Democratic centralism (not libertarianism) will bring liberation

Those anarchists who call themselves communists (and I am among
them) are communist not because they want to impose their specific
way of seeing or believe that it is the only means of salvation, but
because they are convinced, and will remain so unless there is
evidence to the contrary, that the more men and women, united in
comradeship, and the closer their cooperation on behalf of all, the
greater will be the well-being and the freedom that everybody will
enjoy. They believe that even where people are freed from human
oppression they remain exposed to the hostile forces of nature, which
they cannot overcome on their own, but that with the cooperation of
others, they can control and transform into the means of their
well-being. The individual who wished to supply his own material
needs by working alone would be the slave of his labours. A peasant,
for instance, who wanted to cultivate a piece of ground all alone,
would be renouncing all the advantages of cooperation and
condemning himself to a wretched life : no rest, no travel, no study, no
contacts with the outside world .. . and he would not always be able
to appease his hunger. 
- Errico Malatesta The Anarchist Revolution

But how you build such a society without imposing your own vision onto others? How would revolutionary anarchists address problems with counterrevolutionaries? Marxists (and I among them) think that a transitional periodm whereby workers' states would establish socialism and eradicate classes is necessary before the state can be abolished.

Anarchists insist upon horizontalism in organizing.  They would invoke the misattributed Ghandi quote, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Unfortuantely, spontaneous, horizontal organization has never resulted in a successful revolution.  This lesson was hard learned by the Spanish anarchists in 1939. 

A movement that self consciously avoids taking power is masochistic. Franco took over Spain because of such masochism. Education for class consciousness is all well and good, but I'm not convinced that spontaneous, horizontal organization will arise without a vanguard party.

Meanwhile, there have been examples of revolutionary workers' states (even though most have failed to hold up against imperialist capitalism).  Often anarchists blame authoritarianism for the failures of these states to achieve even the first stages of socialism.  The question becomes, how would a vanguard party keep on track with the project of progressively establishing socialism and also preparing for the state to wither away once that eventuality is achieved?

MLs often answer this question by invoking democratic centralism: a cadre leadership that is responsible for addressing the needs and concerns of the proletariat. 

Since the fall of the USSR there have been no shortage of theories on what went wrong. Revisionists and trots blame Stalin, Stalinists blame Khrushchev blah blah. What is apparent is that the USSR was curving rightward long before 1991. 

Another more concise example of a capitalist communist party is, of course, modern day China. I do think that dialectical materialist analysis is useful here. Both China and USSR had socialist revolutions prior to modernization. The neo-feudal systems in both pre-revolution Russia and China presented favorable material conditions for proletarian uprising. The socialist governments were able to modernize those countries very rapidly due to economic planning. They were then elevated to superpower status. From there, it would appear that nationalism overrode socialism and the allure of neoliberalism and a piece of the global capital pie resulted in the downfall of socialism in those nations.

 Those who insist on formal, liberal democracy are those who refuse to distinguish formal freedom from actual freedom.   A one party system has the potential to be more democratic than a multiple party parliament, so long as an active civil society is encouraged. Cuba is a good example of this: one ruling party, but participation in civics and the airing of grievances is encouraged. Mariela Castro, the president's daughter, is currently a leader of a protest movement in favor of LGBT rights. 

Contrast that with USA where we have formal democracy, but the protests of civil society are largely ignored. Additionally, we are told in school that checks and balances on governmental power are what keep us free, but they're really just what keep us from change. Those checks and balances are part of the way the system perpetuates itself. 

A one party system, on the other hand, must adapt to changes in public opinion if they are to stay in power, as there is no protest vote placebo as in a two party system.

Some Scattered Musings on Animal Rights

The Homo sapiens sapiens species is a particular branch of the animal kingdom.  Religious and ethical notions of human superiority in relation to the whole of nature have been problematic throughout history.  The Genesis account in the bible gives Adam and Eve dominion over the animals (Gen 1:26).  The result of this ideology of H. sapiens superiority has resulted in an alienation of humanity from nature.  Murray Bookchin has developed one of the most adequate theories, from the left, regarding such alienation via his writings on Social Ecology.  In Society and Ecology he writes:

...by so radically separating humanity and society from nature or naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can no longer see how human nature is !derived! from nonhuman nature and social evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes estranged or alienated not only from itself in our "age of alienation," but from the natural world in which it has always been rooted as a complex and thinking life-force.

