Creating a World without Money
CINEMA
REVOLUTIONARY MODE
Considering the anarchist cinema of the 21st century
by Richard Porton
Since anarchism is a notoriously difficult term to define, it should not be surprising that the concept of "anarchist cinema" is equally elusive. Just as internecine conflicts between anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-individualists, and anarcho-communists complicate efforts to reduce anarchism to a monolithic ideology, there is no consensus as to whether anarchist filmmaking is more a literal-minded matter of content (e.g. documentaries on anti-authoritarian activism or biopics on heroic figures from the past like "anarchist martyrs" Sacco and Vanzetti or Buenaventura Durruti) or an idiosyncratic style (e.g. the bold lyricism of avant-gardists like Jean Vigo). Even Stuart Christie, the well-known British anarchist writer, activist, and avid movie enthusiast, confessed to The Guardian that some films made and produced by anarchists are often "very boring indeed."
Curiously enough, nearly a decade into the 21st century, caricatures of anarchist violence in popular culture mirror misconceptions that prevailed a hundred years ago. In 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt railed against the anarchist peril, the yellow press excoriated the anti-authoritarian left as nothing more than foreign vermin. This paranoid era provides a partial backdrop for Aleksandar Hemon’s recent novel The Lazarus Project; the journalist-hero, who investigates the still-notorious case of the 1908 murder of a Jewish immigrant, and apparent anarchist, by the Chicago chief of police, looks back at those benighted times and proclaims that the 20th century "war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror—funny how old habits never die." Hemon’s protagonist cites an early-20th-century editorial cartoon "depicting an outraged Statue of Liberty kicking a cage full of degenerate, dark-faced anarchists bloodthirstily clutching knives and bombs."
In the wake of 9/11 and the ongoing "war on terror," an implicit conflation of the longstanding revulsion toward anarchists, and more recent antipathies toward real and imagined terrorist threats, has come to the fore. Many reviews of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight referred to Heath Ledger's Joker as an "anarchist," even though this character, who blithely threatens large swaths of the population with annihilation, is merely branded an "agent of chaos" within the film. From a more complex, albeit muddled, point of view, another comic book film, James McTeigue's V for Vendetta (2005), blends the anarchist perspective of Alan Moore (who wrote the "graphic novel" that inspired the film; illustrations were provided by David Lloyd) and a jaundiced post-9/11 critical orientation. A commentary on the Thatcherite 1980s, Moore’s dystopian fantasy fleshes out the legacy of Thatcher’s repressive regime. Ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras (which in fact became pervasive in Blair and Brown’s Britain) are here emblematic of a neo-fascist mania for total surveillance that evokes both Orwell and the excesses of MI5. McTeigue’s well-intentioned adaptation angered Moore because he believed that the filmmakers' decision to impose post-9/11 concerns onto his narrative transformed Vendetta's anarchist impetus into a more palatably mainstream liberal movie. In Moore's vision, V., the altruistic rebel in a Guy Fawkes mask, explicitly evokes the anarchist tradition of "propaganda by the deed"— a precept associated with solitary acts of terrorism in the popular imagination but actually linked by serious 19th-century proponents like Errico Malatesta to concerted efforts to foment social revolution.
While Moore even lends V. some dialogue paraphrased from an early, pre-anarchist Bakunin tract in which the creative impulse is inextricable from the destructive urge, McTeigue's film is less anchored in the anti-authoritarian tradition but instead takes Moore’s premise as a departure point to flog a laundry list of standard left-liberal demands. Although Moore and the a for anarchy website, which led the anarchist charge in the U.S. against the Hollywood adaptation, presumably share the contempt of McTeigue and screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski for the Patriot Act and homophobia, they were less entranced with the film's propensity to use an incendiary allegory from another era for ends that were deemed either murky or merely reformist. For these critics, the film’s culminating event, the bombing of the Houses of Parliament, resides in an ahistorical void. From a much different vantage point, Lewis Call, writing in the academic journal Anarchist Studies, hails McTeigue's film for its exemplary advocacy of "postmodern anarchism" and terms the destruction of Parliament ("a curiously minor event in the Moore/Lloyd comic") a salutary critique of the "excesses of state power." To a certain extent, the disparity between Moore’s hostility to the film version and Call’s "postmodern" enthusiasm comes down to whether one insists, with purist intransigence, that Hollywood inevitably co-opts radical aspirations or that "if we use consumer capitalism to critique capitalism we are only making use of the practical use of the existing instruments in order to transcend the existing order of things—a very anarchist proposition."
Even though anti-globalization protests at the 1999 convocation of the World Trade Organization in Seattle brought the new anarchist activism to the attention of Americans during the early post-Cold War era, popular culture proved reticent and has only recently registered a response, albeit a feeble one, to these events. While excellent documentaries such as This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000) provided comprehensive analyses of the WTO events, Stuart Townsend’s conspicuously earnest Battle in Seattle (2007) attempted to explain the intricacies of anti-corporate protest to a wider audience. Unfortunately, although Townsend cites The Battle of Algiers and Medium Cool as influences, his film, as critics pointed out, frequently resembles a slightly more enlightened version of Paul Haggis's Crash.
As in Haggisland, a grab bag of strangers collides and endures privation while learning prefabricated life lessons. Although the travails of a harried liberal mayor (based loosely on former Seattle mayor Paul Schell), a world-weary NGO representative, and a cop who regrets pummeling a protester need not concern us, the depiction of the activists, particularly a feisty anarchist named Lou (played with requisite amounts of anger and spunk by Michelle Rodriguez), provides ample evidence of the paradoxes that emerge when anti-authoritarian politics becomes fodder for mainstream entertainment. Despite being a passionate advocate of direct action, Lou—perhaps in the interest of spurious "balance"— is preoccupied with condemning the supposedly violent tendencies of her fellow anarchists. Lou is clearly referencing the activities of the "Black Bloc" and apparently believes that this group’s most famous "transgression" —the smashing of Starbucks windows—renders it hopelessly violent and irresponsible. But as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber observes, "Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of 'violence' . . . so, if even one protester damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of 'violent protests,' but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks, and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent." And as a group of anarchists wrote in an anonymous broadside against Townsend's film, an entire swath of anti-hierarchical protest, which includes grassroots groups like "Food Not Bombs," is overlooked in Battle in Seattle. Townsend is, alas, more interested in gooey humanist uplift than the nuts and bolts of direct action.
A BBC documentary that never mentions anarchism—Adam Curtis's The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (2007)—struck a much more resonant note with many anarchists than Townsend’s tepid docudrama. Since words such as freedom and individuality are cherished by the extreme right as well as the left, Curtis's playful polemic, interlaced with interviews and archival footage, endeavors to prove that, during the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1980s, the regimes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher hijacked the concepts of freedom and individualism in order to implement authoritarian goals. Embedded in Curtis's ingenious linkages among seemingly disparate thinkers—game theorist and economist John Nash; R.D. Laing, the '60s guru of anti-psychiatry; and Sir Isaiah Berlin, the patrician proponent of "negative liberty"—is an assumption that an alarmingly limited brand of freedom that views human nature as intrinsically selfish gained ascendancy under conservative governments during the 1980s and reached its zenith during the ostensibly "liberal" 1990s regimes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. For anarchists, the obvious implication is that "the trap" of neoliberalism recapitulates the "possessive individualism" of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke that triumphed over the proto-anarchist "communal individuality" espoused by 17th-century radical utopians such as Gerrard Winstanley.
