Northeast Marxist School Points The Way Forward

This article originally appeared at Fightback and In Defence of Marxism.

Over 50 comrades attended the second annual Northeast Marxist School in Montreal last weekend. Organized by supporters of La Riposte Quebec, Fightback Canada and Socialist Appeal USA, the school was a resounding success that saw a 30% rise in attendance from the previous year. Comrades from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, New York and New Jersey enjoyed two days of vibrant political discussion and revolutionary socials.

The most important lesson of the weekend was the pressing need for a revolutionary tendency with correct Marxist ideas to help the working class achieve its emancipation. This year’s sharp increase in attendance is a reflection of the revolutionary epoch we have entered.

Since last year’s school, which took place in the immediate wake of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, we have witnessed the wider Arab Spring, pre-revolutionary turmoil in Greece, and massive protest movements around the globe including the Spanish indignados, the Occupy movement and the anti-Putin protests in Russia. The inability of ruling classes to resolve the contradictions of capitalism have led to a global impasse. More and more workers and youth are turning to the ideas of Marxism in order to explain the world we live in and to present a viable alternative.

Arriving on Friday night to a social at the Jazz Hostel, comrades awoke early Saturday morning for a veritable two-day Marx-a-thon. Alex Grant from Fightback’s editorial board delivered the opening presentation, “Perspectives on the World Capitalist Crisis”, which briefly covered the broad historical movements of 20th century capitalism – its boom and bust periods, its contradictions leading to wars and revolutions – as a background for the new crisis we find ourselves in today.

The mass movements in the Arab world, Europe, Africa and North America illustrate that we have entered a tumultuous new period. The presence of all the objective factors for revolution is contrasted by the lack of an organized revolutionary tendency to harness the energy of the working class. If not addressed, this contradiction will play a tragic role in future developments.

Time limits prevented inclusion of some key topics in the lead-off, such as Latin America, but comrades in attendance were more than happy to fill in the blanks and provide their own perspectives during the subsequent discussion period. This was to be a recurring pattern throughout the weekend, as each participant drew upon their individual knowledge to raise the theoretical level of all.

After lunch, Camilo Cahis gave a lead-off on “Lessons of the Spanish Revolution”, a crucial struggle of the interwar period rife with lessons for today’s revolutionaries. The involvement of so many political tendencies in this struggle from 1931-1938 – Marxists, Stalinists, centrists, liberals, anarchists, fascists, conservative nationalists – renders study of the Spanish Revolution an indispensable primer on how the interaction of objective and subjective factors can make or break a workers’ revolution. Not coincidentally, Fightback just released a new booklet reprinting works of Leon Trotsky, Pierre Broué, and Ted Grant on the Spanish Revolution. These booklets were eagerly snapped up by attendees seeking more information.

The last session of the day was “The History of Marxist Organizing”, with Tom Trottier discussing the development of Trotskyist tendencies in the United States and Britain. He examined the strengths and weaknesses of prominent American Trotskyists, particularly James P. Cannon, and how the inability of the leaders of the Fourth International to absorb Trotsky’s method after his death led to a series of splits and muddled opportunistic positions in the ensuing decades.

Tom’s parallel history of the Militant tendency in Britain made the case that Ted Grant had a superior grasp of the Marxist method in his approach to organization and theory. Unfortunately, Militant was not immune to errors or objective factors that led to its eventual split. The importance of these lessons in building a new revolutionary tendency can be found in the old cliché that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

As Saturday drew to a close, comrades adjourned to the Jazz Hostel for that night’s social. Despite the ostensible goal of unwinding after a long day, the quality of the presentations fuelled many in-depth political discussions over beer that evening, and a splendid time was had by all.

Refreshed comrades returned the next day to hear Mark Rahman from the US Workers’ International League give a presentation about “The Minneapolis Teamster Rebellion of 1934”, a pivotal Depression-era struggle that saw American Trotskyists play a key organizational role.

Joel Bergman from La Riposte (Quebec) gave a final presentation on Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism, a compilation of letters and essays the “Old Man” wrote to his American followers in the 1930s. One of the most important lessons comrades absorbed was Trotsky’s use of the proper Marxist method. Unlike the Stalinists and sectarians who attempt to resolve political differences through organizational means such as expulsions, Lenin and Trotsky always attempted to use every dispute as a means of raising the general political level of the cadres.