This paradigm stands in contrast to the notion of speciesism, a liberal ideology, which extrapolates uniquely H. sapiens concepts of ethics, morality and dignity to the whole of the animal kingdom.  Of course, glaringly missing from the concept of "speciesism" is a discussion of the H. sapiens species' relationship to other kingdoms of life such as plants, fungi and single celled organisms, but I will skip over this misstep for the sake of argument.

The purportedly anarchist/socialist/anti-speciesist website Species and Class is one of the forerunners of the left-wing approach to animal rights.  In an article posted on the Species and Class website John Tallent claims that veganism is an obligation for leftists, not an option:

The real question here is this: Why is it wrong to enslave humans that are relatively ‘less intelligent’ than others that are ‘more intelligent’? And if we think about this for a moment, we begin to understand that it is wrong to enslave any human, regardless of intelligence, because humans are sentient beings — that is, we all experience pain and pleasure and we are aware that we, individually, exist. If we did not know that we exist, and we could not experience pain and pleasure, what would it matter what happened to us? We would be senseless, unknowing beings.

Tallent, however, uses a key fallacy as his argument: that intelligence and sentience are guideposts for ethics. A sense of ethical behavior is a uniquely human trait.  According to triune-brain theory, a sense of ethics arises for the capacity for abstract thought resulting from the evolution of the neocortex, evolutionarily the most recent part of mammalian and human brains.  The neocortex is unique to humans and certain other primates.  Below is a description of the evolution of the three brains as well as a pictorial model of the triune brain.

Thus, if we are to take a positivist/materialist approach, "speciesism" has no empirical basis as different species' nervous systems can be radically different.  The neocortex abilities for abstract reasoning and thus ethical behavior that takes dignity into account are unique to the H. sapiens species and a handful of other apes.  To provide a simple analogy, one wouldn't treat a goldfish the same as a lion, would one?

Additionally, isn't it more speciesist to insist that a carnivorous species like lions, who kill other animals for food daily, behave in a similar way as an omnivorous species like humans, or even a herbivorous species like cattle?  So how can one human insist that another human must cease to eat other animals in order to be a proponent of the dignity of all humans?

With the inflated prices of vegan foods and the outrageous adoption fees of pet rescue agencies, it appears that animal rights is fairly certainly a bourgeois issue.  Far from another front for liberation, it is a derailment of the class struggle.  What's more, this assertion is supported by empirical, qualitative data.  According to Business Insider Magazine:

Rich people care more about animal welfare than human rights, and about a dozen other important causes, according to a new report from consultancy Capgemini.
The firm interviewed more than 4,500 high-net-worth individuals from 23 different markets during Q1 of this year to get their take on a number of subjects, including what social issues they care about most.
Besides human rights, the respondents also said they cared more about animal welfare than climate change, poverty alleviation, income inequality and race and gender issues.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/capgemini-wealth-report-2014-6#ixzz3FlcoPoIp

Here is the chart posted on that page:

Additionally, animal rights organizations like PETA have proved themselves to be out of touch with the reality of class struggle.  The worst of these recent stunts was when PETA reported that they would cover the water bills for Detroit families deprived of the human right to water on the condition that they would agree to go vegan for 1 year.

Of course, avowed liberal organizations like PETA are not alone in this culture of tone-deafness.  For example, shortly after a Ferguson, MO police officer had described Ferguson residents of African descent as "animals" the Species and Class site posted the following meme on their facebook page:

To close, I did find on article from Species and Class worthy of praise. I post it below in its entirety:

The Animalization of the Proletariat

August 29, 2014

By Percy Gauguin

The animalization of the dispossessed has been the very process by which the dispossessed became dispossessed. To reduce another to a bestial status is the establishment of supremacy over that other.
The condition of animality is essentially the lacking of humanity. The human who is treated as inferior is not fully human, and therefore lies somewhere between humanity and animality. This hierarchical mechanism is a form of predatory relations constituted within society, or the relations of nature transferred into social relations- not the reproduction of nature on social terrain, but the institution of a separate nature within society. This humanized nature, originating from nature but diverging from it, imposed itself upon ‘original’ nature and made it indistinct from it, thereby conflating human social relations with the natural order spontaneously arising between life forms in an idealized form. 

