Analyzing Right-Wing Propaganda (I)

A friend of mine sent me a link to the right-wing propaganda film Agenda: Grinding America Down and asked for my thoughts on it. Talk about opening the floodgates. Below you will find live-blogging of my experience watching the film in its entirety.

- Ronald Reagan appears onscreen and I already know this is going to be good. Given the black and white picture and his relative youth, I imagine this is a clip from his classic 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in which he claims Medicare represents the beginning of communism in America and the end of freedom as we know it. I pour my first drink.
- Bunch of people talk and it’s clear this movie is going to be all about culture. Culture is the trump card for the right-wing propaganda machine, because it removes economics completely from the picture. Instead of being the inevitable byproduct of profit-oriented media eager to boost the bottom line, the increasing amount of sex and violence in media is blamed on a nefarious, conspiratorial “liberal elite” and therefore represents one of the first steps on the path to communism.
- So liberals are not actually communists, just the “useful idiots” which the communists use as pawns in their grand scheme to eliminate everything good and decent about America. Nothing paranoid about this!
- Less than 3 minutes in and they’ve brought out the Nazi footage! Even as the talking heads conflate liberalism and communism, it looks like this movie will follow Glenn Beck’s example by conflating communists and fascists (aka the most fervent opponents of communism).
- Why would the left continue to push communist policies? “They’re either ignorant, or they’re evil.” Simple!
- I love how while talking about the left’s evil schemes, they show a book burning in which one of the books being burned was written by Lenin. Doublethink – gotta love it.
- Interesting how Curtis Bowers describes his experiences meeting with the CPUSA. This is a superb example of framing: if you support feminism or gay rights, what you’re really supporting is the destruction of morality and the family.
- Flash-forward to 2008, and Bowers can’t believe how successful their agenda has been! The disintegration of the family, the massive power supposedly wielded by the environmental movement, hate crimes legislation that calls bigotry what it is – all this reveals the utter narrowness and backwardness of Bowers’ views.
- The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen was also one of the books most instrumental in the development of Glenn Beck’s warped worldview. Birds of a feather...
- As I look at all the goals of Communist infiltrators outlined by Skousen, I wonder why I’m supposed to take seriously the paranoid ramblings of a former FBI agent and right-wing Mormon crank as definitive proof of leftist goals in the United States.
- “Goal #27: Discredit the Bible”. You mean like Thomas Jefferson, who ripped out every page in his Bible he believed to be false and was left with a few measly pages clinging to the spine?
- John Stormer cites J. Edgar Hoover calling communists “masters of deceit.” Well, if there’s one figure in American history who was a paragon of honesty and virtue, it’s a guy who blackmailed public figures for their sexuality while wearing dresses in his spare time.
- Hearing these guys talk about Latin America and China and lumping them together as “communist” says much about the lack of nuance in their worldview. Liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists, opportunist capitalists calling themselves communists – whatever, it’s all the same thing!
- Jim Simpson acknowledges that most of the people supposedly spreading communism are not communists, instead calling them mere “useful idiots”. So basically, he’s admitting that any social cause with the merest whiff of progressivism is identical to communism as far as he’s concerned. If anything, all he’s doing is identifying himself as an enemy of human progress! I’m sure if Bowers was alive back in the 1850s, he would have said the same thing about those nefarious abolitionists trying to destroy the Southern way of life.
- Great job, Bowers. With your political spectrum, you’ve once more revealed your utter idiocy and lack of historical knowledge. Even though he tries to lump together liberals, socialists, communists and fascists by saying they all worshipped the state, Bowers seems totally unaware that the Nazis were the declared arch-enemies of the communists, that they beat up communists before they came to power, jailed and murdered them after they did come to power, and – oh yeah, invaded the Soviet Union in the largest act of military aggression in world history. But forget all that – Nazis were basically the same as communists.
- Ah, I see – the entire American political spectrum has moved to the left, not the right. Is that why Obama is cutting Social Security while starting new wars and claiming the right to execute American citizens without charges or trial?
- And there is no opposition to any of this – except, of course, for the entire American right-wing blathering on endlessly about the socialist threat as if it actually existed.
- “What’s So Bad About Communism?” Again, these conservative talking heads have only the most simplistic and base view of what “communism” is. They can’t grasp that there could be severe disagreements and criticisms within the communist movement. They have no apparent awareness of Trotsky’s struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR and how he was outright murdered by Stalin’s goons, as were so many of the old Bolsheviks. And they’re so very concerned about how many people were murdered under “communism” – I wonder what their thoughts are on U.S. imperial wars or the current policy of assassination-by-drone-strike based on presidential fiat?
- How many people have died due to capitalism? Funny how nobody ever compiles those figures.
