“Hunger Games”: The Dark Fantasies Of A Doomed Strata

By Caleb T. Maupin

In the modern world, two great hostile camps exist.

In the first camp lies the richest of the rich. They are the owners of the overwhelming majority of all the  banks, factories, giant stores, military production, oil wells, natural gas, and all other economic power in the world. They own as their private property not just all these things, but the governments of most of the world which move at their every command. The western capitalists, or the “1%”, make up this first camp of power in the modern world.

In the second camp, lies the rest of us. Those of us who sell our labor power in order to survive: the working class. The people of colonized world, no matter what their occupation are also in this second camp. The peoples of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America struggling against imperialism and foreign domination, along with the global working class make up the second camp, the 99%; the contradiction to Wall Street power. This second camp is the overwhelming majority of all humanity.

The first camp has entrenched itself as the ruling class over the last 500 years, vanquishing feudalism and replacing it with high tech exploitation on a global scale. It has itself protected with propagandistic media, military power and brute force, and all other means of establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with.

The second camp is now in the process of entrenching and cementing itself, as it rises in battle with the first camp, and take its place at the helm of the world. The rising Bolivarian movements in Latin America, the unified struggle against Zionism and U.S. imperialism in the middle east, the alliance of China with the people of Africa; on a global scale this represents the solidification of the global 99% in their opposition, to the 1%.

Within the borders of the U.S., the 99% is also solidifying itself and asserting its power. The 2006 uprising of immigrant workers, the huge outpourings against police brutality and racism, the struggle to defend public sector unions, and the eruption of Occupy Wall Street signify the second camp, the rising power of the workers and oppressed of the world.

The Dying Middle Strata

However as this struggle boils on a global scale between the global 1% and 99%, there is one sector that is doomed. No matter what force is triumphant, whether the global capitalists, or the workers and colonized peoples, this small strata is doomed.

This is the “middle class”, the “petty bourgeoisie.” It is the indy artist or musician. It is the small shopkeeper. It is the owners of the small “family owned farms.” It is the well known intellectuals and academics. It is doctors and lawyers with their own practice, and no regular employer.

It is those within the western capitalist countries who are not workers, but do not find themselves within the global 1% of wealth power. They “have their own” in a sense, with no regular employer renting them out each day, but they will never be among the ranks of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. They “have their own” but it is just a small corner. It is a little bit of security, a little bit of freedom, and some economic priviledge.

But this is slipping away. The global 1% is destroying them. Wal-Mart is destroying every family owned hardware store. Major record labels, internet self-publishing firms, all of them are rendering “independent artists” out of existence. Agribusiness is turning the family farmer into a mere hired laborer.

Doctors, the once hailed “professionals” are now mere hired employees of big healthcare firms. Academic jobs are highly competitive, and highly stifling. Professors are no longer free independent thinkers who “profess” knowledge to the younger generation, but cogs in an academic machine that brings in billions to the student loan sharks of Wall Street.

However, if the global 99% are victorious, this will not save the middle class. In a socialist society, just as in modern capitalism, these professionals and “independents” will not be able to “do their own thing.” Decisions in the field of economics will be decided democratically and equitably, but they will not be “laissez-faire.” Doctors will be sent where society needs them. Art, media, and education will be subject to popular criticism, input, and regulation. Big box stores will remain, but under popular democratic control, with prices, hours, and all else regulated by the workers and the community.

The future holds collectivism. It will be either the collective obedience to wishes of a small, and shrinking capitalist class in its drive for profits, or collective socialist decision-making and democracy among the overwhelming majority of humanity.

No matter which side is victorious, the petty bourgeoisie will perish. So, as they look to the future, they see misery. As artists often find themselves among the ranks of petty bourgeoisie, this hopelessness and fatalism is reflected in art.

“Hunger Games,” Another Dystopia

George Orwell, expressed the fatalism of his class in his novel 1984. He described the future as “a boot stomping on a human face.” He spoke of a world where “independent thinkers” will not be able to proclaim “2+2=4.”

Though Orwell was a social-democrat, who also associated himself with Anarchism and other left-leaning petty bourgeois movements, his dark vision of the future was no different than Ayn Rand.

Rand’s Anthem and Orwell’s 1984, have the same bleak view of the future. They are not opposites by any means, but mirror images of each other. They fear nothing but the future and the inevitable collectivism of it.

Petty bourgeois fatalism preaches against all collectivism with the same repulsion. They view KKK lynch mobs and anti-racist rallies with the same level of repugnance. Both show conformity, coordination of efforts, and subordination of the individual to the needs of a group. The fact that two such mobilizations serve a totally different social purpose is meaningless in such a mindset.

 “Hunger Games” is another dystopian fantasy of the petty bourgeois variety.

The very premise of it is in some ways sickening. It is set in a future United States, 70+ years after a failed revolt of starving people.

Why not make a film depicting such a revolt? Better yet, depicting a revolt of the starving against the 1% that leads to victory. This is a “Hunger Game” that would be very relevant in the age of capitalist decay. Such a film would reflect on the Occupy Wall Street events, the Black Liberation struggle, and all the rising movements across the world.

However, Hunger Games starts with the premise, before the first lines of dialogue are uttered, that such a revolt is doomed to failure.

The country created in the aftermath of the revolt is one with a very small population, in which there is mass poverty. In order to remind the public of the mistake of the failed revolt, some 70+ years ago, a high tech gladiatorial show of sorts is carried out each year, where youths fight each other to the death.

Yes, “the mob”, descendants of those who took part in the revolt, now joyfully watch in public spectacles of death and violence of their own peers.  One character even bemoans this fact saying “If we just stopped watching it would be over.”

The message is that the people in their millions, the true makers of history, are a worthless mob of easily led sheep. They are oppressed, but they are responsible for their oppression as much as the oppressors themselves. “Conformity” is the films villain, not oppressive institutions and systems.

And the Heroes?

So, with the masses of people in their millions as the villians, who is the hero?

How many times before have we seen this in modern, popular art? Harry Potter was “the boy who lived.” Slumdog Millionaire won out on a TV game show. Superman is the orphaned child of space aliens.

The heroes are never ordinary people who accomplish great achievements, or engage in heroic actions.

No, the heroes are always “different”, they are always “special”, they are somehow “chosen.”

Hunger Games is not different. The heroin is “chosen” to do battle in an arena. She is “special”, and “isolated.” Of course, the ordinary working class people she grew up around don’t understand her, and victimize her, hating her for her greatness.

While the feminist implications of female battle hero are by all means progressive in our misogynist society, the character is still highly problematic. The early scenes of the film border on grotesque in the level of tragedy. The level of suffering the protagonist is forced to endure is repulsive and over the top.

Other aspects of the film are equally confusing and senseless as they reflect the alienation of the petty bourgeois from all humanity.

Though only one of the combatants in the “Hunger Games” can be victorious, and all others must die, somehow certain combatants band together, and begin traveling as a group, working together, hunting down the protagonist.

Despite it being irrational somehow “the mob” of Randian and Orwellian nightmares finds its way into the climatic moments of the film, as a conspiracy is formed to destroy the protagonist. This is odd as those conspiring with each other against the protagonist, are expected to kill each other.

Why do they conspire against the protagonist? What rational sense does this make? They are all equally doomed.

They do it because she is “the chosen one”, she is the “great individual”, and the world, the mob, is lined up against her. This petty bourgeois paranoid fantasy has no rational way of fitting into the constructed narrative, yet it still manifests itself.

The Revolution Is Not A Game

The heroin of Hunger Games by successfully “giving hope” to her district is seen as a potential liberator of the suffering people of this future world. A “special person”, a “chosen one” is seen as potentially achieving what a revolt of millions did not?

The hope for the suffering people of this world is not that someone will randomly chosen to become famous, and expose oppression with their fame. If this were true, the likes of Paul Robeson, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover and Jane Fonda would have rescued it long ago.