The comrades capped off the weekend with raucous renditions of “The Internationale” and “Bandiera Rossa”. As the weekend school ended, enthusiasm among attendees was palpable. For the first time in decades, Marxists are no longer swimming against the tide. Not only do Marxist ideas make sense of current events – far more so than the confused commentary of the bourgeois media – but workers and youth are eager to hear them, as the Northeast school demonstrated.

The current crisis of capitalism is not going away anytime soon. In the absence of an organized revolutionary tendency, the capitalist system will continue to cause unspeakable horror and misery for the vast majority of the human race. Development of this subjective factor must be the primary focus for all Marxists going forward. This school played an important role in this development and helped build unity between revolutionaries in Quebec, Canada, and the United States.

Workers and Hustlers: Conservative Ideology in the Film "Cocktail"

This essay was originally published at The Mass Ornament. Spoilers abound.

The reactionary turn of U.S. politics embodied in the Reagan administration had an indelible impact on American popular culture, both in the 1980s and the decades that followed. As David Sirota argued in his book Back to Our Future, contemporary historiography blamed the unrest of the Sixties on the supposed liberal excesses of hippies and the counterculture, the antiwar movement, black civil rights activists, and the welfare state. These were to be remedied by a strong dose of conservatism, aiming to resurrect a mythical version of the Fifties. The New Right celebrated so-called traditional American values: patriotism, militarism, Christianity, the family, and – most importantly – free enterprise.

In reality, non-economic elements in the New Right’s worldview were always peripheral to the centrality of a revived neoliberal capitalism. Monetarist thinkers like Milton Friedman argued that the unfettered free market was the most efficient allocator of resources. Outside of the state security apparatus, government could only interfere in this self-regulating process. There was nothing new about these economic ideas, which merely rehashed pre-Depression shibboleths about the self-correcting market.

Right-wing political figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher soon institutionalized monetarism through radical programs of deregulation, privatization, aggressive attacks on unions and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Such blatant anti-worker policies – the real core of neo-conservative ideology – were justified through a political smoke screen that lauded patriotism, individualism and self-reliance. Anyone, it was claimed, could become rich and successful if they worked hard enough.

Roger Donaldson’s 1988 film Cocktail, produced near the end of Reagan’s second term, embodies the worship of naked capitalism that characterized the 1980s – a decade that completely missed the irony in Gordon Gekko’s infamous declaration that “greed is good.”

The story of young bartender Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Cocktail mythologizes the self-made entrepreneur at the root of the neoliberal ideology that dominates mainstream culture to this day. But even as it extols the glories of wealth and free market capitalism, the film has an ambivalent relationship to the working class.

In Marxist terms, Cocktail documents Brian’s journey from proletarian to petit-bourgeois. Beginning as the humble bartender of a low-rent New York City tavern, Brian dreams of wealth and fame. By the end of the film he realizes his goal, opening his own bar (appropriately called “Flanagan’s Cocktails and Dreams”) and becoming a successful small business owner. While he has not turned the bar into a nationwide franchise and joined the ranks of the big bourgeoisie, Brian is nevertheless pushed much further along the road to this dream than he would be if the film maintained any connection to economic reality.

Above: Cocktail’s version of working-class stiffs.

At the same time as Cocktail pretends to identify with ordinary workers, it revels in the same ruling class worldview that ridicules the working class as unsuccessful losers. This paradox is encapsulated in a diatribe by Brian’s world-weary mentor, Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown), upon re-encountering his protégé at a bar in Jamaica:

Doug: Biology is destiny [...] There are two kinds of people in this world, the workers and the hustlers. The hustlers never work and the workers never hustle. You, my friend, are a worker [...] It’s there, ingrained in your immigrant blood. Look how tasty your cocktails are, how clean you keep your bar. Why man, you actually take pride in your work.

Brian: I do not.

Doug: Is he or isn’t he a great bartender?

Brian: Listen bozo, if you think I’m stuck in this gig…

Doug: Face it, you’re a career proletarian. You’ve been standing in a puddle so long you’ve got wet feet.

That dichotomy – of celebrating ordinary workers in theory while belittling them in practice – is the bread and butter of the modern conservative movement. The contradiction is expressed in the self-loathing of many working class conservatives: Brian sees blue collar work as an embarrassing way to make a living, a placeholder until he can gain respect through the acquisition of vast riches.

