Extremist?

I: Introduction

A week or two before I began writing out the first draft of this blog post, I received a snarky comment from an obvious right-winger who described me as an “extremist” Marxist. The comment, since deleted (apart from its snark, it doesn’t deserve to be dignified by being allowed to continue existing, for reasons I’ll go into soon enough), was on my analysis of The Last of Sheila, in which my criticisms of capitalism are far from extremist; though to many right-wingers (the extremists of their camp in particular), any criticisms, even the mildest, are deemed “extremist.”

Granted, he may have also read other blog posts of mine, such as my analysis of Conan the Barbarian, in which I go further in my capitalist critique, and take the obviously controversial position of defending such communist leaders as Stalin and Mao. Now, if my right-wing friend–‘right-wing,’ because only someone of that political persuasion would think that calling me a “commie” is an insult–had made his comment on the Conan post rather than the Sheila one, his labelling of me as an “extremist” might, from a politically mainstream point of view, have at least some validity. Instead, he chose to make his comment on a post with only moderately anti-capitalist remarks.

I must ask: why call me on “extremist” on the Sheila post–if that’s all he’d read of me–and not the Conan one, or any of the many others where I present my admittedly hard-left stance? Since my political position is controversial, I am compelled to back up my arguments with a flood of links. A clue to his choice to be snarky on the Sheila post could be found in a careless error I made in the opening paragraphs (since corrected, naturally, and so for that, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him): I misspelled Raquel Welch’s surname as “Welsh”…twice! (Oops! I actually made a similar mistake, in my analysis of Tommy, in misspelling Ann-Margret [again, corrected]; I’m going to have to be more careful with future posts!)

Could it be that the only way he could confidently point out a “Gotcha!” was to hit me with a petty spelling mistake? After all, the realm of politics is a nebulous one, in which pointing out the errors of one’s ideological foes isn’t so clear-cut. An appeal to popular opinion, one based on decades of anti-communist propaganda (which, if you’ve read enough of my writing, Dear Reader, you’ll know doesn’t impress me at all), combined with a spelling “Gotcha!”, is apparently the best my butt-hurt commenter could do.

Nonetheless, it seems that it’s time for me once again to defend my political stance, since people like him never stop coming out of the woodwork. So in the following paragraphs, I will attempt not only to justify my defence of Stalin, Mao, and the other socialist leaders, but also to prove that, on the contrary, it is the right-wingers who are the extremists. In fact, given the aggravation of the neoliberal agenda over the past few decades, even defenders of the mainstream liberal status quo can be legitimately called extremist, as I will also try to prove.

II: A General Defence of Socialism

Let’s start by asking and answering a simple question: what does a socialist want? We can then look at the following list of answers and determine whether or not it’s “extremist.”

–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

The capitalist is the only one who will find this list of goals objectionable, since implementing it will cut into, if not totally obliterate, his profits. He’ll also rationalize his objection to it by claiming its implementation to be impractical and unrealistic.

Actually, a study of the achievements of the USSR, China under Mao, Cuba, and the other socialist states of the 20th century will show that many, if not most or even all, of these goals were either fully achieved, or at least great progress was made towards achieving them, though you wouldn’t know that to read the lies of the right-wing propagandists who endlessly quack about how “socialism doesn’t work.”

Many workers’ co-ops have been achieved in otherwise capitalist societies, and they have not only survived, but they have often thrived. Private property (factories, farms, office buildings, stores, apartment buildings, real estate, etc.) already isn’t owned by the vast majority of the population; we just want to bump that small percentage down to 0%, so everyone can share all of it. (And no, your toothbrush, cellphone, TV, car, and underwear are not private property–they’re personal possessions. You don’t profit off of them, and you don’t exploit workers with them, so we “commies” don’t want to force you to share them. Please don’t hand me that idiotic argument!)

Capitalism arranges the production of commodities to make profits; communists want them to be made to provide everyone with what he or she needs—how is this a bad thing? Right-wingers claim that we can’t afford to make this change, yet billion-dollar spending in the US military, causing a sky-high deficit, is somehow workable. Our billionaire and centi-billionaire class could use their combined money to feed the world, build schools and hospitals–all well-equipped and with well-trained staff–provide affordable, if not outright free, housing, clean up the Earth, and provide well-paying jobs…but they don’t. They’d rather fly rockets out into space. Small wonder so many of us on the left dream of sticking the heads of the superrich in the guillotine (Egad!…how extremist of me!).

Right-wing libertarians fetishize the elimination of the ever-intrusive state, yet they fail to understand that the whole purpose of government is, as Lenin observed in The State and Revolution, to protect the interests of one class at the expense of the other. Usually, it’s the bourgeoisie whose interests are protected by the state, while the proletariat is held down; only in the socialist states established in the 20th century, the workers’ states, were the classes’ positions reversed. Because such a protection of class interests is the raison d’être of the state, its elimination will be possible only with the elimination of those class differences, which must remain as long as capitalism exists to preserve them. The socialist state exists only as a transitional phase, causing the class differences to fade away, before the state can totally wither away…the libertarian dream, in all irony!

The socialist states of the 20th century were working hard to bring about that withering away of the state; Stalin as a committed Marxist-Leninist wanted to move ahead with that after the end of WWII, except that the reactionary traitors hiding in his government were at work thwarting his plans. These fifth columns within had their equivalents from without: the imperialists, who were doing all in their power to reverse the gains of the socialists and bring back capitalism to the entire world. It wasn’t that Stalin didn’t want the state to wither away, it’s just that internal and external factors made that withering away unattainable in his lifetime.

The evils of modern empire are a particular bane to socialists; for this reason, it isn’t enough just to be a Marxist–one must be a Marxist-Leninist and oppose imperialism, in its US/NATO incarnation ever since 1949 and metastasizing especially since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991. How is opposing the depredations of empire “extremist”? Was the rebel alliance of Star Wars “extremist”?

III: Aggravation of Class Struggle

We Marxist-Leninists hear this tiresome series of accusations over and over again: the socialist states of the 20th century were tyrannical, totalitarian nightmares to live in; their leaders were psychopathic, genocidal maniacs who lusted after power; and they tried to ram an unattainable, utopian fantasy world down the throats of an unwilling public. Yawn.