If The Trap might be deemed almost unwittingly anarchist, recent documentaries adhering to an explicitly anti-authoritarian stance reflect a DIY aesthetic than is frequently indivisibly tied to activist goals. In "Videotaping a New World," an article that will appear this spring in Arena: On Anarchist Cinema, an anthology I edited, Andrew Hedden considers the efforts of grassroots anarchist video collectives to provide an "alternative form of journalism." Just as some of the earliest examples of anarchist video—e.g. Clayton Patterson's 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot, which chronicled police malfeasance during a peaceful protest in New York's East Village—fused ethnography and activism, groups such as the Argentinean Grupo Alavio and A-films, a Middle Eastern collective, both document and participate in local struggles. Cop Watch L.A., on the other hand, goes well beyond the role of media watchdog and demonstrates how the line separating filmmaking and direct action can be permanently effaced. Armed with video and cell phone cameras, Cop Watch L.A. brigades monitor police harassment of poor and minority communities in Los Angeles. While outside the realm of art usually assessed by film critics and historians, what Richard Modiano labels a burgeoning "cinematic record of police transgression" also performs an archival function for our era that parallels the aspirations of participant-observers like the journalist Henry Mayhew and the photographer-muckraker Jacob Riis in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Even as unimpeachably earnest anarchist nonfiction thrives, a new film, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Louise-Michel (which screened at Sundance and Rotterdam last month), reinvents anti-authoritarian rage with deadpan gallows humor. The two protagonists' first names invoke the memory of Louise Michel, the anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune of 1871, in ways that will understandably disconcert many earnest anarchists. When the mildly retarded Louise (Yolande Moreau) discovers that she and her colleagues are suddenly out of work after a duplicitous boss abandons their factory, she urges her comrades to hire a hit man to kill the hated culprit. The contract killer turns out to be Michel (Bouli Lanners), a hopeless bungler who leads Louise on a wacky wild goose chase through France and Belgium until their prey is finally discovered relaxing in Jersey, a notorious tax haven in the Channel Islands.
A film that dispatches clownish and inept anti-heroes to wreak havoc on boorish capitalists involves tricky narrative and political strategies. But as buffoonish as Louise and Michel might be, Delépine and Kervern are undeniably fond of this hapless duo; in a recent interview with Cineuropa, Kervern insists that these marginal characters touch him and his co-director "more than the company bosses and middle-classes, or the literary and artistic circles, who are usually the focus of French films." In addition, as the journalist Fabien Lemercier maintains, Louise and Michel's vertiginous quest is almost impossible to disentangle from the peculiar depersonalization wrought by corporate globalization. While a villainous boss in the 19th century would not have strayed from his local estate, contemporary plutocrats, with no visible national allegiances, are free to wander the globe. In the film's most comically transgressive sequence, the ungainly pair simulate the destruction of the World Trade Center with the aid of a scale model, an act that functions as both an absurdist exorcism of this international trauma and an irreverent act that thumbs its nose at mainstream—and anarchist—respectability.
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/revolutionary-mode-20090210
Considering the anarchist cinema of the 21st century
by Richard Porton
Since anarchism is a notoriously difficult term to define, it should not be surprising that the concept of "anarchist cinema" is equally elusive. Just as internecine conflicts between anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-individualists, and anarcho-communists complicate efforts to reduce anarchism to a monolithic ideology, there is no consensus as to whether anarchist filmmaking is more a literal-minded matter of content (e.g. documentaries on anti-authoritarian activism or biopics on heroic figures from the past like "anarchist martyrs" Sacco and Vanzetti or Buenaventura Durruti) or an idiosyncratic style (e.g. the bold lyricism of avant-gardists like Jean Vigo). Even Stuart Christie, the well-known British anarchist writer, activist, and avid movie enthusiast, confessed to The Guardian that some films made and produced by anarchists are often "very boring indeed."
Curiously enough, nearly a decade into the 21st century, caricatures of anarchist violence in popular culture mirror misconceptions that prevailed a hundred years ago. In 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt railed against the anarchist peril, the yellow press excoriated the anti-authoritarian left as nothing more than foreign vermin. This paranoid era provides a partial backdrop for Aleksandar Hemon’s recent novel The Lazarus Project; the journalist-hero, who investigates the still-notorious case of the 1908 murder of a Jewish immigrant, and apparent anarchist, by the Chicago chief of police, looks back at those benighted times and proclaims that the 20th century "war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror—funny how old habits never die." Hemon’s protagonist cites an early-20th-century editorial cartoon "depicting an outraged Statue of Liberty kicking a cage full of degenerate, dark-faced anarchists bloodthirstily clutching knives and bombs."
In the wake of 9/11 and the ongoing "war on terror," an implicit conflation of the longstanding revulsion toward anarchists, and more recent antipathies toward real and imagined terrorist threats, has come to the fore. Many reviews of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight referred to Heath Ledger's Joker as an "anarchist," even though this character, who blithely threatens large swaths of the population with annihilation, is merely branded an "agent of chaos" within the film. From a more complex, albeit muddled, point of view, another comic book film, James McTeigue's V for Vendetta (2005), blends the anarchist perspective of Alan Moore (who wrote the "graphic novel" that inspired the film; illustrations were provided by David Lloyd) and a jaundiced post-9/11 critical orientation. A commentary on the Thatcherite 1980s, Moore’s dystopian fantasy fleshes out the legacy of Thatcher’s repressive regime. Ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras (which in fact became pervasive in Blair and Brown’s Britain) are here emblematic of a neo-fascist mania for total surveillance that evokes both Orwell and the excesses of MI5. McTeigue’s well-intentioned adaptation angered Moore because he believed that the filmmakers' decision to impose post-9/11 concerns onto his narrative transformed Vendetta's anarchist impetus into a more palatably mainstream liberal movie. In Moore's vision, V., the altruistic rebel in a Guy Fawkes mask, explicitly evokes the anarchist tradition of "propaganda by the deed"— a precept associated with solitary acts of terrorism in the popular imagination but actually linked by serious 19th-century proponents like Errico Malatesta to concerted efforts to foment social revolution.
While Moore even lends V. some dialogue paraphrased from an early, pre-anarchist Bakunin tract in which the creative impulse is inextricable from the destructive urge, McTeigue's film is less anchored in the anti-authoritarian tradition but instead takes Moore’s premise as a departure point to flog a laundry list of standard left-liberal demands. Although Moore and the a for anarchy website, which led the anarchist charge in the U.S. against the Hollywood adaptation, presumably share the contempt of McTeigue and screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski for the Patriot Act and homophobia, they were less entranced with the film's propensity to use an incendiary allegory from another era for ends that were deemed either murky or merely reformist. For these critics, the film’s culminating event, the bombing of the Houses of Parliament, resides in an ahistorical void. From a much different vantage point, Lewis Call, writing in the academic journal Anarchist Studies, hails McTeigue's film for its exemplary advocacy of "postmodern anarchism" and terms the destruction of Parliament ("a curiously minor event in the Moore/Lloyd comic") a salutary critique of the "excesses of state power." To a certain extent, the disparity between Moore’s hostility to the film version and Call’s "postmodern" enthusiasm comes down to whether one insists, with purist intransigence, that Hollywood inevitably co-opts radical aspirations or that "if we use consumer capitalism to critique capitalism we are only making use of the practical use of the existing instruments in order to transcend the existing order of things—a very anarchist proposition."
Even though anti-globalization protests at the 1999 convocation of the World Trade Organization in Seattle brought the new anarchist activism to the attention of Americans during the early post-Cold War era, popular culture proved reticent and has only recently registered a response, albeit a feeble one, to these events. While excellent documentaries such as This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000) provided comprehensive analyses of the WTO events, Stuart Townsend’s conspicuously earnest Battle in Seattle (2007) attempted to explain the intricacies of anti-corporate protest to a wider audience. Unfortunately, although Townsend cites The Battle of Algiers and Medium Cool as influences, his film, as critics pointed out, frequently resembles a slightly more enlightened version of Paul Haggis's Crash.