While income inequality is acknowledged in the film, the question is never how to achieve a more equitable distribution of society’s wealth, but rather how the characters can enrich themselves. Brian and Doug maintain self-respect only by viewing themselves as better than the rest of the working class, destined by virtue of their talents and their profession to rise above the rabble and one day join the ranks of the Manhattan bourgeoisie:

Doug: Within one square mile of this saloon lies the greatest concentration of wealth in the world.

Brian: Yes, but how is a bartender going to get his hands on any of it?

Doug: A bartender is the aristocrat of the working class. You can make all kinds of moves if you’re smart. There are investors out there, there are angels, there are suckers, there are rich women with nothing to do with their money. You stand in this bar and you can be struck by lightning.

Brian’s attitude reflects the class contradictions at the heart of modern conservative ideology, recently exposed in the Republican presidential primaries. At the time of writing, the class dynamics of the primaries have thus far resulted in a standoff between blue-blood Mitt Romney, quintessential representative of the moneyed Establishment, and his rivals, equally beholden to the bourgeoisie but who nevertheless claim to speak for “populist” conservatives (a contradiction in terms).

The heroic figures of popular entertainment in recent decades typically draw upon conservative tropes, regularly seen in action films and today informing the Fox News conception of “real Americans” as distinct from “liberal elites”, that inculcate ruling class ideology into unsuspecting audience members by paradoxically identifying that ideology with the common man. Such indoctrination plays upon crude political stereotypes typically advanced by right-wing culture warriors.

The conservative is often portrayed as a hardworking, down-to-earth regular guy, preferably from the rural heartland of America – religious, patriotic, supportive of the military, interested in cars, sports, girls, and rock ‘n’ roll, socially conservative. Beverage of choice: beer.

By contrast, the liberal is seen as an effete, city-dwelling elitist – secular, leftist, “America-hating”, educated, antiwar, socially liberal. Beverage of choice: wine and lattes.

The 1980s particularly revelled in this contrived image of conservative manhood, represented in music by Bruce Springsteen (despite the fact that Springsteen himself was a stalwart defender of progressive causes and opponent of Reaganism) as well as on film through the larger-than-life action pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. Cocktail draws heavily on this idealized conservative masculinity.

At the beginning of the film, as Starship’s pop-rock anthem “Wild Again” blares on the soundtrack, the Cruise character speeds down a rural highway with his fellow soldiers in a car festooned with American flags, chasing the Greyhound bus that will take him to New York.

It is established that Brian has recently been discharged from the army. Although the particulars are vague, his military past nevertheless permits him to occupy the moral high ground as a patriotic “real American”. No contemporary U.S. military conflicts, such as the invasion of Grenada, are specifically mentioned. But this badge of patriotism, identified with the military, allows Brian to challenge his uncle: “Your nephew comes home from serving his country and he doesn’t even rate a beer on the house?”

Upon his arrival in New York, Brian immediately stops off at a bar owned by his Uncle Pat (Ron Dean), who gives him an impromptu lecture on how to become a successful capitalist. Uncle Pat relates how the Mets won the 1969 World Series. When a patron named Eddie suggested free drinks to celebrate, Pat gave him a violent lesson in the spirit of free enterprise:

Eddie: He whacked me with a club. Almost knocked the eyes out of my head.

Brian: That’s your way of making money?

Uncle Pat: You outwork, outthink, outscheme and outmaneuver. You make no friends. You trust nobody. And you make damn sure you’re the smartest guy in the room whenever the subject of money comes up.

Brian: I don’t know, Uncle Pat. Doesn’t sound like too much fun to me.

Pat: Fun? You want fun, you go play at the beach.

As the film continues, it becomes clear that this mentality of ruthless capitalism offers no capacity for human warmth. While Brian and Doug imagine creating their own bar together, their friendship is soon torn apart by vicious competition – not over money, but over a woman.

Brian initially has dreams of making it big on Wall Street – at one point, writing his imaginary obituary for a class assignment, he envisions the following ideal future for himself in a narrative that repositions pre-Depression oligarchs as Randian heroes:

Brian: Brian Flanagan…Senator Brian Flanagan…billionaire governor Brian Flanagan, whose self-propelled meteoric rise to wealth and fame would have made even J.D. Rockefeller envious, died early yesterday morning at the age of 99 while bedding his 18-year-old seventh wife Heidi, who is recovering from exhaustion at the local hospital and will be unable to attend the funeral.

However, through a series of unsuccessful job interviews, he finds that in the Land of Opportunity, there are no such opportunities even for a young go-getter like himself in the absence of a college degree:

Brian: I’m willing to start at the bottom.