- What a fucking warped view of history these people have. So America’s public schools are teaching how to carry out genocide? Funny, they always seemed to mostly ignore what happened to the Native Americans...
- I was about to praise the narrator for explaining the difference between socialism and communism – until he said that socialism can be summed up as “Big Government”. HELP! I’m trapped in a sea of right-wing talking points!
- The central fallacy – liberalism/socialism/communism are evil because of “wealth redistribution”, because they take money people earned through hard work and give it to the undeserving. You know what that reminds me of? CAPITALISM, which is based on not paying people the full value of their labour while the capitalist pockets more than his fair share. That’s where profit comes from. But you’re never going to hear the right complaining about those lazy capitalists mooching off the workers.
- Why use an atomic bomb to illustrate how socialism destroys everything in its path? I checked the social system of the only country ever to actually use nuclear weapons in war, and it wasn’t socialist.
- You know, I wish there were as many people on the left who believed that the final victory of socialism was at hand as there seem to be on the right.
- Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but right after David Noebel talked about how Venezuela was “hard-core Marxist”, I swear I heard him refer to Nicaragua as “N*gger-agua”.
- The “red plague”. Are you kidding me?
- Watching them talk about how Karl Marx begat the Fabian Socialists who begat the Students for a Democratic Society who begat the Weather Underground, and how many of them are still in positions of power, such as Rev. Jim Wallis. Oh yeah, Rev. Jim Wallis – there’s a figure who will send shivers down the spine of the ruling elite. Amazing how right-wing propaganda manages to make the oppressed look like the oppressors and vice versa.
- Sympathizing with the Viet Cong, how dare he! It’s not like they were morally in the right, fighting for national liberation against a military superpower attempting to protect its puppet government, or anything like that.
- Jim Simpson is correct – throughout my impressionable years in elementary school, all I ever heard from my teachers was how great it would be if I grew up to become an atheist alcoholic homosexual.
- Have to laugh out loud at the juxtaposition of July 4, baseball and apple pie with a group of intellectuals plotting behind the scenes to “make America so corrupt it stinks.”
- There is no middle ground: either the father is the breadwinner, disciplinarian and protector of his family, or the government is. Nice to know there is no alternative possibility to the mother being a domestic slave without her becoming married to “Big Government”.
- “Cultural Marxism” was also one of the obsessions of mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who accused young members of the Labour Party of such when he gunned them down in 2011.
- “Most people will give over to the [government], because they don’t want the chaos.” Kind of like how so many people on the right wet their pants and asked Big Bad Government to protect them after 9/11 with the Patriot Act? And how they continue to demand government take away their rights to protect them from the omnipresent threat of “terrorism”? I pour my third drink.
- Thanks to Saul Alinsky, we now know that everyone on the left worships Satan as a matter of course.
- Saul Alinksy defines the modern American left? Funny, I thought lesser-of-two-evillism did.
- The Piven plan to “overload the welfare system” – how exactly did they encourage this? Was there an organized strategy to overload the welfare system? I’d love to see some proof of that, but that would overwhelm the paranoid fantasy.
- That section on Betty Friedan is almost painfully stupid. But then, so is the rest of the film.
- Society is falling apart - I’ll grant you that, Bowers. But your proposed solutions have no relevance to existing power relations.
- “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Awesome Karl Marx quote!
- The Progressive Caucus of the Democrats – truly, a life-and-death threat to the government of capitalist America which trembles before its 20% representation in Congress.
- I know, Christianity gets so much flak in America, more than any other religion. This is especially unfair when we consider how Christianity has traditionally faced persecution in U.S. society to a degree unmatched by any other religion.
- As the narrator says, those who believe in the sanctity of human life have always been the biggest challenge to those totalitarian regimes who would impose “Big Government” on all of us. Just ask Pope Pius XII.
- Why is it that, unlike Aristotle, we now know slavery to be wrong? Because we have the Bible. ("You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." - Leviticus 25:44-46)
- Whether we know it or not, “the Left is at war with God.” Such a thoughtful, nuanced interpretation of events.
- “Anti-God” is the same thing as “Anti-free enterprise”. Perhaps an unintentionally revealing analogy...
- If we tell people about problems with the environment, racism, etc., we are stunting their critical thinking skills. If we tell them that the whole world was created by God and all the proof you will ever need is in the Bible, we are creating free-spirited independent thinkers. Gotcha.
- Movie is promoting the idea that it’s all about self-reliance. How many huge corporations got that way without government assistance? Just want to know.
- Global warming is nothing but a hoax! Well, there’s a reasonable and well-considered idea.
- Jim Simpson says socialism will lead to extreme hardship for most Americans. I suppose that makes sense, if you don’t consider the fact that 1% of Americans own 40% of the national wealth.