Animalization has been one of its underlying historical processes that has established inferiority and superiority between people, which then condensed the signification ‘animality’ as a distinct concept in opposition to ‘humanity’. This continual reproduction of animality throughout time has perpetuated the divide between humans and other species because humans themselves are divided into ‘social species’, or classes.

And so the species-relations between humanity and its livestock appear as the reflection of inter-human relations, reproduced in a distilled manner. The imperative of capital is to relegate each individual to the status of a meatbag which will generate, or at least not be an impediment to, profit. In the mass concentration of animals into bestial death camps proletarianization is reproduced in a very raw manner: the hyperexploited animal is merely a disposable unit situated in the accumulation of alienation. The hamburger fuels and provides alienated pleasure (e.g. McDonald’s) to those whose labor fuels the accumulation of capital and the even greater alienated pleasures of the capitalist class. The idea that animals suffer greatly under the industrial farm system is still extremely alien to many people, and oftentimes a matter of complete indifference and contempt. How can the proletariat’s proletariat become an object of solidarity when workers have no conception of even themselves? The pivot on which capitalism hinges is the individual ego that disregards all life that is situated beyond its egotistical view. The destruction of the slaughterhouse can never be accomplished within capitalism because capitalism is by nature always a world where the predatory instinct is sanctified. [emphasis mine]


What this double proletarianization points to, moreover, is that the proletariat consumes itself as it embodies the contradictions of capitalism within its own being. Through sanctioning the factory-farming of animals the industrial ontology of capitalism is itself sanctioned. The unquestioning devouring of meat no matter what sort of productive processes begot it belies an indifference to the very web of life. This is not a question that only intellectuals bother about in mindnumbing tomes that no one but other intellectuals read. The social and natural ecosystems which we are ceaselessly in communion with are becoming even more severed from us than they have ever been, and to blind oneself to their reality is to become a passive receptacle of capitalist civilization. Food cultivation- of both animals and plants- is undergoing a rapid transformation that is adhering increasingly to a nauseatingly capitalist logic. Our complacency with any type of diet is a complacency with the capitalist system- it is only because animals are alive that we place so much emphasis upon veganism and animal liberation.

But it is not our desire to replace meat-factories with colossal rice patties, and veganize the proletariat. To ‘veganize’ the proletariat would be almost to undo the ideology and practice of veganism altogether. It is the factory as an industrial category which we seek to destroy- because only meat, whether human or non-human, is herded into the factory, for the sole sake of one class over another. The insurrection against capitalism is an insurrection against classes, and the movement of communism is ultimately the championing of the individual within a free society. As long as class systems pervade humanity, the mass slaughter and subjugation of animals will always be a fundamentally class-based issue. Communization is the process which disentangles humanity from its countlessly false links and separates those who are willing to inflict pain on fellow beings and those who are not. The animalization of others in a revolutionary world can only be the action of individuals and groups, but within capitalism it is a systematic process that degrades and marks us all.

Update: Apparently PETA has an insidious, bourgeois notion that pets are better off dead than to be kept by poor people.

Man claims PETA stole, killed family pet

 

Update II on speciesism: Plants know when you are eating them, and they don't like it

Chapter V - Infantile Disorders - the Id, the Ego and the Slasher-Psychodrama

The slasher genre has fascinated European audiences since 1897 when the Grand Guignol theature entranced and terrified audiences in Paris.  Some of the best of the early silent films were what could be described as fitting into the slasher genre, including Bluebeard (1901) and the perpetually engrossing, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with its jagged angles and nonparallel lines.  Of course, the slasher genre did not reach the New World until perhaps 1932's Thirteen Women in which a half-Javanese student enlists a swami to lure her tormenters into committing suicide.  Interestingly enough, Peg Entwhistle, a star in Thirteen Women, is said to have committed suicide beneath the Hollywood sign shortly before the films release, adding an element of life (or death) imitating art.