As in Haggisland, a grab bag of strangers collides and endures privation while learning prefabricated life lessons. Although the travails of a harried liberal mayor (based loosely on former Seattle mayor Paul Schell), a world-weary NGO representative, and a cop who regrets pummeling a protester need not concern us, the depiction of the activists, particularly a feisty anarchist named Lou (played with requisite amounts of anger and spunk by Michelle Rodriguez), provides ample evidence of the paradoxes that emerge when anti-authoritarian politics becomes fodder for mainstream entertainment. Despite being a passionate advocate of direct action, Lou—perhaps in the interest of spurious "balance"— is preoccupied with condemning the supposedly violent tendencies of her fellow anarchists. Lou is clearly referencing the activities of the "Black Bloc" and apparently believes that this group’s most famous "transgression" —the smashing of Starbucks windows—renders it hopelessly violent and irresponsible. But as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber observes, "Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of 'violence' . . . so, if even one protester damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of 'violent protests,' but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks, and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent." And as a group of anarchists wrote in an anonymous broadside against Townsend's film, an entire swath of anti-hierarchical protest, which includes grassroots groups like "Food Not Bombs," is overlooked in Battle in Seattle. Townsend is, alas, more interested in gooey humanist uplift than the nuts and bolts of direct action.
A BBC documentary that never mentions anarchism—Adam Curtis's The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (2007)—struck a much more resonant note with many anarchists than Townsend’s tepid docudrama. Since words such as freedom and individuality are cherished by the extreme right as well as the left, Curtis's playful polemic, interlaced with interviews and archival footage, endeavors to prove that, during the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1980s, the regimes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher hijacked the concepts of freedom and individualism in order to implement authoritarian goals. Embedded in Curtis's ingenious linkages among seemingly disparate thinkers—game theorist and economist John Nash; R.D. Laing, the '60s guru of anti-psychiatry; and Sir Isaiah Berlin, the patrician proponent of "negative liberty"—is an assumption that an alarmingly limited brand of freedom that views human nature as intrinsically selfish gained ascendancy under conservative governments during the 1980s and reached its zenith during the ostensibly "liberal" 1990s regimes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. For anarchists, the obvious implication is that "the trap" of neoliberalism recapitulates the "possessive individualism" of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke that triumphed over the proto-anarchist "communal individuality" espoused by 17th-century radical utopians such as Gerrard Winstanley.
If The Trap might be deemed almost unwittingly anarchist, recent documentaries adhering to an explicitly anti-authoritarian stance reflect a DIY aesthetic than is frequently indivisibly tied to activist goals. In "Videotaping a New World," an article that will appear this spring in Arena: On Anarchist Cinema, an anthology I edited, Andrew Hedden considers the efforts of grassroots anarchist video collectives to provide an "alternative form of journalism." Just as some of the earliest examples of anarchist video—e.g. Clayton Patterson's 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot, which chronicled police malfeasance during a peaceful protest in New York's East Village—fused ethnography and activism, groups such as the Argentinean Grupo Alavio and A-films, a Middle Eastern collective, both document and participate in local struggles. Cop Watch L.A., on the other hand, goes well beyond the role of media watchdog and demonstrates how the line separating filmmaking and direct action can be permanently effaced. Armed with video and cell phone cameras, Cop Watch L.A. brigades monitor police harassment of poor and minority communities in Los Angeles. While outside the realm of art usually assessed by film critics and historians, what Richard Modiano labels a burgeoning "cinematic record of police transgression" also performs an archival function for our era that parallels the aspirations of participant-observers like the journalist Henry Mayhew and the photographer-muckraker Jacob Riis in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Even as unimpeachably earnest anarchist nonfiction thrives, a new film, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Louise-Michel (which screened at Sundance and Rotterdam last month), reinvents anti-authoritarian rage with deadpan gallows humor. The two protagonists' first names invoke the memory of Louise Michel, the anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune of 1871, in ways that will understandably disconcert many earnest anarchists. When the mildly retarded Louise (Yolande Moreau) discovers that she and her colleagues are suddenly out of work after a duplicitous boss abandons their factory, she urges her comrades to hire a hit man to kill the hated culprit. The contract killer turns out to be Michel (Bouli Lanners), a hopeless bungler who leads Louise on a wacky wild goose chase through France and Belgium until their prey is finally discovered relaxing in Jersey, a notorious tax haven in the Channel Islands.
A film that dispatches clownish and inept anti-heroes to wreak havoc on boorish capitalists involves tricky narrative and political strategies. But as buffoonish as Louise and Michel might be, Delépine and Kervern are undeniably fond of this hapless duo; in a recent interview with Cineuropa, Kervern insists that these marginal characters touch him and his co-director "more than the company bosses and middle-classes, or the literary and artistic circles, who are usually the focus of French films." In addition, as the journalist Fabien Lemercier maintains, Louise and Michel's vertiginous quest is almost impossible to disentangle from the peculiar depersonalization wrought by corporate globalization. While a villainous boss in the 19th century would not have strayed from his local estate, contemporary plutocrats, with no visible national allegiances, are free to wander the globe. In the film's most comically transgressive sequence, the ungainly pair simulate the destruction of the World Trade Center with the aid of a scale model, an act that functions as both an absurdist exorcism of this international trauma and an irreverent act that thumbs its nose at mainstream—and anarchist—respectability.
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/revolutionary-mode-20090210
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by michael dickinson on -
Trouble the Water, directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Tom Jennings recommends this Hurricane Katrina documentary as a superior example of genuine ‘reality TV’
No Bridge Over ... Film review – Tom Jennings
September 2005: two regular Michael Moore collaborators reached Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Katrina, planning to examine National Guard redeployment from Baghdad to New Orleans’ new warzone. Instead, rebuffed by authorities fearing Fahenheit 9/11-style crusades, they stumbled on Kimberley Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott flooded out of the Lower Ninth Ward. Buying a secondhand camcorder just before the evacuation order – which, like many thousands, they had no wherewithal to obey – Kim had decided to film their experiences during and after the storm. The gripping footage from its eye and destruction in its wake – full of CNN-savvy pans and angles and peppered with canny commentary and testimony from locals, friends and family – then formed the core of a cinema documentary following them to exile in Tennessee and finally back to their ravaged ’hood. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Oscar-nominated Trouble the Water (USA, 2007) subsequently won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Festival before its UK television premiere on More4 on 25th February.
The utter institutional neglect at all levels, from Bush and his crony Michael Brown of the Federal Emergency Management Agency all the way down the government hierarchy, is by now well-known, and the mortal horrors facing the abandoned poor of New Orleans extensively documented – but nowhere else are these phenomena shown with quite the direct, bottom-up intensity of this film. An oppositional political logic thus grows out of the Roberts’ earlier cynical fatalism in tandem with anger and determination channelled into helping as many fellow survivors as practicable. From shots of disinterested police to submerging ‘Stop’ roadsigns; attempts to float the young and elderly out on makeshift rafts being turned back at gunpoint from empty naval barracks; Kim’s younger brother Wink (inside for a misdemeanour) recounting a jailful abandoned with no food or water; the haphazard bureaucratic mess of relief efforts later, whether to collect dead neighbours, get tapwater reconnected, or grant financial aid for the displaced – all the story’s dimensions weave into a profoundly moving but unsentimental journey of kind, likeable and charismatic folk struggling to overcome.
‘Troubled waters’ is indeed an appropriate metaphor for the whole saga, not just Katrina’s aftermath but the entire trajectory of American society’s increasing numbers consigned to official scrap-heaps irrespective of convenient ‘natural’ or financial catastrophes. And, as repeatedly emphasised in the film, ordinary people now realise more explicitly that lack of resources leaves you with ‘no government’ – except as a hostile force with entirely separate interests.