XL Foods recall: Cost-cutting threatens food and worker safety

Originally published at Fightback on Oct. 24.

The discovery of E. Coli in meat from XL Foods has prompted the largest beef recall in Canadian history. After a routine inspection along the U.S. border discovered the bacteria in XL meat on Sept. 3, a recall was eventually expanded to include all of Canada, 40 US states, and Puerto Rico. At least 15 people have become ill. Ground zero for the contamination was the massive XL Foods processing facility in Brooks, Alta., which slaughters a million cattle per year and processes one-third of Canada’s beef.

The future of the Brooks facility became uncertain after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency pulled XL’s operating license on Sept. 27. The company blamed resulting uncertainty for its Oct. 13 decision to temporarily lay off 2,000 workers at the plant. Only days later, XL announced that 800 “A shift” workers would temporarily be brought back onto the job to process carcasses previously cleared by inspectors, fuelling greater confusion.

Like any capitalist enterprise, XL Foods has one key goal: increasing profit. While corporate consolidation grew and agriculture and meat production became more concentrated, the role of factory farming in agribusiness became more prominent. Today over 95% of animals raised and slaughtered for food in Canada are mass-produced on factory farms. As animals rights groups have pointed out, conditions for animals there tend to be overcrowded and unsanitary, allowing disease to spread easily.

The conditions for human workers are little better than those of the animals. The unappealing nature of slaughterhouse work has traditionally attracted those most desperate for employment, and XL Foods is no different. At its Brooks plant, the company maintained cost-cutting through a super-exploited workforce consisting largely of immigrants, refugees, and temporary employees.

Following the recall, reports started coming in from workers of a general lack of concern by management for food safety. Under constant pressure to maintain quotas, employees could not sterilize their tools between cuts without losing pace. Cleaning equipment was regularly clogged. Unsanitary conditions reigned. Workers’ reports consistently state that for the company, processing meat — ensuring profits — was always the first priority. The health of workers and the public came a poor second.

According to the Toronto Star (8 Oct. 2012), many XL Foods workers developed serious tendon problems in their hands, barely able to open them due to their constant gripping of work tools on the line. When some returned to the plant with written recommendations allowing them modified work, supervisors allegedly tore the forms up. Many workers were simply fired outright.

Such naked exploitation eventually led to an explosion in 2005. A dispute arose when XL Foods workers joined the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) and the company’s then-owner Tyson Foods, refused to negotiate a first contract. When workers voted to strike, Tyson bused in replacement workers, which are legal under Alberta law. Tension increased before an RCMP riot squad was called in. Police charged the plant CEO and other managers with dangerous driving when their car crashed into the union president’s car and injured him (the charges were later dropped).

The union and Tyson eventually reached a deal after three weeks. But the strike experience led to a new approach by the company, which began hiring more temporary workers from abroad. When new owners, the Nilsson brothers, took over the plant in 2009, they increased the number of foreign temporary employees to one-third of the facility’s workforce, where 60% already consisted of immigrants and refugees.

The terms of Canada’s Temporary Workers Program stipulate that workers recruited under the program may not change jobs or bring in family for four years, but when their program is up, employers may nominate them for permanent residency. By dangling such a tantalizing prospect in front of its workforce, XL Foods successfully convinces many employees to accept atrocious working conditions, no matter how dangerous or unhealthy their environment becomes.

UFCW president Doug O’Halloran has called for better industry standards and criticized the Nilsson brothers for not making health and safety a greater priority. Recent developments regarding the temporary layoffs led him to accuse the owners of poor and erratic management. In a press release, O’Halloran complained that the CEO had refused to meet with union representatives to discuss food safety.

Following the recall, Alberta Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson said that food safety was the top priority for everyone involved. But for a private company like XL Foods, this is never truly the case. More accurately, their concern is negative publicity eating into profits. Should the Brooks plant open up again, the focus will still be on profits, with public gestures of safety intended only as a means of maintaining the long-term bottom line. In a capitalist enterprise, this is only to be expected.

The only way to rationalize agriculture and food production is through a mode of production based on the satisfaction of human needs rather than private profit. The agribusiness firms, like all large corporations that make up the commanding heights of the economy, play a dominant role in our lives. The consequences for public well-being are too important for such entities to be left in the hands of private capitalists.

Whether the goal is guaranteeing safe working conditions and a living wage for meat plant workers, or preserving the safety and health standards of the public food supply, capitalism has proven itself incapable of ensuring either. For a rational system of food production that truly values the health of workers and the public above all else, it is necessary to expropriate the largest agribusiness firms and nationalize them under democratic control. Only then will food production be geared primarily towards feeding people rather than profits.

Nationalize agribusiness under democratic workers’ control!

Defend collective bargaining rights of agribusiness workers!

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.”

Unemployment Blues

Recently got involved with a staffing/recruiting agency that's been getting me temp jobs, mostly in data entry. I worked for a couple days at a hospital last week. This week I had an interview for a two-week (!) position at a mining company, but didn't get it.

Temp jobs make me much more conscious of my existence as a wage slave. It's like, "no, you can't make a living here or anything, but we're happy to buy your labour-power for a week!"

Sometimes I feel like I'd like to go back to school and get my PhD, but the prospect of going thousands and thousands of dollars into debt, only to come out and face renewed unemployment, makes me think twice.

A third year English student from my alma mater called me tonight to ask for money on behalf of the university. My response was a no-brainer: "As you know, I was an English major, and am therefore 'between jobs' right now."

In Defence of Marxism

From a recent exchange on Facebook.

A Facebook-friend of a friend made the following remark during a discussion about the Greek debt crisis:

Marxist theory is hopelessly shallow in its perception of how people see themselves. Very few identify as "working class" or "bourgeois" but many would escribe themselves as "Canadian" or "humanist" or "young," "Muslim" or "father." Class identity is important but not all-important.

My response:

Marxists explained a long time ago that there is no final crisis of capitalism - the bourgeoisie will always find a way out until the working class takes power into its own hands.

Please excuse the Marxian terminology (you might say jargon), but it's the most accurate way for describing the broad movements of the economy in terms of who actually produces the wealth (workers). Marxism is actually much more complex than the simple dichotomy of "bourgeoisie/proletariat". It allows for the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners and professionals), lumpen-proletariat (swindlers, criminals, beggars, those on the margins of society), peasants if there are any. And that's just in recent history - in earlier times there were different classes - freeman/slave, lord/serf, etc. As a way of sketching out the broad class formations in social relations, Marxist theory is indispensable.