When we try to defend our ideology, we are dismissed for spewing “tankie” propaganda against the ‘moderate’ and ‘objective’ historical analysis of mainstream liberals and conservatives. We, apparently, are the biased ones, who can’t accept that ours was ‘the god that failed,’ not them. We, apparently, have an ideological axe to grind, not them. Yawn.

First of all, let’s be fair here: there’s no such thing as objectivity in politics. Those mainstream political analysts very much have an ideological axe of their own to grind, namely, the defence of the class system that privileges them at the expense of the working class and the global poor (the only substantive difference between the liberal and conservative camps of this mainstream is that the former will tolerate more taxes on the rich, while the latter won’t, because the former are more willing to spend on social programs, while the latter are less so).

Second, the neoconservatism/neoliberalism they have been defending (to varying degrees) for the past forty years is also a god that has failed; it is, in fact, a much more failed god than communism could ever have been. Capitalism, particularly in its present form, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. It’s so bad that its defenders insist that it isn’t ‘true capitalism,’ but ‘corporatism,’ for the only true capitalism is the ‘free market.’

Third, anti-communist critics are way too overconfident in the sources they rely on. These sources were the propagandistic product of the Cold War. It’s often said that in any war, hot or cold, the first casualty is the truth. This is especially true of anti-communist Cold War propaganda. History is written by the winners; in fact, in the early 1990s, history was even ‘ended’ by the winners.

Though it isn’t well-known by the general public, most of the sources of anti-communist propaganda are laughably inadequate in terms of facts. I refer to such dubious sources as Robert Conquest, The Black Book of Communism, Mao: The Untold Story, Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Leon Trotsky, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Djilas, and Nazi propaganda. You can click on the links for criticisms of these various writers, but to put it briefly, they essentially wrote fiction, directly or indirectly, literally or metaphorically.

My fourth and final, but by far most important, point is that none of the above writers’ critiques adequately, if at all, take into consideration the enormous pressures put on the socialist states to restore capitalism, making revolution to have been all in vain. Capitalists disingenuously claim that their economic system involves no coercion: if you don’t like your job, you can quit and find another (no thought is given to the fact that for most workers, almost every other job they’re qualified for, if it’s even available, is hardly any better, and often worse…some choice!). Socialism, apparently, has a monopoly on state coercion.

Such an obtuse generalization ignores the history of 20th century socialism right from its inception in the Russian Revolution, almost immediately after which came the Russian Civil War, during which armies from all over invaded Russia in an abortive attempt to force capitalism back on the Russian workers and peasants.

Now, Russia won that war, but at great cost. Not only did many on their side die from the war, but also of starvation resulting from the war’s privation and from another of pre-industrial Russia’s many bad harvests. These are the kinds of difficulties that force many communist parties to become authoritarian: with the threat of future invasions or other forms of counterrevolutionary subterfuge, leaders like the Bolsheviks found it necessary to end all sectarian bickering to ensure the steady sailing of the Soviet ship through treacherous waters.

An article on Stalin I found in the bourgeois media, which is of course heavily biased against him (and against Putin, by the way), nonetheless has the surprising decency to acknowledge how misunderstood he’s always been. It admits that, contrary to popular belief, Stalin wasn’t motivated by a mad lust for power (he incidentally tried to resign as General Secretary four times), but was genuinely committed to implementing Marxism-Leninism. (It also acknowledges that the death count of the Great Purge of the mid-to-late 1930s was far lower than the right-wing propagandists would have us believe.)

The article acknowledges the genuine fear that Stalin and the Soviets had of more attempts by the international bourgeoisie to restore capitalism, either by force or by cunning, but what the article gets wrong (or…what it fabricates?) is that these fears were largely unfounded. Just because the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union wouldn’t happen until 1941 doesn’t mean the Russian communists had little, if anything, to fear during the intervening years. The failure of European socialist revolutions in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the tip of the iceberg.

Socialism in One Country, an idea that started not with Stalin but had precedence in Lenin, meant focusing, for the time being, on a defence of the USSR against the very real possibility of future invasions. For fascism, a true form of violent political extremism and an outgrowth of capitalism, was emerging not only in Italy and Germany but also in a number of other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fascism, properly understood, is the ugly face of capitalism, once the liberal veil of politeness has been removed. Capitalists only pretend to care about freedom and democracy; as long as their class interests are secure, they wear the liberal smile. Threaten the security of their class privileges, though, as the Soviet Union had done in the early 1920s, and the capitalists get tough–hence, fascism.

Such contradictions as that between communism and fascism necessitate the aggravation of class struggle. This inevitably leads to communist leaders having to make harsh decisions. These harsh decisions, in turn, have a distorting effect on socialism.

If we had our way, unimpeded, we communists would just have focused on realizing that list of goals I outlined above at the beginning of Part II. The global bourgeoisie, however, has to this day been so relentless in forcing the imperialist agenda on everyone, thwarting almost all attempts at socialist gains, that we’re forced to react to their extreme. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: capitalist harshness results in communist harshness. In my heart, I don’t like violence; but it isn’t a question of liking it–we simply have no choice in the matter.

It is naïvely assumed that the unjust executions of the Great Purge were the responsibility of Stalin, whose ‘stubborn’ devotion to ‘utopia’ wouldn’t tolerate mere ‘political dissent.’ Speaking of traitors and conspiracies conjures up images of a paranoid Soviet government. It’s paranoia, however, only if the suspicions are ill-founded.

First of all, the bulk of the unjust imprisonments and executions of the Great Purge were not Stalin’s fault, but were rather the fault of the likes of Nikolai Yezhov, the quisling head of the NKVD whose treasonous persecution of innocent Soviets and pardoning of genuine traitors wasn’t even realized by Stalin (who as leader of the gigantic USSR couldn’t be expected to have omniscience over the goings-on of every department to which he’d delegated authority) until much later.

Capitalists narcissistically assume most people agree with them, and so the ‘victims of communism’ are supposedly just regular people. Of those punished legitimately for counterrevolution, these capitalist sympathizers–kulaks, Trotskyists, crypto-Nazis, etc.–were actually a small percentage of the Soviet population, and they were genuine traitors and enemies not just of the Soviet leadership, but also of the working class and peasants of the entire USSR.

