Leftist Fundamentals

I: Introduction

We leftists tend to be our own worst enemies, far more so in many ways than the ruling class are. Instead of banding together in solidarity and planning how to overthrow the ruling class, we far too often would much rather bicker and argue over relatively minor issues of doctrine or political analysis.

We tend to forget, it seems, that the ruling class are far more united in the implementation of their agenda than we are. Sure, liberals currently are all in a dither over the recent reelection of Trump, wringing their hands and acting as though the world is about to come to an end, just as they did in November of 2016. I’d say, however, that all of this rending of garments is more of a media melodrama, meant to distract us all from how it’s more the political system is just continuing down the same neoliberal trajectory it’s been going along for the past forty years than it is some kind of imminent Night of the Long Knives.

We know the media is manipulating us, yet we don’t know. Each new outrage that gets thrust into our faces, be it the latest Israeli atrocity, updates on the Ukraine war, or Project 2025, is presented to us in a way meant to rile our anger, though not to unite us–rather, to get us to fight with each other over the ‘correct’ way to interpret what’s happening. The ruling classes laugh at us as we fight each other instead of fighting them, because the attempt to get ego gratification over ‘winning’ an argument with another leftist is far easier than setting aside our petty differences and fighting the real enemy.

None of this is to say, however, that there are no legitimate differences of opinion among leftists that can be safely disregarded. Unity on these fundamental points, the subject of this article, must be respected if we’re to move ahead and organize to overthrow the capitalist class. As for the petty issues so often bickered about, those can be dealt with once the revolution has been successfully achieved, and a socialist society is being built.

II: The Fundamentals

The following are the basic points we leftists should all agree on. There may be variation on how to interpret what these points exactly mean, or how they should be put into practice, but here they are, and they are not negotiable:

The complete replacement of capitalism with a state-planned, socialist economy. No social-democratic compromises with the market, please. We’ve tried that before, with the welfare capitalism of the post-war period, 1945-1973; when attempts like this are made, so that capitalism is ‘more comfortable’ for the working class, it’s only a matter of time before the ruling class gets sick and tired of paying higher taxes and negotiating with unions. Then they start seducing the public with the allure of ‘small government’ and the ‘free market,’ which will lead us right back down the Reaganite/Thatcherite path to the neoliberal nightmare we’re in now.

The only scenario in which a socialist state can tolerate a market economy is when a developing country needs to pull itself out of poverty by building up its productive forces, as countries like China and Vietnam have done. Once these productive forces have been fully built up, though, the left-wing factions of their communist parties should regain their preeminent influence, and guide the nation beyond the primary stage of socialism.

Now, I know any anarchists reading this will wince at my advocating a socialist state. As a former anarchist myself, I can understand how they feel. My suggestion to them is to use dialectical reasoning to resolve the contradiction between having and not having a state. A sublating of this contradiction would be to have the kind of state that withers away. I also recommend reading this.

Stalin was committed to the idea of advancing socialism to the point of a centralized state eventually dying out…when it would be possible to do so (not when there was the threat of a Nazi invasion, and not when the Americans had the atomic bomb). The obstacle to such an end goal was not his ‘tyrannical lust for power,’ contrary to imperialist propaganda (Stalin asked to resign from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union no less than four times, but was refused, contrary to the myth that he was a dictator with absolute power; for further reading of a defence of state socialism, anarchists can go here); that obstacle was imperialism’s relentless attempts at sabotaging socialism. This leads me to my next point.

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Commitment to opposing imperialism in all of its forms. The wish to free ourselves from capitalist exploitation must not be limited to the Anglo/American/NATO-allied countries of the First World. The entire globe must be liberated. No one is free until all of us are free.

The modern stage of capitalism, coming to reach a zenith from around the mid-to-late-19th century in such forms as the Scramble for Africa, has been imperialism. This consists of, as Lenin observed, the concentration of production and monopolies, the new role of the banks, finance capital, the export of capital to other countries, the division of the world among the capitalist powers, and competition between the great powers over which will dominate and be the greatest exploiter of the world.

A crucial element of imperialism is colonialism. One starts with the idea that one supposedly has the right to move into the land where someone else–the indigenous community–has lived for many, many generations, if not centuries, then supposedly has the right to take over and kick the indigenous population out. If they don’t like that, one can simply kill them. This is the basis of the imperial problem: that one can steal the land from those who lived there first.

This is the settler-colonialist foundation of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and many other countries. From this dubious foundation, the settler-colonialist imagines he has the right to go into other sovereign states and steal their natural resources to enrich himself from them. So from settler-colonialism, one proceeds to imperialism.

Just as the boss imagines he has the right to exploit his workers and steal the fruits of their labour to enrich himself, so does the imperialist, a natural outgrowth from the settler-colonialist, imagine he has the right to exploit the indigenous peoples and steal their natural resources. He can achieve this exploitation and theft militarily or through neocolonialism–an indirect control of the dependent country by such methods as financial obligation through international borrowing (think of the IMF and the World Bank).

Other forms of imperialist control include interfering with the political process of the dependent countries by fomenting coups d’état to remove democratically-elected heads of state to replace them with leaders who will be puppets of the empire. There are many examples of this slimy tactic: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973; and Ukraine, 2014 are just a few examples.

Yet another form of imperial control is the manufacturing of consent for war to further the interests of empire; this manufacturing of consent is achieved through the deceitful media that works for empire, which leads to the next point.

One must recognize imperialist propaganda for what it is, never trust it, and always oppose it.

The managers of empire are relentless in their efforts to teach us who they want us to love, who they want us to hate, who to despise, and what we’re supposed to dismiss as ideas thrown into the dustbin of history. Hence, TINA and the “end of history.”

Imperial propagandists are fond of telling us of those heads of state regarded as ‘evil dictators’ who must be removed from power for the sake of preserving ‘freedom and democracy.’ Examples of such undesirables from the recent and more remote past include Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yanukovych, the Kims, Putin, Xi Jinping, etc.

This is not to say that all of the names above are completely beyond reproach. It is just that we should not feel antipathy towards them merely because the Anglo/American/NATO-allied empire says they are all bad men. For whatever wrongdoing these men are…or are not!…guilty of, the Western empire is guilty of much more wrongdoing.

A detailed discussion of the sins of capitalism is beyond the scope of this article, but if you want to delve deeper into that, Dear Reader, you can look at this and this, the latter being something I wrote back in my then-naïve anarchist phase, but scroll down to the fourth section, marked “Capitalist Crimes.”

The point to be made here is that the Western imperialists always need to have an enemy, a political scapegoat on whom they can project all of their vices. Starting around seventy-five years ago (as of the publication of this article, of course), that enemy was communism, which the imperialists were desperate to discredit out of a fear of leftist revolution.

The last great taboo to be broken in leftist thinking is the defence of Stalin, who–thanks to decades of having our heads pounded in with anti-communist propaganda–is portrayed as a kind of left-wing version of Hitler. The idea is as absurd as it is offensive, given that Stalin’s leadership of the Red Army–who did most of the work fighting off the Wehrmacht, with a sacrifice of about 27 million Soviets–was crucial in defeating the Nazis. One is normally called a hero for doing that.

Apart from the fact that the deaths under Stalin are wildly exaggerated and taken out of context (and imperialist propaganda is so pervasive that only Marxist-Leninist sources will offer a different perspective), one should consider how even in recent years, large percentages of Russians, who haven’t lived under a socialist government in decades, still have a high regard for Stalin and look back on the Soviet years with nostalgia. If people are worried about the admiration of dictators, they should worry about all the people out there who still admire Hitler.

But more importantly, what is the real reason Stalin is so vilified? The fact is, his leadership demonstrated that one really can stand up to the imperialists, successfully fight off a vicious fascist invasion, and build socialism in one’s country (i.e., provide free education, healthcare, housing, full employment, etc.). He took a backward society made up mostly of illiterate peasant farmers and transformed it into a modern, industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death. This all was achieved within the space of about twenty-five years. That is nothing short of impressive. The capitalist West felt nothing short of threatened.

The Western media couldn’t let such achievements be spread around freely, inspiring Western leftists to want to bring about socialism in their respective countries. So a propaganda Blitzkrieg had to be unleashed all over the capitalist West, terrifying people with a narrative that communism not only ‘doesn’t work,’ but also leads to brutal totalitarian dictatorships, even though the CIA secretly knew that the Gulag was nowhere near as bad as the media were claiming it was.

Of course, the western propagandists had a lot of help from ‘dissident leftists,’ like George Orwell, Milovan Djilas, Noam Chomsky, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nikita Khrushchev, the last of whom denounced Stalin and his ‘cult of personality’ in a secret speech in 1956. Such traitors as these have given us leftists the “unkindest cut of all.”

After the counterrevolution was complete by the early 1990s, and the imperialists as the only superpower could do anything they wanted to any other country with impunity, it was time to look for a new enemy to draw attention away from the discontents felt in the imperial core, and in the 2000s, that enemy became Islamic terrorism. Though there was considerable opposition to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to steal from the country, the notion of regime change to remove ‘brutal dictators’ and further the cause of ‘freedom and democracy’ has been the accepted rationale–thanks to the corporate media–for all the banging of the war drums since.

Of course, having Democrats in the White House has made it a lot easier to manufacture consent among liberals, hence the Obama administration’s destabilizing (with France’s help) of Libya–with virtually no protest from those who’d protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq–to remove Gaddafi, all because–apart from Sarkozy’s financial entanglements–the Libyan leader wanted to establish an African currency, based on gold, that would free Africa from being chained to the IMF and World Bank, something the Western imperialists would never abide.

Then the imperialists went after Assad, their real reason being, again, to steal their oil, while using the media to lie to us about Assad ‘gassing his people’ and other such nonsense. They‘re still stealing Syrian oil (and wheat), by the way.

Yanukovych wanted to partner with Russia to help Ukraine deal with its financial problems without having to be dependent on the IMF, but such a decision was unacceptable to the West, hence his ouster, to be replaced with a government and military including Russophobic Neo-Nazis. This anti-Russian attitude leads us to the next enemy of the empire.

Russia is reviled not because ‘Putin helped Trump win’ in 2016, a baseless accusation that just fueled the fire and helped manufacture consent for the needlessly bellicose attitude that has led to this awful war in Ukraine, taking away billions of dollars that could be used to help the American poor and fix their country’s crumbling infrastructure. The recent Russophobia and Sinophobia are really because Russia and China, as objects of American hate, are getting stronger (i.e., the BRICS alliance) while the Western empire is deservedly dying.

Still, the Western media, mostly owned by the top oligarchs and, as capitalists, have interests fully entwined with those of imperialism, have convinced a huge swathe of the Western population into believing that Russia and China are our latest enemies, as well as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. For us to believe such nonsense is, of course, far more convenient than to believe the far more uncomfortable truth, that it’s our leaders, both conservative and liberal, who are the problem.

We must stop hating only one half of the ruling class. It’s the entire system–DNC and GOP, Tory and Labour, Tory and Liberal, etc.–that must be opposed. We must give up on such things as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s so ridiculous–and hypocritical–that liberals are up in arms whenever Trump does something admittedly awful, such as rounding up ‘illegals,’ putting them in cages via ICE, and kicking them out of the country, but when Obama or Biden did more or less the same thing, liberals largely ignore or rationalize the problem.

On the other side of the coin, Biden and Harris are rightly despised for their support of Israel and its ‘right to self-defence’ (translation: its apartheid, genocidal policies), but little thought is given to the fact that Trump will be every bit as supportive of those policies when he comes back into office in 2025.

Enough of the black-and-white thinking! In the larger scheme of politics, the ideological differences between conservative and liberal are petty. Both sides are capitalist and imperialist: that’s what matters, not the minutiae that they disagree about. That their squabbles are mere right-wing infighting is especially true in a neoliberal world in which income inequality is at an extreme, homelessness is an epidemic in many parts of the world, most mainstream politicians, conservative or liberal, support the US/NATO proxy war of helping Ukrainian Nazis to fight Russians, thereby provoking the danger of a possibly nuclear WWIII, and most of these politicians support Zionism.

We cannot expect real change when we get upset if a party representing one side of the capitalist class, the side we don’t personally like, wins, but we rest on our laurels when the party representing the side we do like wins. The entire system must be dismantled. The only way to achieve this dismantling is through revolution, not through voting, which is meaningless and only perpetuates the system.

As Mao said, “Revolution is not a dinner party.” Revolution isn’t ‘nice.’ It is violent, it is forceful, it is difficult, and it requires planning and organization. People like voting because it is easy; the ruling class likes voting because it takes the people’s minds off of revolution.

A true left-wing revolution, as opposed to mere liberal, social-democrat reforms, will guarantee such things as these:

–the means of production are controlled by the workers
—private property is abolished
–commodities are produced to provide for everyone
—elimination of class differences, leading to…
–…no more centralized state monopoly on power, and…
–…no more money (i.e., replaced with a gift economy)
–an end to imperialism and all the wars it causes
–an end to the huge gap between the rich and the poor
–an end to global hunger in the Third World
–free universal health care
–free education for all, up to university, ending illiteracy
–housing for all
–equal rights for women, people of colour, LGBT people, disabled people
–employment for all, with decent remuneration and hours
–a social safety net in case of job loss

Conservatives abominate such changes. Liberals speak of gradual, gentle nudging in the left-wing direction without ever really delivering. When some progress has been made in the leftist direction, the right-wingers complain, liberals tend–in varying degrees–to cave in, and we move back in the rightist direction, as we have for the past thirty to forty years. Small wonder Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.”

Does that quote sound too extreme to you, Dear Reader? Consider how the Social Democratic Party of Germany opposed the failed communist German Revolution of 1918-1919, favoring instead the Weimar Republic, upon whose foundation it took only a decade and a half thereafter to lapse into Nazism. Consider how the Democratic Party, about five years after the dissolution of the USSR, gutted welfare, created the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (merging the American media into six corporations), and interfered with the 1996 Russian election to keep pro-US Yeltsin in power. Finally, there’s of course the Biden administration’s pouring of money into Ukraine.

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III: Conclusion

That list you saw a couple of paragraphs ago–those are the leftist fundamentals, right there. I just had to expand on some of them, and make a few more important points to show how indispensable these ideas are to eliminate capitalism and imperialism once and for all.

The point is that once a revolution has been achieved, that isn’t the end of the struggle. The forces of reaction will do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and we have to have a strong defence against that. This is why a socialist state is needed: not only to implement the transition (the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a workers’ state–true democracy) from capitalism to full communism, but also to protect the gains of the revolution; otherwise, our efforts will all be in vain.

Whenever a socialist state was either weak or non-existent, the revolution was short-lived. The Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 are noteworthy examples of such nobly lofty, but ultimately failed, revolutions.

In today’s perilous times, we can’t afford to be soft leftists (translation: liberals); we have to be HARD leftists, always wary of backsliding into liberalism. That means that in today’s imperialist stage of late capitalism, we can’t stop at being Marxists: we have to be Marxist-Leninists.

To be this way, we must advocate a state-planned socialist economy; we must oppose all forms of imperialism, but especially in its current Anglo-American-NATO form as the contemporary, primary contradiction (though if, in the future, any of the emerging powers from BRICS grow to be substantially imperialist, they must then be opposed, too); we mustn’t trust the mainstream, corporate media and its pro-empire propaganda; and we must oppose the entire system of capitalism/imperialism, not just get upset if, for example, the GOP wins, but be content if the Democrats win (or vice versa).

There are no quick and easy answers. Our enemies are far too well-equipped militarily, and far too adept at using the media and modern tech to play mind-games on us and surveil us, to keep us compliant. We must similarly undergo training–that is, our young and able-bodied comrades–and we must learn to organize and plant seeds of revolution in the minds of as many fence-sitters out there as we can. This latter is what I try to do here on this blog.

Let’s do it, comrades.

Analysis of The Dark Knight Trilogy

Introduction

Given the subversive interpretation of these three movies that I’m about to make, I find it fitting that the actor cast to play billionaire/playboy Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, the Batman, should be the same actor who only five years earlier played yuppie psychopath Patrick Bateman, a personification of the cruelties of capitalism, as I observed in my analysis of that film.

Though director Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly one of the best talents in filmmaking over the past two decades, he’s also a very bourgeois one, and this trilogy of films solidly demonstrates bourgeois liberal values, if, on occasion, in a somewhat conflicted way. Though Batman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, and later, Maggie Gyllenhaal), Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Robin John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) are, of course, supposed to be the heroes, and Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), the mob, the Joker (Heath Ledger), Bane (Tom Hardy), and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) are supposed to be the villains, there’s a moral ambiguity in the Batman story that leaves a huge grey area between the black and white of stereotypical good and evil.

For the true centre of evil, as powerfully given in these three movies, is Gotham City itself, a city said–repeatedly by those who wish to destroy it–to be impossible to save. A city in which the hero, a billionaire and a glorified, militarized policeman, represents justice, and in which many are so poor and desperate that they have to resort to crime in order to survive, is one in which the mob (i.e., criminal businesses) rules–this tells us all we need to know about what Gotham City symbolizes…capitalism.

As we know, what prompted the reboot of the Batman franchise was the disastrous failure of Joel Schumacher‘s Batman and Robin (1997), which gave us the generally loathed, campy presentation of Batman, as opposed to the preferred dark antihero version as seen in Nolan’s trilogy. A nauseatingly fitting song in the soundtrack of Schumacher’s film is “Gotham City,” by R. Kelly, with a lyric that includes the line “A city of justice, a city of love, a city of peace…” a line that is as totally misrepresentative of the fictional city as it is barf-inducing in its mawkishness.

If Gotham City is a place of justice, love, and peace, why is Batman needed? Why are villains like Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Bane there? No, the very last things that Gotham City represents are justice, love, and peace: its name, which to me suggests a pun on Gothic, has connotations of darkness and evil that Schumacher’s film willfully avoided presenting to moviegoers in its proper tone.

In terms of theme and its presentation of the subject matter, Nolan’s trilogy has an aesthetically appealing ABA structure, as in much classical music: statement, departure, return. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises share not only references to Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, if not outright presenting them, but also the theme of fear. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has the theme of escalation, and as far as the Joker and Harvey Two-Face are concerned, the latter is referred to and briefly shown in Rises, while the former is never referred to or shown, not even once, though the effects of his actions are thoroughly felt in Rises.

Batman Begins

With the establishment of the fear of bats of young Bruce Wayne (played by Gus Lewis), we are also introduced to his father, Thomas Wayne (played by Linus Roache). Billionaire Thomas is a doctor, head of Wayne Enterprises, and a liberal through and through. As a kind and charitable man, he is not only a child’s ideal father, he’s also the exemplar of bourgeois generosity. Still, all these virtues are a mask, a distraction from the plain and simple fact that billionaires simply shouldn’t exist, especially in a city riddled with poverty, desperation, and crime.

What must be emphasized in such a world is that the only difference worth noting between businesses like Wayne Enterprises and the mob is that the former are law-abiding capitalists, while the latter are not law-abiding capitalists. As far as law enforcement is concerned, the cops touch neither group of capitalists because they are paid for through two channels: the former, through taxes; the latter, through bribes. All three groups–legitimate business, the mob, and the law enforcers–keep the capitalist, class system intact.

The first and third of these groups thus represent the government-regulated forms of capitalism, while the mob represents the deregulated, “free market” form. Incidentally, there will emerge another character, who in his lawless, privatized form of law enforcement, will also represent that “free market” form of capitalism…the Batman.

That we.see such an intermingling of the state-regulated vs. deregulated forms of capitalism–sometimes cooperating and complementing each other, sometimes fighting with each other–in this trilogy makes it a perfect portrayal of our neoliberal world.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Thomas Wayne of this film with him in Joker, the film I looked at here, and more in depth here. Nolan’s Thomas is so kind, gentle, and liberal, whereas the Thomas of the 2019 film (played by Brett Cullen, who also played Congressman Byron Gilley in The Dark Knight Rises) is gruff, mean-spirited, and even Trumpish. Could it be that the superrich and those in power are…two-faced? (For reasons that should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, I’ll be exploring this idea much more in the Dark Knight section of this analysis.)

With Joe Chill‘s killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents, it’s only natural that he, as a kid, will be focused on only his own pain. His focus on his own trauma stays with him until his young adulthood, when he considers shooting Chill when he’s about to be released early in exchange for testifying against crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). A woman hired by Falcone shoots Chill instead.

It takes Rachel Dawes, now no longer just a childhood friend of Bruce’s, but a DA, to get him to understand that it’s the mafia of Gotham, with their control of the economy, police, and politicians, that drives the poor to such desperation that people like Chill rob and kill. Up until this point, we’ve been sympathizing with Bruce; now, we finally manage to spare some sympathy for the poor.