In 1960 British director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho captivated audiences enough to introduce the psychodramatic slasher concept.  It is an intimate portrayal of a serial killer's mental processes, utilizing spacial relations and abnormal deceptions to represent Freudian concepts.  Psycho became perhaps the most influential slasher psychodrama in American film making.  Since then the slasher psychodrama has become an institution in film making exemplified by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John Carpenter's Halloween, the Nightmare on Elm Street series and recently the 2012 film Maniac, directed by Franck Khalfoun.

Slasher psychodramas must be distinguished from the "who dunnit" sub-genre of slasher films exemplified by John Carpenter's Scream, Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, Bob Clark's 1974 holiday classic, Black Christmas and Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983).  These films owe more to Agatha Christie than Alfred Hitchcock.  Here the victims are slain before the motive is know.

In contrast, the slasher psychodrama examines the inner workings of the serial killer's abnormal mind.  Additionally, the identity of the killer is known even before the first act of violence takes place.   Thus, the audience anticipates the violence, without knowing when or where exactly it will come.  These films rely heavily on Freudian theories regarding abnormal psychology.  Generally, the killer's instincts result for an over emphasis on impulses arising from the Id and the Ego, while ignoring the super Ego.

One of the best examples of such Freudian cinema is the 1983, German film Angst.  It is about a narcissistic and sociopathic serial killer who has just been released from prison and his recidivistic exploits that commence immediately upon his release.  An almost constant narration by the monstrous, anti-heroic subject plays throughout the entirety of the film.  The tone of the narration is something like a patient revealing his darkest impulses on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office until the very end when a psychologist offers his own expert opinion via voiceover.  Strong allusions to an Oedipal complex, persecution complex and compulsive narcissism are consistent motifs.

Another excellent example of a film that centers on the Id and Ego while skipping over the Super Ego is the 1977 French film Baxter.  The infantile, morally-bankrupt protagonist of this film is a dog; the title character.  The film is organized around narration from Baxter's perspective as he reveals the inner workings of the canine psyche.  He is given to an elderly woman whom he deems unfit to cater to his whims and thus concocts a plan to orchestrate her untimely demise.  Baxter's infantile, narcissistic impulses are not kept in check by his super Ego as he is merely and literally a beast.

Unfortunately, the socio-ideological effect of slasher psychodramas is that they normalize sociopathic behavior.  The serial killer ceases to be a monster and thus becomes human.  This can be detrimental for the collective psyche of the greater society in two ways.  First, an individual that is already inclined toward anti-social behavior may view these films as an understanding of their condition and thus provide grounds for justification of these impulses.  This is, of course, somewhat of a conservative understanding of the role of entertainment in society, but valid nonetheless.  Second, the gravitas of the pseudo-psychological character of these films may give the innocent viewer an idea that they now understand the so-called "warning signs" of sociopathic tendencies in an erroneously assumed empirical sense.  The may result in the creating of profiling and straw-men or boogey-men.  It could erode a collective trust in the essential goodness, or at least neutrality of strangers' intentions.  The result of this is alienation, obsessive individualism and  again, paradoxically, a justification of anti-social impulses.

It should be kept in mind that the narcissistic character of the slasher is a cultural motif unique to Europe and the USA.  For example, in both the Japanese slasher film Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike and the South Korean love-letter to ultra-violence Fallen Angels, by director Wong Kar Wai, the serial murderers do not kill out of egotistic and infantile impulses, but out of a sense of duty, something that arises from the super Ego.

A critical, Marxian interpretation must be added the the Freudian character of the slasher psychodrama genre.  Marx's concept of alienation, a contribution to the dialogues on what Hegel terms the geist, must here be brought into play.  In the young Marx's 1844 philosophical manuscripts he describes the contradiction of alienation thusly:

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

Mere survival here becomes a privilege that results only from subjugation of the worker to the commodity that is fetishized.  Thus, a worker becomes the servant of the product of her/his own work.  This contradiction creates cognitive dissonance that Freud did not necessarily account for.  A resentment forms between the enslaved creator and the master created.  Thus, the Oedipal complex is corroborated, but not validated.  The product of labor (in the case of Oedipus, the labor of child birth) develops a libidinal desire to dominate the creator.  Adam chooses Eve and the snake over God and is cast out of Eden.  However, the resentment of the objectified product (the offspring or the commodity) is less justifiable than the resentment of the creator (the parent, the god, the worker) against the creation.  Therefore, the Oedipus complex exemplified by the serial killers in slasher-psychodrama films is not to be coddled or pitied.  Conversely, the victims are not to be pitied either as they are complacent in their victimization.  The truly liberating cinema is that in which the victim murders the abuser.  That will be the subject of the next chapter.