Job Interviewer: You’re aiming too high.

As a result, Brian enrols in some business courses and soon finds himself held captive by a monstrous caricature of a professor who delights in verbally abusing and humiliating his students.

The highly negative portrayal of educators in this film reflects the broader anti-intellectualism of the conservative movement. Just as Marxists, university professors, climate scientists and other opponents of the conservative agenda tend to be smeared as “liberal” elitists out of touch with the real world, Brian responds to his professor’s description of him as a “dreamer who can’t take the criticism” by attacking the snooty, mean-spirited academic as someone who “hides here because he can’t hack it in the real world.”

Later, Brian confides to Doug that “not a goddamn thing any one of those professors says makes a difference on the street”, further driving home the irrelevance of higher education. At one point, an English professor tells his class, “I realize I’ve got a class of budding capitalists here, that most of you are seeking the fast track to a career in investment banking or some other socially useful pursuit.” Viewed from the age of credit default swaps, massive financial fraud and government bailouts, it remains unclear whether the teacher is serious or not.

The young hero dreams of franchising his own bar to every suburban mall in America. By becoming the CEO of such a vast enterprise, Brian would ascend at last into the ranks of the big bourgeoisie – the ultra-rich, those who fundamentally control the wealth of society. But that dream is belied by his mundane existence as a member of the proletariat, selling his labour-power to an employer for a paltry wage.

Rejected by Wall Street, Brian finds work at Doug Coughlin’s bar. Although a horrible bartender at first, Brian learns quickly from Doug a myriad of impressive bartending tricks (“flairing”) which they use to entertain customers. Soon the pair is a hit, attracting rave notices from bar patrons evidently unperturbed by having to wait an extra five minutes for drinks while Brian and Doug execute their flashy moves. A successful-looking businessman invites the pair to perform at his own club, where the “World’s First Yuppie Poet” delivers his poem entitled The Bottom Line:

Money isn’t everything, they say.
Okay, so what is? Sex? Did you ever make love to a plumber? Pee-yoo!
Revolution? It takes money to overthrow the government, you know.
Art? The more it costs, the better it is.
And that’s the bottom line!

The moral of the yuppie poem: money is everything.

At this point in the film, Brian seems to be following the outline of the archetypal American success story: starting from difficult origins, he works hard and develops his talent to become one of the best bartenders in the city, becoming a minor celebrity. But following plot machinations revolving around Brian and Doug’s quarrel over the aforementioned groupie, the pair come to blows and Brian storms out.

The difficulties in Brian’s efforts to realize his dream up to this point provide some sense of conflict and drama, making the film more relatable to those audience members not currently living out their own dreams. Brian leaves for Jamaica, glorified as a no-tax capitalist paradise where he can earn enough money to one day finance his own establishment.

Working at a bar in Jamaica, Brian meets his eventual love interest Jordan Mooney (Elizabeth Shue). Taking a seat at the bar, she turns down Brian’s offer of a fancy mixed drink and requests a beer; “my kind of woman,” he responds. Given the popular view of beer as a working class drink, Jordan thereby establishes herself as a down-to-earth working girl, someone who shares Brian’s own economic struggles. That perception is later reinforced when Jordan paints Brian’s portrait on the beach. Asking her if it pays the bills, she replies that “it will someday,”, explaining that she currently works as a waitress in New York.

Doug eventually shows up at the bar where Brian is working and announces that he has married a rich woman named Kerry (Kelly Lynch), engendering a new plot twist. Angered by Doug teasing him as a “career proletarian”, Brian implies that Doug only found a rich woman through luck. Doug, declaring it a matter of not luck but skill, bets Brian that he cannot successfully woo a rich older woman named Bonnie (Lisa Banes).

To summarize the next few plot developments: Brian beds Bonnie; Jordan finds out and flies back to New York, devastated after spending several romantic days with Brian; Brian flies back to New York with Bonnie in the expectation that he will be placed high in the company she owns due to their romantic attachment.

Unfortunately, the payoff is too slow. Almost immediately there is a culture clash between the working class Brian and the spoiled upper-class Bonnie. Upon waking up to Bonnie doing aerobics, Brian’s would-be sugar mama asks him to fetch her some carrot juice. When they attend an art exhibition, a drunk Brian gets in a fight with the sculptor who is depicted as an insufferable snob (“haven’t got this one housebroken yet?” he sneers). Finally, Brian and Bonnie part; as he confides to her, “I tried to sell out to you, but I couldn’t close the deal.”