What’s not acknowledged in this liberal film is that Bruce Wayne’s family is part of the problem. The rich become that way not through hard work, contrary to popular belief, but through exploitation of the working class. The money the rich get through their profits, surplus value, is just money not paid to their employees. Put another way, the rich get rich through stealing from their overworked, underpaid workers…and it’s all legal.

Though as I said, this reality isn’t acknowledged in the film, that doesn’t mean there are no Freudian slips that occasionally give away the hidden meaning. William Earle (Rutger Hauer), CEO of Wayne Enterprises, tells young Bruce around the time of the funeral of Thomas and Martha Wayne that he’ll be watching over “the empire” until Bruce grows up and can take over. Don’t get me started on how capitalism leads to empire. Read this and this instead.

As a young man, Bruce travels to the Far East to learn about such things as hunger and the drive to commit crimes. Bruce, you’re still a billionaire: you can take a vacation from starvation and desperation any time you like; the scrawny, dirty East Asians all around you cannot.

His hanging out with and helping criminals steal show, in symbolic form, the blurred line between law-abiding capitalists and the criminal businesses of the mafia. Still, when arrested, Bruce insists that he not a “犯人.” In a Bhutan prison, he often has to fight off the local prisoners, who just see in him a rich white man. It doesn’t matter whether or not they know he’s billionaire Bruce Wayne: in the Third World, anyone from the First World is correctly understood to be the 1% of the Earth, regardless of whether they happen to be of the ruling class, the middle class, or even the working class of the richer countries.

The League of Shadows learns not only of Bruce being in East Asia, but also of him fighting off groups of prisoners, so “Henri Ducard” goes to the prison to offer Bruce membership in the League, as well as training, and “a path.” Upon release from the prison, Bruce goes to find Ducard in the mountains.

Bruce learns all he needs to know about engaging groups of fighters and taking them all out. He learns that “training is nothing” and “will is everything.” Ducard also tells Bruce of how, many years back, he lost his “one true love,” something that will be developed in the third film, one of many examples of the ABA structure of the trilogy that I mentioned above.

When Bruce finishes his training and proves himself to be the best pupil of the League of Shadows, he is disappointed to learn that he is expected to practice extrajudicial killings. The liberal in Bruce, something he learned from his father and from Rachel, cannot just execute a man without there first being a trial for him.

Ducard insists that in a world of corrupt bureaucrats, there is no such thing as a fair trial. What we see in the contradiction between Bruce’s liberal point of view and the hard line of the League of Shadows is what essentially amounts to a straw man, if looked at more closely. The hard line is portrayed as cruel, extreme, and unreasonable compared to the liberal position. This becomes especially apparent when Bruce learns that he’s expected to lead the League of Shadows into Gotham City and destroy it, which of course he’ll never do.

When we remember that Gotham, permeated throughout with corruption and crime, represents capitalism, which cannot be reformed or saved, the League of Shadows’ position is not so unreasonable or extremist. Also, the film portrays the group of assassins as mere destroyers, rather than revolutionaries who would rebuild a just society on the ruins of the old, capitalist one. We thus see a narrow Overton Window that misrepresents our options as only capitalism, or nihilist destruction…no room for socialism.

Wayne’s belief that there are some good people in Gotham, as against Ducard’s insistence that there isn’t even one good person there, reminds one of Abraham’s negotiating with God (Genesis 18:20-33) over whether there are any in Sodom and Gomorrah who are worth sparing the destruction of the sinful cities by fire and brimstone. Such a suggestion reinforces the idea that Gotham City is beyond redemption, in spite of Bruce’s protestations. Note in this connection the “immortality” of Ra’s al Ghul (Ducard’s secret identity, as we learn soon enough), which makes him rather Godlike in relation to Bruce-as-Abraham.

Bruce escapes and destroys the home of Ra’s al Ghul, thinking he’s left him for dead, too (though actually killing an Asian decoy played by Ken Watanabe), and saving “Ducard.” Bruce returns to Gotham to take over the helm of Wayne Enterprises, only to learn that William Earle, thinking Bruce is dead, is making the company go public. In this we see how Earle, another cutthroat capitalist, is trying to wrest the power of Wayne Enterprises from the Wayne family.

Bruce discusses with Alfred his plan to save Gotham from the mob by presenting himself as a symbol, wearing a mask to conceal his identity and thus keep safe those he cares about. Since bats have always frightened him, he’ll dress in a Batsuit. By ordering the different parts from various manufacturers in places all over the world, he hopes it will be harder to trace them all to him. Adding to this all of the equipment he’ll get from Lucius Fox (the cape, the utility belt, the Batmobile, etc.) and the cave beneath Wayne Manor, the Batman is born.

Note how the Batmobile has been reimagined to become “the Tumbler,” essentially a kind of tank. This ties in well with what I said above, that Batman is a glorified, privatized, militarized policeman. The police, properly understood, don’t ‘fight crime’ per se, or ‘enforce justice’ so much as they protect the interests of the capitalist class. The recent militarizing of the police, a perfect preparation for any attempts at proletarian revolution, has made them particularly threatening to the common people.

It is in this context that we should understand the Dark Knight, a metaphor expressing the idea of protecting a king, a wealthy, landowning ruler. It should come as no surprise that this Dark Knight should be a billionaire, called “Master Wayne” by his butler. This masked vigilante is privatized law enforcement helping the cops; this combination of private and state law enforcement is symbolic of the combination of free enterprise and state-regulated economies, just the right combination for the convenience of the ruling class: “free market” (i.e., low taxes and minimal social programs, to ensure a maximization of profit at the expense of the poor) when convenient, and government involvement (e.g., state subsidies for corporations) when convenient…the essence of neoliberalism.

Batman’s fighting of the mob, who are just another kind of capitalist (as I’ve argued elsewhere), and his helping the cops to fight the mob, should thus be seen as different factions of the capitalist class competing over who will rule the city. Some represent a more state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops), while others, in their relative or extreme lawlessness, represent the “free market” version, Batman and the mob.

Note how the “free market” representatives can be ‘good’ (Batman) or evil (the mob). The representatives of the state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops) can be horribly corrupt, too, as becomes especially apparent in the second movie.

Now, with the excesses of this kind of world, with the extreme wealthy on one side, as well as the mob and the corrupt cops, and the desperately poor and exploited on the other side, it is inevitable that all of these contradictions and conflicts will lead to massive numbers of cases of mental illness.

Here’s where Dr. Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, comes in.

As a psychiatrist with a fear toxin, a hallucinogenic drug, that he uses to induce insanity on anyone deemed a threat or just because it’s convenient to do so, Crane is an example of the corruption in the field of psychiatry that I discussed here. Though he thinks that his collaboration with Ra’s al Ghul, to threaten Gotham with his fear toxin, is meant to hold the city to ransom, it will actually be used by the League of Shadows to make the people of Gotham tear each other apart with fear and madness, thus destroying the city as Ra’s al Ghul intended.

Of course, Batman also uses fear to fight crime, as we see him do to Arnold Flass (played by Mark Boone Junior), a corrupt cop working for Falcone and corrupt Commissioner Loeb. Though in the scene in question, we see Batman intimidating a cop, Batman as privatized cop (even though he insists he doesn’t look like one!) is simply doing what we know regular cops do all the time, those bullies with bullets. And as the ‘good,’ privatized cop going after the corrupt state police, we see another example of the neoliberal agenda in The Dark Knight trilogy.

While Batman is one mask that Bruce wears, another is the act he puts on as Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy, going about everywhere in public with beautiful women on his arms. But of course, this playboy persona isn’t the “real” Bruce, either, since our hero is far too noble to be chasing skirt in earnest. Besides, he’s still in love with Rachel.

And since Rachel is the love interest of this conservative trilogy, she must also be the damsel in distress…in spite of, or rather because of, her pluck as an assistant DA fighting corruption in Gotham. First, Falcone hires some muscle to kill her, from whom Batman saves her; then, after she’s exposed to Crane’s fear toxin upon her discovery that it is being put into the city’s water supply, Batman has to rush her to the Batcave to give her the antidote Fox has made.

What’s interesting is how interconnected all the actors are in the conspiracy to destroy Gotham City. Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows are at the centre of the conspiracy, but not only is the Scarecrow involved–as mentioned above–with his fear toxin, but also Wayne Enterprises is, through the use of a powerful microwave emitter that will vaporize the liquid toxin so all of the people of Gotham breathe it in and go mad with fear.

Though Bruce doesn’t know about the microwave emitter until the climax of the film, William Earle and other senior staff at Wayne Enterprises surely know about it, some of them–including Earle in all probability, since he fires Fox for asking too many questions about it–also being in on the conspiracy to at least some extent. That these capitalists, along with a corrupt psychiatrist and at least some corrupt cops like Flass, have at least an inkling of the plot to destroy capitalist Gotham is symbolic of how it’s been predicted that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own contradictions.

Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, on the other hand, represent a leftist revolutionary movement, though in this bourgeois film, such a political movement can only be portrayed unsympathetically. They’re just destroyers, bent only on tearing down the old, oppressive order. As such, they’re more like nihilists or Trotskyists, since Ra’s al Ghul’s boast that the League of Shadows has existed throughout history, tearing down one decadent city after another, sounds a lot like permanent revolution. There’s never an interest in rebuilding society along socialist lines, such as providing universal free education and healthcare, subsidized housing for all, 100% employment, and a social safety net for the poor. A bourgeois film like this one is content with such omissions.

Wayne Enterprises having the microwave emitter, which can be used to make the Gotham population kill each other through maniacal fear, has its parallel in the third film (recall the trilogy’s ABA structure) with the fusion reactor, ostensibly meant to provide eco-friendly energy, but which can also be converted into a nuclear bomb that Bane will use to destroy Gotham. And Bane is an excommunicated member of the League of Shadows.

Part of the destruction of Gotham as a nerve-centre of capitalism is the burning-down of Wayne Manor by the League of Shadows, an arson even Bruce himself has spoken of wanting to commit. If revolutionaries don’t destroy capitalism, it will destroy itself by its own contradictions. But of course, liberals will fight to keep capitalism alive by attempting to reform it, either by social democrat means or through the libertarian ideal of market fundamentalism. We see this symbolically through the joint efforts of Gordon and Batman defeating Ra’s al Ghul.

…and one day, when Batman retires, Bruce can have a real love life–but with Rachel?

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins ends with Gordon, promoted to lieutenant, warning Batman of the dangers of escalation and giving him the Joker’s card. This anticipates not only the arrival of the Joker, of course, but also the main theme of the second film: escalation.

Normally, we think of the Joker as being just a murdering psychopath, a mad dog chasing tires and foaming at the mouth. Now, unlike the Joker whom Joaquin Phoenix played, Heath Ledger’s Joker has very little backstory to explain how he became a homicidal maniac, apart from his two contradictory stories for how he got his Glasgow smile.

However he got those scars, be it from an abusive father (far more likely than him giving them to himself, in an attempt to appease the woman he loved), they’re an obvious sign of trauma that, among other things presumably, drove him to a life of crime. Bourgeois ideology have very little interest in exploring the real roots of crime in class conflict; hence, we get very little, if any, backstory on the Joker, as we do in the 2019 film.

What we do know of this Joker, though, is surprising. Consider who he attacks throughout the movie. We see him and his gang of wearers of clown masks rob a bank…run by the mob. He kills cops and imitators of Batman, who as I’ve said above is a glorified cop himself. We’ve never sympathized with the mafia, and sympathy for the cops has recently–at best–been dwindling. By the end of the film, the mayhem he’s caused results in the bulk of Gotham’s criminals behind bars, aided by the myth of Harvey Dent’s heroism. Is the Joker the secret hero of this film?

Now, the Joker isn’t an anarchist in the strict sense of the term. We don’t see him set up the anarchist, i.e., stateless, version of socialism because, as I said about Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, the bourgeois liberal ideology of these films insists on an Overton Window narrow enough to exclude even the contemplation of socialist possibilities. This is because ‘There Is No Alternative to capitalism,’ apparently.

The Joker does, however, personify the anarchist solution to the problem of capitalism, if only in a stereotyped form. He speaks of the only sensible way to live being one without rules, and that he’s an “agent of chaos.” Now, such ideas are not truly anarchist, of course, but they are stereotypically associated with anarchism (meaning “no rulers,” not “no rules,” actually), and this film’s bourgeois agenda would have you continue to believe the misleading conception of anarchism, in the hopes that you’ll never consider such a radical solution to society’s ills. His saying to scarred Harvey, “Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” is meant to reinforce the stereotyped association of chaos with anarchy.

At the same time, who does the Joker kill, for the most part? Cops, mafia men and their bosses (criminal capitalists, remember), lawyers, judges, anyone in a position of power and authority. No rulers, in effect. Yet as with the League of Shadows, there’s no rebuilding of society, because the bourgeoisie cannot allow the people to see a newer, better world.

The Scarecrow makes a brief appearance, having sold his fear toxin as a supposed narcotic. A mobster known as the Chechen (played by Ritchie Coster), who works for Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), is upset that the fear toxin’s ‘bad trip’ won’t produce “repeat customers.” In this scene, we see an example of how the mob are just another kind of capitalist. The Scarecrow doesn’t care about money, though: he, being a psychopath, just wants to spread fear into the world, his toxin being symbolically a projection of his own fears and traumas brought on by his having been bullied and abused as a child.

In all of the imitators of Batman, we see people admiring the notion of Batman as the ‘Great Man,’ another myth the ruling class has always used to justify its existence. The faux-Batmen can never measure up to the real Dark Knight, of course, because they wear “hockey pants” instead of the proper armoured Batsuit. In other words, these ordinary men lack the money to pay for a proper Batsuit, which Bruce can even afford to replace with one that will let him turn his head more comfortably.

The new district attorney, Harvey Dent, represents the lawful way of defeating the mob, and therefore Bruce has high hopes that Dent will make Batman no longer necessary. Then, he imagines, he can be with Rachel…only she’s been seeing Harvey.

In the shift from Batman being Gotham’s hero to Harvey being that hero, that is, from lawless protector to lawful protector, we see how capitalism can shift from a deregulated to a regulated system, depending on the social, economic, and political conditions of the time. Yet even at this early point in the movie, those corrupt cops Harvey has been monitoring have already been calling him “Two-Face.” This unflattering nickname suggests the dual nature of the capitalist system: regulated at one time, when convenient, and non-regulated at another time, when convenient.

It’s an economic system of multiple faces, with a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl.

Since the Joker has been stealing the mob’s money, and Batman has been giving them a hard time, Sal Maroni, Gambol (played by Michael Jai White), and the other mafia men have had to meet in secret places. Lau (played by Chin Han), a mafia banker from Hong Kong, has moved all their money to keep it safe where he is.

The Joker barges in on their meeting, laughing at Lau’s feeble promise of protection, knowing that even though the Chinese would never extradite Lau, Batman has no jurisdiction: he will bring Lau back to Gotham, make him squeal, and get the cops all over the mob, which, of course, the Batman does.

Batman catches Lau in Hong Kong, making him beg Batman to let go of him and promising to give him anything he wants. This is the first time we’ve known Batman to go outside of Gotham to catch a criminal; note that Hong Kong can be seen as a capitalist Gotham in its own right. In this scene, we see again how Batman, in his lawless fighting of crime and defying China’s forbidding of the extradition of any of its citizens, represents the deregulated, privatized form of policing. His apprehending of Lau, a mafia capitalist, is also an example of how these three films aren’t so much about good vs evil as they are about competing forms of capitalism.

As a result of Lau’s squealing, Harvey, Rachel, and the police are able to arrest a whole slew of the mob; only high-ranking members like Maroni and the Chechen have the money to make bail. In this great success of Harvey’s, Bruce sees a real hope that he can hang up his cowl soon, and then be with Rachel. He hosts a fundraising party for Harvey in his new home (while Wayne Manor is being rebuilt), repeating the slogan, “I believe in Harvey Dent.”

Bruce’s entrance to his party, from a helicopter, wearing a nice suit, and with not one, not two, but three beautiful women (Russian ballerinas, I assume) on his arms, deserves comment. I’m sure I’m far from being the only man who was awed by this amazing entrance of Bruce’s, back when the film came out in theatres. A similar feeling comes when one sees the home, cars, suits, and technology of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies: the effect is to engender more simping for billionaires among young men, who fantasize about attaining such wealth themselves one day.

Now, hitting the mob as hard as Batman, Dent, and Gordon have done is not going to pass without any retaliation. Here is where the escalations begin. Maroni, the Chechen, et al decide to hire the Joker to go after Batman. By saying he’ll kill people for every day that Batman doesn’t reveal his true identity (something Batman will never do, of course), the Joker is making Batman into a scapegoat for all of these deaths. Once again, we see a blurred line separating the ‘good’ from the bad.

Commissioner Loeb’s liquor is poisoned, a judge is killed by a car bomb, the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, looking for Dent and dropping Rachel from a window, forcing Batman to rescue the damsel in distress again. Disguised as a policeman, the Joker makes an attempt on the life of Gotham mayor Anthony Garcia (played by Néstor Carbonell), for whom Gordon takes a bullet, seeming to kill him and causing his grieving wife to blame Batman.

To stop the violence, Bruce is ready to reveal himself as Batman and turn himself in to the cops, who are portrayed very sympathetically in this conservative film. But Harvey claims to be Batman, and Bruce lets him do it. Just before doing so, Harvey tries to reassure the frightened public that “the night is darkest just before the dawn,” implying that the film’s title is a pun on The Dark Night, a reflection of how bad the escalations are getting.

Of course, Harvey, as a reflection of how the law ‘should’ be enforced, as someone so ‘incorruptible,’ and as someone taking the fall for Bruce, is Gotham’s White Knight…but if you’re familiar with my ouroboros symbolism, you’ll know how quickly and easily the whitest of innocence can fall to the darkest of evil. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

After the exciting car chase scene, in which the Joker fires a bazooka at the armoured police vehicle carrying Harvey, and when Batman’s Tumbler takes the hit, totaling his armoured vehicle and making Batman convert the remains into his Batcycle, or “Batpod,” the Joker is apprehended, and we learn that Gordon never died…he’s soon to be promoted to commissioner by the mayor, too.

The pressure is being put on both Harvey and Batman when they realize that Rachel is being targeted by the Joker. They are increasingly being tempted to sidestep the rule of law to stop the bad guys, putting themselves in danger of becoming bad guys themselves. And when law enforcement, whether in its privatized or state forms, protects the capitalist system as illegally as the mob practices capitalism, we know that Gotham’s ‘good guys’ are no better than its bad guys.

When Harvey, pointing a gun at the Joker’s paranoid schizophrenic henchman Thomas Schiff (played by David Dastmalchian), is flipping a coin with two good sides, we know he’s showing his potential for evil already. He’s already Harvey Two-Face. When Batman, as the “bad cop,” is beating the crap out of the Joker, and Gordon as the “good cop” assures the other cops watching the beating that it’s “in control,” we see again how the police’s defence of private property is nowhere near as justified as it would seem to be. Such a lack of justification is all the more apparent when we see Batman, the privatized form of ‘law enforcement,’ is also willing to bend the law by using a cellphone surveillance system to monitor all of Gotham, violating citizens’ privacy, in order to catch the Joker.

The Joker’s method is a form of accelerationism. He pushes the law enforcers to their limit to get them to show their repressed, ugly sides. Killing Rachel and burning half of Harvey’s face, as well as burning one side of his coin, has turned him from a liberal defender of the class system to one comparable to a violent fascist. The Joker tries to do the same with Gotham’s citizens, with the threats to blow up hospitals if Wayne Enterprises employee Coleman Reese (played by Joshua Harto) isn’t killed for trying to reveal Batman’s identity, and with the threat to blow up the two boats (with the “sweet innocent civilians” on one, and Gotham’s “scumbag” convicts in the other), but without the same success.

When the Joker, disguised as a nurse in Gotham General Hospital, tells Harvey that no one gets upset if a truck of soldiers gets blown up, a theory was formed that the Joker could be an Iraq War veteran, his trauma from that causing his psychopathy. When people from the bottom part of society are killed, like troops or a “gangbanger,” who cares? But if someone from the top, like a mayor, is killed, “then everyone loses their minds,” because such upper echelon deaths are not “part of the plan.”

The Joker, as an ‘anarchist’ of sorts, is trying to prove the point that no one group of people is inherently better than another. We’re all beasts, underneath it all…but more importantly, no one has the right to exercise authority over another; so if those in authority can decide who dies and who doesn’t, so can people like the Joker. The film portrays his attitude as being merely loving of destruction for its own sake, as with the League of Shadows: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is how the bourgeoisie wants us to understand socialists’ aims to be.