Trick or Treat? Horror and the Monster Archetype - Chapter IV: The Religious Horror

The religious horror film is often plays upon binary morality stories: the struggle of good against evil, innocence against experience, and aesthetically - light vs. dark.  These films are related to the ghost films in their obsession with the metaphysical realm, but differ in that morality plays a decisive role, generally.

How is a dialectical materialist to approach such films?  William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist and avowed agnostic, offers a relevant answer in an interview with London's Time Out Magazine:

Even those of us who call ourselves atheists, or think that the whole thing is rubbish, are curious about the mystery of faith. Is there anything to this stuff? “The Exorcist” offers one possible position. While I’m not Catholic, I’m overwhelmed by the idea that a 32-year-old man in a very small part of the world, who never left one word written in his own hand, has affected the lives of trillions of people. I look at the Catholic Church and I see these guys in these far-out costumes with all this gold, and I wonder what it has to do with this young man who went among the people, wore a simple robe and sandals, and healed the sick. But I also wonder how millions of people were willing to give their lives for their belief. And because I wonder, I’m curious about something like “The Exorcist”, which attributes that power to a true belief.’

Additionally, a scientific approach to religiosity has often been the subject of anthropological inquiry.  In the 2013 film the Borderlands an a/v technician, known as Gray, assigned to debunk a supposed miracle asks a priest, known only as Deacon, assigned to the same task about paganism vs. Christianity.  The conversation proceeds thusly:

Gray: The people that came before your lot, right...

Deacon: The pagans.

Gray: Yeah, the pagans or Druids or whatever, the Aztecs.  The believed in stuff that was real.  You know, they had the moon, the sea, the stars the sun.  They had stuff, they worshiped stuff.

Deacon: They didn't know any better.  They were just worshiping what was in front of them.

Gray: No they worshiped what was there, physically there. Whereas you are choosing to believe and worship the great 'what if.'

Deacon: And your point is...?

Gray: My point is, if there was going to be a fight between something that was there and something that wasn't there, I know what side I'd bet on.

Many religious horror films play upon the antagonism between the brutal survivalism of nature and the civilized morality of humanity.  The Lars von Trier film Antichrist certainly plays upon these traditional concepts of the vulnerable nature of women, animals and nature to the base amorality of Satan.

Additionally, one can see such themes manifest when Werner Herzog discusses his departure from the philosophy of peace and harmony in nature of his subject, Timothy Treadwell, in Grizzly Man.  There he describes nature as violence and chaos and points to the evidence of grizzlies eating their young for sustenance, out of desperation, as proof of this paradigm.

Anarchist zoologist Peotyr Kropotkin, however, offers an alternative view of the Darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" in his magnum opus Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.  There he exclaims:

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual Support. In the great struggle for life for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.

In order to for a materialist to exclaim a set of universal ethics, the Judeo-Christian dualism of flesh vs. spirit, or to put it non-theisticly, civilization vs. nature, must be rejected.  Additionally, the doctrine of individualism vs. collectivism plays into this binary.

The lesson of religious horror is that the good are punished, despite doing no wrong.  In this sense, even fundamentalist torture-films like Mel Gibson's evangelical, sycophantic film the Passion of the Christ, can be watched with a subversive, Christian-atheist lens.  That god had forsaken Christ (Matt. 27:46) in his hour of torment is proof either that he does not exist, or that he is not all loving.

The Paranormal Activity series, for example, focuses on the descendants of witches who were tortured by a demon, known only as Toby, which their matriarchal ancestor had promised the first-born male child in their lineage to.  The films do examine the non-nuclear/traditional aspects of the successive generations' families, but it is clear that they are not intentional evil-doers.  Apart from innocent fornication and divorce, they are without sin.  They are middle class and live relatively comfortable lives, until Toby comes into the picture.  Perhaps this too harkens back to Marx and Engle's "spectre of communism", from the Manifesto.  The female descendants are able to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life only at the price of selling their first male progeny to Toby. The prophetic predictions of Marx and Engle's regarding "the spectre of communism" wreaking revenge upon the petite bourgeoisie who had betrayed the proletariat during the French Revolution and thus coming true, one way or another.