The masses in their millions are the makers of history. There will be no “condescending saviors” who win freedom for the people.

Only a movement of millions of people, coordinating their efforts, empowering eachother, and eventually removing the small elite that rules can point the way forward. Yes, individuals will play a role in such a movement, and prove their exceptional qualities in the process, but they will do it by their ability to put millions into motion, shaping the course of the true makers of history.

A vanguard is just a small part of a larger army, and in isolation, it is weak and worthless.

Socialism and the Individual

While the rugged individualism of the petty bourgeoisie and its self-isolating hero fantasies will perish in the flames of worldwide socialist revolution, individuals will not perish.

The Soviet Union was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and theater. Cuba today brings music into the education of every child’s life, in a manner far beyond what any capitalist country has done.

Socialism produced the many well known scientists who conquered the heavens with Sputnik. Socialism brought us the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Socialism brought us epic breakthroughs in Ballet and Orchestral music.

China’s cultural revolution brought films, theater troops, and art to millions of people.

Socialism as it existed in the former USSR, and currently in Cuba and People’s Korea has brought us many great individuals, who have flourished due to collectivism. Collectivism empowers and unleashes the individual to do far more than is possible in a state of isolation and competition.

However, these great individuals were great because they showed selflessness, devotion, and courage in their service of the collective. They were not self-serving sociopaths like John Galt, or angsty egotists like Winston Smith.

The heroes of the Socialist future are the like of John Q, Tom Joad, and Jimmy Higgins. They are the selfless female liberation fighters portrayed in “The White Haired Girl”, and in “Red Detachment of Women.” They are unlikely tragic characters like the whistle-blowing Marine in Brian De Palma’s classic Redacted. They are the unknown masked freedom fighter in “V for Vendetta.”

These are the individuals hailed in Socialist art, art that fights for freedom for the 99%, against the 1%.

Our movie does not end with an explosion, or the vanquishing of a hated foe. No, the taking of power and the defeating of the 1% is the beginning of the epic masterpiece of human history, when we rise as one and continue to the line of march to stateless, classless Communism.

Hunger will be abolished, along with the sick egotistical profiteering games that hold it intact.

Rand's Trash Made Into A Movie: We Don't Need The Rich

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Apr 22, 2011 8:54 PM

The new film based on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” released April 15 is a prime example of how film can serve big capital. It’s part one of a proposed trilogy of low-budget propaganda reels backing the billionaire elite in their war against everyone else.

Given its reactionary message, one can only hope that the almost unanimous criticism regarding its lack of entertainment value reflects its ultimate failure. It would still be worthwhile, however, to examine the historic use of film to promote political reaction and to take Rand’s ideology apart piece by piece.

Almost 100 years ago, the U.S. capitalist system was in an economic crisis, and millions of workers were joining the growing socialist and labor movements. The new motion picture industry came to the system’s rescue with a thoroughly racist propaganda piece.

The 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” rewrote the history of the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath, prettying up the slave-owning class and portraying the Ku Klux Klan as populist heroes who fought the federal government’s efforts to aid former slaves during the period of Reconstruction in the South.

The film helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, which was re-founded in a mass hate rally at Stone Mountain in Georgia. It urged unemployed and downtrodden white workers to direct their rage at Black workers, Jews, Roman Catholics, Socialists, feminists — against everyone except the capitalists responsible for their suffering. Following the film showing, mobs of racist whites re-enacted the supposedly “heroic” events depicted in the film by murdering Black men and mutilating their bodies. (“Hooded Americanism: A History of the Ku Klux Klan” by David Mark Chalmers)

In 2011 “Atlas Shrugged” is aimed to serve reaction. USA Today even pointed out that the film was directly linked to the Tea Party movement and produced to push its agenda. (March 23)

Ayn Rand, a career praising ‘selfishness’

Born to a wealthy family that fled the early USSR, Ayn Rand came to fame as a friendly witness to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, testifying against progressives in the film industry.

The publicity surrounding her anti-communism aided her lifelong career promoting her ideology of “objectivism.” Rand argued that history is made by a small elite clique of “great men,” noted for being ruthless and possessing “the virtue of selfishness,” who she called the “motor of the world.” According to Rand, these “great men” are the “most oppressed minority” because they have to negotiate with unions, follow labor and environmental laws, and pay income taxes. (“Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” Rand, 1966)

When the “great man” in her novel “The Fountainhead” breaks into the apartment of a woman and rapes her, Rand presents this as a heroic action asserting his rights. Despite this blatant misogyny, Rand has often been mislabeled a “feminist.”

“Atlas Shrugged” tells of a few “great men,” led by John Galt, joining together and withholding their contribution to society to protest having to pay income tax, follow anti-trust laws and respect the right of workers to organize. They collectively withhold their greatness from an ungrateful society.

Why now?

Right now the Republican Party and its Democratic Party allies are trying to gut Social Security and Medicare, lower taxes for the super rich, and crush unions. In response workers have begun to fight for their existence from Wisconsin to the Oakland-San Francisco dockyards. This film fits Wall Street’s need to divert popular anger from itself, much as the Tea Party does in the political arena.

These days Rand’s propaganda is pushed at alienated and isolated youths, who are filled with self-doubt and who, despite working hard, continue to endure economic hardship. Rand’s work screams that all society’s ills are rooted in solidarity, compassion and “collectivism.”

We don’t need John Galt!

“Atlas Shrugged” repeats a common illusion about capitalism. It pretends that the owners of industry, mines, oil wells and other economic institutions are tireless inventors who work long hours, unleashing their creativity for the good of society.

In reality the vast majority of modern engineers, architects, artists and innovators are workers.

The wealth their creativity produces goes not to them, but to the capitalists, whose only labor and innovation is the task of pushing money in and out of investments, in which other people’s labor is appropriated and turned into profits.

The rich man’s “strike” portrayed in the film would be a blessing for working people today. If, like the “great men” in the film, today’s rich of the world walked away from their banks, factories, mines and oil wells, for whatever reason, this would be no problem for the working class. We pump the oil, work the cash registers, do the hours in the plants, cook the food, invent things, create works of art, design computer programs, build buildings and do all else that produces society’s wealth.

We could easily own and operate society without the leeches at the top because they contribute nothing, merely owning what is collectively produced. Our message to all billionaires who would rally behind Rand’s fictional John Galt and give up their supposed greatness in protest is, “Good riddance!”

We simply don’t need the rich.

Smash Sexism in Dagenham! Only Proletarian Women Can!

Women workers lead victorious struggle in ‘Made in Dagenham’
By Sue Davis
Published Jan 8, 2011 7:31 AM

Called a “British Norma Rae,” the recently released “Made in Dagenham” tells the story of how 187 women workers, who sewed seat covers at a Ford plant employing more than 55,000 workers outside London, stopped production with their 1968 strike and won huge raises. Their victory led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970.

This inspiring working-class story begins when the women find out they’ve been reclassified as unskilled workers at lower pay. After they vote unanimously to stage a one-day strike, there’s a meeting between union and management. Shy but determined, Rita interrupts a class-collaborationist union bureaucrat trying to derail the strike and defiantly details the kinds of skills the women need to sew seat covers.

Flush from the strike, Rita upgrades the issue from skill levels to equal pay, and the strike continues. Soon the plant shuts down because cars can’t be sold without seats. During a union meeting to vote on whether to support the women’s strike, Rita again interrupts the bureaucrat and appeals to the all-male delegates: “We are the working class. We’re men and women, and we are in this together. We are not divided by sex, only by those willing to accept injustice.” Her militant appeal works — 79 in favor, 48 opposed.

A Ford bigwig, dispatched to London, threatens Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson: Either end the strike or we’ll move the plant to Europe. Wilson so instructs his Employment Minister, Barbara Castle. But Castle, both demeaned in her position and won over by the women, negotiates behind closed doors with the Ford boss, who agrees to a compromise: The women will be paid 92 percent of men’s wages. Castle adds the promise about sponsoring the equal pay bill.