Though Harvey himself–overwhelmed with how deep the corruption is among the Gotham police, how the Joker and the mob can so easily pay off cops like Wuertz (played by Ron Dean) and Ramirez (played by Monique Gabriela Curnen) to have Rachel killed–betrays the very justice system he condemns these cops for betraying, Gordon and Batman know they can’t let the public know of Harvey’s crimes, including the killing of cops. All of those Harvey has had incarcerated would go free, and Gotham would no longer have any hope in eradicating crime.

The lie of the efficacy of conventional law enforcement must be maintained in this lie.

This lie must be maintained in Gotham City because it must be maintained everywhere that the capitalist system is upheld. If not, we’ll have either socialism, or barbarism.

…and we all know that socialism cannot even be considered.

So Batman has to be a kind of Christ-figure and take the fall for something he didn’t do: kill all those Harvey killed. Gordon reluctantly calls it in, to have his cops chase Batman for the killings, as well as for the threat Harvey made to his wife, himself, and his little boy.

Everybody knows that the police all too frequently use excessive force, engage in police brutality, and kill needlessly (often blacks, often with impunity). Such is the two-faced nature of law enforcement and the protection of private property. In his attempt to tear the whole system down, to remove all systems of authority–which, one might hope, would be replaced with a socialist system that produces commodities for the general need, instead of for profit–the Joker, in trying to make Gotham “[his] city,” was trying to save it.

The Joker is not interested in having huge sums of money, comparable to the way an anarcho-communist wants a society without money, so he burns it. Batman “completes” him in a dialectical sense: the Joker imagines he’ll be fighting Batman forever, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in an eternal contradiction between, on the one hand, the capitalist use of state (or privatized) authority for the sake of the protection of private property, and on the other hand, the revolutionary aim of destroying those very capitalist forms of authority.

But instead of saving Gotham in the accelerationist way the Joker initially intended, the corrupt police system has remained intact; still, at least all the major criminals are behind bars. So as far as the Joker being the real hero of the second film is concerned, some might say, what he has ended up achieving is close enough.

The Dark Knight Rises

Though the streets of Gotham are generally clean, our protagonists are scarred right down to the bone. Gordon is racked with guilt over years of never telling the truth about Harvey Dent, and how he threatened the lives of the Gordon family, causing his wife to take their son and leave him. Bruce, with an injured leg, is still mourning the loss of Rachel, and has become something of a recluse.

As I mentioned above, though the Joker is never, not even once, mentioned in this third film, the effect of what he did in the second is still felt, throughout this one. Also, as I said before, this film’s themes and subject matter return us to those of the first film…fear in particular.

Bruce was mourning his parents in the first film, grieving for years afterwards; now, he’s mourning Rachel, wounded by her loss for years. His emotional wounds are symbolized by that bad leg of his. As at the beginning of the first film, at the beginning of this one, there is no Batman. Batman began in the first movie; the Dark Knight must rise in this one.

Another motif in this film, a new one, is hell. Bane and his men, the villains according to the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology, work and plot in the underground of Gotham. After Bane beats Batman in their first fight, incapacitated Bruce is put in an underground prison somewhere in the Middle East, a hell in which all hope is to be abandoned precisely because the tantalizing hope of climbing up and escaping is frustrated by its near-impossibility.

Despair is dialectically strengthened by this perpetually frustrated hope. Finally, there’s one obvious underground hell to outdo all hells: the Batcave, the headquarters of our privatized, militarized policeman who defeats the mob (hope), but keeps alive the very capitalist system that spawns more mafia (despair).

Selina Kyle is an interesting case of the dialectical opposition between seeming to be one kind of person vs actually being a completely different kind. At first, she seems timid and submissive, then revealing herself to be sly and a formidable fighter. As a cat burglar trying to find a way to wipe out her criminal record, she’s a villain going so far as to steal Bruce’s fingerprints to bankrupt him and help Bane in his revolution; yet she also turns heroine, helping Batman in the end and even killing Bane with the guns of the Batpod.

For these reasons, she is yet another example of the moral ambiguity of this trilogy. That moral ambiguity, of course, goes both ways: the one in accordance with bourgeois values, as described in the previous paragraph, and the one in accordance with the Marxist values I’ve been trying to argue for here. As I said above, billionaires shouldn’t exist; and though her saving of Batman is in aid of capitalism, her earlier helping of Bane is the helping of a revolution that needs to be properly interpreted. Recall what she whispers in Bruce’s ear: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Bane’s agenda, being a return to that of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, is the destruction of Gotham, a city regarded as far too corrupt to save…and as a symbol of capitalism, I’d have to agree that it can’t be saved. Still, as with the previous two films, the revolution ends in mere destruction: we don’t see any socialist rebuilding of society because the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology won’t have it.

What sets Bane’s revolution apart from those of Joker and Ra’s al Ghul is that Bane doesn’t just destroy Gotham immediately after beating Batman and putting Bruce in the underground prison in the Middle East: he takes over the city and protects his revolution with his men and their use of such weaponry as Tumblers from Wayne Enterprises. Such a protection of his revolution, through military force, suggests the Marxist-Leninist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in this bourgeois film is inevitably portrayed as a kind of death cult.

The use of the Wayne Enterprises weaponry, the blowing-up of all but one bridge connecting Gotham City to the outside world, and the relatively brief time that Bane’s men control the city, implies that Bane’s revolution, if understood as a kind of leftist one, is comparable to the short-lived Paris Commune, where cannons were kept to protect the working-class revolution.

The conversion of the fusion reactor core into a decaying neutron bomb seems meant to remind us of the fears the West has had of nuclear weapons programs in the USSR, Mao’s China, and the DPRK. Of course, so many of us in the West conveniently forget which government created the original nuclear weapons program and used it the one and only time to kill people.

If Bane’s revolutionary government and kangaroo courts seem terrifying and oppressive to you, Dear Reader, recall that, apart from the films’ propagandistic, denigrating portrayal of such revolutionary change as I’ve explained above, the Dent Act, incarcerating people based on the lie and, indeed, cult of personality surrounding Harvey, is hardly innocent, democratic, or respectful of the rule of law. Bourgeois government is predicated on force and violence every bit as much as, if not more than, proletarian government. In The State and Revolution, Lenin explained how any state, whether capitalist or socialist, is used by the dominant class to rule over the dominated class. In socialist governments, the workers rule over the capitalists; in bourgeois governments (the vast majority of governments around the world), it’s the other way around. Either way, someone is stepped on; why not have the common majority control the rich minority for a change?

Gotham Mayor Garcia has refused to repeal the Dent Act, in typical bourgeois state fashion. Gordon, for all his ‘goodness,’ hasn’t grown the courage to admit that the circumstances surrounding Dent’s death were depicted dishonestly. The rich of Gotham, the real thieves of the poor there, continue to live in luxury without ever being held accountable.

One such example of such a vampiric capitalist crook is John Daggett (played by Ben Mendelsohn), who hopes Bane will help him absorb Wayne Enterprises, and arrogantly thinks his wealth gives him the right to boss others around…fatefully, even Bane. It’s easy to feel no sympathy for him when Bane kills him, but Bruce, Gordon, Garcia, et al are in principal no better…except in how they lack Daggett’s obnoxious attitude. A capitalist nonetheless is still a capitalist, and a protector of such vampires is still a protector of them, whether polite or rude. The same applies when comparing the vices of Trump with those of Biden, Obama, Gates, etc.

Officer John Blake, being a Robin-esque cop, blurs the line between state and privatized police in a manner comparable to Batman, but as an orphan, he reminds Bruce of his social duty as a “billionaire orphan” not to forget the orphans he used to give charity to. In the end, he gives Wayne Manor to those orphans who have grown too old to stay in orphanages. Such charity is as far as liberals will allow, when the best solution to the problem of the homeless, orphan or non-orphan, is to provide housing for all, as such examples of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba do.

Blake, becoming fed up with the shackles of state law enforcement by the end of the movie, will give up on being a cop. He’ll discover the Batcave at the very end, and we are to assume that he will take up the mantle of Batman once Bruce has left Gotham and retired his role as the Dark Knight…or perhaps ‘Robin’ will become Nightwing. In any case, his switch from state cop to privatized cop once again reflects the trilogy’s implied neoliberal agenda.

While The Dark Knight Rises is generally a well-made film, it is also riddled with plot holes, these mostly being based on how incapacitated Bruce becomes by the middle of the story. One must assume that the strapping-up of his bad leg is left intact by Bane’s men when he is taken to the underground prison; otherwise, that near impossible leap he makes to escape the prison just becomes all the nearer to impossible.

Also, though his cellmate fixes the vertebra in his back, surely it continues to hurt like the hell he’s trapped in, right up to his leap to freedom, again, making the leap all that harder to do, as well as making it harder for him to fight Bane again…let alone defeat him. And how was Bruce, without his money, a passport, or any of his Batman equipment, able to get back to Gotham without being detected by Bane’s men?

Apart from filling in these gargantuan plot holes with an added, impractical story arc that would have lengthened an already long film by at least another thirty minutes (Bruce presumably contacting a rich, influential friend in the Middle East, someone to lend him some money, help him get a new passport to get him back to the US, etc.), seeing him back in Gotham, with all of his miraculous return’s willing suspension of disbelief, reinforces the ruling class’s myth of the “Great Man,” able to overcome impossible odds by “the most powerful impulse of the spirit.”

The ability or inability of escaping the prison is to be understood dialectically. The only ones who have ever escaped–young Talia al Ghul, as we eventually learn, and Bruce–did so without the aid of a rope, which makes them have to look fear right in the face. Having the security of the rope, however, ensures failure.

One surprising plot element of this third film, which is a kind of return to an element of the first film, yet in the form of its dialectical opposite, is Alfred’s commitment to helping Bruce, through thick or thin. In Batman Begins, Alfred twice says he’ll “never” give up on Bruce. Yet in The Dark Knight Rises, in the hopes of getting Bruce to give up on trying to revive Batman and to save his life from almost assuredly being killed by Bane, Alfred does give up on Bruce! He quits!

This giving up, this quitting, is related to despair, another major theme of this third film, related to the hell motif described above (recall how Bruce, having been taken to the Middle East prison, that underground hell, wishes in his despair that Bane would kill him). The wish to destroy Gotham, as opposed to the wish to reform the city and purge it of its mafia element, is also related to despair. No inkling of an intent to rebuild Gotham along, say, socialist lines is even to be considered, of course. It is either to be a reformed capitalism, or it must be “ashes.”

Note how Gotham as a symbol of capitalism is expanded to one of American patriotism with the little boy singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The football fans, deeply moved by his “lovely, lovely voice” (which even Bane acknowledges as such), give the boy enthusiastic applause. Shortly afterwards, Bane blows up most of the football field; since his revolution is, as I described above, akin to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, these detonations are symbolic of an anti-imperialist act, tearing American hegemony and hubris down to size.

The entirety of the Gotham police are, around the time of these detonations, trapped in the underground hell of the city. When Batman frees them, they can do battle with Bane’s army, who, far better armed, threaten the cops with violence if they don’t back off…in a manner we expect of riot police. Such an understanding exposes this presentation of belligerents as a form of projection: those cops were trapped in an underground hell because they are like John Milton‘s fallen angels turned demons. Still, we sympathize with them, not those who threaten them on the street the same way riot police would threaten protestors.

If we are to think of the Gotham kangaroo courts as being unfairly denigrated as such due to the trilogy’s biased bourgeois ideology…that is, if we should really condone the people’s condemnation of the rich, and those who work for the rich, like Philip Stryver (played by Burn Gorman), for “living off the blood and sweat of people less powerful,” then does this suddenly make Dr. Crane, the judge of these courts, a good man, in my estimation? No…as a psychopath no less corrupt than the other bad ones of Gotham, Crane is a mere opportunist in the new order, taking advantage of the vicissitudes of the time, and avoiding punishment with all the other guilty Gothamites. Having him as judge, though, for the purposes of the film’s bourgeois agenda, only reinforces the notion of the cruelty of these courts.

As far as the chanting, in 5/4 time, of “Deshi Basara” (“Rise!”) is concerned, the sympathetic, galvanizing character of the music, first heard when we see Bane’s men take over and crash the plane with the CIA men in Uzbekistan, is a case of a Freudian slip in this otherwise bourgeois film. The cruelties of the CIA over the years are so many that one should find it hard to sympathize with their agents, so seeing Bane bash the face in of one of them, while “Deshi Basara” is playing, should be quite gratifying to watch.

Conclusion

Nolan flatly denies that there’s any political message in his Batman trilogy, but the political elements, regardless of whether you assess them my way, the opposite way, or any other way, are so obvious that they scream out at you. The only way Nolan’s denials could have any honesty in them (apart from being a deflection of leftist criticisms, he presumably just wants to prevent any limits to the films’ interpretations) is that neoliberalism as an ideology has so smothered all of political and cultural life over the past several decades that many of us simply haven’t noticed it as such. (Of course, to be fair to Nolan, capitalism as a standard economic way of doing things was already so entrenched in the comic and previous TV shows, cartoons, and movies, that Nolan had only this to work with in his adaptation.)

The bourgeois liberal way of doing things is so ‘standard,’ such a default position, that the average moviegoer sees the resolution of the trilogy as satisfying. Though Bruce most charitably has given Wayne Manor to the orphans and given his estate to Alfred, he must still have plenty of money for himself (the fraudulent circumstances of his bankruptcy having been exposed), for how else could he and Selina have gone to Florence, where they see Alfred at a restaurant? Since Blake has found the Batcave (with the help of a package from Bruce), he is obviously to be the next Batman, anticipating future crime in Gotham, crime of a magnitude requiring another superhero crimefighter…or, as I would call him, another glorified, militarized cop.

All of these things mean that the class structure of Gotham City has remained intact, with a few rich at the top and a multitude of poor people at the bottom. New mafia will rise up to replace Falcone and Maroni; they will exploit the poor, driving them to desperation and more crime. Blake with have to deal with this problem, as well as any new ‘supervillains’ bent on destroying Gotham, since such a capitalist city needs to be destroyed. The trilogy ends with these contradictions only seeming to be resolved, to a ‘reasonable’ extent, at least.

Getting rid of a few billionaires (Bruce and, I assume, some of the exiled Gothamites who fell through the ice and drowned), while providing Bruce’s home to some orphans, may seem to liberals to be a generous sacrifice, but such concessions are far from enough to solve the problems of extreme class conflict. Furthermore, portraying the revolutionary but real solutions to these problems as cruel and extremist only further ensures that no real solution will even be tried, because such a solution will be deemed unthinkable.

There may be sunny skies at the end of the third movie, but a dark night will rise on Gotham again, and soon, a night that may never end in a dawn, as many of us fear the 2020s are such a night.

Fascism Has Two Wings (There, I Fixed It)

I’m not leaving a link for my original article, Fascism Has Two Wings, because frankly, I’d rather you didn’t read it. I wrote it during my early anarchist phase, lo those many years ago, and it’s really naïve politically. The only reason I won’t delete it, like all my early political posts (most if not all of which are badly written, except for the Shakespeare analyses and synopses), is because occasionally I like to look back at them and see how my thinking has changed and grown over the years. But my looking at them still makes me blush that other readers are ever looking at them.

Anyway, my idea for that article was to argue that, essentially, fascism has both a right wing and a left wing, though I presented the idea most clumsily, saying that some on the left may start there, then when in power, shift over to the right. This idea may be vaguely true of some liberals in, say, the Democratic Party (but were they ever truly left?), or of Nazbols and Strasserists, as well as some in the SA, who were later purged from the NSDAP when Hitler, having come to power, moved the party unequivocally to the far right, to please his new big business backers (and even the idea of ‘left-wing Nazis’ stinks of the libertarian agenda).

Well, now that I’ve transitioned fully from anarchism to Marxism-Leninism, I can see not only the wobbly aspects of those early arguments, but also the worst idea that I put forth in the article: namely, that the Bolshevik shift to authoritarian thinking was a move to the right. I now cringe whenever I read that misinterpretation of what happened back in the early 1920s. There, now you know all that you need to know of what I wrote in the original article, and you can spare yourself the pain of reading those oh, so poorly-conceived ideas!

Let us now move on to my more refined way of thinking about both left-wing and right-wing fascism. Now that I have a dialectical grasp on things, I can explain what I mean by ‘left-wing fascism.’ I speak in contrast to Marxist-Leninists when I call out the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultra-leftists.

Now, it’s not necessarily that they are fascistic in nature. They are generally sincere in their wish to make progressive change in the world, to establish socialism. The problem is their naïve utopianism, their wish to have pretty much everything all at once or as soon as they imagine is possible; and the danger of pushing for too much, too soon is that–taking dialectics into account–it can backfire and result in a swing to the far-right.

I’ve discussed in other posts my conception of the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites. The serpent’s biting head and its bitten tail represent the meeting of extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the serpent’s coiled body, along which every intermediary point of the continuum has its corresponding spot on the snake’s body. I feel that the image of the ouroboros makes it easier to conceive how the excessive, impatient demands of the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultras–their far-too-left leanings–slip over to the serpent’s bitten tail, then slide over to the biting teeth of fascism, even though this may not be the ultras’ conscious intention.

Lenin had to deal with the impracticality of the ultras, and he wrote of the problem in his “Left-wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. They were unwilling to make necessary compromises, such as cooperating with parliamentary or reformist socialists. They were overly preoccupied with doctrinal ‘purity.’ These people were stirring up needless trouble at a time when the new socialist state was in dire need of stability, in the middle of the Russian Civil War. This kind of petty squabbling was the last thing Lenin needed as the invaders were trying to re-establish capitalism.

While Trotsky was useful at the time leading the Red Army against the invading White Army, after Lenin’s death, the power struggle between him and Stalin over who would succeed Lenin was, for Trotsky, less about what was right for the USSR than about his wish to lead the country and have power. In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, he went on and on about the perceived faults of the Soviet Union under Stalin, with the sole solution offered of overthrowing his rival for power, rather than simply suggesting ways to remedy those faults. After his exile, he was even willing to cut a deal with the Nazis and Imperial Japan if they’d help him oust Stalin! This sort of thing is what I mean when I talk about a fascist ‘left wing.’

To paraphrase something Michael Parenti once said, these anti-communist leftists love any kind of revolution except a successful one. After that, they only want to find fault with the new socialist system. Now, constructive criticism of the new system is a perfectly worthy thing to engage in, since it aims to make the system better; but the ultras’ fault-finding is generally meant to tear down the system for not being perfect enough.

These people will carp at you for ‘not being left-wing enough,’ for not being ‘politically correct’ enough. This sort of bickering only causes resentment and increases alienation; it can even make some want to give up on the left and switch to the right. The CIA appreciates this kind of bickering–it’s a kind of left-wing fascism.

We can often tell the difference between, on the one side, Marxist-Leninists, and on the other, the ultras, with the issue of the war between Russia and Ukraine. This is a very sensitive issue, since I don’t like war at all, yet the Russian people must be defended against an enemy that isn’t made up solely of Ukrainians, but also their US/NATO backers.

Many on the left, addled by the dubious reporting of the liberal mainstream media, think that the Russian invasion of late February 2022 was “unprovoked,” and that Putin is the bad guy behind the war. Now, to be sure, Putin is far from being my political ideal: he’s a bourgeois, reactionary politician; his stance on LGBT issues is far too conservative for my tastes. Still, we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, and he’s the one who, with Xi Jinping, is leading the resistance to US/NATO world hegemony.

This left opposition to Putin is another example of the impracticality of the ultras. They want to oppose all bourgeois states at the same time, treating them all as equally oppressive, rather than considering the reality of primary vs secondary contradictions. No, the Russian Federation isn’t the Soviet Union, regrettably; but Russian communists have pushed Putin to do something about the ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine for the eight years between the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 and the Russian intervention in 2022.

The ultras tend to want everything all at once, instead of being pragmatic and realizing that achieving our goals must be done in stages. The first priority is to deal with the primary contradiction I mentioned above, to wipe out US/NATO hegemony, which has had its boot on the head of the rest of the world especially for the past thirty years. Once that wiping out has been achieved, then we can think about such problems as reinstating a socialist government in Russia, dealing with income inequality in China, etc.

Rainer Shea recently wrote an article in support of the Russian operation in Ukraine; I shared it on Facebook, and I got a snarky comment from a “leftist” who’s all preoccupied with Russian “imperialism,” yet apparently oblivious to US/NATO imperialism. Here’s a quote of her comment:

‘Ukraine has a Nazi problem like the United States has a Nazi problem like Russia has a Nazi problem.
‘I don’t wish death on all of them because a small percentage of them are Nazis.
‘Putin is a fascist imperialist. I hope both the Russian and Ukrainian working classes come together and overthrow BOTH of their corrupt countries.
‘It isn’t very “Leftist” to support imperialism either.’

