the sheikh hatches his plan with the aid of a British investment firm consultant (Emily Blunt) and UK government fisheries scientist (Ewan McGregor). The film’s predictable and formulaic outcome is signaled early on.

Kristin Scott Thomas as the press secretary for the office of the prime minister provides a few comic moments as the irrepressible seeker of an Anglo-Arab “good news story.” In general, however, Hallström wants the viewer to leave his or her brain outside the theater. Among the many things the viewer should forget or ignore is that Britain was a colonial power in southern Yemen from 1839 and only left, in the face of massive popular opposition, in 1967.

Moreover, there is the ongoing crisis in Yemen, which one would think might have come in for some consideration in the making of the film. The Great Powers, led by the US, along with the reactionary Gulf monarchies and various bourgeois factions in Yemen, are currently engaged in a ferocious effort to block a popular revolution from below, an event that would threaten to spread beyond the country’s borders and challenge their imperialist grip throughout the Arabian peninsula.

Only in Hallström’s fantasies does there exist a Middle Eastern country where poor people are undetectable (in reality, Yemen is one of the most impoverished countries in the region), and where a few nefarious terrorists stand in for a population painted as organically suspicious and resistant to progress—the latter being organized, of course, by an enlightened monarch and his benevolent backers in the British government and financial houses.

So corseted is the film by a false political reality, that even its instances of light-hearted humor—and the charm of its cast—are difficult to swallow. Hallström’s trademark liberal wishful thinking has this time landed him in murky waters.

 

 

 

 

 

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