Again, we see the film’s contradictory relationship to wealth. At the same time as Brian aspires to great riches and both he and Doug see sleeping with moneyed women as a shortcut, the wealthy are presented as alien to ordinary “working Joes” like Brian – they are snobby elitists. This is the same inescapable contradiction of Reaganism, which has dominated conservative thought in North America to this day: glorifying wealth on one hand as the fulfillment and embodiment of the American dream, and on the other harnessing the resentment of poor and working class Americans against upper-class elites when it is politically advantageous. Under a capitalist mode of production, this contradiction can never truly be resolved.

Brian seeks out Jordan at the restaurant where she waits tables. As they are talking, an impatient couple loudly complains: “Miss, we have theatre tickets!” We are meant to empathize with the working class Jordan and Brian, and to resent these clueless bourgeois types.

But then comes a new plot twist: when Jordan runs off to stay with her parents in their Park Avenue apartment, it becomes clear that even as she maintained a working class facade, in actual fact Jordan was from an extraordinarily wealthy family the whole time.

Aside from cheapening the earlier presentation of Jordan as a struggling waitress – since it is merely her personal choice rather than a necessity and she can always fall back on her parents – this revelation allows the film to make a detour into clichéd cinematic territory, to wit: the rich girl’s parents disapprove of her relationship with the poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

It should be noted that when Jordan announces to Brian that she is pregnant and wants him out of her life, abortion is never even considered – another mark of the conservative mentality that dominates this film. It also adds a family-values element to Brian’s determination to win her back: “our kid needs a father,” he tells her.

Jordan’s father (Lawrence Luckinbill) angrily offers Brian money to stay away from her, and when he refuses, adds some upper class condescension to further express his disapproval:

Brian: $10,000? Is that all your daughter’s worth?

Mr. Mooney: Okay. How much will it take?

Brian: I don’t want your goddamn money. You can’t buy me out of Jordan’s life.

Mr. Mooney: You think I’m letting some bartender walk into my family and destroy my daughter’s life?

When Jordan enters the room, he confronts her:

Brian: Were you so honest? Why didn’t you tell me you were the original rich chick?

Jordan: Because you’re so hung up on money, I was afraid I’d never know how you really felt about me. Me.

Brian [ripping up cheque]: This is how hung up on money I am.

The scene is meant to represent a significant turning point in Brian’s character arc, as he realizes that money and wealth are not the most important things in the world, and that love is truly all you need. But as we shall see in the ending, this proves to be an extremely hollow sentiment that the film itself does not live up to.

Meanwhile, Doug’s world has been slowly unravelling. While we saw from her first scene that Doug’s rich wife Kerry blatantly flirts with other men in his presence, by the climax of the film things have gone from bad to worse. Having lost a bet that he would not be working for Doug by St. Patrick’s Day, Brian brings him a bottle of highly expensive Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac / Baccarat Crystal. (Where Brian got the money for such an expensive gift remains a mystery, but mysterious sources of income prove a recurring problem in the film’s climax.) As they sit in Kerry’s yacht to share the bottle, Doug confides to Brian that he has gambled away almost all of his wife’s money on the commodities market.

With Doug too drunk to drive, Brian escorts Kerry home, at which point she kisses him. When he backs away, she asks how she can sleep with only one person for the rest of her life (“it’s called marriage” he responds, echoing the family values theme). Returning to the yacht, Brian is devastated to see that Doug has committed suicide using shards of the broken cognac bottle.

The context and method of Doug’s suicide seem to provide a vivid metaphor indicating that his single-minded obsession with wealth killed him in the end. Certainly, without Doug’s financially-motivated marriage to Kerry, he never would have been in a position either to gamble away enough money on the commodities market to want to kill himself or to offer Brian a job, which was the basis for the bet in the first place. Doug’s suicide drives Brian back to Jordan.

Soon after, we see Brian and Jordan enjoying their wedding reception at Uncle Pat’s pub in a raucous working class celebration. Jordan, we have seen, has closed off any assistance from her wealthy family. Brian has lost the immediate possibility of a high-earning job. Nevertheless, the two are getting married and starting a family. Brian is no closer to his capitalist dream than when the film began, but he is happy. He has matured and is ready to become a father. Most significantly, he has realized that love is more important to him than money could ever be. It is a poignant reminder that while we may not achieve our dreams of wealth and fame, we can still find happiness with the ones we love.