Made with a star-studded cast, the movie has been called timely, stirring, entertaining, but Hollywood predictable. A few scenes seem far-fetched, like the upper-class spouse of a Ford executive encouraging Rita to keep fighting for all women and then lending her an expensive dress to wear to meet with Castle.

Is the movie accurate? Did a male shop steward have to persuade Rita, a composite of several women leaders, to demand equal pay? There’s also the question: Were all the women white? A few men of color are in some scenes.

A big question is: Why was this film made in 2010? U.S. and British reviewers see it differently. In a Nov. 18 New York Times review, Stephen Holden calls it “a grown-up feel-good movie plunked in a feel-bad age” and writes that it’s “so smoothly written and well acted that its humanity and good will leave you with a 1960s buzz of hope that social justice might be at hand; that feeling wears off quickly.”

British reviewers take a more class-conscious approach. In the Oct. 4 Daily Mail, Chris Tookey describes the movie as “ordinary people finding their voice” and notes that it “has pertinent things to say to the modern generation about standing up for your principles.” Writing in the Oct. 3 Independent, Nicholas Barber observes that it’s “fairly radical for a contemporary film to be so squarely on the side of the strikers.”

This reviewer wishes the movie could be shown around the clock on television so all working and oppressed people could be inspired to unite and fight back.
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Published Nov 7, 2010 9:06 PM

The recently released documentary, “The Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story,” highlights the role of cultural workers during the Great Depression when they participated in the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project administered by the Works Progress Administration.

The film revisits the WPA’s provision of millions of jobs for laid-off industrial and service employees and its establishment of a program that hired writers, actors, painters, journalists, researchers and other creative artists to document the history and culture of the United States.

The documentary is based on David A. Taylor’s book, “Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers America,” which explores the FWP and sheds light on the U.S. government’s continuing failure to support cultural workers who seek to realize social change.

The reforms won through the WPA resulted directly from labor and community struggles waged during the Depression’s early years. In 1930 unemployed workers joined in mass demonstrations, and Unemployed Councils formed in many cities to demand jobs and fight against foreclosures and evictions.

Federal Writers’ Project work

The Federal Writers’ Project was established on July 27, 1935. It was directed by the journalist and theater producer Henry Alsberg and was later taken over by John D. Newsome. Both of them commissioned the compilation of historical studies, oral histories, books for young people and assorted ethnographic research projects.

The FWP employed more than 6,600 writers, teachers, researchers and artists. Their work resulted in the documentation of thus-far-unpublished aspects of U.S. political and cultural history.

A notable project was the American Guide Series which provided information on all 48 states as well as Washington, D.C.; Alaska, then a U.S. territory; and Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony. In every state an FWP committee was formed which sent out field workers taken from the unemployment lines.

Many of the FWP writers were labor unionists, left-wing activists, members of the Communist Party and other progressive organizations. Importantly, the FWP collected narratives of African Americans who had been enslaved prior to the Civil War.

Additionally, many of the blues and folk artists of the period made their first recordings through the work of Alan Lomax, who traveled through the South and recorded musicians such as McKinley Morganfield, known as Muddy Waters. In recent years, these documents and recordings have become available to the public.

Some of the well-known writers and artists who worked in the FWP included Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, John Steinbeck, Arna Bontemps, May Swenson, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, John Cheever, Saul Bellow and Frank Yerby.

Nonetheless, overall the FWP employed very few African Americans. One possible exception was the Illinois Writers’ Project, which helped launch the literary careers of Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham and Frank Yerby.

The federal government ended support for the program in 1939, even though it continued under state sponsorship until 1943. A program of this scope and magnitude does not exist today in the United States, even though there are untold numbers of teachers, poets, scriptwriters, actors, producers, painters, musicians, sculptors and other creative cultural workers who are unemployed, with many living in abject poverty.

Demand for federal jobs program including cultural work

The Bail Out the People Movement, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other organizations around the country are calling for the creation of a WPA-style jobs program that would employ, with decent wages and benefits, the 30 million to 35 million people who are unemployed or underemployed. The role of cultural workers is crucial within the movement for jobs and a living income.

In other societies, particularly under socialism, artists, athletes, educators, scientists and others are employed by the state and are guaranteed the right to pursue their creative capabilities. Within a capitalist society, artists can only make a living working outside their field of interest and specialization or if their cultural productions are marketable within the economic system.

The U.S. economic crisis has had a significant impact on popular culture. Radio and television stations restrict diverse programming in order to capture advertising revenue. Fewer musical artists are able to release their music and spoken-word material because the major recording companies only want to produce a select group of artists who sell millions of compact discs and therefore maximize corporate profits. Likewise in the book publishing industry.

This is why many musicians and cultural workers have taken to producing their own work independently of the large corporations. This movement, largely among youth, should be mobilized into local and national campaigns, which fight for jobs and income.

As the “jobless recovery” continues, leaving tens of millions of workers and oppressed people without employment, housing, healthcare and education, mass struggles must emerge to address the deepening class inequalities and corresponding cultural divide within the U.S.

For information on “The Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story,” see www.smithsonianchannel.com.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

A different tale of love and loss

FILM REVIEW

By Martha Grevatt
Published Apr 1, 2010 8:49 PM

“The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant” was shown March 26 at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The 2009 film portrays, through autoworkers’ eyes, the process leading up to the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio.

This writer participated in a panel discussion which included directors Julia Reichert (director of the 1976 classic, “Union Maids”) and Steve Bognar, plus laid-off Moraine workers Kim, Darlene and Chuck. My plant, the Chrysler stamping plant in Twinsburg, Ohio, is scheduled to cease production in June and has been bought by Maynards, the same liquidator that will be auctioning the building and contents of Moraine Assembly.

For me, an autoworker for 22 years whose plant will close in a matter of months, “The Last Truck” was a powerful, eloquent and brutally realistic artistic statement.

I saw workers like myself who first learned — not from GM but from the news media — that their plant would be shuttered for good two days before Christmas, 2008. They talked about how hard they worked and how much it changed their lives to acquire a good-paying union job. They expressed their love for their coworkers — their “family” — a love that cut across lines of race, nationality, religion and sex and, by suggestion, sexual orientation. I felt proud when these union sisters and brothers challenged the near-unanimous chorus of news commentators who insisted the financial woes of the auto industry were “all the union’s fault.”

The film depicted people like us — me and Kim and Darlene and Chuck — people with the knowledge of all that goes into producing an automobile. We have this knowledge in our bodies, our bones and muscle, our eyes, ears, heart, lungs, skin, fingers, knees and definitely our feet. In every cell of our body we know what goes into each vehicle that rolls off the line.

Our minds know it too — doing the same thing over and over for eight, 10, 12 hours, five or six or seven days a week, as the workers described. We know the crippling effect that it has on our intellect and creativity. Those of us who became skilled trades people know that exhilarating feeling — that rush — from suddenly, even within proscribed parameters, being able to use our brains on the job.

A powerful moment in the film was when it showed that winter day when all of these talented workers had to roll their toolboxes out of the plant. One could feel the solidarity as women and men helped each other hoist the boxes onto ice-encrusted truck beds.

I watched and listened as there on the big screen my brothers and sisters of IUE Local 798 showed the kind of people we are: not dense factory hands, but individual people with deep thoughts and feelings, expressed thoughtfully, astutely, politically and poetically — and with righteous anger. These are strong workers who revealed to us their tears and vulnerability, and did so with dignity and integrity. That’s the people of Moraine Truck and that’s the people of Twinsburg Stamping, and we deserve to be treated better than this.

Feasting on the dead dragon

Toward the end of the film a woman worker tells us how she had an image come to her of a gigantic dragon dying, with all its various body parts shutting down one by one. Now that the plant has closed, Maynards, which calls itself “the preeminent liquidation and auction and appraisal company in North America,” has invited vultures in to feast on the dragon’s carcass.