Note how the first two lines of her comment trivialize the Nazi problem in Ukraine by implying it is a mundane problem of fringe minorities in countries around the world. While it is, of course, true that militaries in all countries attract at least a few fascist sympathizers (I saw a few when I was a reservist in the Canadian army in the early 1990s), such a smug generalization blinds one to the well-documented history of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers that goes back even before WWII and Stepan Bandera. (The mainstream media even used to acknowledge the truth of this sort of thing.)

These people, though a minority of Ukrainians, nonetheless have great influence over the Ukrainian government and military. The Banderites back in WWII helped Nazi Germany kill thousands of Jews and Poles, and today’s Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers, euphemistically called ‘nationalists,’ revere Bandera; they also like to tie Russian collaborators to lampposts. In their eight-year ethnic cleansing of Russians, about fourteen thousand people have died. No, Ukraine’s Nazi problem is far worse than that of most other countries; similarly, the American Nazi problem that my commenter mentions so briefly in passing has also been far worse, as seen in such issues as its helping of Ukrainian Nazis (link above), Operation Paperclip. and the employment of ex-Nazis in West Germany, NASA, and NATO after WWII.

To get to the second line of her comment, I see the most heinous straw man. I have never expressed a wish of death on all Ukrainians, nor did Shea in his article, regardless of whether the Nazi sympathizers in that country make up a small percentage or a somewhat larger percentage (something I highly suspect). Actually, whenever we hear the Western slogan “…to the last Ukrainian,” we can get a good idea as to who would actually like to see all the Ukrainians die. Since she has more sympathy for the West’s side in this conflict than for the Russian side, I suspect a little projection in her attitude about how wrong it is to want all Ukrainians killed.

Next, we have the ridiculous “Putler” argument in the third line. As I said above, Putin is not my political hero. I won’t put up Russian flags or pictures of him on my social media profiles, as a number of my Facebook friends have done. Still, while as I said, I don’t approve of his conservative stance on LGBT issues, calling him a ‘fascist’ on the basis of that is a bit much (fascists have treated LGBT people far worse than his laws have, and there’s much more to being a fascist than discriminating against that community), and to call him an imperialist, while making no mention at all of the Anglo-American/NATO globe-spanning empire, with US military bases all over the world, is an obscene misuse of the word.

While the Russian oligarchs probably do have some ulterior motives for waging this war (ulterior motives whose significance must be qualified with an understanding that Putin tried everything to secure peace, through the Minsk Accords with people who were hardly cooperative in the negotiations), any ‘Russian imperialism’ is minuscule compared to that of the US and NATO, who have had threatening troops along the Russian border for years, and while the US military has been occupying a third of Syria (stealing their oil and wheat), and surrounding China with military bases and navy in the South China Sea..

Indeed, with the reunification of Germany came a promise from the West that NATO, never a friend to Russia, wouldn’t move an inch to the East. Now, several former SSRs are NATO members, and they’re working on getting Sweden and Finland (the latter of which shares a long border with Russia!) to join. This Western imperialist aggression against Russia is the context needed to understand the Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US imperialists have worked in the hopes of never allowing any other country to grow in power and thus be a threat to American global hegemony. This is why the PNAC was founded.

The Western imperialists are fond of using the word “dictator” to describe the head of state of any country that challenges or defies the US and the “rules-based international order.” Calling Putin, who has clearly been one of these challengers and defiers, a “fascist imperialist” is just another way of saying “dictator,” which is used as a rationalization to bully a defiant country into submission to US imperialism.

Such a bullying into submission has been done to Russia before, back in the 1990s, with the forcing of “free market” capitalism on a Russian people who, contrary to popular belief, mostly wanted to keep the Soviet system. The Western imposition of capitalism on Russia all but destroyed their economy; attempts to bring back socialism were frustrated by the West’s puppet, Yeltsin. Putin’s real crime was making Russia strong again. People like the woman who commented on my Rainer Shea post clearly either haven’t studied the history, or are lying.

Let’s examine this ‘Russian fascism’ claim a bit more closely. Apart from what I said above, on the one hand, about there always being at least a small percentage of fascist sympathizers in the armies of any country in the world, including Russia, and how, on the other hand, accusing Russians of fascism is a slap in the face to the roughly 27 million Russians who died fighting Nazis (with whom Ukraine collaborated, remember) in WWII, I must react to a video an anarchist Facebook friend of mine once shared, a man who hates Putin with similar virulence; this video (one of many, I’m sure, that exist in the mainstream liberal media) dismisses, without any contrary evidence to justify the dismissal, the significance of Ukrainian Nazis while propagandizing about Russian fascist organizations, tempting me to do a similar dismissal.

How can I confidently dismiss this video’s claim of a hornet’s nest, if you will, of Russian fascist organizations as, in all likelihood, a wildly exaggerated misrepresentation of a few fringe groups, for the purpose of vilifying Putin and manufacturing consent for an increasingly dangerous confrontation? For starters, consider Russia’s 2014 Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism, something the neoliberal, Russophobic Western media would naturally try to invalidate. If the Russian government wants to criminalize any historic denial of Nazi atrocities, they’ll probably want to criminalize Nazism in general, I imagine, thus making the fascist groups in the video far more marginal that it suggests.

Yet even if this speculation of mine proves to be untrue, something else must be considered, something that should make you take this anti-Russian video with a generous dose of salt. While we’re always hearing about how we shouldn’t let ourselves be duped by “Russian propaganda,” so many of us naïvely assume that the news we receive on CNN, the CBC, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, etc., is all objective reporting, ‘the straight facts.’ Funny how it’s always only other countries that propagandize, but never our own!

The fact is, a crucial part of Western empire management is control over media narratives, because the only way the masses in the West would ever go along with war after war these past twenty to thirty years is to keep us all believing that we are ‘the good guys,’ that Putin, Xi Jinping, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milosevic, etc., are and were ‘the bad guys,’ and therefore all of our wars against them were, are, and will be justified and necessary.

The fact that we realized the media lied to us about Saddam’s “WMDs,” and therefore the Iraq invasion was a cruel, unjustified act of US imperialism should have been enough to give us pause about any subsequent American accusations of ‘cruel dictators’ and insistence on the ‘need’ for regime change. We should have demanded proof instead of propaganda; skepticism about the real motives of the US government should have been our default position.

Instead, over the 2010s and 2020s, most of us have become all the more gullible, uncritically believing lie after lie about Gaddafi, Assad, and now Putin and Xi Jinping. None of this propaganda has made the world safer: in fact, we’re now in a new Cold War that has needlessly brought us to the brink of a very possibly nuclear WWIII.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find all of this media mendacity, especially over the past thirty to forty years. Beyond Operation Mockingbird (which could still be going on), first there was the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987, meaning the news no longer had to present all sides of a controversial issue. Then, the Clinton administration enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing mergers and acquisitions in American media, which has led to 90% of American media being controlled by only six corporations; this means that the super-wealthy capitalist class controls most people’s access to information in the US! And in today’s late stage capitalism, this control is applied in an imperialist context–hence, the media vilification of anyone (Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro, etc.) who dares defy the American empire.

Now, this media consolidation isn’t limited to the US. As the Swiss Policy Research website has noted, we can see a media consensus among other Western countries, including European ones. It makes sense, given these countries are NATO members, and therefore have the same agendas.

But the worst, most blatant example in recent years of Western media bias has been the decision, from the beginning of the Russian/Ukraine war, to blot out and censor all Russian media, so people in the West can gain no access to it. You can complain all you want about the pro-Putin bias in media sources like RT (the former Western reporters of which, incidentally, will tell you they were never told what and what not to report): a truly free media will allow all sides of a story to be told (recall the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine). The fact that Russia’s side of the story isn’t allowed to be told in the West is the essence of real propaganda.

People complain about how authoritarian Russia and China are…and of course they are, to quite an extent. But are the Western, NATO-allied countries really any less authoritarian, with so strictly-controlled a media that gets so much money and influence from right-wing billionaires? The way Covid was dealt with in the West can only be described as authoritarian. People running for the heads of state of these countries must be given bourgeois approval, hence “liberal democracy” is really just a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the worst kind of dictatorship is the one that fools people into thinking it isn’t one…and in a society where the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer, many in the West are being fooled.

My commenter’s next point was about her wish that the people of Ukraine and Russia would all rise up and overthrow their corrupt governments…dream on. We won’t solve the problems of the world by wishing for solutions; we’ll solve them through action. The idea of ordinary Ukrainians spontaneously rising up against their government, in the middle of a war zone, with their Nazi soldiers forcibly conscripting untrained men to fight and die, is beyond ludicrous. As for Russia, Putin’s approval rating has generally been high, so I’d say an uprising against him is unlikely, too.

Now, what has Putin been doing? Not only is he standing up to the real empire, the Western one, he’s also helping with the de-dollarization of the world, which will be a major move in putting that empire to an end. This will replace the current unipolar world with a multipolar one, which should in turn move us in the direction of world peace, with its balance of power. The multipolar world will be far from ideal, but it will put us in a position to make socialist agitation far more doable, with an at least greatly weakened American government far less likely to interfere.

But again, this kind of wishful thinking of hers is typical of a lot of the ultras, who want all social problems remedied at once instead of proper organizing and waiting for a revolutionary situation. But worse than all of this is how, in vilifying Putin while either ignoring or giving short shrift to what should be the obvious evils of US/NATO imperialism, these ultras are helping, either tacitly or actively, the fascist elements in Ukraine that are destabilizing the country and pushing us all closer to WWIII.

This support of US/NATO/Ukrainian aggression against Russia, forcing Putin to respond in kind, is what I mean by a left-wing form of fascism (it’s also what Shea was referring to in his article, though by social fascism, he was talking about left-of-centre social democracy, which Stalin called “objectively the moderate wing of fascism”), an idealistic insistence on pushing for so extreme a ‘pure’ form of leftism that it pushes us past the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head, from extreme left to extreme right.

So I’ll say to my commenter that yes, she’s right to say it’s hardly leftist to support imperialism. She’s only wrong in where she attributes the actual imperialist aggression in the world. She is either egregiously ignorant of recent history, or she’s being most dishonest about it, rather like the mainstream Western media now.

Either way, her projection of guilt is remarkably shameless.

So anyway, when all is taken into account, mine is a moderate support of the Russian operation (hoping the horrible war will end as soon as possible), a support that far from idealizes Putin or his bourgeois government, and has no illusions about its hidden agendas. Nonetheless, the US/NATO imperialists are the far greater global threat, and we have no one else at the moment to repel them, so it looks as though it will have to be Putin’s government and military, as well as those of Xi Jinping, to lead the struggle against them. Once the Western empire is decisively defeated, then we can work on fixing the imperfections and genuine faults in Russia, China, and elsewhere, however great or small those faults may be.

Criticism of Russia and China are valid to a certain point, but it mustn’t be done to the point of brushing aside the far greater evils of the Western imperialists. To do so would be to aid those evils, however tacitly that aid might be given. And in a world in which fascism is coming back in style, it’s the far more blatant fascism that must first be fought…not helped by the ‘left’ anymore than by the right. .

Some Preliminary Thoughts on ‘Joker’

Arthur Fleck is my hero.

Sorry, I’m a bit of a joker sometimes…HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!

I finally got around to seeing Joker today. Wow! What a powerful film. Though set in the early 1980s, it’s as relevant to today’s times as any movie can be. Indeed, it’s the first Hollywood movie in a long time (to my knowledge, at least) that has genuine balls.

Contrary to what some of the knuckleheads in the mainstream media have either said or implied, Joker very much has a message. And no, that message is not for sexually frustrated, right-wing men to go out doing mass shootings. The film’s message is firmly left-wing: all out war against the bourgeoisie, and that’s what the ruling class–for whom the mainstream media works–feels truly threatened about.

No, I’m not advocating everyone wearing clown masks going on mass murder rampages, and busting things up. I believe in an organized, well-planned revolution that will result in giving people like Arthur Fleck what they need: decent medical and psychiatric care, guaranteed employment, etc. In short, I seek to eliminate the class system that deprives the have-nots, and which causes the alienation that causes so much of Fleck’s suffering.

I can’t do a proper analysis of this film until it comes out on DVD; then I can watch it twenty to thirty times or so, and savour every detail of this masterpiece, mining it for themes and symbolism. Until then, these preliminary remarks will have to do: after all, so much has already been said about the film in newspaper articles and videos.

Go see the film if you haven’t yet…no, chances are, you won’t become a murderer.

Analysis of ‘Scanners’

Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science fiction/horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O’Neill, and Patrick McGoohan. It is about people with mind powers (empathy, telepathy, telekinesis, etc.) who are wanted by a company, ConSec, that hopes to exploit their powers. Elsewhere, there’s a rogue scanner (Ironside) who also wants scanners to build an army and rule the world; any scanner who won’t join him…he kills, as he does any other enemies.

Here are some quotes from the film:

Cameron Vale: You called me a scanner. What is that?

Paul Ruth: Freak of nature, born with a certain form of ESP; derangement of the synapses which we call telepathy. […]

“My art… keeps me sane.” –Benjamin Pierce, gesturing at plaster head

“You are 35 years old, Mr. Vale. Why are you such a derelict? Such a piece of human junk? [pause] The answer’s simple. You’re a scanner, which you don’t realize. And that has been the source of all your agony. But I will show you now that it can be a source of great power.” –Paul Ruth

Darryl Revok: This was a test campaign used in 1947 to market a new product. The product was a drug, a tranquilizer called ‘Ephemerol’. It was aimed at pregnant women. If it had worked it would have been marketed all over North America. But the campaign failed and the drug failed, because it had a side effect on the unborn children. An invisible side effect.

Cameron: It created Scanners. […]

[striking at Cameron with scanner abilities] “All right. We’re gonna do this the scanner way. I’m gonna suck your brain dry! Everything you are is gonna become me. You’re gonna be with me Cameron, no matter what. After all, brothers should be close, don’t you think?” –Darryl Revok

“I’m here, Kim. We’ve won, we’ve won.” –Cameron Vale, in Revok’s body

What is particularly interesting about this film is the relationship between inner, psychic reality and outer, socioeconomic and political reality. There’s also how politics and economics affect family life, and vice versa.

ConSec, as a private security firm that wants to capitalize on scanners as a potential weapon, is a representation of capitalist, imperialist war profiteering, reminding one of Lockheed-Martin et al. That Vale’s and Revok’s father, Dr. Paul Ruth (McCoohan), has few qualms about using his sons for profit shows how politics and economics damage family life.

Ruth is the inventor of ephemerol–a drug he put on the market for pregnant women back in the 1940s, but which also had the surprising side effect of creating scanners. He gave his pregnant wife the strongest doses of ephemerol, making his two sons the most powerful scanners.

Ruth seems to know that Vale and Revok are his sons, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to him, for shows little fatherly attitude to them–he just wants to use Vale to hunt down Revok; and what’s more to the point is why he abandoned his sons when they were little, leaving Vale to become a derelict, and leaving Revok to become a psychopath. His fear of the ‘Ripe’ program creating new scanners gives him a jolt, but until this realization, he’s been content to use scanners like his sons for the sake of ConSec profiteering.

It’s often hell enough being an empath of the ordinary kind, always intensely feeling the emotions of others, especially their pain. But Vale’s sensory overload, his agony from hearing the whispers of others, from further off in a shopping mall, where two middle class women at a table look down on him as a ‘bum’…that’s excruciating. So connected to others he is, yet so alienated. So close to others…yet, so far away.

The point is that scanners are extremely sensitive, gifted people. The trauma of being separated from their parents and any normal, loving human contact is unbearable for them. It’s easy to see how Vale and Revok would go mad with their powers, though in almost opposite ways.

Revok went so insane he tried to kill himself by drilling a hole in his head. The mark is like a third eye of Siva; in fact, black-and-white video of him, interviewed by a psychiatrist, shows an eye drawn on the bandage where the drill mark is. His pain is his higher mystical knowledge, as it were. Later, instead of trying to destroy his own mind, he succeeds in destroying that of another scanner in the famous head explosion scene.

This scene perfectly exemplifies, in symbolic form, projection of Revok’s death drive onto someone else. All of his fragmentation and psychological falling apart, all of his inner pain thrown at another scanner.

ConSec staff try to control Revok by giving him a shot of ephemerol, the very drug that has given him his powers in the first place. (Vale has been calmed down with the same drug when Dr. Ruth has him in his custody.) A pun on ephemeral, the drug temporarily inhibits scanning ability; this paradox of giving and inhibiting the psychic powers exemplifies the dialectical relationship between opposites that I symbolize with the ouroboros. From the serpent’s biting head of maximum scanner powers, we shift to the serpent’s bitten tail of their suppression.

Similarly, there’s a dialectical relationship between the extreme sensitivity and empathy of scanners and their psychopathic opposite, as seen in Revok. When younger, he must have felt the agonizing of that extreme sensitivity and empathy, and the pain drove him to put that hole in his head. This self-injury was him crossing the serpent’s biting head of empathy over to its bitten tail of psychopathic lack of empathy.

Benjamin Pierce (played by Robert A. Silverman) was similarly violent to his family because of the torment that scanner empathy gives him; now, he uses his art to stop the pain from driving him mad. When Cameron Vale learns how to control his scanner powers, he too can function without going mad; but Pierce knows that, apart from his art, the only way to avoid pain is to avoid contact with people–that closeness, in a world of alienation, causes his empathy to torment him. The serpent’s head of closeness, what we would normally find an emotionally healing thing, for Pierce too easily slips over to the serpent’s bitten tail of new wounds.

While ConSec’s exploitation of scanners as human weapons for profit is easily allegorized as capitalist commodification, Revok’s building up of a scanner army, not only to rival ConSec, but also to rule the world, can be allegorized as a form of fascism (i.e., the superiority of scanners, a new master race). Note how Revok’s company, Biocarbon Amalgamate, is a rival, not the opposite, of ConSec; Revok is also running his ‘Ripe’ program through ConSec. Note what this ‘love-hate relationship,’ if you will, between the rival companies also implies, symbolically, about the relationship between capitalism and fascism.

The real opposition to this pair of rivals is a group of scanners led by Kim Obrist (played by O’Neill), who meet in private. When Vale finds them, though, he unwittingly leads Revok’s assassins to them, too…as he had led them to Pierce.

Obrist’s group of scanners sit together in a circle, in a meditative state, and use their powers to connect with each other. The scene is proof of how empathy doesn’t have to be painful; when used among friends, it can cause a sense of communal love to grow. Indeed, the sight of them together meditating in that circle, looks almost like a mystical experience for them. Closeness to others can be a good thing, after all.

So, if ConSec represents capitalism, and Revok and his assassins represent fascism, then Vale and Obrist’s group of scanners can be seen to represent socialism…though, it must be emphasized, a libertarian, anarchist, form of socialism, since their group is poorly protected. Indeed, Revok’s assassins come in and kill everyone except Vale and Obrist; it’s like when Franco‘s fascists took over Spain and crushed the communists and anarchists within a mere three years.

Vale and Obrist learn of Revok’s rival company, whose ‘Ripe’ program is giving pregnant women ephemerol to make new scanner babies. Revok also has a corporate spy, Braedon Keller (played by Lawrence Dane), who is giving Revok information about ConSec, as well as trying to stop Vale and Obrist. Revok even has Keller kill Ruth: this goes to show you how capitalist success makes a failure of one’s home.

The whole point of the contrast between the communal oneness of Obrist’s scanners, as against ConSec and Revok, is to see how empathy should be used to hold us together, not drive us mad and tear us apart. Cooperation and mutual aid, not competition and destruction of perceived enemies, are what will move humanity forward.

We see how, in ConSec’s profit motive, capitalism manipulates our feelings to make us enemies of each other; here sensitivity is distorted into feelings of persecutory anxiety, a move from the ouroboros’s head of empathic feeling to the serpent’s tail of psychopathic lack of feeling. When the ConSec security guards try to apprehend Vale and Obrist, she makes the man pointing a gun at her think he’s threatening his mother with it; he breaks down and weeps. Here again we see the tense relationship between upholding the capitalist system and one’s family relations.

(Recall what Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, had to say about the family in relation to capitalism: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.” [Marx, page 52])

Back to the movie. When Revok has Vale and Obrist in his custody, he hopes to make a last gasp at connection with someone, his own brother. Of course, his plan to dominate the world with his future scanner army is too insane an idea for Vale to accept, so Revok feels as betrayed by him as by all the others.

The ensuing final confrontation between the two most powerful scanners is symbolically a sublation of opposing ideologies–socialism and fascist domination–and thus it is, in a way, comparable to the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.