Finally, religious horror fascinates us because religiosity is one of the greatest examples of the human imagination at work.  We can invent gods and angels to protect us, but we can also invent demons and witches to betray and torture us.  Freud had this to say about how the demonology of the Puritans served the interests of the moralistic culture in his time and space:

Its insistence on the evil in man’s nature, and in particular on the sexual root of that evil, suited the New England temperament well which had been shaped by a similar Puritan emphasis. In fact, to hear Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the one and two-year-old is to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons on infant damnation.

Interestingly enough, Freud was heavily influenced by fellow German writer Goethe, and especially Faust in which the title character makes a pact with the demon Mephistophiles, in order to woo his loved one.  Freud would have insisted that so-called Satanic impulses result from the Id - the infantile aspect of consciousness. He thus explained the infantile nature of what theists know as evil:

This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any high ethical standard from children.

Freud wrote of the ultimate, real-life ghoul, Adolf Hitler:

The dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was infantilism. It explains the most prominent as well as the strangest of his characteristics and actions. The frequently awesome consistency of his thoughts and behaviour must be seen in conjunction with the stupendous force of his rage, which reduced field marshals to trembling nonentities. If at the age of fifty he built the Danube bridge in Linz down to the last detail exactly as he had designed it at the age of fifteen before the eyes of his astonished boyhood friend, this was not a mark of consistency in a mature man, one who has learned and pondered, criticized and been criticized, but the stubbornness of the child who is aware of nothing except himself and his mental image and to whom time means nothing because childishness has not been broken and forced into the sober give-and-take of the adult world. Hitler’s rage was the uncontrollable fury of the child who bangs the chair because the chair refuses to do as it is told; his dreaded harshness, which nonchalantly sent millions of people to their death, was much closer to the rambling imaginings of a boy than to the iron grasp of a man ..

Here Freud explains how the concept of sin resulted in the creation of the super-ego:

Here too is found the explanation of Original Sin ... It is not our concern to discuss the theological conception here, but psychoanalysis has thrown considerable light on what underlies the conception, The sense of sin comes, we have seen, from the personalisation of the Super-ego at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, by which the wish to destroy the father and possess the mother are mastered in the developing infant. If these wishes had not existed there would have been no need to form the Super-ego and so develop a moral conscience. Thus the precondition of getting a knowledge of good and evil at all is that we have sinned psychologically. A sense of guilt is inherent in our make-up. The original sin is the complex of wishes in the Oedipus Complex which we develop before we have a moral sense, but which remain, in varying degrees of fixation after we have developed that moral sense in dealing with them as dangerous wishes.
  
Certainly, the fear invoked by demonic stories and paradoxically the adrenergic elation from viewing such Satanic horror films can be said to be, in the case of the latter, an activation of the ethical super-ego and in the case of the former, the cognitive dissonance that arises from the activation of our infantile id, which enjoys the macabre, the evil, the sadistic and the taboo.

The Grand Budapest Hotel and cinematic fascism

After meaning to see it since it came out, I finally got around to watching Wes Anderson's the Grand Budapest Hotel.  It inspired some thoughts on Anderson's cinema in general.

Anderson's world is one of beautiful fascism.  Anderson is a totalitarian director. Wes Anderson dictates the picturesque visual style of each shot and uses primarily established actors, which lends a level of gravitas to his films. 

Here, I am reminded of Hitler's interest in symmetry. This fascistic approach to storytelling can be effective (recall that Philip K. Dick, after being solicited by communists, described himself as a fascist in his Exegesis), but is of course a disaster on a macro level (politics, social relations, economics etc.).  But are glorified, fascistic tropes in entertainment necessarily dangerous?  Here is Zizek's response to this question in realtion to the popular, 1990s, German nu-metal band Rammstein:




In Anderson's Grand Budapest, even the fascists, exemplified by Edward Norton's character Henckels, have compassion and humanity.  It is a compassionate, utopian fascism. He depicts France until Nazi fascist occupation as a quaint period worthy of nostalgia.  Jail cells become symmetrical gems whose only objectionable quality is their elegant simplicity.  Legal procedure become a delicate ritual; a brilliant dance that holds lives in the balance. Luxury is celebrated as trickling down even to the servants. Loyalty is prized over everything, even (and potentially especially) at the detriment to the loyal individual.