Kulaks, resisting the necessary collectivization of agriculture, were hoarding grain and killing livestock during the famine of the early 30s. In other words, they were assholes who deserved punishment. Trotsky was such a power-hungry, narcissistic piece of shit that he actually wanted to enlist the aid of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan just to oust Stalin. As a Jew, Trotsky should have been purple-faced with shame; don’t expect me to feel sorry for him for getting that blow to the head with Mercader‘s ice-axe.

Could you even begin to imagine what would have happened if the fifth column sneaking around in the USSR, pretending to be good communists, had succeeded in their conspiracy? Something far worse than the injustices of the Yezhovshchina would have happened: a successful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would have dwarfed the 27 million Soviet deaths that actually occurred in WWII.

Nazis would have carried out an ongoing enslavement, brutalizing, and genocide of Slavs, an ethnic group Nazis hated on a level comparable with their hatred of Jews. Stalin’s unflinching leadership, indefatigably pushing for industrialization to build and prepare the Red Army for the upcoming Nazi menace, not only prevented such a horrifying alternative, but also saved Europe from fascism.

Normally, people get called heroes for doing things like that.

The justification for the aggravation of class struggle doesn’t end with the Soviet Union, though. North Korea got bombed to the Stone Age in the early 1950s, giving the Kims more than legitimate reason to begin a nuclear weapons program to prevent the US from ever mass murdering them again. Cuba has suffered an economic embargo ever since the 1960s. China has endured a similar embargo and military threats from the West, justifying their nuclear arms program begun by the beginning of the 1960s. Just after having repelled the French colonialists, Vietnam had to endure such horrors of American imperialism as napalm. The CIA helped the right-wing dictator Suharto murder up to a million Indonesians, regardless of whether they were actual communists or just suspected ones. These are just a few examples of imperialist atrocities that get far too little mention in the bourgeois media.

IV: Voting Doesn’t Work

Many will wonder, given the violent, forcible nature of revolution, why people like me won’t simply opt for voting for a leftist political party. After all, isn’t revolution by its very nature extremist, and voting the moderate, reasonable solution to today’s political ills?

Please refer back to the title of this section for an answer.

Bourgeois democracy is nothing more than an illusion that voters have a choice in who will lead the country. Even if the most radical of candidates is voted in, he or she will never challenge the essential class structure of society. This illusion of democracy is one of a myriad of techniques that the ruling class will use to keep the masses at bay. The face of capitalism has a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl. When the people finally see past the illusion and fight in the streets for change, that smile turns upside-down and we see the ruling class in all their repressive ugliness.

The death-grip that the American ruling class has on their country is so tight that a mere social democrat like Bernie Sanders hasn’t a prayer of winning the Democratic candidacy, let alone getting elected so he can have a chance at enacting his only modestly progressive reforms. He is, however, useful to the ruling class as a kind of liberal lasso to throw around the necks of the more gullible of the progressive camp; when he loses to the likes of Hillary or Biden, enough of these gullible types will be expected to vote for such hucksters, leading often enough to a victory for the DNC.

On the right side of the aisle, someone like Trump can pretend to campaign for change, not being part of the Republican political establishment. Still, he’s a member of the billionaire class, and anyone with a modicum of understanding of class analysis will know that, even though Trump opened his big mouth a lot and blurted out comments to embarrass the American political establishment (the real reason they hate him), he could still be counted on to keep the political status quo essentially the same (e.g., bipartisan, billion-dollar military spending, corporate tax cuts, pro-Zionism, anti-immigrant policies, etc.).

In Canada, Justin Trudeau speaks with all the usual politically correct liberal verbiage, but commits the usual imperialist and neoliberal crimes, too (e.g., giving haven to Ukrainian fascists, putting a gas pipeline through aboriginal land, selling weapons to Israel to kill Palestinians, and to Saudi Arabia so they can kill more Yemenis, etc.). I call my country’s prime minister “Turdeau” for a reason.

No, voting won’t make the necessary political changes; recall how the Russian people’s attempt to vote back in the communist party was thwarted by the American ruling class in 1996. Mao meant it when he said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “revolution is not a dinner party.” We cannot expect the capitalist class to allow us to legislate them out of their wealth.

Class war is not a mere excuse for communists to engage in “extremist” acts; class war is a reality. The capitalist class has been winning this war over the past forty years, and they’re continuing to win this war as we speak. In fact, they started the whole class war by taking over from where our feudal lords had left off: it is now up to us “extremist” communists to end this war.

V: Utopians?

Right-wing propagandists often say that we socialists are dreaming of an impossible-to-attain utopia, rather than the truth, which is that we’re trying to make life better for everyone, as good as is humanly possible. In this way of presenting a straw-man argument, right wingers are, however unwittingly, exposing their own black-and-white thinking: either we accept the total shit, TINA world of capitalism, or we fantasize of a perfect world…what utter nonsense.

Marx had already made it clear in The Communist Manifesto that there is a difference between utopian and scientific socialism, of which we communists espouse the latter. Marx says, ‘The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalanstères,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” of setting up a “Little Icaria“—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

‘They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.’ (Marx, III: Socialist and Communist Literature, 3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism)

We don’t merely dream of a perfect world, violently take over countries, then ‘force’ our unattainable ideals on a largely unwilling public. Like scientists, we thoroughly scrutinize the inner workings of capitalism (as Marx did in his three volumes of Capital), we examine the dialectical shifts in history (as Marx did, and as Stalin did), and we analyze how the drive to seek out new markets in foreign countries leads to imperialist competition and war (as Lenin did in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

After communist revolution, state-planned economies are set up to replace the profit motive with a system that benefits everyone. Some changes in the way of doing things succeed, while others fail; when failure occurs, we adjust our methods to see if things go better; if not, we adjust them again and again until we succeed. This is the scientific method applied to socialism, hence “scientific socialism.” We’re not dreaming, we’re doing. The black-and-white capitalist mentality imagines that “socialism doesn’t work”; the nuanced, dialectically-minded socialist admits, “Socialism has had problems, but it has also had many successes.”

Let’s look at some of those successes, starting with the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks started with a huge area of land that was, by modern standards, backward: mostly agrarian, with peasants living off the land, without electricity or modern farming technology. Thanks to such efforts as Stalin‘s three Five-Year Plans, the Soviets industrialized and transformed that backward part of the world into a modern, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death…a time period of about two and a half decades!

Such an achievement is nothing short of impressive, yet when you come to think about it, it makes perfect sense: people can do amazing things when they all help each other, which is a lot more than when they slavishly work for one egomaniac at the top who overworks and underpays them, then takes almost all of the credit for the success of that work.