Another recent documentary, on US national debt (I.O.U.S.A., dir. Patrick Creadon, 2008), showed – among countless scandals – federal accountants uncovering massive theft and fraud of FEMA funds paying for top management necessities like cars, vacations, champagne, lap dances and porn films. Not ‘trickle-down’ or even ‘trickle-up’ economics but funds veritably flooding along faultlines of power, uncannily negatively correlating with the deluge afflicting New Orleans ghettoes. Nevertheless, in vignettes of dignified courtesy shown to military and government personnel prevented from providing proper assistance on the ground, Trouble the Water carefully highlights the understanding among survivors, evacuees and relatives that the causes are systemic.
The selfless heroism and humility of the film’s subjects in caring for and about each other, including those previously shunned, also effortlessly contradicts preferred media hysteria concerning pathological criminality [1] as well as default modes of liberal charitability for helpless victims. The latter tendency pervades other prominent film accounts of the events, like Spike Lee’s heartbreaking visual testament in the four-hour When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and Greg MacGillivray’s Hurricane on the Bayou (both 2006) meticulously detailing the ecological significance.
Surveying the lower-budget progressive filmmakers flocking in since autumn 2005, Dennis Lim’s ‘The Angry Flood and the Stories in Its Wake’ [2] pinpoints the main dilemma of “the emerging genre of Hurricane Katrina cinema” as outsiders objectifying Louisiana citizens – in effect, reproducing in representational forms their supposed passivity in the face of the storm itself [3]. Therefore Lessin and Deal aptly foreground community self-activity and cultural expression even while Kim and Scott are forthright about the price paid for prior urban decay and disintegration, including them both having in the past been low-level drug-dealers.
Moreover in Come Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Civitas Books, 2006), Michael Eric Dyson notes that the only significant remaining records of life in the drowned zone are music videos by Southern rappers; the latter also being the most prompt and vociferous celebrities to plunge straightaway into protest and aid activities. But, given the persistent strength of local culture even in appalling circumstances, it’s fitting that the film score’s versions of ‘Wade in the Water’ by the legendary Dr John and contemporary R&B/gospel duo Mary Mary are trumped with four blistering tracks by Kim in (then amateur) gangsta rap guise as Black Kold Madina [4]. Her fortitude and determination will doubtless come in handy, with Trouble the Water’s summarising captions stressing that:
“billions of federal rebuilding dollars have not been disbursed; rents in the city have doubled and so has the homeless population; thousands of livable public housing units are being demolished; most African-Americans have not returned while most white residents have; the majority of the city’s public schools are deemed academic failures; Louisiana’s incarceration rate is still the highest in the world; and the rebuilt levees in New Orleans remain flawed and vulnerable”.
So it’s heartening that the final sequence shows Kim and Scott at a boisterous demo at City Hall, complete with trad-jazz band in trademark funereal and celebratory modes, signalling new potential with fewer illusions. Next time it might be the grass-roots troubling the waters.
Notes
1. lucidly interpreted by Slavoj Zizek in ‘The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans’, In These Times, 20 October, 2005; see also James Lee Burke’s hard-boiled post-Katrina crime thriller The Tin Roof Blowdown (Orion Books, 2007) and my analysis in ‘CSI: The Big Sleazy’ (Variant 31, 2008; www.variant.org.uk).
2. New York Times, 15th August, 2008 (www.nytimes.com).
3. raising general questions of ‘objectivity’ in documentary strategies – also discussed in relation to Fahrenheit 9/11 in ‘Extracting the Michael’ (Variant 21, 2004), and social-realist cinema in ‘Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting the Working Classes’ (Variant 34, 2009).
4. namely, ‘Amazing’, ‘Hustle and Struggle’, ‘Bone Gristle’, and the closing credits accompaniment ‘Trouble the Waters’. Her CD is now available, after the original masters were lost in storm-damage, via the Roberts’ own independent label (www.bornhustlerrecords.com).
Trouble the Water is released on DVD on 27th April, priced £12.99.
Flm review published in Freedom, Vol. 70, No. 7, April 2009.
For other reviews and essays by Tom Jennings, see:
www.variant.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
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Permalink Reply by michael dickinson on
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HEART OF THE FACTORY
a film by Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito
http://www.cdfdoc.com.ar/
The film looks at the life of a group of workers, men and women, inhabitants of the Argentinean Patagonia. These workers start a fight to stop the deaths and accidents that happen in the factory where they work. They live complex and dangerous conflicts and they are taking more and more commitment, something many of them had never imagined could happen.
These strong episodes are affecting their perception of the reality, of the world. No one now can see himself or herself like the human he or she used to be. Something broke, something has changed and can not return to the original place.
In a poor country looted by its own governments and businessmen, the workers of Zanon Ceramic take the factory in their own hands when the owner closes it. They start to produce ceramics again, but without bosses.
Now, they feel free. They’ve found in their work a way to grow humanly. But at the same time, they have to assume a series of responsibilities and challenges. Usually, this provokes serious arguments among them or with themselves.
During that process, the workers had to study and to overcome themselves in order to solve all the problems linked to the areas of production. Through the democratic assembly, they found a way to support their organisation and learn how to take their own decisions in the management.
In a country devastated by an economic debacle, they created two hundred new jobs. Now they are 470 people working in the factory.
Together with 5,000 Neuquen’s inhabitants who support them, workers have resisted four attempts of evictions.
They do not consider themselves as the new owners of the ceramic factory: on the contrary, they consider the Neuquén community as the only owner. And they give back in donations to the most needed sectors the surplus that the factory produces.
This is the only factory in the world where the workers' management (without bosses) has been operating for more than four years. This is a permanent challenge where every day they have to fight against a political and economic system that tries to boycott them.
Their biggest obstacle though does not come from the outside. It is about their own fears inculcated by this society. Although many of them do not know it, if they win the battle in their consciences they will open the door to build a completely different world.
http://www.cdfdoc.com.ar/
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Permalink Reply by michael dickinson on
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Just email your article to polfilmblog a-t gmail – com. Put “FILM BLOG” in the subject header, and I’ll try to get it uploaded here when I have time.
Various points of view are welcome, with a notable exception: stupidity.
-Joe Giambrone
http://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/about/
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Lucio
2007 93min. / Spanish, French, English with English subtitles. Directors Aitor Arregi, José María Goenaga.
Meet Lucio Uturbia — anarchist, bank robber, forger, fugitive, and above all, a bricklayer. Lucio’s life is the stuff of legend.
As an activist in 1950’s Paris, he counted André Breton and Albert Camus amongst his friends, worked with anarchist guerrilla Francisco Sabate to bring down Franco’s fascist regime and carried out numerous bank robberies to fund the struggle to free Spain. In 1977, he successfully forged US$ 20 million dollars of Citibank travellers cheques to fund guerrilla groups in Latin America, bringing the bank to its knees in the process. His motivation was not his own gain, but to dent confidence in this powerful financial institution. Lucio was arrested for this and ended up in prison, but soon got back on his feet.
He also helped organise the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie from his hideout in Bolivia, aided the escape of Black Panthers like Eldridge Cleaver from the US and not surprisingly was targeted by the CIA.
The story of how this bricklayer with a skill for forgery brought down powerful institutions without resorting to violence is riveting. His sensibility is pure and enchanting: fight power altruistically without ever aspiring to hold power.
Testimony from Lucio and his cohorts intermingle with a mesmerizing procession of archival evidence and tasteful re-enactments. Co-directors Arregi and Goenaga create tension and excitement without sacrificing gravitas and the film’s stunning cinematic style matches the rapid and almost unimaginable trajectory of Lucio’s tale.