Maynards’ holdings include dozens of GM and other auto plants throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. There are no plans to find buyers to restart these highly productive plants. The vast arsenal of robots, conveyor belts, stamping presses, machine tools, plastic molding machines and much more will be sold off piecemeal. Don’t smell what you want in Moraine, the liquidator asks the vultures? Check out Twinsburg, check out Michigan, check out California, Missouri or our European holdings. We at Maynards will find you the specific organ that your profit-driven palates desire.

All the workers in the film have a sense that something is being taken away that rightfully belongs to them. “That’s our plant,” a brother in the film flat-out states. I agree. We have paid for these plants with the best years of our lives; we have outbid the highest bidders. We have earned the right to own and operate the plants ourselves, especially since our bosses don’t want them.

Workers in the Dayton, Ohio, area now face a terrible economic crisis. In addition to the 2,500 Moraine plant workers laid off permanently from GM, 10,000 more jobs were lost indirectly as a result of the closing. Delphi, the former parts division of GM that was Dayton’s biggest private employer, closed all of its eight facilities, leaving the city with no auto plants.

Kim, an electrician, has finally found a job after 15 months, but it doesn’t provide the pay and benefits he came to expect from GM. Darlene and Chuck have become full-time students under a state-sponsored program, but they had to jump through numerous hoops and choose from a narrow list of state-approved occupations before they could receive a subsidy. Whether their training will lead to meaningful employment remains to be seen.

By the end of 40 minutes, “The Last Truck,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short, had everyone in the sold-out audience in tears. This story of love and loss is the first serious film about plant closings since Michael Moore’s 1989 classic, “Roger and Me.”

The filmmakers stated that they wish they hadn’t had to make this film. Now is the time to fight for a world where no one will have to make another one. A good place to start a protest campaign could be at any one of the plant auctions that Maynards — the liquidators of our futures — will be conducting this year.

Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Comedians Plans For Cleveland Aren't Funny

By Caleb T. Maupin
Cleveland
Published Mar 25, 2010 8:17 PM

Cleveland, like many other industrial cities in the “rust belt,” has suffered terribly in the economic crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment in Ohio is at 10.8 percent. (bls.gov) The Cleveland Police Department wages a reign of terror against oppressed people, and seeks to jail young Rebecca Whitby for daring to file a complaint after suffering a police assault in her own home.

Cleveland has just closed 16 school buildings in an effort to reduce costs and deal with funding cutbacks. Neither the communities near the schools nor the students’ parents were consulted, sparking community outrage and protests.

Former Cleveland resident Drew Carey, now a million-dollar entertainer in Los Angeles, proclaims he has the solution. This former sit-com star and current host of “The Price is Right” has produced a four-part documentary called “Reason Saves Cleveland.” In it Carey proclaims that the answer to the woes of his former hometown is extreme cutbacks, privatizations and charter schools. (reason.tv)

Carey’s condescending film gives a distorted history of Cleveland, littered with factual omissions. He claims the boom in Cleveland’s economy following WWII was due to “a business friendly climate.” He never mentions how the Cleveland auto workers occupied General Motors’ Fisher Body plant as part of the 1937 sit-down wave, which started nearby with the Akron rubber workers, and how these strikes won decent wages and union rights for workers and their families.

Carey never mentions the struggles of oppressed people in Cleveland, who rose up heroically against racism numerous times, such as in 1968 when Ahmed Evans did battle with the brutal, racist Cleveland Police Department, or the famous Hough rebellion when the Black working class took to the streets after a restaurant owner hung an illegal Jim Crow-style sign in front of his business establishment.

Cleveland was hardly pro-business when it was the site of the Ohio Industrial Organizing Council, part of the CIO, a grouping of unions that at the time was a radical departure from the AFL. This largely Cleveland-based union was known for its militancy and fighting spirit. Cleveland also was the site of the founding convention of the Trade Union Unity League, a coalition of trade unions which proclaimed the overthrow of capitalism as one of its founding principles.

The TUUL led numerous strikes among Kentucky miners, southern textile workers and countless other groups of workers who were left abandoned by the right-wing AFL. Unlike the other unions of the time, both the TUUL and the CIO made a point of not participating in racist demagogy as was common among their rivals in organized labor.

The TUUL was known for appointing Black communist Harry Haywood to lead the strike of mostly white Pennsylvania miners in order to make a strong stance against racism. The CIO refused to back or defend “hate strikes” by white workers who opposed workplace integration, and was a key ally of the emerging Civil Rights movement.

Carey’s solution to the educational woes of Cleveland seems to be the destruction of the public school system, replacing it with schools run for profit, also called charter schools.

Cleveland resident Kadie Huntsman told Workers World about her experiences as a student at “Life Skills,” one of the city’s charter schools. She said that instead of being taught, she sat at a computer clicking through screens of information while nonunion, low-paid teachers sat silently watching at the end of the room, without a contract and subject to “fire at will” employment.

Greg Owens, another veteran of an Ohio charter school, told WW of how the schools routinely fail students in order to receive more tax dollars to fund teaching “troubled youth.” This practice is sometimes worth three times as much in profits for the school-corporation.

Carey’s “Reason Saves Cleveland” series calls for massive deregulation, cutbacks and destruction of nearly all the gains won by years of struggle on the part of Cleveland workers and oppressed people. The producers of his film, associated with Reason magazine, are openly anti-working class.

The answer for workers and oppressed people in Cleveland is not the economic self-mutilation of Drew Carey’s plan to “save” Cleveland, or the racism, sexism and extreme bigotry of the right-wing elements who funded this “documentary,” revising Cleveland’s history and extolling the virtues of poverty, deregulation and attacks on working people.

The answer is for the workers and oppressed people of Cleveland to join together and fight back in their own interests, demanding their basic human rights to employment, health care, quality education and freedom from repression.


Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

History Channel Revisionism: Review of "Nazi America: A Secret History"

The fortune 500 company Disney-Pixar, and the History channel, several years ago produced a film called Nazi America. It was a made for TV documentary telling the history of “Nazism in the United States.” The film begins with the German-American Bund, and from there tells of George Lincoln Rockwell’s “American Nazi Party”, and finally William Luther Peirce’s “National Alliance” and the terrorist spin-off group “The New Order.”

To the film’s credit, if any can be given, they made it clear that Nazism is very anti-communist in addition to being Anti-Semitic and Racist, not jumping on the bandwagon of Jonah Goldberg’s contention that Nazism is a “leftist” belief system.

However, the film was greatly flawed in its history of U.S. Nazism, and at some points greatly inaccurate through the omission of key historical facts.

There’s Way More Than The Bund

The section of the film about the 1930s, only covers the “German American Bund,” and its previous incarnations such as the “Friends of New Germany.” The film fails to mention that there was a LARGE fascist and pro-Hitler movement in the U.S. that contained countless other organizations. The Silver Legion of America was pro-Hitler in its agitation, as was the Black Legion of Michigan and the Ku Klux Klan of the Southern U.S.

Charles E. Coughlin, the Pro-Nazi Clergyman, preached Pro-Nazi and Anti-Semitic rhetoric from the radio-waves to millions every Sunday evening in a pulpit provided by General Motors. Henry Ford distributed millions of copies of The International Jew to those who patronized his car dealerships, and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst printed Pro-Nazi editorials in his countless publications throughout the U.S.

However, this Disney-Pixar produced, broadcast, and distributed film seemed simply to focus on the “German-American Bund”, a small band of German-Americans that never attracted more than a few thousand members.

The film never explored the “Liberty League”, a congressional caucus, and society of businessmen who said Roosevelt was a “Marxist” and attempted to overthrow him and install a Pro-Nazi dictatorship.