Elsewhere, we can find the achievements of Cuba, which took an island controlled by a right-wing dictator, infested with prostitution, illiteracy, and poverty, and transformed it into one with the best health care in the Third World (even sending doctors to people in need in countries around the world), with housing and education for everyone. This has all been achieved in spite of the strangling economic embargo imposed on Cuba since the 1960s.

China’s transformation from the ‘sick man of Asia’ to the second-largest economy in the world has been a rocky one, but ultimately just as sure a one as the two others just mentioned. Though things started out badly with the Great Leap Forward (the wildly exaggerated death toll of which was mainly the fault of a bad harvest; and if the right-wing propagandists want to emphasize bad policy decisions of the CPC as having exacerbated the problem, we can respond by saying the American economic blockade against China, hoping to help bring about the Sino-Soviet split, was also a factor), eventually the industrialization and modernization of China has worked out beautifully.

The CPC has lifted millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty, and regardless of how leftists choose to think of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ one cannot deny that the country’s transformation over the past forty years is yet another impressive example of the superiority of state planning over the anarchy and chaos of the “free market.”

Finally, though the Nordic Model of the Scandinavian countries, and the social democracy of Venezuela and Bolivia, are not socialism as it’s properly understood in the Marxist-Leninist sense, the success of their free healthcare, free education, and other social programs is proof that the achievement of these progressive ideas is far from being a pipe dream. The capitalists are just too greedy and selfish to be willing to let them succeed, hence all the imperialist attempts to sabotage the efforts of the left-wing governments in places like Latin America.

VI: Fascism

In the previous sections, I went over the contrast between the good intentions, the goals, of socialism, and the pressures placed on socialist governments that had a distorting effect on them, forcing them to take on authoritarian measures they’d never have wanted to take on had the imperialists left them alone. Let us now contrast left-wing intentions with right-wing ones.

What do fascists want? Let’s list their goals:
–strengthening one’s nation against foreign influence
–imperial conquest of foreign nations to achieve the above end
—class collaboration
–use of violence to achieve the above ends
–national chauvinism, bigotry, and xenophobia
–a strong, authoritarian state to achieve these ends
–achievement of all the above ends to safeguard capitalism from socialist revolution

Put another way, fascism is capitalism, nationalism, and authoritarianism gone mad. Fascism is extremist…and it never really went away at the end of WWII.

Though some Nazis were punished during the Nuremberg trials (really, little more than just a show to placate the many victims of Nazi murder), many more Nazis were not only left unpunished, but were actually given prominent jobs in the American and West German governments to help the capitalists fight the Cold War.

Matters got so tense between East and West Germany during the 1950s and early 60s that, to avoid war, the Berlin Wall was erected. The East German name of the wall gives a hint as to its real intention: The Antifascist Protection Wall. It wasn’t so much about ‘trapping’ anticommunists and preventing them from defecting, as the right-wing propagandists would have you believe (although a legitimate wish to prevent brain-drain was part of the reason); it was about keeping fascist spies out of the GDR.

Fascism has continued to pop up in various forms over the years. I mentioned above the Canadian accommodation of Ukrainian fascists, who have revived such ahistorical forms of Nazi propaganda as the Holodomor hoax, a canard spread through Hearst‘s fake news, and later spread by that liar, Robert Conquest.

My analysis of Conan the Barbarian (link above) highlighted the fascist/right-wing libertarian agenda of the film-makers, who even did Nazi salutes on the set; and incidentally, my aim in writing up that analysis was not ‘to prove’ a right-wing agenda so obvious to any film analyst, and subtle only to those moviegoers who pay no attention to themes and symbolism, watching it for mere entertainment; my intention was to demonstrate the film’s social effects, the dangerous allure of subliminal fascist symbolism.

Indeed, many of the slanders directed against socialism have Nazi origins. Consider the ridiculous conspiracy theories of Wall Street and Jacob Schiff supposedly supporting the Bolsheviks, of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and the like. Why would a capitalist bastion like Wall Street support anticapitalist revolutionaries, just because of some bigoted nonsense about “the Jews”? Schiff was an anti-tsarist and Zionist, not a communist.

Another slander thrown on communists was the Katyn massacre, which when disregarding the ‘official’ narrative, and being researched thoroughly, leads to who I’d say were the real perpetrators: though Soviets did execute some Polish soldiers (no women or children!), presumably for having committed certain crimes, the killers at Katyn were in all probability the very Nazis who slandered the Soviets. (People have, at least, shown the decency to admit that the similar massacre in Volodymyr-Volynskyi was indeed perpetrated by the Nazis, and not by the NKVD).

To be fair, it’s hard to take a firm line on what happened when the evidence is so foggy and often contradictory. Still, we need at the very least to consider the political agenda of the ‘official’ version every bit as much as that of the Soviet self-defence. It’s interesting how those who found the bodies were Nazi murderers who (reliable of sources!) blamed it on the Soviets, then the Soviets said it was the Nazis who did it, and now, in our neoliberal, increasingly fascist-sympathizing era…apparently, it was the Soviets after all! (When Gorbachev, of all people, is corroborating a Nazi accusation, we shouldn’t be too trusting of the sources.)

Yet another attempt at moral equivalency between fascism and communism is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Poland in 1939. I’ll let the links give you the details, but to make a long story short, many non-aggression pacts were made between the capitalist West and the fascists (i.e., Munich), Stalin never got chummy with Hitler (the epic fighting between their two armies that ensued soon after should be enough to prove the point), and their pact bought Stalin some needed time to get ready for the inevitable Nazi invasion of the USSR.

VII: Who Are the Real Extremists?

You might have noticed, Dear Reader, a recurring theme in this blog post: the creeping emergence of fascism, a true form of extremism. As I said above, it never went away; the loss of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy was a mere setback.

Such things as Operation Paperclip, anticommunist propaganda disseminated throughout the Cold War era, Operation Gladio, Canadian accommodation of Ukrainian fascists, White Nationalism, and “MAGA” are all manifestations of one form or another, be they more subtle or more blatant, of a resurgence of fascism, the kind of thing I saw an allegory of in my analysis of The Boys from Brazil.

Fascism, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Other reactionary elements in the politics of the past forty years, generally deemed more ‘moderate,’ are also helping to push our world in an extremist direction.