The film then proceeds to take that message and blow it to kingdom come.

Suddenly we cut to the flashing neon exterior of a bar. It is “Flanagan’s Cocktails and Dreams.” Inside is Brian, pouring drinks and reciting a poem to the patrons about his lovely wife and their unborn child. Brian has done it after all! He did manage to start his own bar and attain his dream. If not yet the bourgeois head of a nationwide bar franchise, he is nevertheless a successful petit-bourgeois small business owner who could very well be on his way to vast riches some day.

The only problem? There is little to no explanation of how Brian scraped together the money to start his own bar smack-dab in the middle of the world’s most expensive real estate market.

In his review of Cocktail, Roger Ebert pondered the question:

How did he finance it? There’s a throwaway line about how he got some money from his uncle, a subsistence-level bartender who can’t even afford a late-model car. Sure. It costs a fortune to open a slick singles bar in Manhattan, and so we are left with the assumption that Cruise’s rich father-in-law came through with the financing. If the movie didn’t want to leave that impression, it shouldn’t have ended with the scene in the bar. But then this is the kind of movie that uses Cruise’s materialism as a target all through the story and then rewards him for it at the end. The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Ultimately, the film is guilty of the same kind of magical thinking that animates the modern conservative movement. Just as advocates of supply-side economics maintain that it is somehow possible to cut taxes and dramatically increase military spending while balancing the budget, Cocktail holds that a down-on-his-luck bartender, whose wife is pregnant with twins but who has “saved money” and worked out a loan with his (by no means rich) uncle, can end up running his own classy singles bar in downtown Manhattan.

Drenched in the imagery and discourse of Reaganism, Cocktail’s presentation of the hero’s transition from hardscrabble worker to successful business owner is ultimately as false and meaningless as the American Dream itself in capitalist society. Given the much more adverse economic conditions of 2012, and the large-scale immunity of political and financial elites from criminal prosecution, the old cliché that anyone can become rich and successful in America if they work hard and play by the rules today rings more hollow than ever.

Had it not been for the ending, Cocktail might have remained a satisfactory parable, à la It’s a Wonderful Life, of failing to achieve your dreams but finding happiness nonetheless. In the final product, however, Brian achieves his dream almost as an afterthought barely tethered to the plot developments that preceded it. More than any other aspect of the film, that unearned and unrealistic ending illustrates the superficiality of the film itself, the decade from which it came, and conservative politics in general. It also gives further credence to George Carlin’s immortal observation: “they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Marxism, Ideology and Media "Objectivity"

"Having an ideology is not a sin but a sign of principles."

- Julian Benson

Marxism, like any analysis, assembles the available facts, draws connections, notes contradictions and tries to recognize patterns. But I would argue that as an analytical method, it is more rigorous than most.

One of the greatest myths of establishment media is that it is somehow objective. No one can be objective when unique life experiences inevitably shape and influence our views, yet corporate media figures continue to proclaim their status as "objective journalists" when they are anything but. Media bias is a common complaint from all ends of the political spectrum. The logical fallacy lies in the belief that media can ever be truly objective.

What do you think of as "objective" media? Probably what's in the newspapers, right? The Associated Press. I read AP stories every day. On one hand, it provides the blandest possible account of the relevant facts. On the other, there are scores of hidden biases surrounding each story that the reader rarely dwells upon. Why are they reporting on this story instead of that one? Why do they give more weight to official sources in our country than in the designated "enemy" country? Why are they painting this guy as the good guy and the other as the bad guy?

Our newspapers talk about human rights abuses in China or in Russia or Iran. Our politicians, they say, are so very concerned about human rights. But they never habitually mention the human rights abuses of our own governments as they do in stories about China or Iran. They don't talk about the disastrous effects of our wars of aggression or CIA torture camps.

Even so, the facts eventually get out. It's no big secret, the information is out there. Everybody knows the Iraq War was based on lies. People knew about the firebombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima. The question is why people accept these things. We're told by politicians, by the media, that state crimes were either necessary (in the case of destructive large-scale military actions) or aberrations (such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse). And then we move on. The message is clear: we're still fundamentally good people and our governments represent us.


We might have political disagreements with our fellow citizens. The liberal point of view criticizes the excesses of big business, but never seriously challenges it. The conservatives worship big business, or want to reverse history and go back to a utopia of small businesses (libertarians). But this is the spectrum of acceptable political thought in the United States.