I am curious how Wes Anderson would depict Spain during the war against Franco.  Certainly, he would find more beauty amongst the manure than Fernando Arrabal did in Viva La Muerte and would probably even erase the pain of the period more than Guierrmo Del Toro did in the Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.

Recall Salvador Dali's unusual relationship with Franco during this period.  According to Counterpunch:

He made explicit and known his admiration for the figure and writing of the founder of the Spanish fascist party (La Falange), José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and used in his speeches and writings the fascist narrative and expressions (such as the fascist call “Arriba España”), referring to the special role Spain had in promoting the imperial dreams over other nations.  He sympathized with the anti-Semitic views of Hitler and celebrated Franco’s alliance with Hitler and Mussolini against France, Great Britain and the United States.  He also welcomed the “solution to the national problem” in vogue in Nazi and fascist circles at that time.

Dali became the major defender of the Franco dictatorship in the artistic world.  He was also, as Spanish fascism was, very close to the Church and to the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, indicating that modern art needed to be based on Christianity.  His loyalty to the fascist dictatorship continued to the very end, defending the state terrorist policies that included political assassinations, even in the last moments of that dictatorship.  A few months before dying, Franco signed death warrants of five political prisoners, which created an international uproar of protest.  Dali defended Franco’s execution orders, indicating that many more death sentences should have been signed by the generalissimo, to whom he referred as “the greatest hero of Spain”.  Franco is the Spanish figure who has killed more Spaniards in Spanish history, (120,000 of them are still disappeared with no knowledge of where they are buried)

Anderson's films, exemplified by the Royal Tennenbaums and especially the Grand Budapest Hotel (the Fantastic Mister Fox and maybe even Rushmore may present exceptions as they appear to be somewhat class consious), would have been denounced in the USSR under Stalin as bourgeois decadence, in favor of the rugged, worker-centric cinema of Eisenstein and his socialist realist comrades.  However, his insistence upon elegant totalitarianism is not to be dismissed.  He creates beautiful pieces of artistic cinema, but this may be a danger to the freedom of the proletariat.  I cautiously admire Anderson's work.  I hope he never becomes a politician, but he can continue to be an artist.

Hollywood Remakes Represent Regressive Ideology

I recently saw the original version of the Wicker Man (1973) and was reminded of something Zizek had written about the ideologically regressive nature of Hollywood remakes.  In Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline he describes the ideological trajectory of three adaptations of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend thusly:

The gradual ideological regression can be observed here at its clinical purest. The main shift (between first and second cinema version) is registered in the radical change in the meaning of the title: the original paradox (the hero is now the legend for vampires, as once vampires were for humanity) gets lost, so that, in the last version, the hero is simply the legend for the surviving humans in Vermont. What gets obliterated in this change is the authentically “multicultural” experience rendered by the title’s original meaning, the experience of how one’s own tradition is no better than what appears to us as the “eccentric” traditions of others, the experience nicely formulated by Descartes who, in his Discourse of Method, wrote how, in the course of his travels, he recognized that “all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.” The irony is that this dimension disappears precisely in our era in which multicultural tolerance is elevated into official ideology. 

Such ideological regression can also be seen in the two versions of the Wicker Man.  The first version is a commentary on the cultural and societal changes that took place in the late sixties and the resistance from the old-guard status-quo.  In the first version the police officer is an interloper in a neo-Pagan, Dionysian utopia.  He is a devout Christian and struggles with the hedonistic nature of the Summerisle society.  

In the 2006 remake Nicholas Cage (who is always awful in whatever he is in) plays the police officer who finds himself an interloper in a matriarchal/radical-feminist utopia where the men are demoted to the status of obedient servants.

In the original, 1973 version we are to revile the uptight cop who sticks his nose where it doesn't belong and gets what's coming to him in the end.  In the 2006 version we are to pity  Nick Cage's character as a victim of feminine seduction and, in the end, feminism gone wrong.  This is clearly an ideologically regressive trajectory.