The coverage of the response to the German-American Bund was greatly lacking as well. Rather than pointing out accurately how the movement was led by the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, both of which had numerous anti-Nazi protests including the meeting of the Silver Legion that was shut down by the SWP, the Anti-Nazi movement was characterized simply as “Jewish Americans,” a false and racist accusation if ever. Countless non-Jewish U.S. residents were outraged by Nazis and other Fascists, and took up guns and makeshift street fighting weapons against them.



The “America First Committee” an isolationist, conservative group that was openly Pro-Nazi and opposed entrance of the U.S. into WWII received no mention in the film, despite the fact that the German-American Bund was very active within its ranks.

“Worse than Mccarthyism?”

The Smith Act Prosecutions of fascists in 1943, in which the Nazis, unlike the Communists and Socialists charged under the same law, walked free in a mistrial, was never mentioned.

At one point when talking about the 10,000 Germans interned during WWII, compared to the millions of Japanese people, a German citizen proclaims “this was nothing compared to Mccarthyism.” A disgusting historical mis-characterization if ever.

The film shows how inside of these internment camps, Nazis were allowed to have rallies in support of Hitler, march with Nazi flags, eat “good food” from their country of origin, go swimming, relax, and enjoy themselves at the tax payers expense.

The film did not compare the treatment of these 10,000 Nazis with the internment of the Japanese who suffered horrifically in comparison, and were arrested on much lesser suspicions of any illegal activity.

The thousands of Communists jailed during Mccarthyism contrarily to the spas for Pro-Nazi U.S. citizens, got to go to Federal or State Prisons, where they were barred from reading anything remotely in support of their ideology and in some cases starved, tortured, raped, and beaten by other prisoners hoping to get parole through the “patriotic” act of brutalizing a “commie” prisoner.

Hundreds of political prisoners from the Black Liberation Army, the May 19th Communist Organization, the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, and other leftist organizations remain locked away in the U.S., where the guards can depend on the help of fascist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood to do things that may have legal consequences for prison authorities.

“Hollywood Nazis” v. “Ron Paul & Friends…”

The section on modern Nazism, is also loaded with the same problems of previous sections of the film. It shows only the “Hollywood Nazis”, a section of modern Pro-Hitler fascists who are few in number. These folks are known for marching in brown shirts, waving swastikas, and screaming racial epithets while getting defended by the ACLU on the basis of “Free Speech.”


The film did not mention the other wing of the Nazi movement in the U.S., that being the various “Paleo-conservatives” who openly speak in favor of Hitler, and use conspiracy theories about “Zionism” to justify all dislikable things about U.S. Society.

Pat Buchanan, MSNBC contributor and speechwriter for Richard Nixon, recently wrote and posted an article claiming Hitler “wanted peace” and “Socialists” in the U.S. government forced war on Germany for his website. David Duke, the Holocaust Denier and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican, and was recently interviewed on CNN.

Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign in 2008 was staffed by members of the Neo-Nazi movement to whom he gave winks of approval by his denunciation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his support for “State’s Rights”, the slogan of the KKK and segregationist movement.

The Constitution Party of the U.S.’s 2008 Presidential Candidate, Chuck Baldwin, openly declares that the South should have been victorious in the civil war, and that Lincoln started the “march toward socialism” with the emancipation proclamation.

Clearly, Nazism has much more support in the modern U.S. than simply the likes of Hal Turner and Bill White, who parade in outlandish, silly, offensive costumes, saying disgusting things while thousands of police protect them from any possible retribution. Ironically, even open Neo-Nazi Hal Turner is now publicly acknowledged as FBI employee, who was supplied with airplane tickets, thousands of dollars in wages, and other benefits while preaching the merits of lynching on his radio program along with Holocaust denial and every racial and ethnic slur in the U.S. vocabulary.

Who fights Nazis? Only the JDL?

The Anti-Fascists of today were equally slandered in the modern section as in the section on the 1930s. The coverage of George Lincoln Rockwell, did not tell of how he was blocked from entering New York State after Workers World Party and Youth Against War and Fascism shut down New York City in 1963, or how the Socialist Worker’s Party beat him senseless in Boston led by Barry Sheppard.

The numerous Anti-KKK and Anti-Nazi protests shown in the film did not feature leftists, who traditionally lead the marches. Contrarily, a leader of the Ultra-Zionist Terror organization, the “Jewish Defense League” (JDL) was interview extensively, saying things to the effect of “anyone who slanders Jewish people out to be murdered.” The JDL also assassinates Palestinian activists, bombed the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, and attacked Workers World Party and Socialist Workers Party meetings with led pipes because they denounced Israel and Zionism. Are these right-wing Zionists the only Anti-Nazi activists that could be found for interview?















Such a characterization of the Anti-Nazi movement as being merely a movement of militant Zionists does great damage, and is exactly the image Neo-Nazis would like to present.

Overall, the piece clearly showed the class biases inherent in Disney-Pixar corporation. The film fit the current dialogue about fascism, as a small clique of right-wing extremists, not so different from the left-wing extremists, who show the “beauty” and “danger” of free speech in this “beautiful” “democratic” U.S.

The fact that countless capitalists have been pro-fascist and very few have been pro-Communist, shows that there is a clear interest in covering the real history Fascism in the U.S. as well as the movement to counter it among the workers and oppressed people.

Should we expect anything else from the class that Bankrolls Nazism to prevent the workers from taking power from them? I think not.

The Exposed Matrix of Capitalism: The Anti-Cosmopolitan School of Science Fiction

The Matrix was a hit film of the late 90s. It portrays a complicated science fiction universe in which a lead character discovers that the entire world is an illusion. Rather than living in late 90s Manhattan, he is in fact living as a product, harvested in the far off future now that a race of machines has taken control. The world we live in is simply an illusion projected into our minds by the machines, to distract us from our imprisonment as harvested object to be plundered by the machine overlords.


The Anti-Cosmopolitan School

The Matrix is just one of a slew films of which it is probably the most famous. These are science films that indirectly attack capitalism. Unlike Social Realism and Proletarian School literature such as Bertolt Brecht, Maxim Gorky, John Steinbeck and such, the Anti-Cosmopolitan (Anti-Cosmo) school does not attack capitalism for poverty, unemployment, greed, and inhumanity. The Anti-Cosmopolitan school attacks capitalism for very unique reasons, forged by the material reality of the era in which they were spawned.



The Anti-Cosmo school attacks capitalism for its false happiness. The real world in The Matrix is of course, a lie. The people of the world think they live in the economically prosperous mid-90s, when in reality they are being harvested like farmed fish or cows raised to be slaughtered.

The same for the main characters in The Island, another hit from this genre. In The Island the protagonists believe they are awaiting a chance to go live in a paradise-like Island after a horrific nuclear holocaust. In reality, they are simply awaiting the day when their bodies will be utilized as replacements, in order to grant immortality to the rich and famous from which they are cloned for this purpose.

The new release Surrogates tells a similar tale. In this futuristic world, people no longer leave their homes and are replaced by robots that they control with their minds. These robots can be who-ever they choose. In reality, the people of the world are overweight, depressed, sad, etc. But in the fantasy world of “surrogates” they can be charming, good like, ideal human beings.

All of these films in the Anti-Cosmopolitan School share several key themes. The Deception of happiness and beauty is a key theme. In the Anti-Cosmopolitan School, all of the heroes think they are in a happy, wealthy, care-free world. In reality, they are suffering horrifically and being exploited. The ugliness of the world is covered for them by the falsehood of happiness.



The Anti-Cosmo School also shows how human beings are reduced to financial calculations. In the Anti-Cosmo School we see how while being deceived into thinking they are in a happy world of love and freedom, the world is really a harsh place in which human beings treat other human beings as chattel, property, and objects to be plundered for personal gain.

The Anti-Cosmo films then share another theme, that being extreme anger and romanticized violence. Upon realizing the false state of reality they inhabit, and breaking through the illusions, the protagonists of these films engage in extreme acts of terroristic and individualist violence.