The war ended in a victory for communism over fascism, but a costly and even ambiguous one; for those on the west of divided Germany still had ex-Nazis in their government, and the US incorporated some ex-Nazis in their government, too, via Operation Paperclip. Small wonder Dr. Strangelove was a Nazi stereotype in Kubrick’s satirical 1964 movie, and small wonder East Germany called the Berlin Wall the “antifascist protective rampart.” When opposing forces come that close together, there’s bound to be tension.

Similarly, with Vale and Revok, we feel a chilling tension when the latter says, “brothers should be close, don’t you think?” as he begins sucking the former dry. This feeling of intense closeness, in a hostile world full of alienation, is the central theme of Scanners. This is why the scanners’ heightened empathy, with the attendant sensory overload, is so agonizing for them.

As Revok continues to “suck [Vale’s] brain dry,” pulling Vale into him, we see the dialectical resolving of contradictions. In this particular case, we see not only the symbolic sublation of fascism vs. socialism, but also of self vs. other, for it is through Revok’s introjection of Vale, and Vale’s projection of himself into Revok, that one sees oneself in others, and vice versa. This is Bion‘s container/contained, dramatized; it’s also apparent in the logo used for ephemerol.

At first, Revok seems to have the upper hand: Vale is cringing, his veins are popping out blood, and he even tears a gory scar on his cheek. Revok is grinning maniacally.

Then, Vale regains his composure, even as he’s covered in blood and set on fire psychically by Revok. Vale’s eyes explode in splashes of blood, while Revok’s show only the whites. By the end of the confrontation, we’re not sure who’s won.

Indeed, when Obrist wakes up and comes into the room, she sees Vale’s body lying in a silhouette of ashes, yet her scanning ability seems to detect Vale’s presence. Crouching in a corner and with a coat covering him, Revok is seen; but with Vale’s eyes instead of Revok’s dark ones, and without Revok’s forehead mark (his ‘third eye of Siva,’ as I like to call it), he says in Vale’s voice, “We’ve won.”

Obviously, Vale and Revok are one…but who won? Whose personality is dominating Revok’s body? Is that really Vale’s voice we’re hearing, or is Revok psychically forcing Vale to say he and Obrist have won, to trick her?

Revok is Siva, the destroyer. Ruth is Brahma, the creator (of all scanners). Vale is Vishnu, the preserver, the sustainer of his life throughout the film, in all his struggles to survive. By dying and resurrecting, with his mind put into Revok’s body, Vale is also a Christ figure, the spirit conquering the flesh. I, however, am a materialist, and I see mostly Revok’s body. So who won?

And as far as my political allegory for the film is concerned, who were the real postwar winners, the political left, or the right? Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were defeated, but many fascists survived 1945. Only some Nazis went on trial at Nuremberg. Francoist Spain carried on unchecked until Franco’s death in 1975. Pinochet’s authoritarian, right-wing government, with the help of the CIA, replaced Allende’s in 1973. Israel, irony of ironies, has become a racist apartheid state. And fascism in Europe and Brazil has been on the rise in recent years, as against a largely impotent left.

And even if Vale is in control of Revok’s body, he and Obrist will still have to deal with ConSec, which hopes to make weapons out of that new generation of scanners about to be born. So, if that’s Vale’s real voice saying, “We’ve won,” what justification does he have to be so overconfident?

Dialectical thinking mustn’t be reduced to the cliché triad of thesis/negation/sublation, as even I’ve done in other posts, for the sake of brevity. With every sublation comes a new thesis to be contradicted, for the idea of dialectics is to give us all a sense that reality is a fluid, ever-changing thing, not permanent blocks of stasis. The sublation of socialism defeating fascism had merely lead to a new contradiction, the Cold War, which was resolved in the dissolution of the USSR and the rise of neoliberalism. If we’re lucky to triumph over this new variation in class war, there will be new contradictions to resolve under the dictatorship of the proletariat, such as the danger of a resurgence of capitalism.

The microcosm of such contradictions is in the family situation, where so much alienation is spawned, as we see in Ruth’s so troubled sons. He cared so little about the monsters he’d created, and their fusion in one body, one mind, could very well be a new battleground, all inside one body. Will Obrist be able to accept it? Will Vale and Revok be able to?

With the end of Siva/Revok, is Vishnu/Vale’s reincarnation the start of a new cycle of creation/preservation/destruction, a new thesis to be negated and sublated? It seems that way. Vale considers Revok to be a reincarnation of Brahma/Ruth: could Vale’s judgement be a projection, now that he’s reincarnated in the Ruth-reincarnation of Revok? The cycle of dialectics spins round and round, forever, it seems, with not only irresolution of class conflict, but also irresolution of family conflict.

And this irresolution in the family, who “should be close,” is the true horror symbolized in this film.

Analysis of ‘Viridiana’

Viridiana is a 1961 Spanish-Mexican film by Luis Buñuel, loosely based on the novel Halma by Benito Pérez Galdós, and starring Silvia Pinal in the title role, as well as Fernando Rey, Margarita Lozano, and Francisco Rabal. As usual, Buñuel criticizes the Church and bourgeois society in this film. It is about a novice soon to take her vows as a nun, but who finds it increasingly difficult–due to external pressure, or internal?–to reconcile herself with the moral ideals of the Church.

Viridiana was the co-winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.

Here are a few quotes in English translation:

Viridiana: I know my own weakness, and whatever I do will be humble. But, however little it is, I want to do it alone.

Jorge: I always knew that you and I were going to end up playing cards together!

Verdiana was the name of a generous, charitable saint who secluded herself for 34 years to focus on her faith. The Viridiana of this film is similarly, if not so extremely, reclusive, but just as generous and charitable. Her name comes from a word meaning ‘green’: I think of an old meaning of green, from back in Shakespeare’s time, meaning ‘youthful, inexperienced, immature’; but also, ‘fresh, recent, new’ (Crystal and Crystal, page 205), strongly implying ‘pure.’ There is, indeed, a strong sense that this novice embodies all of these definitions, in more ways than one.

She also happens to be a beautiful young blonde, most desirable to men; her choice to become a nun seems to be, at least in part, motivated by a fear of sexually predatory men. Her virgin purity makes her all the more attractive to her uncle, Don Jaime (Rey), who finds that she reminds him of his late bride, who died before he could even consummate their marriage.

His preoccupation with her beauty and purity reminds me of Heinrich Heine‘s poem:

Du bist wie eine Blume,
So hold und schön und rein;
Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmut
Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.

Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt’,
Betend, dass Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.

You are like a flower,
So lovely, fair and pure;
I gaze at you and wistful
Melancholy slips into my heart.

It’s as though I ought to place
My hands upon your head
And pray God to ever keep you
So pure, fair, and lovely.

This notion of extreme purity leads to an exploration of the themes of modesty, humility, and every other point on the circular continuum I symbolize with the ouroboros, including the dialectical opposites of pride (the serpent’s biting head) vs. shame (the bitten tail). Viridiana is so particular about her maidenly modesty, it’s a source of narcissistic pride for her. Thus, even the mere suggestion of male physical closeness feels like a violation to her.

This excessive modesty comes from her stern Catholic upbringing, once again Buñuel’s satirical target. She has no interest in visiting her Uncle Jaime, whom she’s met only once; but she’s pressured into visiting him by her mother superior. She’d rather stay secluded and cloistered, suggesting she regards the Church as more of a family than her biological one. I suspect she had an unhappy family upbringing, driving her to the Church for a replacement.

The Virgin Mary seems to be an idealized parental imago for Viridiana, the perfect mother who represents an ego ideal to which she aspires. We get a sense of this when she prays the Angelus with the homeless people. Mary is “full of grace” (κεχαριτωμένη), which the Catholic Church interprets as a kind of purity existing from birth, the Immaculate Conception. Viridiana would thus want to identify with Mary, for narcissistic reasons.

Any man even making a pass at her threatens this purity she so covets, causing her narcissistic injury. Viridiana, I suspect, has transferred her feelings of maternal love to Mary, just as Don Jaime, admiring Viridiana’s beauty and purity, transfers his love of his deceased bride onto her, especially since the two women look so alike. Indeed, transference is a major theme in this Freudo-Marxist film.

Normally, one thinks of transference in the psychoanalytical setting; the patient transfers the feelings of a powerful emotional bond, especially one from childhood, onto the therapist. Viridiana has made this kind of transference onto Mary, her ‘therapist.’ Similarly, Viridiana has become, however unwittingly, Jaime’s ‘therapist.’ They are using their transferences in an attempt to heal, though these attempts ultimately fail.

On the first night of Viridiana’s visit, we see her in her bedroom, taking off black stockings to reveal her delicious legs; Buñuel’s lustful camera does a closeup on them, another example of his irreverence towards Church authority. She unpacks a large wooden crucifix and a crown of thorns. She’s so devoted to her faith, she’d rather sleep on the hard floor, as Jaime’s servant, Ramona, notes.

Now, Ramona is an interesting character to compare and contrast with Viridiana. Jaime’s servant is dutiful, bashful, and modest, but also lacking in the novice’s religious pretensions. This is another of Buñuel’s jabs at the Church. And who, I’m curious, is the father of Ramona’s naughty, nosy daughter Rita? Jaime has been kind enough to take mother and daughter in: is the girl an illegitimate child, as Jaime’s son, Jorge, is? Again, we see Buñuel’s alternative morality to the hypocritical one of the Church.

I suspect that Ramona has a secret love for Jaime, an Oedipal feeling, perhaps, transferred from her father onto her master, but a feeling she’s too shy to express openly. In any case, after he hangs himself and she meets Jorge, she transfers her love from father to handsome son…and feels that love more overtly, this time.

The morning of the second day of Viridiana’s visit, she goes to a servant milking a cow. She tries pulling on one of the cow’s teats; but they are long, even phallic in length. She can’t bring herself to handle them, as doing so, it seems, far too much resembles masturbating a man to orgasm (i.e., the squirting out of the milk). Her pious modesty is so extreme, she cannot do anything even vaguely redolent of sexuality.

Then, naughty Rita agitates her by saying she saw her in her nightgown the night before, having sneaked a peek from a nearby terrace. Viridiana blenches at even having been spied on by a pre-teen girl.

That night, Jaime has been fetishizing the bridal clothes of his deceased wife; he puts his too-large foot into one of her high heels (symbolic intercourse wish-fulfillment), then stands before a mirror while almost trying on her girdle. Apart from the erotic overtones of these actions, we sense his pathetic yearning for his lost love, his unfulfillable wish to be at one with her.

Then he sees Viridiana sleepwalking in that white nightgown, with her pretty bare feet and lower legs exposed. She is doubly vulnerable before him, in a relative state of undress, and unaware of it. The thought of his predatory eyes on her will terrify her when he tells her what he’s seen the next morning.

During her sleepwalking, she’s also psychologically naked and vulnerable, for her unconscious is let loose, expressing her hidden desires, if only symbolically. Kneeling at his fireplace, she empties a basket of yarn and needles into the fire, representing an unconscious wish to be rid of clothing, the antithesis of a nun’s modesty. She has a bad habit, it seems.

Then she gathers ashes in the basket and takes them to his bedroom, then sprinkles them on his bed; the ashes, we learn the next day, are a symbol of penitence…and death. What has she to repent of…secret, repressed sexual desires? Death associated with his bed suggests once again the marriage of the life (e.g., sex) and death drives.

The next day, Don Jaime, so captivated by Viridiana’s beauty, her purity (So hold und schön und rein), and of course her resemblance to her deceased aunt, asks her to dress up in her bridal gown, another shocking thing to do, in Viridiana’s view. The deceased bride, having worn white to the wedding, was in all probability a virgin (especially given the conservative mores of the time); but Viridiana–though complying–still feels uncomfortable doing it, as she feels like a sex object.

She of course is being objectified and ogled by her uncle, who has Ramona drug Viridiana’s coffee. Ramona, wholly devoted to her master, will do whatever he wants her to do, even as wicked a thing as helping him take advantage of his unconscious niece! Why? I suspect because Ramona secretly wishes Jaime desired her in the same way…also, allowing Viridiana to be deflowered–and thus, shamed–would serve Ramona because of sexual jealousy. Hence, she doesn’t mind telling Viridiana of Jaime’s shameful wish to marry his niece. Still, he’s a good man, in Ramona’s mind.

Viridiana is already uneasy enough knowing her uncle is the father of an illegitimate child (Jorge), for such is her lofty moral ideal. Her purity is part of what makes her so attractive to him; she looks so sexy in that virginal white dress…and she knows exactly how he feels about her.

Being in that dress with him at night is, of course, a reenacting of his wedding night with her aunt, when she died of a heart attack before he could consummate the marriage. This lonely, reclusive man has yearned to have that night given back to him, and now he can have it back through Viridiana.

Even before Ramona has given her the drugged coffee, Viridiana can sense her uncle’s lust; wearing that bridal gown strongly implies a soon-t0-be-lost virginity, which is anathema, horrifying to her. By helping Jaime satisfy his desire, though, Ramona can satisfy hers vicariously through Viridiana. Meanwhile, little Rita is frightened by a bull she claims entered her bedroom; the animal represents a sexually predatory male…is this an omen of what’s to come between Jaime and Viridiana?

While sexual assault (of anyone, woman, man, or child) is of course never defensible, especially to a communist like Buñuel, Viridiana’s predicament can be seen unconsciously, symbolically as a wish-fulfillment in that it desecrates the Catholic ideal of sexual purity in a woman. Destroying this impossible ideal by demonstrating its unattainability can liberate women sexually, by making them give up on it. Indeed, Viridiana will be so liberated at the end of the film.

Note that Jaime never carries out his plan to deflower her. While she’s unconscious, and Mozart‘s Requiem Mass is playing (symbolizing a fusion of the libido and death drive), he kisses her on the lips, unbuttons her top to reveal her creamy cleavage, then kisses her there (and naughty Rita spies on them); but moral scruple makes him come to his senses, and he stops. He mustn’t stain such divine purity.

So hold und schön und rein.

The next morning, when he tells her he took advantage of her while she was out cold, even when he later insists he never actually penetrated her, she can’t be certain of which statement is the truth, and which the lie–has he, or has he not raped her? So she, “for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety,” and imagine the worst. But how can she be unsure of what’s happened? Surely she knows that she will feel vaginal soreness, pain from a ruptured hymen, that there will be blood, if he’s had her.

He lies about having intercourse with her while she slept (later admitting he’s lied) so she’ll think her ‘stained’ body will make her unworthy of being a nun, then she’ll have nowhere else to go but to live with him. She’s afraid of male sexual predation to a far greater degree than the average woman, religiously devoted or not—why?

I don’t think we’re supposed to believe she was sexually abused at an earlier period of her life (though she, in all likelihood, has endured men’s leers and groping hands on many occasions throughout her life); for if she was raped, given the strict Catholic morality of her world, she surely would have already considered herself too ‘unclean’ to be a nun.

Now, for her, the meaning of sexual assault is expanded to mean “that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) Furthermore, given the way rape victims tend to be slut-shamed, especially in Viridiana’s prudish world, she will feel as guilty, however unjustifiably, of having ‘tempted’ her attackers as they are of attacking her.

So her fears about whatever Don Jaime has done while she’s been unconscious are not based on a fear of possibly having been penetrated, nor do they seem to be a kind of PTSD reliving of what may have happened to her sometime before the beginning of this film. His having touched her, kissed her, and partially undressed her are rape enough.

And how far did he undress her? She has no idea. We know he only unbuttoned her top: he saw her cleavage, but not her whole breasts. Still, how does she know he didn’t undress her further? Does he know what her whole naked body looks like? Did he fondle her nakedness? Taste it? How many of her anatomical secrets does he know of?

Even the few of those secrets that Don Jaime knows would be enough to make any woman cringe, because they have been divulged without consent (consider the complaints against lecherous Bill Cosby to see my point). But for a woman as proud of keeping her secrets hidden as Viridiana is, her uncle’s–however slight–‘breaking and entering,’ as it were, is all the more outrageous and unbearable.

She feels the shame, but don’t forget that he does, too. After all, he’s the sinner, not she…and no one is more aware of his exclusive guilt than he is. He’s so tearfully desperate to get her forgiveness that, when he doesn’t get it, he hangs himself.

What we must remember is that he doesn’t merely lust after her–he’s fallen in love with her (which is not to excuse him for his scurrilous scheming), out of her resemblance, in her looks, her walk, her voice, in every way, to his beloved late bride. He’s transferred that deep passion onto Viridiana.

Buñuel has been said to have valued sex over love: this seems to be a vulgar, bourgeois interpretation of his frank depiction of sexuality in his films, and it’s utter nonsense. Buñuel uses sex to enhance love, to free it from the bourgeois chains of Church morality.

Another theme in this film is that of solitude. Viridiana prefers being cut off from the larger society: if not hidden from it in the convent, then in the outbuilding section of late Jaime’s estate, which he’s left to her and Jorge. Her religious solitude, as I’ve said above, echoes that of the saint who shares her name; but is this solitude out of spiritual conviction, or social alienation?

Jaime’s solitude is certainly out of alienation, for he, as a bourgeois, rentier capitalist, is inevitably affected by the estrangement that capitalism causes. He has some goodness, though, as all the characters in Viridiana are each a mix of good and bad. For example, Jaime has taken in Ramona and Rita, and he even saves a bee from drowning.

His illegitimate son, Jorge, has a sexual interest in Viridiana that bothers both her and his jealous, live-in girlfriend, Lucia, who soon leaves him; but he isn’t the type to rape a woman. The worst he does is to walk into Viridiana’s bedroom without her permission. He kisses Ramona on the lips only because he knows, from the longing in her eyes, that she is aching for his kiss.

Still yearning to be a good Christian even though she feels unworthy of being a nun, Viridiana takes in a group of beggars to live in the outbuilding part of the house. As pitiable as these wretches are, though, they’re far from virtuous; they make one of them, a bald fellow without his upper front teeth, into a pariah because his varicose veins seem to them to be a symptom of leprosy.

Out in the field with Viridiana, they pray the Angelus with her while Jorge’s hired workers are renovating the house and surrounding area; in other words, the first group is engaging in faith, while the second group is actually working. Here is another example of Buñuel taking a jab at the Church, which values grace through faith over good works. She and the beggars are praying a useless prayer to her idol, Mary, while Jorge’s men are making themselves useful–working, because il faut cultiver notre jardin.

One of the beggars, El Cojo (‘the lame one,’ played by José Manuel Martin), fancies himself a faithful Catholic and not only helps Viridiana in leading the Angelus prayer, but also paints a portrait of the Madonna; still, he’s a bad, even violent fellow, for he threatens the ‘leper,’ and later Jorge, with a knife, and even tries to rape Viridiana toward the end of the film. Again, Buñuel demonstrates the emptiness of faith as against good works.

When she, Jorge, Ramona, and Rita leave the house on business (the servants have also left, out of disgust with the beggars), the beggars decide to go in the house and have a party. They’ll clean up after, and no one will be the wiser…or so they imagine.

This party symbolizes a proletarian seizing of the means of production…though it’s a poorly planned ‘revolution,’ more like anarchist Catalonia, or the Ukrainian Free Territory under Makhno, than anything like the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Accordingly, their ‘insurrection’ doesn’t last.

During their dinner, they take a group photo at the long table. Buñuel deliberately has the actors pose in a manner parodying Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper, with the blind Don Amalio (played by José Calvo) in the middle, in Christ’s place. When Enedina (played by Lola Gaos) takes the photo, her lifting up of her dress is the ‘flash!’

After that, the ‘leper’ puts on a record of Händel‘s Hallelujah Chorus, and he dresses up in some of Jaime’s bride’s clothing, repeating the suicide’s cross-dressing, though in a comical, rather than pathetic, way. His dancing around to the music is more of Buñuel making fun of religious piety. He tosses to the floor the feathers of a dove, symbolic of the Holy Spirit, he found earlier.

Furthermore, this juxtaposition of these would-be lumpenproletariat revolutionaries with Christian music and iconography represents how the infantile disorder of ‘left’ communism is as unrealistic as is Viridiana’s idealization of Marian Catholicism. Just as there is no way to be a morally perfect woman, there is also no way to have a perfect communist revolution, all in one fell swoop. The beggars have no vanguard to educate and organize them, so their ‘revolution’ is practically still-born.

And so, because these people are, in varying degrees, degenerates, their party degenerates, too. A man takes Enedina behind the sofa and has her. An older beggar, Manuel, who has a penchant for gossip, tells Don Amalio about the screwing around, but he won’t lead the jealous blind man over to the sofa to beat the man for taking his woman; so Don Amalio smashes his cane on the dinner table, destroying the dishes.