Another example is the J. J. Abrams bastardization of the Star Trek franchise. This version of the Star Trek universe is far from the vision of anti-racist, anti-sexist, socialist harmony that Gene Roddenberry established in the original series and the Next Generation. What's more, Abrams has turned the characters into caricatures in the worst possible way.

Hollywood.com writer Christian Blauvelt described the regression quite elegantly in a recent article reviewing why Trekkies recently voted Into Darkness the worst Star Trek movies:

...Uhura's a Less Progressive Character in 2013 Than She Was in 1966

When Star Trek first aired, Nichelle Nichols' Uhura was a competent professional who was defined by her intelligence, her skills, and the ambition that saw her serve aboard the bridge of a major Federation vessel. By Star Trek Into Darkness, however, Zoe Saldana's Uhura is defined entirely by her romance for Spock. Not to mention that unlike most other incarnations of Trek, Into Darkness doesn't even pass the Bechdel Test.

For those that don't know what the Bechdel Test is, here's a little video for explanation.

Pretty simple basic criteria:

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

To close, I'd like to demonstrate the emancipatory nature of Star Trek:

 Click here for more information on Star Trek and communism. 

Scientific Socialism

Marxism is a science, based upon a scientific method.  It is also an ideology, but only until the ideology is rendered irrelevant by material conditions.  Until now Marx's critique of capitalism has not been rendered irrelevant.  Capitalist apologists have not been able to prove that the warnings in Kapital have not come true.  Inequality, crisis and violence continue to be aspects of the capitalist mode of production.  Ye, Marxism is all the more relevant today as Climate Crisis approaches a critical stage and the reactionaries continue to insist on a revisionist conceptualization of environmental science that does not rely upon empirical evidence.  Clearly, green capitalism is not sufficient to rescue the planet from extremely corporeal global catastrophe.  Of course, the reactionary profits will warn that any attempt at planned economy will result in totalitarian disaster. 'Just look at the Soviet Union under Stalin, or China under Mao!'  Certainly, these individuals orchestrated what they knew would be disasters.

Those who would insist that these individuals knowingly created the conditions that would lead to famine and starvation give these individuals more credit as agents with the ability to steer the course of history than I would.  Mao apologized for his role in the Great Famines in China.  He said that his had about a 20% role in the famines through mismanagement of the economy and the rest was nature.  Stalin of course, never made such an apology, but he was, of course, the "Man of Steel."

Admitting mistakes is a sign of political maturity.  Castro apologized for jailing LGBT folk.  A socialist leader sees themselves not as a god-king in the Egyptian sense, but as an agent of history, and perhaps even an experimental political scientist.

The WWII period was a politically experimental time.  Industrial capitalism had reached a critical point, and there were variations in the way the major players reacted to it.  In USSR they had a proletarian revolution, and the cult-of-personality of Stalinism prevailed.  This was a mixed blessing.  On one hand, USSR had an authoritarian leadership that suppressed counter-revolutionary activity.  On the other, collectivization and the uplifting of the Soviet economy was a priority.  In Germany, Italy and Japan these themes presented themselves as fascist appropriations of leftist-populist rhetoric combined with capitalist ruthlessness and insistence on efficiency and profit.  In the capitalist Republics of UK and USA the pressure from the proletarian dictatorship of USSR manifested itself as a strengthened welfare state.  For a time, these nations united against the common, fascist enemy, but not long after the war they became engaged in a ruthless cold war.

Much of the experimentation was done for us in this period.  We found that fascism and welfare capitalism eventually devolve into disaster.  The authoritarian socialism of Stalin may have been extreme.  He may have tried to collectivize the economy to fast.  Socialism in one country may have been an unrealistic insistence.  But a successful revolution redeems all previous failed ones.  Next time we won't make the same mistakes.  The scientific method insists that we must revise our hypothesis for differing conditions (this is not, or course, an endorsement of Kruschevian revisionism).  The USSR went from agrarian late-feudalism to industrial socialism in a very short period of time.  This was a triumph for socialism and for the Russian people.  For them to regress back to capitalism was a disaster, but it would not have been possible except for the proletarian revolution of 1917.  Let us learn from the past and move forward with strategy in mind and with winning as the goal.