Who can forget the scene in The Matrix when Neo and his companions enter the corporate offices where those enforcing the deceptions reside, and open fire with thousands of rounds of ammunition from countless fire-arms stuffed under their trench coats. We of course get treated to the humor of our protagonists walking through a metal detector, and hearing the security guard say “Holy Shit!” when he sees the cache of assault weapons and ammunition being carried into the highly protected building calmly, before he is gunned down by the rage filled heroes of the film.

In Surrogates we also get to see a barrage of exploding helicopters, fire-arm duels, explosions, riots, etc. The Island is a bit less violent, but even it contains levels of terrorism, violence, and such.

The Anti-Cosmopolitan School of Science Fiction film is a product of the youth radicals of the late 90s and pre-economic melt-down years of the current decade. It reflects the rage, anger, and confusion of youth drawn to leftist politics in the age of Clinton and Bush.

Bush-Era Radicalism Among Youth

I recall when I was teen, and a “web of lies” had all around me believing they lived in the “happiest, most free country in the world.” The web of lies allowed a large majority of the U.S. to believe that the U.S. was a peace-loving nation, and that the actions of the U.S. abroad were always carried out with the most pure, compassionate, and moral intentions.

Those who realized this to be a falsehood, often through the works of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, the most popular leftist intellectuals at the time, filled with rage. These young people, including myself, saw that the “good America” being spewed before us on T.V. screens and billboards was a lie. We knew that the U.S. was a country that founded itself on mass genocides of indigenous people and slavery.

We knew that the U.S. continues murder and expansionism with economic institutions like the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank, as well as through military imperialistic actions like the destruction of Yugoslavia, the brutal bombing and sanctions of Iraq, the funding of the genocide against Palestine, and the backing, funding, and aid of countless brutal regimes.

The left of the 90s saw itself as “seeing through the matrix.” But no matter how much we tried to tell those around us about this reality, we seemed to continually fall on deaf ears. To the majority of the U.S. population, who got their news from corporate media and capitalist educational institutions, the United States was a peace-loving, democracy spreading, happy, free, fun land of opportunity. When our truth fell on deaf ears, we filled with rage.



Our rage poured out in the Battle of Seattle, where in black hoods and gas masks, countless angry youth from the Columbine Generation fought the police, smashed windows, and spray-painted slogans like “Fuck Capitalism” on the walls of Banks and Starbucks Coffee Shops.

Anarchism gained a huge amount of support among the Bush-era college radicals, and “black blocs” in which youth dressed in black combated police while smashing windows to the rhythm of makeshift drums seemed to pop up at countless demonstrations.

In Cleveland where I currently reside, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, a youth organization affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, a New Left Maoist Sect, grew in prominence with scores of young recruits from the college wing Anti-War and Anti-Globalization movements.


Chants like: “Saddam, Bin Laden, Pinochet! All Created by the CIA!” sought to break through the Matrix of lies and expose U.S. Imperialism for what it was.

We filled with rage and anger. Some of us undoubtedly watched the violent finale of The Matrix with glee. We were the “good guys” who saw through “the Matrix” and were ready to wage warfare against the heartless machines that ran the world and saw people as objects to be used up and thrown away.


The Smashing of the Matrix

The Anti-Cosmopolitan School of Science Fiction reflected the Bush-era radical’s belief that if people just “had their eyes opened” they could see through the lies and join in revolution.

In some ways we were right. Though George W. Bush was disputably re-elected, he left office in disgrace. His war in Iraq became immensely unpopular. Dislike for torture became the overwhelming public opinion. Dislike and sometimes hatred for Bush and his policies filled nearly all of U.S. society excepting merely a small 22% by the time he left office.

However, the great masses of people in the U.S. didn’t pour their hopes in changing these “moral outrages” into armed revolution or mass protests, though there were many large demonstrations.

Barack Obama’s election campaign was one way that mass outrage against the policies of the Bush-era was channeled. Another way was the road of conspiracism and Neo-fascist Libertarianism.

Documentary films like Loose Change and Zeitgiest traveled the internet, promoting beliefs in a shadowy elite manipulating the world. The audience of Alex Jones, the far-right radio host who believes that Bush is an agent of a secret “socialist conspiracy” also grew in numbers.

Though the country seemed united in its hatred for George W. Bush and the current state of affairs, where to go from there is still not agreed upon. Amidst the confusion, the U.S. economy finally collapsed after years of propping it up with bad lending and government stimulation. The economic meltdown made it clear to all the status quo was no longer an acceptable course to march down. Now new questions had to be answered.


As Lenin Once Asked: “What Is To Be Done?”

In the modern U.S., dislike for the status quo is higher than ever. But what is to be done? Where do we go from here? The “Tea Party Movement”, staffed by former anti-Bushists recruited into the Alex Jones fan club and the Presidential Campaign of John Birch Society supporter Ron Paul, call to “restore the republic.” They seek to revoke all social programs, carry out a mass pogrom against immigrant workers, completely de-regulate the economy, and revert to private control of all features of society.



Then of course, the liberals of the Democratic Party, MSNBC, and Air America seek to make a “kinder, gentler” U.S. society. They seek a national healthcare service, a higher minimum wage, equal rights for the LGBT community, a loosening of the police state, and less religious domination of the affairs of the state.




But all of these forces do not have a political program that can challenge the base of the problem, that being, the capitalist system and its private for-profit control of the economy. Only the Marxist-Leninist movement puts forward a program for a new economic system in which the banks, factories, and other commanding heights of the economy are under the control of the people, and human need comes before the profits of a few.

Yes, the Matrix of lies has been exposed. Now the Emperor stands naked before us, and all see him for what he is. We can clothe him, yes, but what wardrobe it is that shall replace his nudity remains to be written in the pages of history, by the millions of people, who have written every page before, and will be writing many pages still to come.

Slumdogs, Extracts, and Fascism At The Movies

The right-wing preaches that Hollywood, California is Leftist/Marxist occupied territory. It is true that there have been a great deal of films with a leftist bent in recent times, not including Michael Moore’s documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story. It is indeed true that the recent film Surrogates has an anti-capitalist and consumerist message, as do other great films like V for Vendetta and Revolutionary Road.

However, recently Hollywood has released two films of a racist, sexist, and “survival of the fittest” nature that preach anything but a leftist message. These films, though poorly put together, have been raised as “great art” by the ruling class and treated as such, one of them winning “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards of 2009.

“Slumdog Millionaire” Speaks for Billionaires

The film Slumdog Millionaire is a right-wing, pro-capitalist rant. While it imagines that it is the “grapes of wrath” or “Schindler's List”, it is simply a right-wing propaganda piece with “epic” content and a Horatio Alger plot.

The film portrays a young, impoverished boy in modern India. When Muslims attack his family, the government sits by and lets it occur. He travels throughout India in poverty, and is taken advantage of by a man who tries to blind him. The man attempts this in order to take advantage of those who would give him “charity” with their “compassion” because of his condition.

The Message: Compassion rewards cruelty and the weak.

Of course, through his “free will” and “intuition” the main character triumphs and wins on India’s version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, but he is tortured by the Indian government, because they refuse to recognize he is capable of success. He is punished brutally for succeeding, by the supposedly lesser human beings who run the state. John Galt would probably wet his pants with happiness at this crude, hateful, right-wing film.

The main character’s brother turns to crime, and ends up dead, of course. He could have got by “honestly” and become a millionaire like his brother, but he broke the “social contract” and became a “criminal.” So, of course, he deserves to die because of “personal choices.”

Two particular sections in this film portray the disgusting atmosphere as blatantly as possible. In one section of the film, the boy is being beaten. A tourist couple from the U.S. stops the man from beating him. The innocent “John Galt” child cries out: “This is what the real India is all about.”