In my Conan analysis, I discussed how right-wing libertarianism, though not identical with fascism, is on a continuum that inevitably leads to it. Indeed, it is common for libertarians to slide over to fascism, or to at least a sympathy for it. Now, who are the extremists?

The past forty years has been a shift rightwards from libertarian origins (i.e., Reagan and Thatcher) to at least fascist tendencies (e.g., Trump, Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen‘s near-win, etc.). The DNC, having always been bourgeois in spite of the right’s idiotic characterization of it as “socialist,” moved particularly to the right during the Clinton years, a move continued by Obama and Biden.

Indeed, liberals—never a group to be trusted by us on the left–have moved dangerously to the right in recent years. They’ve supported Democratic politicians who have been banging the war drums against nuclear-armed Russia and China, against the former because they were sore losers over Hillary’s loss to Trump in 2016, spreading a spurious accusation of Russian meddling in the election.

It should be common sense that we don’t want to start WWIII, which could easily turn nuclear and wipe out all life on the planet. We communists, in direct contrast to the liberals and conservatives, want peace with Russia and China. We’ve always wanted peace: the first thing the Bolsheviks did on seizing power in the November revolution was to get out of WWI. We’ve generally fought wars only because we had to, as the Soviet Union did when the US was helping the fundamentalist mujahideen thwart attempts to make Afghanistan socialist. Look at the mess that country is in now.

I ask again: who are the extremists now?

People need to be reminded that reality isn’t fixed in a state of rigid stasis: reality is fluid, ever-changing from one state of being to another; this is why we Marxists are dialecticians. What seems moderate now can become extreme later, and vice versa. Thirty to forty years ago, communism was almost universally regarded (by me, too, back then!) as extreme; now, more and more people are reconsidering socialism. Libertarianism was seen as moderate back then; now that we’re in the death-grip of neoliberal privatization, austerity, and extreme wealth inequality, the so-called “free market” is clearly understood to be not all that free. History is repeating itself.

Unlike the paranoid Nazi notion of “the Jews” being the root of all evil, the communist notion of imperialism is a very real evil, one especially evident over the past thirty years, since the catastrophic dissolution of the Soviet Union, something most Russians never wanted.

Without the USSR to demonstrate a real alternative to capitalism, not only could neoliberalism thrive unchecked, but the US/NATO imperialists could do anything they wanted with impunity. Despite promises made to Gorbachev that a reunified Germany would not result in a NATO move eastward, such a move very much resulted, starting quite soon.

In the nineties, they took Yugoslavia. The demonizing of Milošević was used to justify regime change there, which would become a major foreign policy tactic of the US and/or NATO. 9/11 gave a perfect rationalization to start carving up the Middle East and thereabouts, hence, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and all the US military activity in Africa. Killing, killing, killing.

Who are the extremists? I ask again.

Added to the extremism of imperialist war is the lukewarm effort to deal with climate change. The US military is the worst polluter of them all, the “free market” allows deregulation so corporations can pollute the earth, the sky, and the water with impunity, while we the common people are expected to reverse the problem with such puny measures as using paper straws. On top of this, our anti-covid masks are littering the earth everywhere.

The best that bourgeois liberals can do to warn us of the dangers of climate change is to film a tepid and occasionally-funny satire, Don’t Look Up, in which the metaphor for the ecological disaster is a comet hitting the Earth. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio may have ditched his private jet to fly to COP26, but why does the pro-environmentalist have a private jet in the first place?

So, we have endless imperialist wars escalating to a very possible nuclear WWIII, and foot-dragging responses to climate change…hmm. Note also how the green capitalism of Musk’s Tesla had the motive for the Bolivian coup…lithium. What are the roots of these extremist problems?…capitalism. The endless search for profit causing not only so much suffering, but also threatening our planet’s very survival.

But apparently, Marxists are the extremists…I see.

VIII: Conclusion

In previous posts, I made the analogy of a runaway train racing to a cliff where the bridge is out; I used this analogy to describe our current political dangers. For the sake of argument, I’ll say that we see the train shooting from left to right. After all, this train represents capitalism.

Of all the passengers on the train, the right-wingers are walking or running to the front. The liberals are staying in their seats. Moderate progressives are walking to the back. Anarchists are walking faster to the back. We Marxist-Leninists, however, are running as fast as we can to the back, then jumping off the last car.

We aren’t extremists. We’re reacting to today’s extremism in the only appropriate way.

Stairs

The wealthy, monied aristocracy

causes those of the petite bourgeoisie

to be afraid of those in poverty,

to whom those in the economic centre

may, one unhappy day, have to descend.

Those in the lower social echelons

dream, one day, of ascending to the top;

but those already there would have them stop

for fear that they would, one day, them usurp.

Still, the rich promote the American dream.

In their deceptiveness, they’d make it seem

that anyone financially can rise,

to make them work more tirelessly…what lies!…

for their employers; yet, nothing comes of

this extra work. Hence, this misguided love

of all things monetary blinds us all

from the reality that there’s a wall

that separates each step on this stairway.

All walls of glass, invisible, but they

will stay there always, until we, as one,

decide to break them down. Then, we will run

up to the top, and tear the structure down.

Then we will have a world for all the people, not one of rising claimants to the crown.

Who Is to Blame?

One of the popular motivational videos you can find on YouTube is a scene from Rocky Balboa, when Rocky steps outside with Robert, Rocky Jr. (played by Milo Ventimiglia), his adult son, to discuss why Rocky, now in his fifties, wants to go back in the ring and fight Mason “The Line” Dixon, a young fighter in his prime. Robert tries to talk his father out of fighting Dixon, complaining that his ambitions in life have been stifled from living under his father’s shadow, and that this fight will make it all worse; but Rocky retorts with the advice that, to succeed in this harsh world, “it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” He, significantly, also tells his son that blaming others won’t help him.

I must say that I have mixed feelings about Rocky’s speech. While it is true that our ability to overcome difficulties is based on how much we “can get hit and keep moving forward,” and that when we go and get what we’re worth, we have to be prepared “to take the hits,” I don’t think it’s necessarily cowards who point the finger and say that they aren’t where they want to be “because of him, or her, or anybody.”

Sometimes pointing the finger at others is just plain telling it like it is.