As we can see, their ‘revolution’ is a bit too Makhnovist for comfort. Jorge, Viridiana, Ramona, and Rita return early to find out what’s been happening. El Cojo and the “leper” subdue Jorge while Ramona goes off in the car to get the police; this leaves Viridiana to the mercy of El Cojo’s lust. She fights the good fight to get him off of her.

All her efforts to be a good Christian, to show charity and compassion to the beggars and to give them moral instruction, have been for naught. Jorge, however, promises money to the “leper” if he’ll beat El Cojo on the head with a small shovel to stop him from raping her. Though El Cojo is stopped, she, overwhelmed with trauma, faints…just as she was unconscious when Jaime–almost–had her.

Note how, only when unconscious, will she allow any man to touch her. This shows how, only in her unconscious mind, will she allow herself any expression of sexuality. The conscious wish to be an imitator of Christ, of Mary, is clearly a reaction formation against her deepest, most repressed desires, expressed when she was sleepwalking.

The wish to lead a life of chastity rubs against its dialectical opposite, the secret wish to be sexual. Jorge, in contrast, is neither extreme: he accepts the ephemeral nature of sexual relationships, and is none too upset when Lucia leaves him. At the same time, he doesn’t force sex on anyone, unlike El Cojo, the ‘good Catholic.’

Viridiana’s trauma from the attempted rape has, for what it’s worth, one good side effect: she’s been liberated from her attachment to an impossible moral ideal–perfect chastity. As painful as this has been for her, at least she can now get off her high horse and join humanity…and become truly humble, not affectedly so.

She looks at herself in a small mirror, Lacan‘s mirror, as a tear runs down her cheek. That nun she’s seen in the reflection was an illusion, not the real her, but an idealization that has alienated her from herself. Her ability to be ‘pure’ cannot be eternal and unchanging. She must accept this painful truth.

She joins Jorge and Ramona in the main part of the house. He’s pleasantly surprised to see Viridiana at the door. Since Ramona is already his lover, Viridiana’s involvement is implying a ménage à trois, surely to the chagrin of the Francoist censors, but this ending was allowed nonetheless. Instead of listening to pompous religious music, the three would rather hear some fun popular music, Ashley Beaumont’s Shimmy Doll.

Their sitting at table together to play cards suggests an equality the beggars couldn’t attain: that of male and female, of master and servant. Jorge’s moderate ‘socialism,’ if you will, is rather like Dengism; one incrementally moves from capitalism to communism, as Xi Jinping‘s government is doing. His sexuality is similarly neither prudish nor overly licentious. No idealistic rushes to extremes here, but rather a cautious creeping ahead.

Jorge doesn’t like the degenerate beggars any more than the other workers in his home. He considers Viridiana’s charitable duties to them pointless; he does, however, tolerate them for a while…until they commit their crimes on him and her. He also takes compassion on a dog, Canelo, and he offers money to the “leper” to stop lustful El Cojo. Though Jorge, representing industrial capitalism, is the bourgeois owner of the house given to him by his father, he’s clearly more generous than the average capitalist.

So, Jorge’s morality is a comfortable middle ground between Viridiana’s Catholic idealism and the reckless anarchism of the beggars. It’s like a Marxist sublation of the Christian thesis of an unattainable moral perfection, and its Makhnovist negation. This is the alternative morality Buñuel is proposing, and it’s a refreshing alternative to all the rubbish we’ve had thrown in our faces for so long.

The Patient Anarchist

I: Introduction

With the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian government having just passed, I would like to share my thoughts on the relationship between the state, capitalism, and communism. There is a lot of propaganda floating around that treats the state and capitalism as mutually-exclusive opposites, and on the other hand, that treats the state and communism (and/or socialism in general) as so synonymous that they would seem indistinguishable.

I hope to cut through all this propaganda, and to explain the true relationship between these three, one that neither dichotomizes nor identifies any of the three in an absolute sense. Rather, capitalism is entirely enclosed within the state (contrary to the fantasies of the right-libertarians), that is to say, the bourgeois state; and there is some overlap between other aspects of the state (i.e., the proletarian state) and the socialist transition from capitalism to full communism, which involves–through the complete annihilation of capitalism–the replacement of class differences with the notion, “from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his or her need”, the withering away of the state, and the replacement of money with a gift economy.

What I’m saying now does not contradict what I’ve said elsewhere about the state and capitalism always being together; rather, what I’m saying now clarifies and refines what I said before. For me, the ultimate goal is still anarcho-communism, but I have grown more patient in my wish for all the world to achieve this goal.

II: Getting from A to Z

I still regard the transitional phase between capitalism and stateless communism to be the state capitalism complained about by George Orwell and Milovan Djilas; I just consider state capitalism to be necessary, and thus a good thing (or at least a necessary evil), an unavoidable part of the transition between today’s neoliberal nightmare and the socialist dream. To get from hell to heaven, one must pass through purgatory.

Anarchists typically complain of the ‘back-stabbing’ of Bolsheviks during such difficult times as the Kronstadt Rebellion, Lenin’s turning against Makhno, and Stalin’s meagre helping of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Many anarchists fail to grasp that, for the revolution to succeed, it must be global, not just local; at the same time, local victories must be defended in the most organized way possible, and not have their defence diluted in the name of disorganized and weak ‘permanent revolutions’.

Revolution can’t and won’t be achieved all in one fell swoop; there will be many small revolutions whose gains must be protected while other revolutions are attempted elsewhere. And the danger of counter-revolution mustn’t be trivialized: much, if not most, of the ‘oppression’ of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s can be attributed to the difficulties and pressures caused during the aftermath of the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, rather than to Lenin’s supposed ambition.

It is not only wrong-headed, but absurd, to think that we can go from A, a neoliberal capitalism led by an idiot man-child in the Oval Office, to B, full communism, with every business fully collectivized, no more money, and no more state. To achieve our goals, we can’t just go from A to B, but from A to Z, with every intermediate step of B, C, D, etc., fully considered, planned, and worked through. The B of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), openly acknowledged by him as ‘state capitalism’ (as stated in ‘On Cooperation’, Tucker, pp. 707-713), or the B of China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics“, must be acknowledged. (I just wish the CPC would move on to C, D, and E some time soon [contrary to those leftists who think it has moved on]: even Job’s patience had limits.)

In the cases of such socialist states as the USSR and Cuba, though, that movement to C, D, E, F, and quite a few steps beyond, definitely happened. In the 1930s, Stalin moved past the NEP and collectivized agriculture, which, granted, was fraught with such problems as the selfish hoarding of the kulaks (and selfishness is regarded with bizarre admiration by right-libertarians), especially troublesome during bad harvests (a peasant resistance that was from a much smaller part of the population than is usually assumed), forcing the Stalinist regime to suppress them as ruthlessly as it did. In industrializing the Soviet Union, however, and protecting it from such counter-revolutionaries as the Nazis (whom his Red Army defeated, and thus he deserves the lion’s share of praise for saving the world from fascism), as well as building a nuclear arsenal to defend the USSR against that other genocidal monster, the US war machine, he transformed Russia from a backward, agrarian society into a superpower in a matter of a few decades–no mean feat.

The USSR and Cuba created free healthcare, free education, and other social services. They also aided national liberation movements in Third World countries around the world. Similar benefits could be found in other socialist states, such as those in the Eastern Bloc, North Korea, and China during Mao’s rule. We may see states in these countries, and a not-yet-fully developed communism, but by any reasonable measure, their efforts showed remarkable progress towards Z.

Cuba, a Third World country with a US-imposed economic embargo stifling its growth for over fifty years, has almost 100% literacy and superbly-trained doctors that often go to other poor countries to help the sick there. Impressive.

Contrast these achievements with the truly backward movement of the US over the past thirty years. Reagan (as well as Thatcher in the UK) started our neoliberal nightmare with union-busting, deregulation, and tax cuts to the rich. Bill Clinton gave some crippling blows with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which essentially took away the social safety net; and his repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is believed by many to have lead to the 2008 financial crisis, in the aftermath of which George W. Bush and Obama helped only the super-rich.

Today, consider all of Trump’s cuts to education (and poor quality US education/student performance is nothing new), the arts, etc., while the already bloated US military budget got a further bloating, thanks to support not only from the GOP, but the Democrats, too! Then there’s Trump’s brilliant (<<<sarcasm) idea to have, for every one new regulation, deregulation of two things…not that it’s a particularly workable idea, of course.

As if the situation weren’t bad enough, we have right-libertarians who delude themselves that our current neoliberal mess is somehow not at all capitalist, merely because of the existence of a state and some regulations; therefore, the solution is apparently to deregulate all the more! These right-wing ideologues fail to see how the “free market” creates the monopolies that result in the very crony capitalism they imagine to be the opposite of ‘true’ capitalism; thus capitalism can enlarge the state, rather than exist as its antithesis. They achieve this ideological sleight-of-hand by imagining that the state exists more or less in one form–some variation on socialism–rather than acknowledge how the state can serve the rich, or serve the people.

III: The Bourgeois State vs. the Proletarian State

In The State and Revolution, which opened my eyes and my mind to Leninism in ways nothing else could, Lenin clearly distinguished two kinds of government, either of which involves one class dominating the other. The wealthy and powerful will use the state to rule over the workers, or vice versa. The wealthy will never annihilate the workers, because they need workers to provide their wealth; but the workers could eventually obliterate the bourgeoisie, which would result in the withering away of the state. Anarchists must be patient in waiting for this end result.

Only a worker’s state is a socialist one: all others are properly understood to be variations on the bourgeois state. The neoliberal American state, as well as all those countries that bow to US interests (including Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the countries of the EU, the UK, and the puppet governments in Brazil, etc.), are all bourgeois states. The social democrat states of the Nordic model are market economies with some concessions to the people (i.e., strong unions, welfare, free education, and universal healthcare), but are still bourgeois. And fascist, or quasi-fascist, states like Italy under Mussolini, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Chile under Pinochet, were bourgeois, not socialist.

What must be emphasized is not whether there is a state or not, but rather whose interests are served by that state: the rich, or the people? Countries with free healthcare and education, near 100% employment and nearly 0% homeless are clearly head and shoulders above countries whose states contribute to wealth inequality, and finance war and corporate welfare instead of healthcare, education, and a social safety net for the poor.

When the poor are oppressed, I feel every sympathy for them; when capitalists in socialist states are taxed appropriately, so the poor are provided for, I feel no sympathy for the ‘poor rich’. The issue of taxation is the next point I need to address.

IV: Two Needful Considerations Regarding Taxes

We often hear right-libertarians complain, “Taxation is theft!”, while giving no consideration to how the overworking and underpaying of workers, imperialism’s rape of other countries’ land and resources, and underfunding of taxpayers’ needed social services are all theft.

The petite bourgeoisie screams as loudly as does the moyenne/grande/haute bourgeoisie about lowering taxes, but it’s the latter who largely benefit from those tax cuts. It never occurs to those lower-to-middle class right-wingers that they get a return on their taxes through those social programs…provided they’re provided.

Whether taxes are a good or a bad thing depends on two important considerations: who is being taxed, the lower, or upper classes; and how is the tax revenue being spent. If there’s progressive taxation, taxing the wealthiest the most, the middle classes far less, and the lower middle to working classes hardly at all to not at all, you have a valid case for taxes. If the tax revenue is spent on such things as education, free healthcare, and unemployment insurance, even those in the middle classes get a return on their taxes, for they may benefit from those social services as well as the poor.

Contrast this validation of taxes against the system in the US. The middle classes pay a moderate level of taxes, and the moderately rich pay high taxes, while the super-rich pay far less in taxes than they should pay. (While the US’s taxation is kind-of-sort-of progressive, with the huge, egregious exception of the super-rich as pointed out above, in the UK, the tax system is the inverse opposite of progressive. On top of that, consider the income tax evasion of the super-rich worldwide, as well as their non-declaring of income.)

To make matters worse, way too much of US tax revenue goes into the military, while healthcare, education, and other social services are left in a totally ineffectual state. Obamacare was portrayed as ‘socialism’ in the mainstream media, when it was anything but. The neoliberal cuts to such vital things as welfare and social services that started with Reagan continued from Clinton to Bush (whose tax cuts for the rich hardly created jobs or boosted the economy), to Obama, and finally to Trump; at the same time, the military budget increased and increased, up till the gargantuan increase supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Such insanely high military spending, hardly a good use of tax revenue, does result in a bloating of the state, but it’s a bloating of the bourgeois state, not the proletarian state.

Taxation in a workers’ state would be the opposite of the US way of doing things. The only qualification to this contrast would be a sizeable amount of tax revenue going to the military (in defence against counter-revolution, as North Korea has been doing, not for the sake of imperialism), and even this budget would be Lilliputian compared to the US military budget. This need to defend against counter-revolution is part of the justification for a temporary, transitional state, something anarchists must be patient about, and this leads me to my next point.

V: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

One cannot establish socialism without a plan. All efforts to establish communism in one fell swoop have resulted ultimately in failure. As thrilling as the Paris Commune was, it lasted a mere two months’ time before it was brutally suppressed. Theorists like Marx and Lenin discussed what they thought were the fatal errors made by the Communards (not seizing control of the bank, not taking the fight to Versailles to secure their gains–Marx/Lenin, p. 97), and proposed ways to improve on future revolutions.

This learning from one’s mistakes, developing newer and better theory to raise the chances of success in future revolutions, is the basis of scientific socialism. There is often a poverty of theory in anarchism that results in sloppy acts of rebellion (e.g., Black Bloc members randomly destroying property in protest at G8 or G20 summits, etc.) instead of planning effectively.

We want direct action that brings results, not adolescent acts of defiance that ultimately do nothing to change the system. Was Makhno’s anarcho-communist experiment a valid one, or was it an exercise in thuggish banditry, one that ironically had all the authoritarianism it claimed to be opposed to? Is this latter possibility the real reason Leninist authoritarianism suppressed Makhno? Whichever is the correct interpretation of events, his anarchist experiment didn’t last–that we know for sure.

Anarchist Catalonia was another thrilling experiment during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939; but even Madrid’s socialist government wasn’t strong enough to fight off Franco’s fascists. I wish Stalin had given more help to the Spanish Republicans instead of fretting over the anarchists, or whether Trotskyists were, among them. Franco’s victory assuredly encouraged Hitler and Mussolini (who’d helped the Spanish Nationalists) to carry on their warmongering…and we all know what that led to.

But let’s contrast these failures with the successes of the 70-year existence of the USSR, with Cuba, with the Eastern Bloc, and with North Korea. The Soviet Union fought off a counter-revolution from 1918-1921, then fought off internal, treasonous dangers during the 1930s (revisionism that continued to exist right to the dissolution of the USSR), and finally did the lion’s share of fighting off and defeating the Nazis. Cuba foiled the Bay of Pigs invasion, and has successfully dealt with an embargo for over fifty years. The CIA and Cuban exiles tried to kill Castro over 600 times. The Eastern Bloc, gained after the defeat of fascism, lasted roughly forty-five years, in spite of all the West’s attempts to thwart it at the time. And North Korea, having been bombed to the Stone Age during the Korean War, lost 20% of their population, and traumatized to this day, rose from the ashes, is, relatively speaking, a thriving country (in spite of how Western propaganda portrays it as a basket case), and has created a nuclear deterrent to make the US think twice before ever bombing it again.

While the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc ultimately crumbled, they made the anarchist attempts look like still births in comparison. These are clear examples of how to bring about and protect a socialist revolution, Cuba and North Korea even more so. Consider also North Vietnam’s humbling of the US, while the latter’s cowardly napalm campaign only proves what murderers their army were and are.

Only a well-protected revolution can guarantee that transitional process of going from A (capitalism in its most brutal, naked form–i.e., today’s) to Z (full communism, with the withering away of the state, production to provide for everyone instead of just for profit, and the end of the use of money). The withering away of the state requires a temporary, transitional workers’ state to make the dream of socialist anarchy possible. Dialectics: a) an unregulated (or minimally-regulated) capitalist state, as we have over most of the world today, b) a regulated workers’ state, and c) stateless communism.

To bring about the final resolution of present-day contradictions, anarchists must be patient. Mao Zedong, who in his youth had anarchist tendencies (i.e., he’d been influenced by the ideas of Peter Kropotkin) before embracing Marxism-Leninism, said that the Chinese dictatorship of the proletariat would take one hundred years before the state finally withered away: now that is patient anarchism. (Marx and Engels were also patient anarchists; so were even Lenin and Stalin, properly understood. These four theoreticians simply accepted the exigencies of the time, namely, that a protracted period of class struggle to wipe out all traces of capitalism had to come first before full anarchist communism could come into being.)

One hopes that the current Chinese dictatorship would switch to that of the proletariat sooner rather than later, though, especially with the prediction that the hegemony of the American empire will have crumbled by the 2030s, and that China will be among those superpowers, like Russia, that supplant it (or at least they will all coexist), and that leaders like Xi Jinping will do more than just talk the Marxist talk. Then, who knows? Maybe…just maybe, the Chinese state really will wither away by 2049.

VI: The Aftermath of the USSR’s Catastrophic Collapse

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Western media portrayed it as a triumph of liberal democracy over totalitarianism. The Cold War was over! No more need to worry about nuclear war, because Russia and Eastern Europe were to join the capitalist world. It was seen as the “end of history”. Communism was seen as discredited.

The invalidating of communism was seen as further proved when we saw the economic turmoil Russia had been plunged into, for the Soviet planned economy was blamed for the debacle of the 1990s; but a more careful analysis will show that matters were more complicated…and more sinister…than met the eye.

Oligarchs rose up in Russia, buying up state property and assets under Boris Yeltsin’s incompetent, alcoholic leadership, and causing terrible wealth inequality, while the socialist safety net of the USSR was no longer there for the unfortunate to fall back on. Capitalism, not socialism, is what ruined Russia.

George Soros helped with this switch-around, and while he has been a vocal critic of the excesses of “free market” capitalism, his ‘left-leaning’ should be taken with a generous dose of salt: he’s a billionaire, so you should consider where his real class loyalties lie.

When the USSR collapsed, along with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany, Moscow was promised that NATO would not expand or move eastward. Anyone who has been following politics for the past 25 years knows what a broken promise (translation–blatant lie) that was: NATO troops are currently lined up along the Russian border, after unsubstantiated stories of ‘Russian threats to the Baltic region’ started popping up in the media during the 2016 US election campaign. It should be clear who the real aggressors are.

The first signs of the US/NATO’s broken promise came with the Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, etc. lived there in relative peace under the Titoist system. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, though, the IMF, the World Bank, Germany, the US, and NATO worked to undermine Slobodan Milošević’s efforts to maintain socialism by stirring up the old ethnic hatreds and blaming the killing on him, fabricating a charge of genocide (of which he was exonerated by the ICTY). Then came the US/NATO ‘humanitarian war’.

After NATO claimed the former Yugoslavia for US imperialism, they went after most of the other former Warsaw Pact members. An attempt was made to include Georgia (which was encouraged by the US to fight with South Ossetia, a country friendly with Russia) in NATO back in 2008, angering Russia and leading ultimately to the Russo-Georgian War. US imperialism interfered in the democratic process in Ukraine, getting rid of pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with a government that includes neo-Nazis! In Russia herself, the US interfered with the democratic process by manipulating the 1996 Russian election to re-elect the hugely unpopular Yeltsin against what would have been a shoo-in re-election of the Communist Party.

…and US politicians complain about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 US election, an accusation they have never been able to prove.

What must be borne in mind is that the Soviet system, for all its flaws, was an effective counterweight against the depredations of Western imperialism. The Western welfare state of the prosperous 1945-1973 world was influenced by socialism, and was an attempt to stave off the ‘communist threat’. The USSR was frequently involved in helping national liberation movements in the Third World. With the Soviets gone, the US/NATO knows there’s been nobody significant standing in their way…at least not until Vladimir Putin pulled Russia out of the abyss Yeltsin helped put her in, and not until China began rising as a major global economic power.

Small wonder the US has been so hostile to these two countries lately!

Throughout her history, the US has been a warmongering nation, starting with the Revolutionary War, then the massacres of Native Americans, the taking of a huge chunk of Mexican territory, her imperialist bullying of the Philippines, the needless nuking of Japan, and the bombing of North Korea. But the so-called War on Terror takes the cake: look at what US imperialism has done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Niger. Iran, North Korea, Russia, and even China are next on the list.

With all this killing in mind, we need to explore all the killing that communists have been accused of.

VII: A Re-examining of the Communist Death Count

Communists, admittedly, aren’t innocent of excesses when it comes to bloodshed. Millions died under their watch…but how many millions was it, really? And is there a context behind this killing that must be scrutinized to get at the real meaning behind it?