But Marxism doesn't JUST talk about class. That's an understandable misconception. Like any good method of analysis, it takes into account as much information and facts as possible, including gender, race, nationality, and so on. At the same time, it realizes that class is ultimately the determining factor when it comes to actual change of the social order. What we think of as "the middle class" is actually the working class that is enjoying the benefits of past struggles - for the 8-hour work day, overtime pay, pensions, collective bargaining rights. All these are now being taken away from us. Why? Because capitalism is in crisis worldwide.

It's only a Greek problem? Wrong. (Just ask the Wall Street Journal.) When Greece defaults - and it will, no matter what austerity measures are put in place - we'll get defaults in Ireland and Portugal, followed by a financial crisis in Spain, dragging the whole of Europe and the United States into it. French and German banks have the most to lose from a Greek default, which is why their governments are pushing for bailouts of the debtor nation.

The problem is, these kinds of periodic crises are endemic to the capitalist system, and even its most ardent defenders will admit that. Duh - boom and bust, right? Everybody knows a capitalist economy will have recessions and depressions. BUT: It's only the people who win under capitalism that are cushioned from the effects. The working majority always lose out.

Why is there massive unemployment that just seems to get worse all the time? Why are people with jobs being forced to work longer hours for less pay and benefits? Why are governments cutting social services everywhere? I live in Toronto and our mayor wants to cut the budget of all departments by 10%, including the fire department. Why is all this happening? Because this kind of thing always happens when the capitalist party ends and the working class gets the hangover ("Wall Street got drunk" - George W. Bush). Bankers blew a hole in the global economy. They, along with other corporations and the wealthy, control our governments (the Golden Rule - "he who has the gold makes the rules"), and now they want to make the working class pay for a crisis they caused.

The media constantly chirp about a recovery. In truth, the long postwar economic boom has been pushed far past its shelf life through increased debt. A little fast history: capitalism was effectively pulled out of the Great Depression by World War II, which served as an artificial stimulus to a massive armaments boom. The technologies that emerged from the war and the new markets opened up to the United States led to a long economic boom that started to plateau in the late 60s and stagnated in the 70s. As a reaction, the deregulation of the 80s and development of ever more exotic financial securities led to the ever-increasing financialization of the economy and to a large extent de-coupled financial markets from the "real" economy. (Stocks numbers are great right now, employment figures not so much.)

Over the last 30 years of reaction, workers' wages stagnated while the bosses' have skyrocketed (this was partly masked by greater consumer debt). Income inequality is worse than ever, and there seems to be no real recovery in sight. This is not a matter of me reading a Marxist book and thinking about rrrrrevolution! It's about being sick of a system that's left our world a stinking impoverished mess. I'm sick of the wars, inequality, the hunger, the environmental degradation, the national rivalries and racism - and the system of private profit at the root of it all.

People react strangely to the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", because they associate the first word with individual tyrants. In fact, it just means power, and it makes a lot more sense if you consider that right now we live under the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Ever get the feeling that your vote doesn't matter? In some ways, it doesn't - not when the game is rigged and the same people are pulling the strings no matter who gets elected to office. If you want to describe who those people are, bourgeoisie is as good a term as any.

One last point I want to make, and I congratulate anyone who's made it this far. I used to think that the idea of two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, duking it out was an antiquated 19th century notion. I hope I've absolved you of any confusion there. When Marxists talks about the "working class", people tend to think about workers in factories. But it's really about producing surplus value (i.e. goods and services), and the tools and machines you use to make those (if any) don't really make a difference. So that includes service jobs, like working at Wal-Mart or being a waitress. It includes white collar office jobs and blue collar industrial jobs. Basically, it's anybody who earns a wage for a living.

Marxists don't back the working class because of some romantic idea of what it means to be a worker or because we think they're great people. We support them because they are the only class capable of transforming society - in the first place, by shutting it down.

If Richard Branson or Bill Gates goes on strike for a year...who cares? But if there's a general strike for just one day, everything stops. Nothing can get done, nothing can be produced. You'll notice that in Egypt, it was only when the Egyptian working class mobilized - when we saw strikes in factories, among unionized workers of all kinds - that Muburak was finally pressured to step down. Essentially, if you're sick of the world we live in right now, there's only one group in society that can change that: the international working class. Workers in Egypt have more in common with workers in Canada than either of us have with our elected national "leaders".

In The Belly of the Beast: My G20 Experience

It had been, I felt, a productive day of protest. Thousands of people had defied the rain on this gray Saturday, June 26, 2010 to vent their rage against the global corporate elite as its leading representatives met in Toronto for the G20 summit. My friends and I took advantage of a free bus ride offered in Kingston by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) to make our way to the T-dot that weekend, and what I had seen so far had left me deeply moved. The sheer size of the turnout was impressive, especially given the poor weather, and seeing so many passionate activists engaged in that most basic and essential of democratic activities - grassroots protest - was a powerful rebuttal to any suspicions I might have had that the Canadian public was too lethargic to get out in the streets and make its voice heard.