" Those looking for a documentary about anarchism won't find it here. Lucio never lays out any strict guidelines for being an anarchist, although he preferred working in small groups, never wholly trusted others, and didn't feel compelled to join or support formal organizations. Some today might praise or critique his anarchist doctrine, but without walking in his shoes one would be wise to just let him tell his own story. "
TRAILER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBVjEUmmrGs&feature=related
Official Site
http://www.lucio.com.es/lucio_ing.html
Lucio Uturbia’s working-class roots sapped his faith in capitalist and religious institutions. His upbringing under Franco’s regime drew him towards the philosophical tenets of anarchism. And his talent for forgery helped him to cripple the world’s largest bank. The story of how this bricklayer with a skill for forgery brought down powerful institutions without resorting to violence is riveting and inspiring.
The stunning style of the film matches the rapid and almost unimaginable trajectory of Lucio’s tale. Testimony from Lucio and his cohorts intermingle with a mesmerizing procession of archival evidence and tasteful re-enactments. Directors Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga create tension and excitement without sacrificing gravitas or distracting us from the simple lessons at the heart of the film—difficult feats to achieve in the face of such drama.
The sensibility of this former fugitive is pure and enchanting: fight power altruistically without ever aspiring to hold power. In this context, Lucio’s fate makes perfect sense, and his fight on behalf of anarchism comes across as a sober commitment to a solid philosophy, not as the empty gestures of a marginalized troublemaker. With great respect for the fight against political, economic and social injustice in Spain and around the world, LUCIO chronicles one man but recognizes a global struggle.
-Deborah L. Jaramillo, SilverDocs
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THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD
The screwball true story of a couple of activists who infiltrate the world of big business and pull off outrageous pranks to expose corporate greed and its impact on society.
Director: Mike Bonanno, Andy Bichlbaum, and Kurt Engfehr
Year of Production: 2009
Running time: 87m
http://theyesmen.org/theyesmenfixtheworld
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Lucio, The Good Bandit: Reflections of an Anarchist
Written by Marie Trigona Thursday, 05 June 2008
Lucio Urtubia could be described as a modern day Robin Hood, a man who stole from the rich to give to the poor. Lucio, a 76-year old Spanish anarchist and retired bricklayer carried out bank robberies, forgeries and endless actions against capitalism. His actions helped to fund liberation movements in Europe, the US and Latin America.
Outspoken and charismatic, Lucio speaks like a true anarchist. When asked what it means to be an anarchist, Lucio refutes the misperception of the terrorist, "The anarchist is a person who is good at heart, responsible." Yet he makes no apologies for the need to destroy the current social order, "it’s good to destroy certain things, because you build things to replace them."
Lucio has old friends in the Southern Cone. Funds from the forgery operatives helped hundreds from revolutionary organizations exile and finance clandestine actions against the bloody dictatorships which disappeared ten thousands of activists, students and workers during the 1970's throughout Latin America. In Uruguay, funds from falsified Citibank travelers’ checks funded the guerilla group Tupamaros, in the US the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups throughout Europe.
During his recent visit to South America, Lucio stayed at the worker run BAUEN Hotel in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires. He was astounded by the accomplishments of the workers without bosses. At the BAUEN hotel, workers are putting into practice workers autogestíon or self-management. Self-management has been a mainstay of anarchist thought since the birth of capitalism. Rather than authority – obey relationship between capitalists and workers, self-management implies that workers put into practice an egalitarian system in which people collectively decide, produce and control their own destinies for the benefit of the community. But for such a system to work, participants have to be hard working and responsible, one of the most important attributes a man or woman should have according to Lucio. "The anarchist movement was built by workers. Without work we can’t talk about self-management, to put self-management into practice we need to know how to do things, to work. It’s easy to be bohemian."
Lucio explains that his anarchism is based in his poor childhood in fascist Spain. "My anarchist origins are rooted in my experience growing up in a poor family. My father was leftist, had gone to jail because he wanted the automony of the Basque country. For me that’s not revolution, I’m not nationalist. With nationalism humanity has committed a lot of mistakes. When my father got out of jail he became a socialist. We suffered a lot. I went to look for bread and the baker wouldn’t give it to me, because we didn’t have money. For me poverty enriched me, I didn’t have to make any effort to lose respect for the establishment, the Church, private property and the State."
In Spain, fascism persevered 30 years after the end of World War II. Hundreds were placed in jail for resisting the Franco dictatorship. Anthropologists have estimated that from the onset of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 to Franco’s death in November 1975, Franco's Nationalists killed between 75,000 and 150,000 supporters of the Republic.
Lucio exiled to France where he discovered anarchism. He had deserted the nationalist army and escaped to France. Paris in the 1960’s was a bourgeoning city for anarchist intellectuals, organizers and guerillas in exile. It was there that Lucio met members from the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT). He was anxious to participate.
During his early years in France, Lucio met Francisco Sabate, the legendary anarchist and guerilla extraordinaire. At this time Sabate, otherwise known by his nickname "El Quico" was the most sought after anarchist by the Franco regime. French police were also looking for Sabate, who led resistance against Franquismo. "When I met Quico, I was participating in the Juventud Libertarias. They asked me if I could help Sabate, me an ignorant, I didn’t know who he was." Sabate used Lucio’s house as a hide out. The young Lucio, listened to Sabate’s tales of direct action and absorbed whatever wisdom he had to offer, like methods for sniffing out infiltrators. "I met guerillas that put me on the road to direct action and expropriations. Sabate taught me to lose respect for private property."
It was then that Lucio began participating in bank robberies. "There are no bigger crooks than the banks," says Lucio in the defense of expropriation. "[This was the] only means the anarchist had, without funding from industry or government representatives to fund them. The money was sent to those suffering from Franco’s regime." Student organizations and worker organizations received the funds to carry out grass roots organizing. In other cases the money was used for the guerilla actions against Franco’s regime, such as campaigns for the release of political prisoners in the nationalist jails.
To save the lives of exiles, Lucio thought of a master plan to falsify passports so Spanish nationals could travel. "Passports for a refugee means being able to escape the country and lead safe lives elsewhere," he explains. Not only in Europe but in the US and South America, dissidents used false ID’s to lead their lives and direct actions.
In 1977, Lucio’s group began forging checks as a direct form to finance resistance. Lucio was essentially the "boss" of the operation—he made, distributed and cashed the checks. The checks were harder to falsify than counterfeit bills. Lucio thought they should target the largest banking institution in the world, National City Bank. The distribution of the checks went to different subversive groups who used the funds to finance solidarity actions. Lucio explains that "no one got rich" from the checks. Most of the funds went to the cause. All over Europe, these checks with the same code number were cashed at the same time.
Lucio’s master plan cost City Bank tens of millions of dollars in forged travelers’ checks. But many say a much larger sum was expropriated. City Bank was at the mercy of the forger, who had cost so much that the bank had to suspend travelers checks, ruining the holiday for thousands of tourists. At the time, people did not use check cards or credit cards. Lucio was arrested in 1980 and found with a suitcase full of the forged checks. In the meantime during Lucio’s arrest, Citibank continued to receive false travelers’ checks.
Citbank became worried. Representatives from the bank agreed to negotiate. Lucio would be released if he handed over the printing plates for the forged checks. The exchange was made, and Lucio became a legend for his mastermind plan. Although his life as a forger ended at 50-years-of-age, his life as an anarchist continued.
Lucio had always worked as a bricklayer. "What’s helped me the most is my work, Anarchists were always workers." Lucio–bricklayer, anarchist, forger and expropriator has left a legacy like his predecessors. "People like Loise Michel, Sabate, Durruti, all the expropriators taught me how to expropriate, but not for personal gain, but how to use those riches for change." At 76-years-of-age he does not apologize for his actions. "I’ve expropriated, which according to the Christian religion is a sin. For me expropriations are necessary. As the revolutionaries say, robbing and expropriation is a revolutionary act as long as one doesn’t benefit from it."