And while sometimes it is true that “Life” is what hits the hardest (i.e., bad luck), it shouldn’t be used as a sweeping generalization to which all our troubles can be reduced. Often, indeed quite often, we really aren’t where we want to be because of other people’s evil-doing. Very often, it’s other people who are hitting us the hardest…literally hitting us, even. Blaming our woes on an abstraction like “Life” is often an evasion of personal responsibility on the part of our abusers.

Indeed, abuse victims are traumatized not by “Life” but by other people, their abusers. Bullies often like to make their victims feel as if it’s their weakness that has put them where they are, but that’s nonsense. It’s the bullies who are the real cowards and weaklings, by taking advantage of their victims’ meekness instead of solving their own problems.

The Jews suffered pogroms, discrimination, hate, and a genocide not because of “Life,” but because of other people…European Christians in particular. On the other side of the coin, the Palestinians aren’t suffering oppression because of some abstract notion called “Life,” but because of the Zionists who are occupying their land, and making life there unliveable for the Palestinians.

The aboriginals of North and South America, as well as Australia, suffered the theft of their land, the rejection of their culture, systemic racism, and a genocide not because of “Life,” but because of other people…whites in particular.

Blacks were enslaved, abused, scorned, lynched, and have to this day suffered police brutality not because of “Life,” but because of other people…whites in particular.

And the global proletariat have been ruthlessly exploited and kept in either poverty or near-poverty not by mere bad luck, but by other people…the ruling class.

(The above examples are, of course, far from exhaustive. I’ve failed to mention the many, many other examples of victimization not out of a wish to trivialize or minimize them, but because I simply need to carry on with my argument.)

Yes, other people cause our misfortunes all the time, and there is nothing wrong with pointing this out. In fact, pointing this out is a crucial first step towards ending the misfortune that these other people keep causing for us.

The idea that “cowards” go around blaming other people for their woes is in line with the neoliberal agenda that those in power, and those with sky-high levels of wealth, needn’t take any responsibility for the toxic effect they have on the world. Instead, apparently, those who are down on their luck are unsympathetic ‘losers,’ or are people who just need to pull their socks up.

A recent manifestation of how the obscenely wealthy have risen even higher, while the poor have been plunged into even worse poverty, has been the global response to the coronavirus epidemic. My focus here isn’t so much on how much of a danger covid is, but rather how the global capitalist class is using this pandemic to further their own nefarious agenda.

Millions of people have lost their jobs (I, myself, have gone from employed to underemployed) and/or have been at least in danger of losing their homes, or are food insecure, while the likes of Bezos and Musk have seen their wealth skyrocket. The common people are being made to wear masks while the wealthier don’t seem to need to all that much.

Bill Gates, a man with no education in medicine whatsoever and therefore no authority on medical matters, has been treated like a health guru in the media, pushing the vaccine mandate. A look into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s history with imposing vaccines on their Third World guinea pigs in India and Africa should give us all pause. This, recall, is the same man who has bought up huge areas of American farmland, who has far too much influence over the media, and over organizations like the WHO through the money he’s given them, and who had an unsavoury business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein…not someone we should be trusting.

I’m no “anti-vaxxer,” but I do believe vaccines should be given a longer testing period than these new ones have been given. I’m definitely opposed to the mandate on them that is being pushed. When people who don’t want the jab are being denied work, re-entry into society, etc., only for refusing an experimental vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission of covid, that at best gives some protection against more serious symptoms, and at worst could worsen one’s medical condition (due to ADE, something the medical establishment dismisses, but which many of us, not trusting the politics of that establishment, don’t dismiss)–all against a virus where, if you catch it, your chances of survival are at least 99%–this is a potential recipe for totalitarian repression. This is other people hurting us, not “Life.”

Now, some might think the use of the term “totalitarian” to describe vaccine mandates, coronavirus immunity passports, and the like is alarmist. We must, however, think about what all of this is leading to, if we sit back like those unthinking beasts in Animal Farm and passively accept all of this piecemeal chipping-away at all of our rights.

Covid is being exploited by the global capitalist class to usher in not only vaccine mandates, but also to goad everyone into having digital vaccine ID passports, which will further erode our privacy. Governments will be able to surveil and monitor everything we do, everywhere we go, in spite of paying lip service to protecting our privacy. Total tech, that is.

Cashless economies will spring up soon enough, making it possible to take us off the online grid, as it were, and deny us access to the purchasing of anything, if we say or do anything considered a threat to the power of the global elite. Sometimes people are denied access to crucial necessities simply through an online glitch from these biometric ID systems, as has happened to many impoverished Indians unable to get their monthly rice rations…these people starved to death. “Life” didn’t do this to them; other people are to blame–the ruling class.

To get back to the covid controversy, the problem with masks, social distancing, and lockdowns is that it aggravates the already devastating alienation that has grown over the past forty years. Solidarity, worker unity, and organizing aren’t sufficient conditions to bring about a revolutionary situation leading to socialism, but they are necessary conditions.

Adding to all this divisiveness is how the media has portrayed the compliant side vs. the resistant side in the covid debates. The former are portrayed as not only ‘mature,’ ‘reasonable,’ and ‘responsible,’ but also as the bulk of the left…and by ‘left,’ the media presents them as liberals. As for the resistant side, not only are they seen as crybabies, irrational, and selfish, they’re also portrayed as largely right-wing (i.e., libertarians, Christian fundamentalists, NWO/Illuminati conspiracy theorists, and/or Trump supporters).

My resistance, on the other hand, as well as the resistance of many others out there to the repressive measures being used on us, is based on solid leftist principles. More and more of the working class is getting fed up with extreme income inequality, long hours with poor wages, food and housing insecurities, and the like; not only are workers striking, but they’re outright quitting en masse. Add to this the worst economic collapse (predicted before covid) we’ve seen in decades (along with inflation), and it isn’t hard to see how the global ruling class is getting nervous.

Just as, a century ago, the capitalist class used fascism to circumvent socialist revolution, so are they now using these authoritarian measures to rein us in. This current predicament is why revolution is so urgently needed. These months and years could be our last chance before not only these authoritarian measures are implemented and irreversible, but also the ecocide of climate change and the threat of nuclear war between the US, China, and Russia could be realized.

Again, these evils that loom over our heads aren’t to be blamed on some impersonal force called “Life,” or “bad luck.” There are real people to be blamed for all these ills.