True, there had been some worrying signs after the masses assembled in Queen's Park and peacefully marched down University Avenue. We had seen a young man with his hand over an eye, blood running down his face, as his comrades ushered him through the crowd and cried out for a medic. Maybe he got in a cop's face, we thought. Eventually the protesters found themselves blocked off by a line of police at Queen Street East. The 5-0, decked out from head to toe in their latest quasi-fascist militarized police togs, shields raised and batons ready, may have been an intimidating presence, were it not for a crowd that refused to let itself be intimidated. A drum circle directly in front of the line provided a defiant flow of tribal beats; animal rights activists defended the sanctity of all life on this planet while I got my picture taken with a girl dressed up as a giant gray seal (a moment recorded for a TV update on Global News). When the cops took a menacing step forward, a girl cried out, "Sit down! They can't move us back if we're sitting down!" I grabbed my friend's megaphone and further spurred the crowd on to a sit-down protest - "the easiest form of protest", I declared - and the police were stopped in their tracks.


We experienced one unsettling moment when the police were ordered to don their gas masks. "Put on your bandanas!" yelled people in the crowd. As one officer perched high and aimed his riot gun menacingly at the protesters, we saw signs of tear gas in the air behind us. Yet for this afternoon, on this particular street, the crowd seemed safe for the time being. After a while, my friends and I decided to grab a bite at a Vietnamese restaurant and eventually found our way to Kensington Market, where we rented a room at a backpackers' hostel. Taking a breather, we switched on the TV for an update on how the Canadian media was reporting what we had just seen.

There was zero resemblance between the two narratives. What the CBC News Network, like the others, aired over and over was a single shot of a police car burning, sandwiched in-between footage of black-clad protesters smashing in the windows of banks and a Starbucks. There was no reporting whatsoever on what the protesters had actually been saying - i.e. what they were protesting against, or the myriad progressive solutions they put forth. Rather, there was a generic focus on "violent protesters", alarmism over the "anarchists" that had apparently swarmed the city, and an overall narrative that purported to offer all the necessary justification for Stephen Harper's $1.3 billion in security costs.


From this moment on, the dominant voices of the Canadian establishment completely submerged the voices of the protesters and drowned them in a sea of media-inspired agitation over the anarchist mob. I had seen members of the so-called Black Bloc as we filed out of Queen's Park: a wave of young people clad completely in black walking past me with bandanas covering their faces. It quickly became apparent that these people represented the outer boundaries of protest tactics - willing to go where the larger mass of people did not. The majority of the marchers I saw wielded a more subtly effective weapon: words. Chants of "peaceful protest" and "this is what democracy looks like" interspersed with "this is what a police state looks like" made clear the protesters' essentially Gandhian approach while maintaining a full-blooded stance of anger at the corporate elites who have plundered and poisoned our planet, destroyed the Canadian manufacturing base, pushed for bloody wars of imperial conquest all while relentlessly punishing the poor for the crimes of the wealthy bankers who crashed the world economy.



The most telling quote I heard the whole weekend came from an older gentleman beside me who faced down the line of police at University and Queen and asked a question as simple as it was profound: "What are you afraid of?" he demanded to know.

The answer, if you want it, is right here. But to summarize: the massive turnout of the police and tightening of the security apparatus was not simply about protecting the delicate ears of the G20 leaders. Rather, it was a dress rehearsal for the suppression of working class revolt by the Canadian capitalist elite, which fears the legitimate rage of a population facing long-term unemployment, endless war and looming ecological disaster. In this powder keg atmosphere, the corporate-financial elite is determined to hang on to its remaining privileges and power by any means necessary, including (as that formulation inevitably does) naked physical force.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to find something very fishy in Black Bloc protesters managing to set multiple police cars on fire and break store windows in a city virtually under martial law, with over 5000 police officers patrolling downtown Toronto alone. I walked those city streets myself and you could not walk more than 25 metres without passing a cop. The idea that police would leave squad cars alone in this environment is difficult to believe, and leaves open the possibility that the Black Bloc was infiltrated by police provocateurs who incited and/or led the destruction of property in order to justify a brutal crackdown on the protesters. Such a suggestion is not fantasy; there is well-documented precedent for just such infiltration. After the images of the burning cars and broken windows were broadcast ad nauseum to a clueless Canadian TV audience, with newscasters squeezing the word "violence" as frequently as possible within allotted time frames, the picture of the protest as anarchist war zone was complete, and for the rest of the weekend police had a convenient excuse for any repressive measures they wished to enact.

My friends and I would learn that firsthand the next day.

We largely stayed out of the protest scene on Saturday night; with intermittent rain and a general cluelessness as to where the main action was, we caught the patron saint of independent media, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, at Trinity St. Paul's United Church. She was promoting her new book, Breaking The Sound Barrier, but also reporting on the G20 protests for the show. As a matter of fact, we passed her on University Avenue during the afternoon march; she seemed in a rush, but asked if we would attend her lecture that night. Full of wit and stories of her reporting adventures, Goodman eloquently put forward the case for a media that does not merely kowtow to the powerful, but performs the heavy investigative lifting that makes the Fourth Estate such a crucial pillar of democracy in popular lore.