Marie Trigona is a writer, radio producer and filmmaker based in Argentina.
Lucio is one of the most fascinating people she has met in her experience interviewing people.
She can be reached at mtrigona@msn.com
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Michael Moore Takes on Capitalism: What Is the Alternative?
Oct 5, 2009
By Dan DiMaggio
Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, opened in over 1,000 theaters across the U.S. on Friday, October 2 with a simple message: “Capitalism is evil,” and must be replaced with a system that puts the interests of ordinary people over profit.
The film puts the suffering of ordinary, hard-working Americans facing job losses, home foreclosures, skyrocketing tuition, and declining wages and benefits on full display. Capitalism is exposed as a system that is rotten to the core, subordinating every social concern to the limitless quest for profit.
Moore calls this movie “the culmination of all the films I’ve ever made.” In his previous films, he focused on specific industries like health insurance (Sicko) or corporations like General Motors (Roger & Me). But in Capitalism, Moore shows how the problems we face are systemic in nature, rather than the product of a few bad apples or a handful of evil corporations.
As he explained in a brilliant interview on Democracy Now (9/24/09): “I am tired of having to dance around this or deal with this symptom of the problem or that calamity caused by capitalism. I mean, I could keep doing this ’til the end of my life, and I don’t think anything is really going to change that much. And I’d like to see change in my lifetime… I guess I can keep making movies for another twenty years about the next General Motors or the next healthcare issue or whatever, but I thought I’d just kind of cut to the chase and propose that we deal with this economic system and try to restructure it in a way that benefits people and not the richest one percent.”
Capitalism: A Love Story will educate millions about the realities of a system which has only one goal: the short-term maximization of profit. The significance of this phenomenon – a major filmmaker denouncing capitalism in front of an audience of millions in the most powerful capitalist nation in the history of the world – should not be lost. While Moore does not provide a clear alternative, he is forcing open a popular debate on the need to transform the entire social system.
Victims of the system
The film relies on intimate portrayals of the human costs of capitalism. In one example, Moore shows a privatized juvenile detention facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The owners of this facility made tens of millions of dollars by bribing judges to unjustly convict over 6,500 kids and lock them up for months for offenses ranging from throwing a piece of steak at their parents to making a MySpace page about their assistant principal.
He interviews families facing foreclosures and layoffs, giving voice to working class anger at the bosses, bankers, and politicians responsible. Moore traces the devastation of Randy and Donna Hacker, as police force them from the home they built on their family farm. As Randy Hacker says, “There’s gotta be some kind of rebellion between the people that’s got nothing and the people who have it all… There’s no in between anymore.”
Perhaps most disgusting, Moore exposes the “Dead Peasant” insurance policy, through which giant corporations like Wal-Mart and Bank of America take out life insurance policies on their employees, usually unbeknownst to the workers or their families. If a worker dies, these companies collect tens of thousands – or even millions! – of dollars, while the family is left to foot the bills for medical and funeral expenses. This gives these companies an incentive for their employees to die young, when they can collect the most money.
Similarly, Wall Street investment banks, seeking a new arena to profit after the collapse in housing prices, are hatching a plan to buy up millions of life insurance policies from elderly Americans at less than half their value, then bundle them together to be sold to big investors as bonds. The investors will then collect the payouts when the people die (with the biggest profits coming from earlier deaths). Predictions are that this market could reach up to $500 billion (NY Times, 9/6/09).
This is the sick logic of the capitalist system, in which human life itself is reduced to a mere commodity. If there’s profit to be made off of something, the capitalists will find a way to do it, leading to the ever-growing commercialization and commodification of our society. Moore exposes Wall Street for what it is – an “insane casino” – and fittingly, covers it in crime scene tape.
The film does not even get into the crimes of capitalism on a global scale. This is a system that condemns 30,000 kids under the age of 5 to die every single day because of poverty (State of the World’s Children, 2008, UNICEF). This year, for the first time in world history, 1 billion people will go hungry, despite record harvests, because they are too poor to afford food. Meanwhile, the wealth of the world’s 200 richest individuals is greater than the combined wealth of the poorest 2.6 billion who struggle for survival on $2/day or less. Not to mention the record $1.47 trillion in military spending in 2009 (48% by the U.S.), or the environmental catastrophe being wrought by the endless quest for profits, no matter the long-term damage to the planet.
Capitalism Vs. Democracy
At the end of the film, Moore concludes: “Capitalism is an evil, and you can’t regulate evil. You have to eliminate it, and replace it with something that is good for all people.” Yet while Moore is clear on the problems of capitalism, he avoids putting forward a coherent alternative. He says we need to replace capitalism with “democracy,” though what exactly he means by this is unclear.
Moore counterposes his call for real “democracy” to the anti-democratic character of capitalism, decimating the claims of the corporate media and political elite that the free market goes hand-in-hand with democracy.
As he told Democracy Now, “The wealthiest one percent [of Americans] have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. When you have a situation like that, where the one percent essentially not only own all the wealth, but own Congress, call the shots, are we really telling the truth when we call this a democracy? I know we get to vote every two or four years. Is that it? Just because we get to vote every now and then, we can call this a democracy, when the economy is anything but? You and I have no say in it. The people watching this, listening to us today have no say in how this economy is run. There’s not democracy in the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the people who have to work with whatever it is we’re working with have a say in how it’s working.” (Democracy Now, 9/24/09)
Moore’s call for “democracy” means in part the building of social movements of workers and oppressed. The film cites some important examples, including community struggles to prevent evictions and, most notably, the successful factory occupation by workers at Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago last December where workers forced their employers to give them the back pay and severance owed them. Moore also shows several factories that are owned and democratically operated by workers themselves, rather than corporate bosses. It is to be hoped that this film will help spur similar struggles across the country.
Yet while highlighting the need for struggle from below, and calling for an alternative to capitalism, Moore avoids calling himself a socialist. For example, when asked by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now if he was a socialist, he evaded the question, answering, “Uhh, I’m a heterosexual! Uhh, uhh, I’m overweight!” before they ran out of time (9/24/09).
Moore’s reticence to refer to himself a socialist may have something to do with the long anti-Communist history in the U.S., and the words association with the crimes of Stalinism. The film does highlight the growing interest in socialism among Americans, and points out the recent Rasmussen poll showing that among people under thirty, only 37% say they “prefer” capitalism to socialism, while 33% prefer socialism and 30% are unsure. This is thanks in part to the right-wing’s efforts to tar any efforts at reform as “socialism,” as well as the impact the crisis of capitalism is having on the legitimacy of the system.
Yet many of Moore’s descriptions of “democracy” could accurately describe genuine socialism! Democratic socialism does not mean the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, or the sort of top-down system in which the government controls every aspect of life, as the right-wing likes to caricature it. Nor does it have anything to do with bailing out the biggest banks and corporations with trillions of taxpayer dollars. Neither is socialism is some conspiracy to be organized by a tiny minority acting in the interests of the “masses.”
Rather, as the socialist pioneers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto, socialism is “the movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” They explained that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.”
A Socialist Alternative
A socialist society would put the economy and political system under the democratic control of working people, whose labor actually creates all the wealth. If we all got a democratic say in what got produced, the methods of production, and how products were distributed, the world would be a fundamentally different place. The resources of society could be used to benefit all of humanity and the environment, rather than just a few super-rich people.
For workers to control what is produced, that means the economy must be run on an entirely different basis than the current system of private ownership. Socialists call for taking the top 500 corporations, including the big banks, auto and oil industries, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and more, out of the hands of their wealthy shareholders and placing them under public ownership and democratic working class control.