The U.S. couple looks down on him with smiles, and hands him a wad of U.S. federal reserve currency, and tell him: “This is what the real America is all about.”

They rub him on the head, as any good compassionate imperialist carrying their “white man’s burden” would.

The message: The white western civilization of the U.S. is an honest, free market society, in comparison to India, a nation depicted in the film as filled barbaric brown skinned people who do not have “free market” ideas.

In the second sequence the main character looks out from a construction site at a city and speaks of how great it is becoming now that western capitalists have come.

The Message: Western Capitalism and Domination is saving India from its ways.

Slumdog Millionaire foams with racism and colonialism to its core. It tells us that India is a pre-capitalist hell-hole, that is gradually being saved by the free market and Imperialism. The film glorifies western capitalism and depicts the brown-skinned people of South-East Asia as barbaric and ignorant, in need of the guidance and domination of western Capitalists. The film portrays compassion, sympathy, and such as a character flaw, and champions ruthlessness and “the rule of law.”

Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig Von Mises could not have written a better propaganda film. The worst part of this, is that some on the left are confused, and somehow think the film is an exposure of the poverty created by capitalism. They don’t seem to notice that the thrust of the film is the lie that capitalism destroys poverty and saves indigenous people from their supposed inherent idiocy and socialistic tendencies that justify imperialism.



Another film could show the same horrific conditions, yet champion the Naxalite Rebels of the countryside or the worker’s movements of the industrial centers. These movements do have a chance of stopping these atrocities, and are motivated by a desire for liberation, not capitalist greed.

But this is not the message the film portrays. This film is a product of the “Revolutionary Right-Wing” that proclaims that the world must go backwards toward “good capitalism.” The admiration of western civilization, the demonizing of the indigenous peoples, and the Neitschzian “ubermenchen” theme make this film the kind of magnum opus to expect from Leni Riefenstahl or D.W. Griffith.

“Extracts" of Exploitation

Unlike Slumdog, this fascist piece does not pretend to be an “epic” “groundbreaking” film. Rather, this anti-working class hit piece pretends to be a comedy. It has the snide, crude, nasty cruelty found in every Glenn Beck rant in which he fumes with rage at the oppressed, but of course, throws in a few laugh lines to keep us from drowning in his venom.

The film starts out reminding one of “The Office” or “40 Year Old Virgin.” It’s about a factory that makes vanilla extract, and working at the factory there are slew of funny characters.

The boss who owns the factory, cannot get his wife to have sexual intercourse with him. After consulting a friendly bar tender, he comes up with an elaborate, semi-humorous scheme to morally reprieve him of infidelity by tricking her into being the first to commit adultery, with an intellectual challenged male prostitute who he pays to seduce her.

If this sexist, patriarchal, idiotic plot twist isn’t enough, soon the story shifts from forbidden sex, to the ranting anger of a middle class capitalist against the “idiots” of the working class who don’t appreciate his greatness.

The factory workers attempt to strike to keep their jobs fearing they may lose them if he sells the company, the owner says “why not take the whole company!” He fumes with hatred at the inferiority of the workers. This is clearly an indirect attack on Republic Window and Door Makers who did exactly the same, seizing the plant in order to save their jobs. I suppose whoever wrote this film hates the idea of worker’s believing they have the property right to their jobs.

It seemed to me that nearly a half hour of the films content is merely the main character, a petty-capitalist, bemoaning the fact that “everyone” supposedly sympathizes with the proletariat, but no one sympathizes with him, the guy who owns some means of production and has the ability to exploit the labor of the proletariat because of his “initiative” and “creativity.”



We hear about how this oppressed boss “invented a new formula” in college, and “gave his life to the company that produces.” This is ironic and deceptive as most new chemicals are invented by hired proletarian chemists. Their inventions are then copyrighted by the capitalists who hired them to create it, who reap the profits from their creativity. Inventors, innovators, and such are rarely among the ranks of the modern bourgeoisie. The big dogs of modern capitalism are the bankers who own mountains of stock and mountains of capital to “invest” in other people’s sweat and blood.

The main character bemoans his persecution, and points out that he is not an evil corporation, but a small businessman, who gives all for his employees unlike the ruthless big capitalists who are corrupt and faceless to their workers. I almost expected him to begin parroting Alex Jones about Rockefeller, the union busting monster was a “socialist” because he supported contraception.

Yes, the persecuted middle class, and its love of sarcastic Glenn Beck anger flows out in every line of this films dialogue. I should have seen this bombastic propaganda coming, when I noticed a statue of shrugging Atlas in one scene at a bar.

The "Capitalist Victim" : Fascism's Friend

These two motion pictures share the same theme. That theme is “capitalism is great” and “supermen” are persecuted by the ignorant masses and the demagogues who manipulate them to fight for “handouts” and steal from the “supermen.”

These films point toward compassion as a character flaw, and also portray the rich who “succeed” as “victims” of the “heartless mob” of workers who childishly think they are entitled to what the oh-so-persecuted rich have.

These films are unrealistic by all stretches. Small vanilla extract companies are few and far between. The chances of an impoverished youth from the slums of India winning a million dollars are also slim. It is also ironic that the star of the film, a young boy from India, was homeless once again, after he starred in the film that won “best picture” at the Academy.

These films play into the “Tea Party” mentality. They are films in which the petty-bourgeoisie is glorified as victims of the ruthless “free loaders” of the working class. There is occasionally a bit of anti-corporate petty bourgeois rhetoric like that of Father Coughlin or Huey Long in times before.

These two films, most likely the first of many to come, are the ideological manifestos of the far right-wing fascist movement erupting in response to the dying capitalist system. Though they have an “anti-establishment” air to them, they are dangerous, elitist, anti-proletarian films, that set the basis for the smashing of Democracy to preserve capitalism and imperialism, without the threat of Socialist Revolution.

These films would have you think the National Healthcare, Trade Unions, and Progressive Taxation, are the “tyranny” that needs to be overcome. The logical conclusion of these films is that the state must defend the “supermen” from the “rabble” and the demagogues who manipulate them. This translates to smashing trade unions, outlawing the Socialist and Communist Parties, and in some cases, mass genocide in order to “purify” and “breed” these “supermen” who come from the great “western civilization.”

It will be interesting to see if the battle on the screen of Hollywood will continue to rage as the economic crisis becomes more acute, and more people align with the two anti-establishment armies of Socialism and Fascism. I must of course, recall the 1930s when racist films like “Gone With the Wind” that worship the “oppressed slave masters” filled the screens, countering the radical films like “The Grapes of Wrath” that championed class struggle and “The Watch on the Rhine” that hailed Anti-Nazi resistance.

I suspect Hollywood, will do as it always does, and reflect the contradictions of society. Let us hope soon, when the contradiction is resolved, we are watching film like the master-pieces of Eisenstein for free during May Day Celebrations, not sitting in theaters watching “The International Jew” with guns to our necks, and our hands cuffed down to our seats.

Harry Potter: A Fairy Tale of the New Left

J.K. Rowling is a child of the 1960s, the age of rock and roll music, psychedelic drugs, and a political mass movement known as the “New Left.”

J.K. Rowling spent these years idealizing her hero, Jessica Mitford, a british teen who ran away from home to fight alongside Communists from around the world, in defense of the Spanish Republic against the rising menace of Fascism. As J.K. Rowling was reading Mitford’s writings, listening to the Beatles, and attending a prep school started by the abolitionist movement, her fellow youth were shutting down induction centers, burning their draft cards, campaigning to free Huey Newton, and rebelling in the streets of the world against Capitalism and Imperialism.

Harry Potter, the books and now popular series of films, is in many ways, a new left fairy-tale, full of the ideological thinking of student radicals of the period in which her thought was forged. One almost expects Harry Potter to be pull out a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book as he battles the forces of “pure blood”, “tradition”, and greed.

But the series also contains some of the New Left’s flaws; Flaws that continue to impact the radical movement of today, which emerges as the child of the generation before.