With a socialist revolution, we could also settle the covid controversies once and for all by taking all the relevant medical information and putting it in the hands of the people. A big part of the reason that so many of us don’t trust how the medical establishment is presenting the ‘facts’ on the ‘rona is with all the censorship and ‘fact-checking’ going on.

The mainstream media lied about Iraq, Libya, Syria, ‘Russia-gate,’ and is currently lying about China and the Uyghurs. And we’re supposed to trust the same media establishment, paid for and controlled by such oligarchs as Gates and Bezos, to be telling us the truth about the ‘rona? Hearing the likes of Fauci, the top mouthpieces of the medical and political establishment, flip-flop and lie–time and again–over the past two years, doesn’t encourage trust.

A revolution could result in the people gaining control over the narrative. With all the information available, uncensored and free of the undue influence of the wealthy, we the people could scrutinize and thoroughly debate the evidence on the effectiveness of vaccines and masks, the seriousness of covid on people of all ages, and all the other relevant issues. Whichever way the pendulum ultimately swings, and how far it swings one way or the other (i.e., the compliant side vs. the resistant side), we would all have an answer we could trust.

We’d also have a decent chance to solve all the other problems of our world: the endless wars, ecocide, income inequality, homelessness, healthcare, education, racism, alienation, and bullying.

If, given this post-revolutionary chance, we fail to solve these problems, we really will have only ourselves to blame.

Analysis of ‘Le Amiche’

Le Amiche (“The Girlfriends”) is a 1955 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, written by him, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, and Alba De Cespedes, and adapted from Tra donne sole (1949), a novel by Cesare Pavese. The film stars Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi, and Valentina Cortese, with Yvonne Furneaux (who was also in Repulsion), Ettore Manni, and Madeleine Fischer. It was shot on location in Turin, Piemonte, Italy.

Le Amiche received the Silver Lion award in 1955 from the Venice Film Festival; it also won the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon Award for Best Director (Antonioni) and Best Supporting Actress (Cortese).

The name of the film is ironic and somewhat deceptive, since Nene (Cortese), Momina De Stefani (Furneaux), Rosetta Savoni (Fischer), and Mariella (played by Anna Maria Pancani) are girlfriends in little more than a superficial sense. There’s actually a considerable amount of conflict between them, at varying levels of intensity, due to jealousies over their rivalries over men, as well as their varying degrees of vanity and narcissism.

Indeed, jealousy, envy, vanity, and pride are major themes in Le Amiche. A few minor comparisons between this film and Othello can be made, as far as the themes of jealousy and envy are concerned. Rosetta can be seen as the Othello of the film (Nene, too, in an opposing way); her doomed, jealous love of Lorenzo (Ferzetti) leads to a failed suicide attempt at the beginning of the film, and a successful suicide towards the end, just as the Moor kills himself at the end of Othello. Momina, cynical and envious of others’ happiness in love, is the scheming Iago: she encourages Rosetta’s pursuit of Lorenzo, leading to a conflict she finds most amusing to watch, just as Iago enjoys watching the Moor go insane with jealousy.

In a way, a vague comparison can be made also between Le Amiche and Romeo and Juliet, since the film involves pairs of lovers from incompatible worlds. The pairings of Clelia (Drago) and Carlo (Manni), and of Rosetta and Lorenzo, are incompatible not because of feuding families, though, but because of conflicting class relations and sex roles.

Clelia, as the manager of a new fashion salon opening in Turin, is–like her boss (played by Maria Gambarelli)–as an Italian woman in the conservative 1950s, a career woman ‘before it was cool.’ Thus, Clelia is a bourgeois. Carlo, her love interest, on the other hand, is a worker. The sex-role assumption of the time was that, were they to marry, he’d be supporting her financially, not vice versa…a rather hard thing for him to do, with the lower amount of money he’s making than she is. She’d also suffer an unacceptable lowering of social rank in such a marriage.

Similarly, Rosetta is from a well-to-do family, while the man she’s in love with is a struggling artist, one struggling so much that Nene, his fiancée, is actually more successful as an artist than he. Again, the sex-role assumption is that Lorenzo is supposed to be the more successful of the couple, and therefore the more monied one, not Nene or Rosetta. Neither of these women care that he is of modest means (nor should they, of course), but his pride and male chauvinism make him envy Nene’s success, just as she and Rosetta are jealous of each other with regards to him.

Though Clelia is as bourgeois as Momina, both women are on the opposite ends of the narcissism spectrum. We can see this contrast early on in the film, when we are introduced first to Clelia, who is unassuming and, with a smile, tells the hotel maid either “signora” or “signorina” is an acceptable way to address her; then later on, we’re introduced to Momina at the front desk of the hotel, where she treats the man working there contemptuously, saying he’s “ridiculous” to think her friend, Rosetta, has already left the hotel, then orders him to call her room. We see the contrast in their attitudes towards workers, and towards class differences.

Clelia may walk around in a beautiful fur coat, but she does so not out of narcissistic ostentation; as the manager of the new fashion salon, she has an image to maintain, hence the nice clothes. Similarly, her annoyance with the workers’ slow progress in getting the salon ready isn’t out of a condescending attitude to them, but from the pressure she feels from her boss to have everything ready on time.

In Clelia and Momina we can see the Venn diagram, as it were, where narcissism and capitalism overlap. In Momina, both are apparent, since she uses the class hierarchy of capitalism as one of a number of rationalizations to demonstrate her ‘superiority’ to others. In Clelia, we just see the pressures of capitalism making her dress and act with an air of superiority, but narcissistic tendencies are minimal in her: her looking at herself in mirrors, for example, is brief. Momina, in contrast, will look idolatrously at her reflection with that of Cesare Pedone (Fabrizi) in a window in her home, idealizing the image as one of a ‘perfect couple,’ when actually, she’s married–though temporarily separated from her husband–using Cesare as one of many lovers.

A recurring issue in this film is various characters’ preoccupations with such superficialities as what dress to wear, what facial lotion to use, how is one’s reputation or social status, etc. Note again that this preoccupation with one’s public image is directly related to one’s social class, where narcissism and capitalism meet.

The big mystery early on in the film is why Rosetta has tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. On the train ride back from the girlfriends’ disastrous get-together at the beach, Rosetta confides in Clelia about her reasons for her suicide attempt: namely, she speaks of the emptiness of, for example, wondering what dress she’ll wear; soon after, she confesses the more central reason–she can’t have Nene’s Lorenzo. Still, that earlier reason carries considerable weight, and in fact it bears a relationship with the second reason.