This doesn’t mean putting the resources of these corporations into the hands of government bureaucrats appointed by big money politicians, like the recent nationalization of General Motors. Instead, the current government, controlled by a two-party system thoroughly awash in corporate cash, must be replaced by a government made up of direct representatives of ordinary working people.
In this way, socialism would mean a massive expansion of democracy. In fact, direct democracy will be vital for socialism to succeed. Instead of simply voting for representatives every few years, while the real decisions are made behind the scenes in corporate boardrooms, socialist democracy would bring collective decision making into the day-to-day functioning of every workplace, every neighborhood, and every school and university. Elected workplace committees would replace existing bosses. They would control wage scales and methods of production, and have a say in what was produced.
Neighborhood and workplace councils, holding regular meetings open to all, would send representatives to expanded city and regional councils. In turn, such regional councils would elect national representatives. Elected representatives would be paid no more than the wage of the average worker, and be subject to immediate recall should they betray their promises (imagine if voters had been able to recall all the politicians in Congress who voted for the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, or the bank bailouts).
By taking the biggest corporations under public ownership, they would no longer be able to buy votes and lobby to exert what amounts to a corporate dictatorship over the political system. Just look at the current healthcare “reform” debate if you need convincing of this, where the head of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrat Max Baucus, receives 1 of every 4 dollars of his campaign contributions from for-profit health companies anxious to stymie real reform. A reduction in the workweek to 30 hours or less, which is entirely possible given the vast increases in productivity that Moore shows in the film, would also give people more time to engage in discussions and debate about the direction of society.
On the basis of bringing the economy into public ownership and democratic control, and by replacing the “insane casino” of the market with democratic economic planning, we could dramatically improve living standards for the majority, save the environment, and abolish poverty and war.
A socialist United States would guarantee the right to a living wage job, a home, adequate medical care, social security, and a good education. Under capitalism people are evicted from their homes and forced to live on the streets while millions of houses lie vacant. Workers are thrown out of their jobs despite the urgent need for more teachers, nurses, and public transportation. A democratically planned economy would not allow this cruel insanity, instead utilizing the resources of society to meet human needs, rather than profits for shareholders.
Many object that socialism is impossible, because people are too lazy and would cease to work without a boss. But Moore shows how such a society might be possible in the film, when he highlights several companies being run democratically by their workers. There are numerous examples throughout history that show that when workers have been able to democratically control their workplaces, productivity has actually increased, contrary to capitalist mythology.
However, while these co-ops and democratically run workplaces show workers’ ability to run their own factories – and society as a whole – alone and isolated they cannot form a viable alternative to capitalism, given their small scale. Real social change will require the most powerful sections of the economy to be brought under democratic control and public ownership, and the drawing up of a democratic plan of production.
Role of the Democratic Party
Moore’s film exposes the role of both the Democratic and Republican parties in implementing policies that have benefited the top 1% at the expense of ordinary workers. This film could have been a wake-up call, educating anyone interested in real change of the need for a political alternative to the two-party system. This would include running independent, pro-worker, anti-war candidates in the 2010 Congressional elections and preparing for a national challenge in 2012.
Unfortunately, Moore himself stops short of calling for this critical step, and at times, the film serves to mask the true role of the Democratic Party, both in the current crisis and historically. Recently, Moore has said he’s too old to help start a new party, and to him, reforming the Democratic Party from within is more realistic. But this is a complete misreading of recent history.
Moore does show a powerful clip of Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, Ohio, calling from the floor of Congress for Americans to “squat in their own homes” and refuse to leave. He also shows left-wing Democrat Dennis Kucinich, also of Ohio, asking, “Is this the U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?”
But figures like Kucinich are marginalized within the Democratic Party, often functioning, despite their intentions, to provide a left-wing face while the party continues to carry out pro-corporate, pro-war policies. The important positions go to people like Christopher Dodd and Max Baucus, who after raking in health industry donations are now busy making sure that health care reform does not even include a public option. The real party leaders make policy within the strict limits imposed by the Democrats’ corporate donors.
For example, as Kaptur explains, after the $700 billion bank bailout was initially voted down by the House of Representatives in September 2008, there was massive pressure exerted on anyone who wanted to advance in Congress to vote yes. Party leaders promised Senate seats, committee chairmanships, and more. The bailout sailed through shortly thereafter, with both major presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, playing a key role in lobbying their parties for its passage.
All efforts at reforming or “capturing” the Democratic Party by the left have only resulted in the left being captured by the Democrats, pushing movements to water down their programs and methods of struggle to what is acceptable to the big business leaders of the party. Instead of relying on the Democrats or holding out false illusions that the party can be transformed (even as it drifts further to the right), we need a party of, by, and for working people. Such a party would refuse all corporate contributions, and would provide a vehicle to unite our social movements into a common struggle against big business.
The Myth of Roosevelt
Another weakness is Moore’s presentation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at times comes across as the hero of the film. FDR appears as the champion of working people, supporting their struggles to unionize and fight for a decent living in the 1930s. Moore claims that had FDR lived a few more years, history would have been different, with the enactment of a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing the right to living wage jobs, health care, housing, education, and more, as FDR outlined in a 1944 speech.
Yet reality is far different from the popular mythology of the New Deal and this “great man theory of history.” It was not thanks to FDR’s leadership that workers achieved all the gains they made in the 1930s, from stronger unions to Social Security and unemployment relief. It was because they broke the law and defied court injunctions, local police, “citizens’” militias, and National Guard troops with sit-down strikes, mass pickets, general strikes, demonstrations of the unemployed for relief, and more.
One would never know from Moore’s film that, as labor historian Art Preis writes, under FDR “more company unions had been organized, more workers killed, wounded and jailed, more troops called out against strikers … than under any president in memory” (Labor’s Giant Step, 47). It was only under massive pressure from below, and the fear that workers would go even farther and threaten the entire capitalist system, that FDR and the political establishment made concessions.
These struggles were most often led by anti-capitalists – including socialists, communists, and anarchists – who refused to accept the logic of capitalism during the Great Depression and instead based on themselves on the needs of the working class. This powerful labor movement was key in securing the gains of the postwar period as well, with the biggest strike wave in U.S. history coming in the years immediately following World War II.
Moore also shows how after World War II the Japanese, Germans, and Italians, to name a few, achieved social provisions in their constitutions such as were outlined in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights speech. According to Moore, the U.S. should know this since we helped them write their constitutions. But contrary to Moore’s portrayal, these social provisions were only granted following massive struggles by workers in these countries, and the fear that workers would move to the left and challenge capitalism itself. The film neglects to mention that U.S. occupying forces actually banned workers’ strikes and demonstrations in Japan and Germany after the war.
Social democratic reforms were granted in Europe in particular because mass workers’ parties rose to power to challenge the establishment parties and this, combined with the threat of the Soviet Union and Easter Europe, threatened the very foundations of European capitalism.
Obama’s Role
Moore also treats Obama with kid gloves, despite criticisms of his economic team and some of his policies. In the film, he presents Obama as if he were initially a threat to Wall Street and Corporate America, who they sought to rein in by throwing tons of money at him – with Goldman Sachs his top contributor. Yet Obama never would have been able to make his meteoric rise to power had he not, from the start, been thoroughly vetted by key power brokers among the U.S. corporate elite, who he impressed with his ability to employ a soaring message of “hope” and “change” at the same time as faithfully serving the same interests who have run the show for many years.
Further, despite the impression that he created of his campaign’s reliance on an army of small donors, nearly half his campaign money came from donors who gave $1,000 or more – in other words, the wealthy. Obama himself was more than willing to play by these rules.