The Heroes



Our heroes before getting into specifics, are all young students at an elite Wizarding School. Throughout the books and films our young heroes disobey adults, challenge authority, and commit their acts of magical heroism as they sneak out of bed, steal potions, and scoff in the face of arbitrary authority figures who get in the way of what is right and just. No modern literary protagonists have said “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” louder than Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger.

Harry Potter, our main character, is born into a status of wealth and fame. Like Rowling’s generation of baby boomers, he is celebrated simply for his existence. He is looked up to for an act that he cannot even remember, killing the ruthless Lord Voldemort.

Harry is an heir to fortune of millions, but instead of living a happy wizard home-life, he is forced into living with a suburban, conservative, gosspy, and money obsessed family called the Dursleys. In their oppressive, “white picket fence” home, he is ridiculed for not being athletic and for not fulfilling the “normal” families ideal of what a child is supposed to be like.

These largely overweight, untrustworthy British suburbanites seem to be very incarnation of the “Labor Aristocrats” that 60s radicals spoke of when referring to the right-wing working class of the U.S. who “just couldn’t get with it” and be convinced by their radical views.

Several times the Dursleys rant in favor the death penalty and corporal punishment, making their reactionary politics clear.

However, upon becoming a teen, Harry is swept away into an underground society of Witches and Wizards with long hair, and brightly colored robes. This “counter-culture” is made up of magical people who hide beneath the radar of the modern world, building a society of their own, far superior to the old world of the fogies and straights whom they call: “muggles.”

Harry Potter has a sidekick named Ron Weasley, who is of low-income teen from a hard-working and morally pure proletarian family of redheads. Ron has Harry Potter to point him toward his emancipation, and lead him into battle with those responsible for his family’s conditions of poverty and exploitation.

And there is Hermione Granger, a smart, intelligent, young woman who struggles to prove herself through academics in a world where women are not supposed to be smart. Throughout the books she makes the occasional feminist speech, and in a one of the films she punches a bully in the face only to be cheered on for her “un-ladylike” act, defying the patriarchal norm of “girls don’t hit.”

And let us not forget Fred and George, the twin older brothers of Ron, who lampoon authority with pranks and satire, in a style that would make the Youth International Party and the Situationist pranksters of Haight Ashbury green with jealousy.

Yes, these characters seem not like the heroes of a children’s novel, but the biographies of the leaders of the Weather Underground Organization or the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee.

The Enemy

And then there are the villains. The enemies of Potter and his gang, are a secret order amongst the rich called the “Death Eaters.” They wear drab clothes, and long for the greatness of an old Imperial England which is slipping away to the liberalism and promiscuity of tolerance and compassion. They seek to restore the “pure blood” of Wizarding people. They commit hate crimes against non-Wizards who they views as inferior.



These antagonists wear hoods over their faces as they travel in mobs committing crimes against the helpless, and when they roam the world they wear outfits might one expect from those attending a party at Castle Dracula on St. George’s Eve.

Voldomert, their violent authoritarian leader, has been defeated. Yet in the shadows he is secretly returning. When our heroes sound the alarm, society dismisses them simply as insane wild youth. But they continue daring to tell the truth to a world which does not wish to hear it. They persevere in their battle for what is right, no matter how harshly they are slandered by the “vultures” of the Daily Prophet, the mainstream newspaper of the Wizarding world.

In the fifth installment of the novels they find their soapbox in the beloved Alternative Press called “The Quibbler.” (This section was not in the film version, however.)

Other New Left Themes

The story line is so obviously a New Left fairy-tale allegory, we need not look to deeply. How more obvious can it be? A group long haired free thinking people in robes who are outcast from a dull and drab society, battle a group of dark, power-hungry, bigots who hate happiness and freedom, and worship money and the traditions of the past.

When Hermione forms an organization for the liberation of the House Elves, small little creatures who serve the Wizards, they reject her. Hermione’s attempt reminds me of what happened when groups like the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Union went into the U.S. factories, selling Challenge and Revolutionary Worker at the factory gate before their shifts began. These idealistic young intellectuals were not to be greeted by their fellow workers as liberators, but rather told to “go back to Russia”, and greeted with “Look, here comes Ho Chi Minh”, by the very working class they sought to liberate from the tyranny of the bosses.

The moralist rhetoric of the New Left bleeds through particularly in the second film. When Harry Potter turns to the headmaster, with his fears that he is “destined” to be in Slytherin, a section of the school of Wizardry associated with evil, his wise educator informs him “The choices we make are more important than any destiny we have.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Althusser, Bill Ayers, Herbert Marcuse, all voiced this loud philosophical leap of the New Left, replacing Dialectical Materialism with Existentialist Moralism. Yes, people’s behavior is a product of their environment, the New Left proclaims in agreement with Marx. Yet, they ad a postscript that justifies their moralist and non-economically based activism: “unless we become enlightened and decide not to be.”

Harry Potter and his team of young rebels, like the children of the New Left, and unlike the radical movements of the 1930s and prior, is not driven by a desperate need for bread, jobs, or employment. Rather, Harry Potter is driven by the same force that drove Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and seemed to scream out of each of the ads that “World Can’t Wait” put in the New York Times during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Harry Potter is driven by moral outrage, alienation, and the drive to be “right in his soul,” as Anna Louis Strong called it, by giving up his comfortable life to do battle with injustice.

Harry could just as easily join the forces of evil and enjoy the privileges and power of his birth and class standing, but because of his morality and alienation he driven to the side of the oppressed, where he views himself as their triumphant defender and battle-commander.

Conclusion

Harry Potter is the fairy tale of a different left in a different time. The movement of the 1960s white student left was led by college students, who disliked the status quo and the Vietnam War and sought to break with the conservative ways of their parents. They longed to have a good time, to get “turned on”, to “drop out” into a world of their own. They sought to morally demonstrate to everyone else about why U.S. Society was immoral, violent, alienating, and disgusting.

Harry Potter is a representation of the baby-boom radicals, who gave up lives of luxury to stand on street corners selling Revolutionary Worker, The Militant, and New Left Notes hoping to enlighten the broad masses about the evils of their society, only to be dismissed as lunatics by the “uptight” “fat” working class of the U.S. which was still enjoying the crumbs of imperialist wealth.

Like Harry Potter, some of these young radical formed groups like Potter’s “Defense Association” from the fifth installment, where they learned to fire handguns, and even planted pipe bombs in draft offices and ROTC buildings. The new left radicals did not have faith in the working class to make a revolution, so many resorted to failed adverturist attempts to spark it themselves with anarchistic terrorism.

The era we live is greatly different from the scenario presented to us in Harry Potter’s exploits. We live in a time when the working class is far from content, but suffering in an economic collapse and ready to hear what Marxists have to say about putting an end to unemployment, poverty, and starvation.

In our current time the goal is not to “get turned on” and “drop out” to build a society of our own on a new code of ethics, but rather to fight against the rich and powerful together with the entire working class, and build a society for all that works for the good of everyone.

Harry Potter is by no means void of value in modern times. Perhaps the youth who confusedly rallying behind Ron Paul’s call to “Restore the Republic” should think of the Death Eaters and their fantasy of restoring the past while loathing reforms.

Those who turn toward Randian Libertarianism and its “Virtue of Selfishness” should take note that the evil Lord Voldemort tells Harry there is “no good or evil, only power and those who seek it.”

In terms of who the enemy are (conservative, greedy, bigots who long for the past) and who the heroes are (students, workers, and oppressed people), Rowling’s allegorical novel is right on. However, when it comes to the forces that motivate the battle for our future, she reflects the battles of another period in history, very different from our own.

It says a great deal that the Harry Potter books, with its overall leftist message have been so embraced by my generation. This is perhaps a sign that the horizon contains many happy endings and celebrations, which will make the fairy-tales of the middle-ages seem dull and depressing.