On Sunday, after a brief lunch at vegan restaurant Urban Herbivore, we headed to Queen's Park in expectation of a protest similar in size to yesterday's. However, we found that the crowds had thinned out considerably. We first came across the anti-Zionist Jews fiercely denouncing the state of Israel; amusingly, other protesters soon set up a sign directly next to them admonishing passers-by to "support the state of Israel against Hamas".


But that was part of the protest's charm as we saw it; divergent groups (albeit with a broader progressive unity than apparent in this example) coming together to protest the corporatist policies of the G20 and the Canadian state. It seemed like democracy at its finest. While there were no large protests at Queen's Park this day, we did sit down with members of the Zeitgeist Movement sitting on the grass next to the Earthians. Like most of the protesters I talked to, they were well-read, passionate yet friendly and laidback individuals. I interviewed Lawrence, a member of the Zeitgeist Movement (far right in picture below).


The Zeitgeist Movement, he explained, is a non-political social movement advocating technological salvation for humanity by building on the foundational similarities between cultures to develop a more sustainable economic model. He held that the technology already exists to create a higher standard of living for all, but is held captive by our current monetary system which subordinates such visions to a more base pursuit of profit and raw materials.

We have the means to make sure that wars don’t happen. What are the barriers to that? A lot of it is because of resource scarcity. So you see wars happen over areas that are very resource-rich. What needs to happen is that all the resources of the planet need to be declared the common heritage of all the world’s people. The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of something called the Venus Project, and the Venus Project is what’s putting forward these standards. It is the total redesign of the culture, talking about technologically unifying the globe. If we just update our thinking, and update the knowledge of the population as to the potential of our present-day technology to free us from boring and monotonous, socially offensive labour that you’re required to perform in order to feed and house yourself...we live in a society now where we’re wage slaves, essentially economic slaves. You know, a slave, you’re required to feed and house a slave. But an economic slave is required to feed and house themselves.

Impressed by his summary of the evils of capitalism, I told him that we had a lot in common and went into my usual argument about how socialism was the answer to humanity's problems. While he agreed with some of what I said, he intriguingly explained his opposition to my ideas by declaring that socialism didn't go far enough:

The one thing about socialism that is the same as capitalism, that’s the same as anything - free enterprise system, the same as fascism - is that they all operate within a monetary system [...] Money is really a root to a lot of large-scale problems. If you cannot get paid to do a job...I mean, 70% of non-violent crime is either drug-related or monetary-related, or related to money in some way.

We’re looking at unifying everyone. The problem with socialism is that it’s not radical enough. It’s radical, but it’s not radical enough. And when I say radical enough, I mean, when we’re talking about means of production or workers’ government, there doesn’t need to be that. The technology exists today to free everyone from food production, to free everyone from fabrication of homes and things like that. The technology today is incredible, and we’re able to do this.

So I understand where a socialist is coming from, where they’re like, “we want the people in power, we want a government of the people.” People not profits, that’s totally admirable. But is that possible in a monetary system? Greed and corruption are inherent in any sort of...when money is involved, when money is the reason for acquisition, incentive and exchange, especially incentive, especially incentive, when your incentive is to make money, then that comes first before [the] common good of [the] people.

After our chat with these interesting folks, my friends and I decided to head on down to where the action was. I made the decision to turn left onto a crosswalk, and didn't really perceive the danger of the cops on the traffic island until they said, "we're searching your bags." Note that was not a request. Anxious to avoid any legal trouble since I started a new job that requires a security clearance, I submitted to the search along with my two friends, one of whom had walked right into the lion's den. When the cops searched his bag, they found Ziploc bags filled with flour and paint that he had intended to pass out to protesters (telling them to add water) as a non-violent means of countering repressive crowd control by splashing the cops and making them look silly - in his words, "street theatre".


Barely seconds after the cops opened his bag, my friend was under arrest, in handcuffs and soon led into the back of a police van. The entire story of his imprisonment at "Torontanamo" is viewable here, but the gist is that his experience was rife with subtle forms of psychological torture. Those arrested were kept cuffed even when they were locked in a cage; they were denied food and water for long periods of time; forced to sleep on a cold concrete floor; he told of a couple 17/18-year-old girls who had been in lock-up for thirty hours without being allowed to call for legal aid. He was eventually processed, and the end charges were unbelievable. While the arresting officers had talked of a mischief charge, my friend is now accused of carrying dangerous weapons and looking at a six-month jail sentence. In a blatant violation of his Charter rights, he is banned from attending any future protests due to the bail conditions he agreed to in order to get released. No matter what you think of my friend's plan (and even he seems to think it was pretty stupid now), the threatened punishment in this case is grossly disproportional to the alleged crime. Although job considerations prevented me from acting in solidarity at his moment of arrest - although the only likely scenario would be my getting arrested too - I am fully supportive of him as he prepares to battle these outrageous charges.

Understandably, he describes his weekend as "cataclysmic", and it's hard to argue with that assessment. The weekend was full of innocent (and not-so-innocent) bystanders being arrested, harassed, or beaten by cops. The McGuinty government's cynical use of the 1939 Public Works Protection Act to radically expand police powers, which they attempted to slip past the media before it turned up on the e-laws website, is a useful gauge of this government's contempt for the people it claims to represent, as well as the intent of the police to go as far as they cared to go in harassing people. Although the law claimed people could be searched or arrested for not having ID within 5 metres of the perimeter fences, my experience on Sunday confirmed that in fact the police were exercising this power indiscriminately throughout the entire city. Following my friend's arrest, my remaining companion and I were searched on at least three more occasions that afternoon. On the initial search, police confiscated our ear plugs and bandanas - i.e., the only things we had to protect ourselves against crowd control devices like the LRAD sonic weapons and tear gas. No self-defense against the Canadian police state could be countenanced, it seemed.