Moore supported Obama’s campaign in 2008 and even helped create false illusions in his policies. This was despite Obama’s support for the bank bailouts, opposition to single-payer, and call to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. Moore justified his support by saying: “I'm hoping that Senator Obama is like all politicians: they don't always keep their campaign promises, right? Somehow I've told myself that those campaign promises that he will not keep are expanding the war in Afghanistan [and] pushing a healthcare plan that leaves the profit-making health insurance companies in charge of the plan” (Democracy Now!, 10/31/08).
Of course, these are exactly the promises that Obama has kept, sending over 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year (and now debating whether to send tens of thousands more), and allowing the for-profit health insurance industry to dictate the terms of the healthcare debate.
Today, as millions grow increasingly frustrated with Obama and the Congressional Democrats’ policies, Moore continues to create illusions in them. In late September, he told the AFL-CIO convention, "Instead of us piling on [Obama], he needs our support… I see him out there [at the town halls] on his own. Who's got his back?" (Washington Post, 9/16/09)
Clearly the racist attacks on Obama put forward by the right-wing should be sharply opposed by all. But Obama’s sell-out on health care reform, his bailouts for the banks, and his refusal to create the kinds of jobs programs needed to reverse rising unemployment, are rapidly creating the conditions for a right populist movement to develop. The half-measures of Obama and the Democrats have managed to antagonize the right while demoralizing the millions of workers and youth who had hoped for real change.
Instead of “having Obama’s back,” the key is to mobilize, independently of the Democrats and Republicans, around the needs of working people, rather than from the standpoint of what is acceptable to the corporations and their two-party system. Imagine if the AFL-CIO had mobilized its millions of members to demand single-payer healthcare (a guaranteed, universal health care plan in which the government insures everyone, cutting out the insurance companies, and allowing free choice of doctor and hospital)? Or if the unions had spent the $450 million they spent electing Democrats in 2008 on building a new party that stood unabashedly for a moratorium on foreclosures, a mass jobs program, and single-payer healthcare?
Unfortunately, the right-wing has mobilized its base and dominated the debate, despite the massive public support that exists for a single-payer system (as well as the public option). The left, meanwhile, not wanting to embarrass its “friend” in the White House, has remained largely silent. This is why Moore’s position is so problematic.
In the film, Moore includes clips of quotes from former president George W. Bush defending capitalism during the financial crisis last year. Bush intones, “Capitalism is the best system ever devised.” Yet Bush is not alone in this position. Despite the right wing’s claims that Obama is a socialist, he wrote in his autobiography, “Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources...our free market system.”
So Obama defends the very system that Moore is indicting with this film. Far from being a socialist, his policies thus far have been aimed at saving the capitalist system from a devastating crash like the Great Depression and, like FDR, preventing social upheaval that could threaten corporate rule. Thus, it is no coincidence that his top economic advisers have ties to Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street firms. Instead of providing relief to homeowners or guaranteeing jobs to workers, he has prioritized the interests of the banks, and the profit system.
Ultimately, as Moore shows, we need to build movements from below – for jobs, homes, health care, education, and more - to challenge the corporate stranglehold over our political system. But that will also mean breaking from the Democrats, and linking those movements together into a new political party to represent ordinary workers and youth – a party of the millions, not the millionaires.
Moore himself was once a proud champion of the need to break from the Democrats and build a political alternative that represents working people. He was a supporter of the Labor Party in the 1990s, founded by a number of the country’s most progressive unions, and also a major backer of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign. For those who want to see real change, it’s necessary to return to this spirit.
End of the American Dream
Capitalism: A Love Story provides striking proof that U.S. capitalism cannot guarantee a decent living for working people in the 21st century.
Moore charts the changes in the U.S. economy in recent years, and what he terms the end of the U.S. “love affair” with capitalism following the end of the post-World War II economic boom in the early 1970s. This boom allowed U.S. capitalism the space to grant millions of workers a decent living, though this was only in order to secure class peace to more securely make profits, following the massive postwar strike wave and growth in the power of the labor movement.
Millions of working class families were able to survive on one income, and those with a good union job often secured 4 weeks paid vacation, free dental and health care for their entire family, and guaranteed pensions. Many Americans came to take these living standards for granted, along with the idea that their children would be better off than they were (although at the same time, millions were left out, in particular African-Americans and Latinos).
All of these gains are under sharp attack today, just like the advances made by workers around the world, as the capitalists attempt to restore and maintain their profits in the wake of growing competition. This shows how the reforms won under capitalism will never be secure or permanent, because they will be undermined by the relentless competition to maximize profits unless the fundamental structure of society is changed.
In reality, the conditions that existed during the postwar boom were an exception to the rule, not a normal part of capitalism. As Moore briefly shows, this boom in large part owed to the decimation of any competition during the carnage of World War II, when the industrial bases of Western Europe and Japan were reduced to rubble. In addition, there was the U.S. corporate and military domination of the formerly colonized countries, ensured by U.S.-backed coups (Iran 1954, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, etc.) and violent military interventions (Vietnam, etc.).
The post-war boom came to an end in the early 1970s, with the oil price shocks and the restoration of German and Japanese competition. In order to restore profits, big business around the world resorted to attacks on workers and the welfare state. The more recent period has seen a return to some of the more “normal” features of capitalism, with a global race-to-the-bottom, massive attacks on unions, corporate globalization, financial deregulation, and more. Despite huge increases in productivity, workers have seen their wages stagnate, and their pensions, health care coverage, and job security under attack.
These trends have only deepened recently. According to one measure, 3.5 million good jobs, defined as “one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour” were lost in the U.S. between 2000 and 2006 – before the current recession even began (McClatchy, 3/23/08). Inequality in the U.S. today has reached its highest point in 80 years. To give one example, in just two weeks in 2004, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott earned as much as the average American Wal-Mart worker would earn in a lifetime.
In order to stay afloat, workers have been forced into record levels of debt. Meanwhile, the prison population has skyrocketed, with 2.3 million people now locked up, disproportionately people of color. The U.S., which capitalist ideologues love to refer to as “the freest country in world history”, now has by far the highest incarceration rate of any country in the history of the world.
Even when there is a recovery from the current recession, it will not mean a return to the living standards of the past. As radical journalist Naomi Klein writes, “Without huge popular pressure for structural reform, the crisis will prove to have been nothing more than a very wrenching adjustment. The result will be even greater inequality than before the crisis. Because the millions of people losing their jobs and their homes aren't all going to be getting them back, not by a long shot.” (The Progressive, 8/09). Achieving any gains will require massive movements from below.
Movement Against Capitalism Needed
Moore ends the film with an appeal for people to get active in building movements against the corporate domination of our society. It is an appeal that could certainly catch on, given the anger bubbling up beneath the surface in U.S. society.
We cannot sit around and wait for capitalism to fall on its own accord. No matter how deep the economic crisis goes, capitalism will always recover at the cost of much pain to working people, unless we build a movement powerful enough to change the system.
The need to struggle to fundamentally transform this system is posed more urgently now than ever before. If this system is allowed to continue, in addition to the usual exploitation, wars, and general rottenness, the question of the very future of the planet itself is posed.
Building such a movement will clearly be a difficult task. We are faced with reorganizing the socialist movement from humble foundations, given the throwback in socialist consciousness and all types of struggle in the last two decades. But imagine if just a tiny fraction of the 33% of young people ages 18 to 30 who said told a Rasmussen poll they preferred socialism over capitalism got active in the socialist movement?
Every single worker and young person who gets active can make a massive contribution to fighting for a just world. Let Capitalism: A Love Story be a wake-up call for a new generation of activists to rebuild our build movements and link these to the struggle to fundamentally transform the system.
To anyone interested in building a fight back against capitalism, we urge you to consider getting involved in Socialist Alternative. Join us in the fight for a world free of poverty, exploitation, war, and the tyranny of the super-rich. Join us in the struggle for a democratic socialist future.
http://www.socialistalternative.org/
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