Mainstream sources tend to give figures of around 100 million dead due to communist repressions. But where do they get these gargantuan figures from?

While there is lots of documented evidence, including mass graves, photographs, etc., of the victims of the Holocaust (with six million Jews and five million non-Jews murdered by the SS), nothing in the Soviet archives indicates tens of millions killed during Stalin’s purges; actually, about 800,000 people were executed between 1921 and 1953. At worst, about 2-3 million died in the Gulag, while 20-40% of Gulag prisoners were released each year from the 1920s to the 1950s.

As for the ‘tens of millions’ supposedly killed under Mao’s initially problem-laden (i.e., bad harvests), but eventually successful Great Leap Forward, those exaggerated statistics are based on manipulations of censuses and death-rate figures from the 1953-1964 period. Right-wing writers like Robert Conquest, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (authors of Mao: The Unknown Story), and Stéphane Courtois, editor of The Black Book of Communism, who seemed obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million killed by Communists, are all responsible for these error-laden, anti-communist smears. (Of course, Deng Xiaoping helped with the anti-Mao slanders in order to further his reactionary agenda of reintroducing the market in the 1980s.)

Among this demonization is the nonsense surrounding the Holodomor, which was really little more than a famine in the Ukraine; but the political right insists on portraying the tragedy as a ‘communist Holocaust’, a supposedly deliberate murder of Ukrainians. (The same largely goes for the Great Leap Forward.)

Linked to this kind of anti-Soviet propaganda is how the ‘Forest Brothers’, an Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance guerrilla movement linked to Nazi Germany back in the mid-1940s, are being celebrated as heroes in a short film (as contemporary anti-Russian propaganda) published and promoted by none other than NATO! Only that puppet of US imperialism would be low enough to vilify Communists while lionizing pro-fascist Jew killers.

The far-left is often more or less equated with the far-right in the horseshoe theory, something I once believed in years ago, but now realize is hopelessly wrong. The points of comparison between fascism and Communism are, at best, superficial: their authoritarianism, collectivism, and propensity to resort to violence all serve totally different objectives. Fascists use these three to strengthen their respective nations at the expense of other nations, races, or ethnic groups; Communists use the three to emancipate the global proletariat from capitalism, of which fascism is an aggravated version.

One group commonly associated with Communism, but who would more accurately be described as a kind of Asian nationalism, were the Khmer Rouge. The atrocities perpetrated under Pol Pot‘s rule of Cambodia are, contrary to popular opinion, not to be associated with Communism.

The Khmer Rouge’s ideology had, at best, a mere smattering of Marxism; deserving of far more focus was their xenophobia and ultra-nationalism. Rarely was Marxism-Leninism discussed among them, according to Nate Thayer; only Nuon Chea referred to the ideology, once, as a guiding party principle, of all the senior or other party members of the CPK, in all the interviews Thayer had with them from the 1980s to the 1990s.

They were opposed to modernization, something so crucial to socialists–as the one true way of ensuring the productive forces can provide for everyone–that even critics of Communism like Milovan Djilas acknowledged the need for industrialization in socialist states (see Djilas, The New Class, pages 15-18). Pol Pot’s ideal, in contrast, was ‘primitive communism’; this, combined with the US bombings of Cambodia, which caused a frantic desperation to produce food directly, meant that urban dwellers were forced into farming in the rural areas, which led to famine and starvation.

The Khmer Rouge, far from being the comrades of socialist Vietnam, fought them (the USSR supported Vietnam, while the Khmer Rouge were supported by the US and China [under the rule of “Communist” Deng Xiaoping]). Normally, there is at least a reasonable level of solidarity between socialist states. If the Khmer Rouge were Communists, they were pretty strange ones.

Most importantly, though, to come back to a discussion of the genuine Communists, the deaths under Stalin and Mao must be understood within the context of class war, or the aggravation of class struggle under socialism. There was, and is, always the fear of re-establishing capitalism within socialist states (consider what Maduro’s and Kim Jong-un’s governments have been going through to see my point); and the neoliberal nightmare of today, with the exacerbated state of imperialism and neocolonialism rampant in the Third World, shows how justified those socialist fears are of the “free market” insidiously creeping back into our world.

Stalin inherited from Lenin a USSR that had not so long ago fought off the White Army in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. Added to that, Russia was an agrarian society, backward and lacking in modern industrialization. He also knew of the threat of the capitalists around the world (including revisionists within his own country!) were looming like a shadow over everything he’d tried to build.

Speaking of threats, several years into the implementation of the first of his three Five-Year Plans to industrialize the USSR, Stalin had to deal with an especially formidable foe: Hitler, who hated Communists and considered them a Jewish conspiracy. And the Nazis weren’t across the ocean, but right next door to Russia. Stalin had no choice but to speed up the industrialization of the Soviet Union, including working the Gulag labourers like slaves, in time to be ready to withstand a Nazi invasion. Attempts were made to stall Hitler, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to buy time until the Red Army would be ready to face the SS.

Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, and such battles as that of Stalingrad were among the bloodiest in military history. Far too few people in the West appreciate the huge sacrifice the Soviet Union made to rid the world of the Nazi menace: between 20-30 million Soviet Russians died, including 3.3 million POWs who were brutalized, given inadequate (if any) clothing–including in winter, and starved in Nazi concentration camps. We always hear of the heroism of the US and the UK who fought for our freedom in WWII, but their sacrifice was dwarfed by that of socialist Eastern Europe. The Red Army, who fought their way right into Berlin, making Hitler put a gun to his head, were the real heroes of WWII.

The Great Patriotic War was one of those few times one could truly speak of soldiers fighting for our freedoms. So many other wars have been thus rationalized, but usually they have only been imperialist competitions for land and resources, as WWI was. It is truly nauseating to hear anyone try to justify the current “War on Terror” as a fight for freedom, when the exact opposite has been fought for.

If there’s any one thing that shows Stalin as being in no way comparable to Hitler, it is his defeat of Nazi Germany. It is obscene how people, right-wingers in particular, try either to equate these two men, or to make Stalin seem worse, typically by basing their dubious assessment on not only grotesquely bloated statistics of those who died under Stalin (a ‘dictator’ who tried to resign multiple times, but couldn’t, because his people loved him too much to let him go [many Russians still love him, by the way]), but also minimized statistics of the victims of Nazi murder.

The SS brutalized and killed Jews, Roma, gay men, and the mentally and physically disabled because they hated them. Communists killed their political enemies, as did Nazis, of course, but consider the nature of those respective political enemies. Those who opposed Nazism were people of conscience, those who cared about the human rights of Jews, Roma, gays, women, and the mentally and physically disabled; many of these people of conscience were leftists, the first ones put in Nazi concentration camps. Communists’ political enemies were capitalists and traitors (those executed) and those leftists with otherwise reactionary views, the impatient leftists (typically those just put in the Gulag and then released).

All these political enemies of Communism were a danger to a political and economic system dedicated to human rights, equality, and anti-imperialism. Enemies of Nazi Germany were enemies of racism and imperialism. It shouldn’t be necessary to re-educate people on these matters, but fascist tendencies have been rising lately.

There is no denying that there were excesses during the Stalin era, some impatient leftists who suffered a far worse fate than the punishment they deserved; but Stalin’s wrongs were far fewer than those of Hitler. Part of the false moral equivalency of these two men is the fault of groups like the Alt-right; part of it is the fault of neoliberal capitalists who are doing everything in their power to prevent a resurgence of socialism.

If there is any moral equivalence to be made with Hitler, it’s the kind of people who financed him…capitalists, who have been responsible for the deaths of far greater numbers than even the highest estimates given of those killed under Communism.

VIII: Conclusion

We leftists have a lot of work to do in fixing what is wrong with our world today; but fixing those problems won’t come about by dreaming of utopia without planning and doing the hard work of going from A to Z. In a transitional socialist state, do you fear state terror, surveillance, militarized police, prison slave-labour, an all-powerful oligarchy? Does the US not already have all those things right now? If you fear things going wrong in a Marxist-Leninist system, I must ask you: do you think things could be any worse than they are now?

Now here’s a question that needs some kind of answer: have I, one who has called himself an ‘anarcho-communist’, and a ‘libertarian Marxist,’ become a tankie? I hesitate to label myself with that term, if for no other reason than because I find any such labels limiting (and the same goes for ‘anarcho-communist’ and ‘libertarian Marxist’, to be fair.)

I’ve done a number of ‘political compass’ tests, with slightly differing results, but here’s one I did for the sake of this article: take it however you will. Here’s another:

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In any case, I consider myself, however contradictory this may sound, to be a libertarian-leaning Marxist with moderate ‘tank’ sympathies. I very much believe in the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and I see the need for some kind of vanguard to lead and educate the working class, though I’m not sure I’d define such concepts in as particular a way as the average Marxist-Leninist would. I prefer at least some elasticity in their application.

For me, anarchy is an aspiration, though, not an immediately realizable state (pardon the pun). So, to make the kind of progress towards a point when the state will no longer be needed, because no class war will exist anymore, we’ll have to be patient anarchists.

Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1975

Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, Harvest/HBJ Book, New York, 1957

Karl Marx & V. I. Lenin, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, International Publishers, New York, 2008

‘Wolfgang,’ a Werewolf Erotic Horror Novel

My new e-book has been published on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Wolfgang-Werewolf-Erotic-Horror-Novel-ebook/dp/B01HYNIX0O/

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Analysis of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel written by George Orwell in 1948 and published the following year (the title of the novel seems to come from a reversing of the last two numbers of the year he was writing it). It is a political satire whose main target is the Stalinist USSR, but it can also be seen to satirize any totalitarian society, such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, or even contemporary neoliberalism and the intrusive state apparatus that protects today’s capitalist class.

Given the current geo-political climate, I find it irresistible to compare Orwell’s Hell with ours today; and because this story is so rich with possible political interpretations, I will explore many of those here. Not all of these necessarily reflect my own personal political beliefs, but they’re here to show all the interpretive possibilities in such a literary masterwork.

Some right-libertarians like to misuse this novel, as well as Animal Farm, to suggest that Orwell was attacking socialism as a whole (while, adding to that, idiotically saying that Fascist or Nazi totalitarianism was also a brand of socialism, of which it was really the opposite). Actually, Orwell was committed to the ideal of democratic socialism; these two literary criticisms of Stalinism really show his anti-authoritarianism, not anti-socialism. His book, Homage to Catalonia, clearly shows his sympathies for a worker-ruled society.

In the 1930s, however, neither Stalin nor the leftist media, which propagandized for him, was very sympathetic to the Spanish Revolution, on the Republican side of which Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War; indeed, they denied that a socialist revolution was even going on there, because Stalin wanted to control the Spanish Republicans and purge them of Trotskyists and anarchists. Instead, Stalin’s meagre support of the Republicans against Franco‘s right-wing coalition of Nationalists was in the name of ‘defending liberal democracy’, not socialism, in order to appease Britain, France, America, and he hoped, get their help in fighting Nazi Germany later on. This Soviet betrayal of the Spanish leftists was what embittered Orwell against Stalin.

So, the ‘socialism’ that Orwell was criticizing in Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t really socialism per se; rather, Stalinism, as Orwell saw it, was a perversion of socialism, a bureaucratized bastardization of it, as symbolized by the Newspeak corruption of Oceania‘s ‘English socialism’ into ‘Ingsoc’ (this ‘socialism in England’, as opposed to worldwide socialism, suggests Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country‘). Similarly, Eurasia‘s political system is called ‘Neo-Bolshevism‘, implying a corruption of Leninism; and Eastasia‘s system is a kind of ‘Death-Worship’, or ‘Obliteration of the Self’. This religion-like quality brings to mind aspects of Juche in North Korea, with its infallible ‘Great Leader’, who does all the masses’ thinking for them. In other words, Orwell was satirizing authoritarianism, not socialism.

In fact, the Ingsoc short form resembles the Nazi short form for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. This suggests the state capitalism of fascism rather than socialism, since all left-leaning Nazis (except Goebbels) were purged from the party when Hitler came to power, propped up by big business. Moreover, the first people put in Nazi concentration camps were leftists. So Big Brother’s moustache may not only represent Stalin’s, but also Hitler’s. Not only Big Brother, but also BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

Another interesting concept in this novel is doublethink, in which two contradictory ideas can be simultaneously true. It can be considered a corruption of the notion of Marxist dialectics, when contradictions in material conditions are contemplated, and a unity seen in the contradictions leads to a refinement of one’s philosophy, then to be contradicted and refined, again and again. But where dialectics bring out a refinement, or improvement, in philosophy, doublethink uses contradictions for the sake of self-serving politicians.

Winston Smith‘s name was deliberately chosen by Orwell, suggesting the character’s everyman quality through Smith, a common English surname, and his anti-totalitarian stance (Winston, i.e., Churchill…not that Churchill is any kind of hero to self-respecting leftists, mind you; and just as we shouldn’t idealize Stalin, nor should we ignore Orwell’s faults). Indeed, the juxtaposition, Winston Smith, could be seen as an example of doublethink in itself: Winston Smith indicating that, if you will, IMPERIALISM IS POPULISM; after all, for all of Orwell’s faults, he always despised British imperialism, of which Churchill was its personification at the time, despite his anti-fascism.

Julia, as Winston’s love interest, suggests Juliet.

As members of the Outer Party, Winston and Julia are in a position analogous to the middle class (the Inner Party being the ruling class state capitalists, and the ‘proles‘, or proletarians, being the working class). Oddly, the Outer Party members are the most repressed in this society, since they are the biggest potential threat to the Inner Party. The proles, on the other hand, are given more lenience, since they, in their ‘low-class’ ignorance of political matters, are more easily controlled through pleasurable distractions (pornography, beer, football, etc.).

This acute repression of the middle-class Outer Party seems to presage the near-annihilation of the middle class by neoliberalism over the past thirty to forty years. Though Orwell’s novel has only a totalitarian state as the collective antagonist, we must remember the principles of doublethink. Since WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, then, if you will, the FREE MARKET IS STATISM, too.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, deregulating capitalism and giving tax cuts to the rich allows them to accumulate obscenely large amounts of wealth, enabling them to buy corrupt politicians; elsewhere, they can use free trade deals (more deregulation) to get cheap labour overseas instead of paying local, unionized labourers; and endless imperialist war means profits through the sale of weapons, and through the plundering of Third World resources. All of this results in more private property that needs protection, hence the state expands rather than contracts, contrary to the fantasies of right-libertarians. The ‘free market’ (of which there really is no such thing, anyway) creates crony capitalism, or another kind of state capitalism.

Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth–whose short form, Minitrue, suggests the half-truth nature of the propaganda it spreads (TRUTH IS LIES, if you will)–is to eliminate all elements of the past considered politically troublesome to the Inner Party. He will eliminate all evidence of the existence of anyone guilty of thoughtcrime, those now rendered unpersons, just as Stalin used to take old photos including people considered enemies of the state and eliminate them from the pictures, so no memory of the hated people remains.

Similarly, today’s capitalist class can rely on us to forget the past provocations (e.g., the CIA giving money and weapons to Bin Laden and the mujahideen in the 80s, America and other Western countries aiding Iraq by helping develop chemical weapons during the Iran/Iraq War, the US creating the conditions out of which ISIS arose) that have led to the ‘War on Terror‘. Instead of blaming Western imperialism, we blame Muslims, just as the people of Oceania spit out their hostility to Emmanuel Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate, then swoon in ecstatic adoration of Big Brother, whose Inner Party is their real oppressor.

Interestingly, the remaining part of the globe that isn’t a part of Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia–the disputed area where most of the war is going on–is most of Africa, much of the Arab world, and all of southeast Asia, or the Third World, which is the area most oppressed by Western imperialism today. How little things change.

The people of Oceania shout so loudly at the video of Goldstein–a Jew just like Leon Trotsky, so hated by Stalin; yet also a man representative of all the Jews, so hated by Nazis and today’s antisemites among the conspiracy theorists–that not one word of his can be heard. This is like how so many people today, so committed to one ideology, hate its antithesis so virulently that they won’t listen to its despised ideas. The ruling class, like the nomenklatura or the fascist totalitarian state, always makes sure we hate the wrong people.

The cult of personality surrounding Big Brother–just like that of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, or even, arguably, Obama–makes him into a Godlike figure in opposition to the ‘devil’ Goldstein. Here we can see a critique even of religious authoritarianism: Jesus is Lord, but the liberal left are the spawn of Satan; Allahu Akbar, but the West is the Great Satan; etc. Accordingly, we aren’t even sure if Big Brother exists (or Goldstein, for that matter), as with God or the Devil. Big Brother is like a kindly older brother who protects us from bullies, but we sometimes forget that an older brother himself often bullies us, too.

The notion, ‘Who controls the past…controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’ is pregnant with thought-provoking interpretations. It expresses the essence of propagandistic white-washing of the past. The current regime is free to vilify whoever was in power previously, comparing the present state of affairs favourably to that of the past by showing only the light side of now and only the shadows of yesterday. And in perpetuating this propaganda, the current regime will ensure that future generations have the ‘correct’ opinions.

Consider how synagogues, churches, and mosques have all blackened the memory of their pagan or secular predecessors or enemies, to ensure that the flock remains faithful. And not only did Stalin’s regime denigrate the names of ‘revisionists’ and ‘reactionaries’ like Trotsky to ensure the survival of his rule, but today the capitalist class portrays socialist states like the USSR (misusing Orwell, as we know) as evil dictatorships to discourage any reconsideration of socialism in today’s neoliberal society.

Similarly, the memory of the Black Panther Party is vilified to deter anyone in the struggle against white racism. Conservatives stereotype feminists as all being like Andrea Dworkin or Catherine MacKinnon to discourage any move away from traditional sex roles; while, on the other side of the coin, radical and third wave feminists propagandize about the past and about ‘patriarchy’ to justify moving in the direction of gynocentrism. And apologists of Western imperialism exaggerate the jihadist history of Islam to deaden sympathy for Muslims. The list of examples can go on and on.

Everywhere in Airstrip One, a deliberately dull choice for a name for England, there are telescreens, or two-way televisions through which the Inner Party and the Thought Police can watch everyone 24/7 in order to catch ‘thought criminals’. Today’s telescreen is the ubiquitous internet surveillance, through not only the NSA and other government organizations out to get any subversive types they can find, but also through capitalists who monitor all our online shopping and other interests to present us with products they hope we’ll waste our money on and fatten their wallets. Consumerism distracts us from activism.

Marriages and other relationships are bereft of affection in Orwell’s Hell, as they are in much of today’s society, with almost half of Western marriages ending in divorce. People would rather stare at a smartphone, tablet, or computer than communicate face to face with people; the emotionless conversations of all Outer Party members, including the public chats of Winston’s and Julia’s, reflect this grey reality. And while Winston is already guilty of thoughtcrime from the first word he’s written in his journal (actually, from when he bought it), it’s not until he and Julia have become lovers, copulating for their mutual enjoyment (‘sexcrime’) instead of for the sake of producing offspring for the state (‘goodsex‘), that they are finally arrested.

And when they are arrested, the symbolism is powerful. Winston and Julia–made to hold their hands behind their heads–are completely naked in the second-floor room of Mr. Charrington’s shop (he secretly working for the Thought Police). The lovers’ nakedness symbolizes their vulnerability and powerlessness, their secrets all known while their fully-clothed intruders needn’t worry about their own secrets being known.

Held in the Ministry of Love (a place of torture), Winston sees not only the usual police rough-housing of prostitutes and other common criminals among the proles, but also the detainment of Tom Parsons, a character known for his sycophantic adherence to Big Brother. Even a bootlicker like him can be a thought criminal! Parsons, a man who happily incorporates the corruption of English known as Newspeak into his speech, has been betrayed by his own daughter, a member of the Party Youth, who are like the Hitler Youth, or like today’s Social Justice Warriors, typically being young university students who have been fully indoctrinated in political correctness by the mainstream corporate media and the corporately controlled universities.

Newspeak is in itself a fascinating concept. Syme speaks of the beauty of the destruction of language. If no words exist for a concept, for example, freedom, then that idea won’t exist anymore, either. This is comparable to how political correctness tries to eliminate bad ideas by doing away with all those words associated with unacceptable ideas. Apparently, if we dispense with words associating a job with only one sex–businessman, stewardess–and replace them with ‘gender-neutral’ language–businessperson, flight attendant–social attitudes will change such that people won’t be tricked into thinking that these jobs are exclusive to one sex or the other (Never mind that at least a whole generation using politically correct English has gone by, and there are still far more businessmen than businesswomen, and far more female flight attendants than male ones.). Similarly, if we do away with ‘ableist’ language–‘retarded’ as a synonym for stupid–it seems that people will stop showing contempt for mentally handicapped people (Never mind that the still-used words idiot, cretin, imbecile, and moron were once words used for mentally disabled people.).