Despite all the police violence and harassment, there remains one word I use to describe my experience of the G20: inspiring. Being stuck in small-town Kingston, it's hard to get across my excitement upon seeing thousands and thousands of committed activists all around me, whether labour groups like the PSAC, environmentalists such as Greenpeace ("There is no planet B" being one of my favourite signs), peaceniks, communists - in essence, all the groups that the media and mainstream discourse works hard to erase from the picture. They were all there in full force, daring to face down the militarized might of the capitalist state in order to reclaim democracy for the people (a sadly relevant distinction). I was inspired by the heartfelt dedication of the masses. Although I happened to see, believe it or not, a couple of Tea Party activists with an American flag - not to mention an old lady carrying a sign "Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged" - this was not that twisted parody of a popular uprising. Rather, it was from people smart enough to know who there real enemies were, and that higher level of awareness brought hope to me when I was beginning to drown in hopelessness for the future of humanity.

Along with the representatives of labour, environmentalists and youth - including the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Canadian Labour Congress and Greenpeace - I was stunned by the level of class consciousness and organized socialist resistance. Red banners and pictures of Karl Marx abounded, along with signs that said "Down with capitalism - long live socialism!" I marched with the Marxists, the Trotskyists, the Maoists and sampled party literature that was handed out to me on the street. For me, the novelty of seeing committed Marxists around me was enough, as I had grown used to the near-solitude of spreading that secular gospel in a small town like Kingston.


At one point early on, I talked to Adil Ahmed, representative of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq in Canada. He discussed the work of Iranian communist Mansoor Hekmat, and his reasons for being in Toronto reflected the heart of the anti-capitalist movement. "We came here to protest this summit, of course," he said, "this summit for the capitalist system. They came here to save the capitalist system, of course. And we are here to protect the people, that is, the worker class. This summit is against workers and poor people around the world, and we came here to say no to your policy, no to your system [...] Socialism is the only solution for humanity."


As I heard the union groups around me singing "Solidarity Forever", I drank in the populism. Adil came from an older tradition than I, but his doctrine of socialist internationalism was precisely my ideological cup of tea. Where before I had despaired of the future for organized political action by the working class in Canada, now I knew there were millions of people out there willing to fight for justice in the face of corporate enslavement. The overwhelming task that now faces us is the unity of the working class as it enters this new era of unadulterated class struggle. With his description of the solidarity of workers across national borders, Adil brought out my inner optimist.

We are here. It doesn't matter what kind of peoples, what languages they speak. We're all together here to say no to capitalism. We are stronger [than the elites], of course. We are 90% of the people, they are 5% of the people of the world. If we unite, we can do everything we want - if we do. If we unite, we can do anything. That's why we are here.

All photos by Andréa Prins.

Remembrance Day: War, Myth and Reality

91 years ago today, the First World War finally ended. The man-made hell in Europe marked the dawn of a new age of industrialized slaughter. Its dubious status as "the war to end all wars" became a bad joke almost immediately following the Armistice, contradicted most visibly by the even greater atrocities of the Second World War. Even today, historians disagree on the causes of World War I, a needless conflict that inalterably changed the course of human development in the 20th century and beyond. War is a contagion that feeds on the collective sense of anger and tragedy engendered by every previous conflict. But even today, the historical conditions that allowed, even encouraged, such collective madness, endure through the continued dominance of the capitalist mode of production.

The world of 1914 was in many ways as globalized as our own. It was the heyday of imperialism, and the European powers had carved up most of the world in an effort to lay claim to raw materials and captive markets that would help enrich the ruling classes of each respective country. Long before the assassination in Sarajevo, there was no room left for each of the powers to expand without encroaching on the territory of the others. In his 1915 pamphlet War and the International, Leon Trotsky explained that the move to total war was borne out of the inevitable contradictions between international capitalist markets and the outmoded, artificial boundaries imposed by the nation-state:

The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit.

The nation must continue to exist as a cultural, ideological and psychological fact, but its economic foundation has been pulled from under its feet. All talk of the present bloody clash being the work of national defense is either hypocrisy or blindness. On the contrary, the real objective significance of the War is the breakdown of the present national economic centers, and the substitution of a world economy in its stead. But the way the governments propose to solve this problem of imperialism is not through the intelligent, organized cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country; which country is by this War to be transformed from a Great Power into a World Power.

The War proclaims the downfall of the national state. Yet at the same time it proclaims the downfall of the capitalist system of economy. By means of the national state, capitalism has revolutionized the whole economic system of the world. It has divided the whole earth among the oligarchies of the great powers, around which were grouped the satellites, the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones. The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy. World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organizations, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos.

The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its inherent contradictions. …

Capitalism has created the material conditions of a new Socialist economic system. Imperialism has led the capitalist nations into historic chaos. The War of 1914 shows the way out of this chaos by violently urging the proletariat on to the path of Revolution.