In America you can go pretty much as far right as you want, so long as you're not an actual fascist, neo-Nazi or KKK. Fox News will demonize liberals (which basically translates to "not conservative"), but otherwise you're pretty solidly in the mainstream. Social democrat - discouraged but tolerable. Socialist...hmm, okay, you're getting a little out there. You might even be "destroying America". But full-on Marxist? You're kidding! Are you crazy? Don't you know that communism doesn't work? "Everyone tells me that communism is evil, and after reading The Communist Manifesto once that's enough for me!"

It doesn't matter to such individuals if Karl Marx produced the most detailed analysis of the capitalist mode of production ever written. In terms of how he changed the way we look at ourselves, I can only compare him to Charles Darwin. Darwin revolutionized the way we looked at the natural development of species, including the evolution of humans. Marx revolutionized how we looked at the historical development of humanity and the evolution of societies.

We live in a capitalist economy. Everyone knows that, but Marxists think outside the box (as do anarchists, the Zeitgeist Movement and other anti-capitalists, though I would argue Marxism provides a superior theoretical framework). Mainstream economists are great at explaining what went wrong after the fact, not so great at predicting the future. The more successful ones are those who can keep the boom cycle going. People like Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan. These economists win Nobel Prizes. When capitalism is in a boom period, they're feted as the Masters of the Universe.

But in an economic crisis, suddenly, there's nothing they can do. They're helpless to provide any solutions to the problems of capitalism within the framework of the current system. Unemployment in the United States today is a national emergency. So is the wave of home foreclosures. But this is not a priority of the government, which is all about more war and lower corporate taxes while somehow cutting the deficit and paying back the bankers. It's insane, and the inevitable result of such insane policies is that the debt has to be paid off on the backs of workers through massive cuts and layoffs.

You won't hear that explicit view in the mainstream media. They don't provide any real solutions to the crisis. This is the central contradiction in class society: between the desires of the masses and the desire of a tiny elite. And you never hear about it in ruling class media, at least until the Occupy movement forced the issue.


You will hear it in Marxist tracts. And yet somehow, the Marxists are criticized for not being objective? The so-called "objective" news sources can't paint an objective picture of how the world economy really works?

I make no pretensions to objectivity. As a Marxist, I advocate a specific point of view: for the interests of the working class. And those interests are very concrete: good housing, well-paying jobs, education, pensions, health care, free time and yes, consumer goods. Doesn't everybody want these things?

Yet workers more and more have to fight to fulfill those basic needs, because under the wage system, they are a) always at the mercy of their employers, b) shortchanged in pay which accrues as profit to the capitalist, and c) far more likely to suffer in an economic downturn.

If I link to an article from the International Marxist Tendency, I do not claim it to be "objective". I merely think it correct from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism.

People need to get past the view that ideology is bad, because there is a sharp difference between merely having an ideology and being an ideologue.

A Century of Global Class Struggle

During a recent debate, an American libertarian informed me in no uncertain terms that "even when their lives are crumbling, workers have never banded together globally."

However, a cursory examination of the past century indicates certain periods are more conducive to revolutionary sentiment around the world:

1917-1923

• Successful socialist revolution in Russia (October 1917) leads to short-lived Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria
• Workers' councils take control in Germany (November 1918) and force an end to World War I
• Egyptian Revolution of 1919 leads to Britain recognizing independence in 1922
• Mexican Revolution ends with victory of social democratic forces
• Irish War of Independence (1918-1921) against British rule
• Revolutionary conditions in Italy with mass strikes, factory occupations, and rule by workers' councils that led to the Fascists taking power to crush the labor movement
• First Red Scare in the United States (1919-1920). Authorities were very seriously afraid of revolution after labor unrest such as the Seattle General Strike, resulting in the Palmer Raids to arrest and deport radical leftists
• Winnipeg General Strike (1919) in Canada leads to a situation of dual power between strike committees and the bourgeois municipal government

1931-1939

• Spanish Revolution; threat of the radical left in Spain (anarchists, communists) and mass labor unrest leads to military coup against the Republican government
• Germany and Italy support Franco's Fascist forces because - as I was just reading the other day in Ian Kershaw's definitive biography on Hitler - the Nazi leader was deathly afraid of Bolshevism taking root in western Europe
• Leftist volunteers from many countries, including France, Britain, the United States, Canada and Poland, go to Spain to fight for the Republican forces