In today’s world, we hardly need a totalitarian state to condemn someone for thoughtcrime. Merely use the ‘wrong’ vocabulary, or tell a politically incorrect joke, and the masses will go mad on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media, doxxing and shaming you, or destroying your career and reputation by spreading the word about what a ‘bad person’ you are. Though today’s militarized police are certainly frightening, we the common people are our own Thought Police. And remember: “Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime IS death”.

Winston’s next shock is seeing O’Brien, the man who gave him Goldstein’s book (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a parody of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed), come into the room. But the greatest shock is knowing that O’Brien hasn’t been helping the resistance (which, incidentally, is called The Brotherhood), but has been working with the Thought Police all along. Like O’Brien, so many of us only seem to be against the system: ‘anarcho’-capitalists, who oppose the state, but support an economic system that can’t exist without the state; bickering leftists who get hung up on minor ideological differences instead of building solidarity, and betray each other in the manner described in the above paragraph; or ‘Democratic’ leaders like Obama who at first claim to want to ‘spread the wealth around’, then end up serving the same ruling class as eagerly as the Republican Party.

Along with the physical torture that O’Brien subjects Winston to, there is also psychological manipulation in the form of gaslighting. This includes bullying Winston into acceding that 2 + 2 = 5. Those in power can coerce or trick us into accepting all kinds of nonsensical beliefs, including the notion that more capitalism (the ‘free market’) is the solution to the evils of our current capitalist system, which apparently is so merely because the state is involved in it. Just minimize or remove the state and its regulations, and capitalism will be ‘purified’, demagogues like Ron Paul tell us. This is also what the Koch brothers have always said; and instead of liberating society, all their political influence has intensified our troubles. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

O’Brien burns pictures of the unpersons Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford by dumping the photos down a memory hole, saying the men never existed, the lack of extant evidence of their existence being ‘proof’ of their never having existed. That they still exist in Winston’s mind is evidence only of his ‘mental illness’. This is like how authoritarian societies of all kinds, whether left or right-wing, disregard all memory of past offences, pretending they never happened, then pretend that defiant people are mentally ill (i.e. oppositional defiant disorder). “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever,” O’Brien tells Winston.

Finally, Winston must be brought to ‘love’ Big Brother. Of course, to love Big Brother is to be a traitor to oneself, as loving Stalin was betraying the working class (from the anti-Stalinist point of view, at least), or loving Hitler was betraying Germany. To make Winston betray himself and Julia, he is brought to Room 101, with the cage of hungry rats strapped to the front of his face.

Earlier in the novel, he shrieked at the sight of a rat in Charrington’s second-floor room, when he was with Julia; later, Charrington revealed himself to be a rat, having informed the Thought Police of Winston’s and Julia’s affair. Now, Winston sees terrifying rats right before his face.

While, on the surface, his fear is of having his face destroyed by the rats, on a deeper level, his fear of them symbolizes his fear of himself as a rat, about to betray Julia. Seeing those rats is Winston looking at his own mirror reflection (all of which raises the question of how self-conscious Orwell may have been of his own ratting out of pro-Stalin communists). Those in power, whether they be Stalinists, fascists, religious fanatics, or capitalists, always stay in power by making us betray ourselves. Winston the anti-authoritarian is Churchill the imperialist.

We all long for freedom, but when the pressure is on, when we’re taken out of our comfort zone, our spirit is broken, sooner or later, as Winston’s is. We lack the necessary backbone; we are too complacent, especially in the First World; we lack true revolutionary potential. We all give in, and then everything is all right, we’re finished with the struggle, and we resume our obedient following of authority.

We love Big Brother.

Analysis of ‘Animal Farm’

Animal Farm is a novella written by George Orwell and published in 1945. Written in the form of a ‘fairy story’ with talking farm animals, it is a satirical political allegory of the first twenty-five years or so of Soviet Russia. It has been said that almost every detail of the story allegorically represented something of political importance from early Soviet history.

Orwell was prompted to write Animal Farm (and Nineteen Eighty-Four) by his disquieting experiences as a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, fighting with the POUM, an anti-Stalinist Marxist group who were slandered by the Stalinists as Trotskyist, and, more fantastically, as sympathizing with Franco. In Homage to Catalonia and numerous letters, he wrote of how inconsistently the USSR was ‘helping’ the Republican side, who should have been their allies as fellow leftists. Stalin seemed more interested in making alliances with the capitalist West (i.e., England, France, and America, whose ‘neutral,’ non-interventionist policy actually aided the Fascists) against the growing threat of Naziism, and in crushing any manifestations of Trotskyism among the Spanish communists, than in helping his comrades in Spain. Hence, the leftist media, following the Stalinist agenda, denied the socialist revolution going on in Spain at the time, insisting instead that the struggle against Fascism was about preserving ‘liberal democracy’. Indeed, what Stalin really wanted was to crush the Spanish revolution. Hence, Orwell’s bitterness against the USSR. Now, let’s look at the allegory of Animal Farm.

Mr. Jones, the owner of the Manor Farm, represents Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian capitalist class. The Manor Farm, therefore, represents Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, up until World War I.

Old Major, an aging pig that hasn’t long to live, represents Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, Lenin (later in the story, Old Major’s skull is reverently put on public display, recalling Lenin’s Mausoleum). So his speech, in which he describes the deplorable state of the overworked, underfed farm animals, represents the conditions of the disenfranchised working class in 19th century England, as described in Capital, as well as autocratic, tsarist Russia in Lenin’s writings. Old Major’s prophecy of a day when the animals will revolt against Jones and take over the farm represents Marx’s prophecy of the eventual collapse of capitalism and the workers seizing control of the means of production in a communist revolution.

When Old Major warns of the danger of the animals adopting human vices, and becoming as oppressive as man is after emancipating themselves, this can be seen as a reflection both of Orwell’s and Marx’s later anti-authoritarian stance (in the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France), as opposed to his more statist stance in The Communist Manifesto.

After Old Major dies, the animals prepare for the day of revolution, with the pigs in leadership positions; this represents how, after Marx died, Lenin and his vanguard party, the Bolsheviks, led the working class in Russia in preparation for revolution there.

Jones is kinder to Moses, a raven that promises ‘Sugarcandy Mountain’, a kind of animal heaven, to all hardworking animals on the farm. Moses thus represents the Russian Orthodox Church, an authoritarian structure propped up by the tsar and ruling class, to placate the frustrated workers and keep them under control.

Finally, on a day when Jones has got too drunk to remember to feed the animals, they rebel against the farmhands and kick them off the farm. Even Jones and his wife run off, with Moses flying close behind her. This moment represents the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power.

The feeling of freedom is exhilarating for the animals, as it must have been for the Russian communists in 1917. The animals change the name of the farm, from the Manor Farm, to Animal Farm. A green flag, with a white hoof and horn crossing each other, is hoisted on a flagpole; it obviously represents the red communist flag, with the hammer and sickle.

The pigs being the smartest of the animals, just like the educated Bolsheviks, have the animals go into the fields to begin the harvest after the pigs have milked the cows. Later, it is discovered that the milk has gone missing. The Seven Commandments, painted on the barn wall, suggest a religious-like idealism for the new values of ‘Animalism,’ which represents communism, but which may also be a pun on anarchism, since full communism includes a withered-away state; also, the Bolshevik bureaucracy hadn’t developed in Russia yet. Finally, there was Nestor Makhno‘s anarcho-communist Free Territory in the Ukraine.

Not accepting defeat easily, the humans mount a counter-attack, just as the capitalist class did in Russia in 1918. The Battle of the Cowshed, which involves men from other farms helping Jones retake his farm, thus represents the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922, in which the White Army of the capitalist class included help from capitalists from other countries, like the US. The farmers lose the Battle of the Cowshed, being chased off the farm thanks in particular to the bravery of the pig Snowball; just as the White Army lost the Russian Civil War thanks to the leadership of Leon Trotsky (whom Snowball represents) and the Red Army.

Before this battle, the pig Napoleon has already secretly taken in a litter of puppies to rear them. This represents the secret machinations of Stalin (Napoleon) and his rise to power. Later, we learn that not only the milk but also the apples are being eaten by the pigs rather than shared by all the animals. This privilege represents the continuing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, with the Bolsheviks creating a hierarchy of power, as well as advocating working with reactionary unions and bourgeois parliaments (though only when considered justified and necessary), the kind of thing that German and British Left Communists were complaining about even under the rule of Lenin, who dismissed his critics as having ‘an infantile disorder‘.

Mollie doesn’t like living on Animal Farm; she prefers the old days when men ran the farm and gave her sugar and ribbons for her mane, to make her look cute. She’s been caught by her animal comrades taking secret gifts from humans, and she eventually leaves Animal Farm to live on another farm. She represents how women can be as bourgeois as men; and even though Orwell was unlikely to have known Ayn Rand, Mollie can be seen to represent such pro-capitalist women, who left Russia with their noses firmly out of joint.

Ideological struggles begin to grow between the pigs. Snowball advocates encouraging animals all over the farms of England to revolt against their human masters; for if all farms become like Animal Farm, there will be no need to defend them against humans, since the revolution will be complete. Napoleon, on the other hand, prefers focusing on protecting Animal Farm alone, getting firearms and learning how to use them. This discord represents the ideological rift between Trotskyism and permanent revolution on the one side, and Stalinism and ‘socialism in one country‘ on the other.

Similarly, Snowball proposes building a windmill to provide electricity for the farm; this, he promises, will reduce the workload for the animals and make their lives much easier. In this, we see that Snowball, though mostly based on Trotsky, also has a bit of Lenin in him, since Lenin wanted to promote electrification in the USSR; one need only read Lenin’s writing, ‘Communism and Electrification’, from 1920: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” [Lenin’s emphasis] (Tucker, p. 492-495). As S.A. Smith says in The Russian Revolution: “Productivism was evident in Lenin’s enthusiasm for electrification, which he avowed would ‘produce a decisive victory of the principles of communism in our country’ by transforming small-scale agriculture, by eliminating drudgery from the home, and by dramatically improving public health and sanitation.” (p. 104)

(Incidentally, I find it interesting how Lenin, represented slightly in Old Major and here in Snowball, doesn’t have his own pig to represent him in full. Odd.)

Napoleon rejects Snowball’s idea, even pissing on his windmill drawings; but after having his now-fully-grown dogs (which represent the secret police of the USSR) chase Snowball off the farm, he later pretends that the windmill was his idea all along.

The chasing off of Snowball represents the exile of Leon Trotsky after he lost the power struggle with Stalin in the mid to late 1920s. Napoleon’s adoption of the plan to build the windmill, and the three attempts to build it, represent Stalin’s three Five-Year Plans to industrialize the Soviet Union, carried out mostly during the 1930s.

The animals are getting suspicious of the pigs, as were many communists of the bureaucracy in the USSR. Napoleon is now doing business with humans, namely, Mr. Whymper, trading hay, some of the wheat crop, and the chickens’ eggs for urgently needed things in order to build the windmill…but later on, also to obtain such things as booklets on brewing and distillery, for liquor. Weren’t the animals forbidden to drink alcohol, according to the Seven Commandments? Wasn’t the whole reason for ridding themselves of their human masters that the animals were to keep all the products of their labour? Weren’t all humans the enemy (‘four legs good, two legs bad’), never to be associated with?

The end of the regular animal meetings on Sunday mornings represents the fading of the influence of the Soviets, or workers’ councils, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat‘ replaced by a dictatorship of the vanguard. Napoleon doing business with the humans represents Stalin doing business with American capitalists like Ford Motor Company.

During one bitter winter, the animals’ food falls short, and they are faced with starvation. This represents the Great Famine of 1932-33.

Unwilling to part with their eggs, the chickens revolt against the pigs, and are rounded up by the dogs. The chickens, along with other animals said to be guilty of ‘treason’ against Animal Farm, are executed. This killing represents the Great Purge of the 1930s, which killed such high-profile communists as Nikolai Bukharin, and also Stalin’s use of state terror to keep his people in line. Napoleon even has the song ‘Beasts of England’ replaced with one praising him.

Napoleon is doing business with Whymper and other farms, making deals with Frederick‘s farm and Pilkington‘s (or trying to), as Stalin did with Nazi Germany (i.e., the non-aggression pact, purging the USSR of Jews, etc.) and tried to do with England. Clearly, Animal Farm isn’t so much different from other farms, as Stalin’s regime was much like any other.

The Seven Commandments are being increasingly modified, and thus discarded: the pigs are sleeping in beds, they have given themselves licence to kill any animal that is a threat to them, and they can even get drunk if they like.

Orwell is often criticized on the grounds that he never set foot in the Soviet Union; but his observations were largely confirmed by Milovan Djilas (who personally met and worked with Stalin on several occasions) in such books as The New Class and Conversations With Stalin. A new Russian elite was replacing the old, tsarist one; capitalist imperialism was traded in for Soviet imperialism. This would explain such things as the meagre help Stalin gave the Spanish communists and anarchists in the late 1930s.

In Conversations With Stalin, Djilas noted, “It is time something was said about Stalin’s attitude toward revolutions, and thus toward the Yugoslav revolution. Because Moscow abstained, always in decisive moments, from supporting the Chinese, Spanish, and in many ways even the Yugoslav revolutions, the view prevailed, not without reason, that Stalin was generally against revolutions. This is, however, not entirely correct. He was opposed only conditionally, that is, to the degree to which the revolution went beyond the interests of the Soviet state. He felt instinctively that the creation of revolutionary centres outside of Moscow could endanger its supremacy in world Communism, and of course that is what actually happened. That is why he helped revolutions only up to a certain point–up to where he could control them–but he was always ready to leave them in the lurch whenever they slipped out of his grasp.” (pp. 92-93)

Now, the erosion of animal rights needn’t symbolize only the erosion of workers’ rights in the USSR: this erosion can also represent such things as the change from liberation movements in the 60s and 70s into such mutant forms of today as political correctness, postmodernism, social justice warriors, and identity politics. The struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., was carried out with much more solidarity forty years ago than it is today. Interestingly, forty years ago, neoliberalism hadn’t quite gotten off the ground yet, either. Hmm…

The decision by farmers led by Mr. Frederick to go in and take back Animal Farm for human control results in the violent Battle of the Windmill, so called because the second windmill has been dynamited (by Mr. Frederick and his men). This battle represents the Nazi invasion of Russia during the Second World War, since Frederick represents Hitler, who, contrary to right-libertarians’ portrayal as a ‘socialist’, was as much a whore to big business as any other capitalist politician. The violence of this battle corresponds to that of the Battle of Stalingrad, often considered the bloodiest battle in military history.

A third windmill is finally built, at the cost of Boxer‘s life: its construction represents the completed transformation of the Soviet Union from an agrarian country to an industrialized superpower. But all the benefits of the windmill go to the pigs, who are now wearing clothes and walking on their hind legs! No longer do the sycophantic, mindless sheep bleat ‘four legs good, two legs bad’; now, it’s ‘four legs good, two legs better‘! The Seven Commandments have been replaced with one: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ This chilling commandment can be seen to represent not only the New Class, the nomenklatura of the Soviet bureaucracy set up and bloated by the Leninists and Stalinists, but also the reverse discrimination championed by politically correct-thinking social justice warriors.

That said, however, Orwell was not trying to attack all forms of leftism, as the right-libertarians like to think. Indeed, the political right is fond of misusing Orwell for their own propagandistic purposes, as this CIA-funded cartoon movie of Animal Farm shows. This movie’s depiction of the Soviet Union, as with every right-wing distortion of socialism, paints a much darker portrait of Stalinism than even Orwell had intended.

Ironically, the Stalinists and Maoists also seem to think Orwell was opposed to all of socialism. Actually, he was opposed only to authoritarian forms of socialism, as well as to Fascism.

Now, sometimes Orwell’s antipathy to the USSR went too far, and the attitude he had towards blacks, gays, and Jews does him no credit at all. Furthermore, one shouldn’t be too negative towards Stalin. After all, his Red Army marched into Berlin and defeated the Nazis. And his transformation of Soviet Russia, from a backward agrarian country into a modernized superpower, within just a few decades, can only be described as impressive.

The vices of Bolshevik rule tend to be exaggerated, too. Not all of Leninist authoritarianism can be so simplistically reduced to government corruption. Much of the bureaucratization, especially in the wake of the Russian Civil War, was inevitable, as S.A. Smith observes in The Russian Revolution–A Very Short Introduction: “The massive problems of recruiting, feeding, and transporting the Red Army, of squeezing grain from an unwilling peasantry, and of overcoming parochialism and inertia at the local level created irresistible pressures to centralize decision-making at the apex of the party. Moreover the constant emergencies of war fed the pressure to take instant decisions and to implement them forcefully, with the result that the party came increasingly to operate like an army.” (p. 66)

What’s more, polls have been taken in Russia, repeatedly indicating that the majority of Russians would prefer a return of the USSR. Surely, Soviet Russia wasn’t as bad as Orwell was portraying it. All this said, though, apart from the collectivization of the farms, was the USSR genuinely socialist?

Orwell’s opposition to the USSR was based on the Stalinist reality that he’d experienced in Spain (i.e., the repression of the POUM), and it wasn’t a condemnation of socialism as a whole. Consider what he had to say about anarchist Catalonia:

“It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal…All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” (Homage to Catalonia, from Orwell In Spain, pp. 32-33)

“As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists.” (Homage to Catalonia, p. 116–not from Orwell in Spain)

These are hardly the words of an anti-socialist.

His point about the pigs being indistinguishable from the humans was that the Soviets were indistinguishable from Western capitalists. Soviet ‘socialism’ was really just state capitalism, with the state–rather than the workers–controlling the means of production. This is why the Marxist state never withered away, or even approached such fading.

As Milovan Djilas explains in The New Class: “In the course of industrialization, the property of those elements who were not opposed to, or even assisted, the revolution is taken over. As a matter of form, the state also becomes the owner of this property. The state administers and manages the property. Private ownership ceases, or decreases to a role of secondary importance, but its complete disappearance is subject to the whim of the new men in authority.” (p. 30)

The pigs’ meeting with the humans at the end of the story represents the Tehran Conference of Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt. Calling the farm ‘the Manor Farm’ (note the pun on man in Manor) again shows the reality of state capitalism rather than real socialism. Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington accusing each other of cheating when they both play the ace of spades simultaneously is an anticipation of the troubles of the Cold War.

Now, Orwell’s criticism of authoritarianism isn’t limited to the bullying of the Stalinists. He was also pointing out the weakness and conformity of the animals, who blindly follow whatever propaganda the pigs throw at them. Boxer, though loveable, isn’t very smart. His motto, “I will work harder,” is noble, but foolish. His getting up earlier and earlier in the morning to lift heavy rocks for the building of the windmills is what causes his death. Even more foolish is his saying, “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” We mustn’t idealize our leaders, or be too willing to sacrifice ourselves for them, expecting a reward that will never come. Boxer never gets the retirement he’s deserved.

And whenever a commandment on the barn wall is altered, the animals passively accept it, imagining they have just forgotten that it has always said what it only now says. Indeed, those in authority often exploit our tendency to forget what has happened even as little as, say, ten years ago; thus, they trick us into making the same mistakes we’ve made so many times before.

Part of ending authoritarianism is the vigilance of the people to root it out whenever it’s seen. There will always be power-hungry people out there, ready to subvert justice for their own selfish ends. We, the people, have to keep watch against such demagogues, never letting their guile get the better of us.

Indeed, a similar corrupting of the ideals of personal liberty can be seen in the rise of contemporary neoliberalism. In the 1970s and 80s, right-libertarians (a kind of ‘Old Major’ in their own right) promoted the idea of the ‘free market,’ insisting that too much government regulation was bad for the economy, and akin to Stalinism. Deregulation and tax cuts ensued, allowing the rich to grow into the super-rich of today.

Ironically, instead of resulting in greater liberty, all we’ve seen is the kind of centralization that comes from capitalist accumulation, which Marx wrote about in Capital. Instead of less government, we have more of it, thanks to the excessive influence that the super-rich have over politicians (consider Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street).

With the growing of capitalism has come the growing of imperialism and the ‘War On Terror.’ Now the state interferes with our lives more than ever, but the right-libertarians propagandize that the problem is too much ‘socialist’ government, rather than too much capitalism. Today, Napoleon and the pigs aren’t the state capitalists of the USSR; now, they’re all just plain capitalists, pretending to be anti-statists.

Today, Orwell’s story is more relevant than ever, if for reasons totally different from the original ones.

S.A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: a Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002

Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1975

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