The results of the First World War ultimately satisfied no one save the United States, which was the only Great Power left relatively unscathed by the calamity. The Treaty of Versailles paved the way for the Second World War, which was ultimately fought for the same reasons as the First; namely, rising powers (Germany and Japan) were dissatisfied with the restrictions placed on their access to international markets by existing geopolitical power arrangements. In 1914, Germany's chief rivals were France and Great Britain; by 1939, with France and Britain weakened by the strain of fighting the last war, it was the USA that ultimately represented the greatest challenge to German supremacy.

The fact that the world wars were fought out of conflicting economic and geopolitical interests between the Great Powers has been distorted and romanticized in the time since; as always, the winners write the history books. The propaganda message of the Allied powers in the First and Second World Wars - i.e. that this was a fight against militarism and dictatorship on behalf of freedom and democracy - has become ingrained as official historical truth, aided by the undeniable brutality of the Nazi and Japanese war machines amid atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking. But we should not permit historical romanticism to get in the way of analyzing the real concerns of the ruling classes in each belligerent nation. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us today in a story about the increasingly autocratic Iraqi administration of Nouri al-Maliki, governments do not fight wars to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. They do it for more basic economic interests - not for the country as a whole, mind you, but to ensure the elites continue to reap the benefits of captive markets around the globe.

Note this analysis by veteran British Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter, who lived through World War II as a young girl. She beautifully punctures the Churchillian myth proffered by the government of the time and since adopted by all Western governments, getting to the reality of the situation:

After the fall of France, Churchill and the government propaganda machine portrayed Britain as a brave little island fighting on behalf of the people of the world for the defence of democracy. And this was widely accepted. The country was mobilised into the war effort, and a whole generation of youth was conscripted into the armed forces believing they were in fighting for democracy against the evils of fascism.

But far from being just a “little island,” Britain was the most powerful colonial nation the world had ever seen. The British Empire made up one-fifth of the earth’s surface, including the Indian subcontinent as well as vast regions in Africa.

The colonial peoples were cruelly oppressed and exploited and the British bourgeoisie extracted vast raw materials and financial resources from every corner of the globe. It was this power which was challenged by the German war machine. In order to become a world power, the German bourgeoisie required access to the resources of the world. And the establishment of Germany as a world power was something which the British ruling class could not tolerate.

The only possible response of all the major capitalist powers to the economic crisis that was raging in the 1920s and 30s was trade war, leading to military conflict.

In 1938, Trotsky had warned of the imminence of war, which he described as “a catastrophe that threatened the whole culture of mankind.” And what was the essence of that conflict? It was an imperialist war waged by the capitalist great powers—“democratic” and fascist alike—for the division of the world and its resources in the interests of profit.

If the ruling classes' lust for dominance and access to global markets was the key impetus to two world wars, can we now say that this gruesome period in human history is well and truly over? Sadly, no. As long as the capitalist mode of production persists, the bourgeoisie of each Great Power will aim to establish its own predominance in the zero-sum game of global hegemony. Frank Capra's World War II-era American propaganda film Why We Fight pointed to the potential for Axis domination of the Eurasian land mass as the key factor in compelling the USA to join the war effort. Today, the leading ideologues of American imperialism - most notably former Carter advisor and current Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard - emphasize the continued importance of U.S. dominance over Eurasia and its ample natural resources. Is it any wonder that the seemingly pointless war in Afghanistan - with its key strategic location in central Asia - continues to command unswerving support among ruling classes in Canada, the United States and Europe?

As the United States continues its historical decline - aggravated by the inability of the American political-media establishment to see beyond its own imperialistic hubris (biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Expand the war into Pakistan!) - we see the potential for rival powers like China, India and Russia to step into the fray and advance the economic interests of their own elites. The key question is, as the United States is further weakened and these powers grow ever stronger, will we see a new global conflict? I used to think the possibility was remote, given the deeply entangled trade relationship between "frenemies" China and the United States. However, as America becomes ever weaker economically, might it exploit the one area in which it is still indisputably a world leader - i.e., military force?

As this article helpfully explains, that is precisely what the world's premier rogue state has been up to for the last 20 years. The United States has engaged in military action against Iraq, the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and is now seemingly determined to pursue a war against Iran. The military-industrial complex, the backbone of the American economy since the Cold War (and, for all intents and purposes, the Second World War), has truly spun out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if, like Germany in the 1930s (to use a tired comparison), the country's elites turn to renewed war as an economic stimulus. They seem to prefer that to any other option.

Remembrance Day should be a day in which we reflect on the colossal waste and pointless slaughter of war. Sometimes we do, but even today we feel the need to justify the killing through abstract ideals, proclaiming that Canadian soldiers in World War I died "fighting for democracy". Perhaps the individual soldiers did, but the politicians who sent them there most certainly did not. Warren Beatty, as American Communist John Reed in the film Reds, had a piece of dialogue that summed it up best. When asked about the causes of the First World War, the Reed character simply responds, "profits".

It's a considerably less romantic picture than the one we commonly associate with slain soldiers, but an absolutely essential perspective if we are to educate the people about the true causes of war and the need to end the subjugation of human life to corporate profiteering. Sanitized war memorials and regurgitation of contemporary propaganda only serve to remythologize the pointless slaughter.