1960s

• Colonial Revolution continues in the developing countries, with many countries gaining independence through anti-colonial struggle or waging war against imperialist powers (Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba) and instituting nationalized planned economies
• Civil rights movement, counterculture, antiwar protests, Black Panther Party (Marxist militants) in the United States. Domestic turmoil practically tears the country apart.
• Cultural Revolution in China. Mao was merely trying to re-assert his own power, but the spontaneous revolutionary action of millions of youth in China clearly indicated some real resentments in society (shared by confused Maoist students in the West). There were many corrupt and bourgeois elements in Chinese society at the time; Mao simply exploited that mass feeling for his own cynical ends.
• Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (1968) - period of political liberalization calling for "socialism with a human face." Crushed by Stalinists.
• May 1968 in France. Mass protests begin with student occupations, later joined by workers. Largest general strike ever brings economy to a standstill. Government leaders literally feared civil war or revolution. Betrayed by leaders of the trade unions and French Communist Party, who sided with the de Gaulle government.

1998-2011

• Election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (1998) leads to Turn to the Left throughout Latin America
• Left-wing or left-leaning governments elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, etc.
• Anti-globalization movement targets World Bank and the IMF before post-9/11 reaction
  

2011-2012

• Arab Spring
• Occupy movement
• Indignados in Spain
• Anti-Putin protests in Russia

Insiders and Outsiders

Most Americans are suffering the negative effects of capitalism right now, and they're angry about it. But they don't know where to turn or what to do because the ruling class has hegemony over popular culture.

A handful of giant corporations control almost everything we hear, watch and read - and it's in their interests to say that American politics boils down to Democrats and Republicans. Nothing exists outside of that two-party duopoly for them, and since we are conditioned to consider that "the mainstream", Americans will go to the polls in November and most will vote for a Democrat or a Republican.

But what choice do they have, really? There are a myriad of institutional obstacles that the duopoly throws up for any third party candidate. The difference in resources is simply too vast for anyone to compete with the two corporately-funded parties, with one exception: the trade unions. American labor unions must break with the Democrats and put their resources into backing independent labor candidates.

Occupy Wall Street is a grassroots movement that exists because people realize the two parties walk in lockstep on behalf of corporate interests. The Tea Party is largely astroturf, and is obviously a confused bastion of reactionary beliefs, but the populist elements within it understand on some level that the government does not work in their interests. The common element in rank-and-file supporters of OWS and the Tea Party is a perception that both parties work for self-interested elites and not ordinary Americans.

This will be thrown into even sharper relief if the 2012 presidential election comes down to a race between the two corporate empty suits, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Rank-and-file conservatives don't like or trust Romney, and principled progressives realize Obama offers nothing but empty words.

Despite all the usual nationalist bromides, the rulers of the United States effectively speak a different language than the country's working class. While the ruling elite talks incessantly of deficits, "fiscal responsibility", "shared sacrifice". and endless war to defend oil interests, American workers want to hear about good jobs, education, health care, preserving Social Security, clean energy and ending the wars.

Caterpillar Closes Electro-Motive Plant

One of the big labor issues here in Canada is the U.S.-based Caterpillar corporation locking out workers at its Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario, and threatening to move the factory unless workers took a 50% pay cut.

There was a massive demonstration in London a couple weeks ago. Some of my comrades from Toronto went in solidarity, along with masses of union workers from all over North America. But apparently, it was all for naught: the company just voted to close down the plant.

From the Toronto Star:

The timing of Caterpillar Inc.’s decision to close its locked-out London locomotive plant was no accident.

On Wednesday, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law a so-called right-to-work bill making his state the first in the U.S. industrial north to directly take on private-sector unions.

Two days later, Caterpillar — which is based in next-door Illinois — closed its unionized London plant.

Since it locked out 460 Canadian workers in January, the giant U.S. firm had made little secret of its intent to move their jobs to Muncie, Indiana.

All it was waiting for, apparently, was a signal that the state government there was serious about crippling trade unions.

The London plant closing is not an isolated event. It is part of a coordinated attack across North America on unions and wages.

So now Indiana is a "right-to-work" state? Bad news for unions in the northern states.

Workers everywhere need to stand firm together against the aggression of the bosses and their servants in government. I agree with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP): the government "should seize the Caterpillar assets in London and ensure that all community and worker obligations are fully met."

Of course, that'll never happen under the Harper regime. But it's still a good sign that the union is advocating such measures.