She loves Lorenzo because she sees in him a gruff honesty that doesn’t exist in such superficial friends as Momina and the pretty, but air-headed Mariella, the latter’s preoccupations being little more than how beautiful others see her, and who will be her man. Rosetta doesn’t care whether Lorenzo is successful or not: she loves him for how he’s made her feel, in the portrait he’s painted of her.

Though Momina predictably doesn’t think much of the picture, Rosetta is touched by Lorenzo’s efforts. It felt to her as if, with his brush painting her face, he was caressing her. To look at her portrait is, for her, to look in a metaphorical mirror: in painting her, he’s created an idealized version of her to which she cannot measure up if she can’t have him. Hence, when she tries phoning him prior to taking the overdose of sleeping pills, she wishes he’d destroy the painting, as she’s destroyed all her photographs, other metaphorical mirrors of herself. She’d wipe out all traces of herself prior to her suicide.

Of course, Lorenzo being by his own admission much too vain to destroy his painting, also sees it as a kind of metaphorical mirror (i.e., of his painting ability), since apart from having painted it, he sees, in her face, her love reflected back on him, titillating his vanity. Indeed, he looks at her smiling at him, and he feels she has ‘the most beautiful smile in the world.’ His narcissism isn’t of Momina’s malignant kind (i.e., he doesn’t consciously intend to hurt Rosetta or Nene, whereas Momina finds it amusing to stir up drama in this love triangle), but it is sufficient to make him enjoy an affair with Rosetta, enjoying her charms and flattery while leading her on and causing Nene to suffer.

Now, Momina is eager to find any insights related to Rosetta’s suicide attempt, including whom she tried to phone prior to taking the pills. Momina acts as though she only wants to help, but her real agenda is to find out the truth about Rosetta and Lorenzo, in order to exploit it.

Other examples of Momina’s superficiality, narcissism, and general meanness are seen in the early scene when she asks Clelia, in her hotel room, about whom Rosetta phoned. Momina gives Clelia a backhanded compliment about how well she dresses, as good publicity for her salon, when also pointing out how, apparently, ‘fashion designers usually dress like tramps.’ She then asks about Clelia’s facial cream, Clelia getting the hint that Momina is implying how cheap it is. Clelia, lacking Momina’s narcissism, doesn’t judge a product’s worth by its price.

Now, Clelia’s unassuming, but her sense of social class nonetheless must exclude Carlo, as much as she likes him. Workers are typically talked down to by not only Momina, but also Cesare, who is condescending to Carlo in the diner scene when he’s with Clelia; though Mariella acknowledges Carlo is a ‘hunk.’ Clelia tries to be kinder to workers, as I pointed out with her interaction with the hotel maid, as well as with her accommodation of the vagabond in the trattoria scene, when Lorenzo fights with Cesare.

Clelia, therefore, represents the liberal capitalist, who would like to be kinder to the poor, but the pressures of her social class won’t allow her to go beyond a few token gestures of generosity. Hence, she enjoys Carlo’s company in the diner, as well as during their walk to look at furniture for the fashion salon…but marriage with him is out of the question. Just compare her coat with his to see why.

During their walk, she shows him the poor area of Turin where she lived as a little girl. Yes, she was once poor, and was able to rise out of it, so she lacks the snobbishness of Momina and Cesare. Carlo, nonetheless, can feel her airs of superiority, however much Clelia tries to minimize them, and he cannot hide his annoyance with her.

At the end of the film, when Clelia is to leave Turin by train and return to Rome, Carlo wants to be there when she leaves, but he is too ashamed of his lower social class to show himself to her. As he follows her to the train she gets on, he hides behind a vendor’s tall cart. Note how this carrier of things to sell, a symbol of capitalism, is a barrier separating Carlo from Clelia.

Rosetta similarly would love Lorenzo with all her heart, and not care that he has less money than the wealth of the snobbish family she feels little affection for. (Indeed, when her mother visits her in the hospital and is scandalized by her suicide attempt, instead of focusing on her daughter’s pain, she steps aside and looks at herself in her compact. Her narcissistic preoccupation with her own looks, her image, is a more pressing concern than Rosetta’s health and happiness.) She sees herself and Lorenzo in a large mirror while he’s lying on a bed; seeing their reflection together is her idealizing of their relationship, but for the opposite reason of Momina’s idealizing of her time together with Cesare, seeing their reflection in the window in her home. Momina loves the status of having a man like Cesare; Rosetta sincerely loves Lorenzo for himself.

It isn’t Rosetta who sees the class divide between herself and Lorenzo as a problem, though: it is he who does. His masculine pride won’t allow him to marry up, as Clelia’s pressure from the capitalist world won’t allow her to marry down (she wouldn’t want to give up her career and be a housewife/mother for a wealthy husband, but she especially won’t do so for a working-class husband–Carlo…Couldn’t she continue to work, and he be a househusband?).

In these contradictions, we see how career women rising in the context of capitalism will never assure equality of the sexes. A wiping out of sex roles–including the assumption that men are supposed to be more successful (recall Momina’s comment in this connection, during the scene in her home, something with which Rosetta vehemently disagrees), more monied, and generally ‘superior’ to women–is indispensable to such an attainment of equality…and it must be achieved in a socialist context, with a wiping-out of class differences, since sex roles, along with such things as racism, are among the many things the ruling class uses to keep the working class divided among each other.

Lorenzo, however, has internalized the social expectation of masculine preeminence, and his pride won’t let him let go of it. Hence, his fight with Cesare, whose taunts about Nene’s artistic success over Lorenzo’s failures push him beyond endurance in the trattoria scene. Cesare, of course, pretends he’s just joking around, an obvious falsehood, but one of the main themes of Le Amiche is the keeping up of appearances.

As I mentioned above, “The Girlfriends” is an ironic, deceptive name for this film. These women (and their men) largely go about keeping up the appearance of friendship, all for the bourgeois sake of saving face. Actually, all manner of animosity and hostility abound, coming to a head in the three fight scenes–first, at the beach with Momina slapping Mariella, then in the trattoria, with Lorenzo and Cesare trading punches, and finally, between Clelia and Momina in the fashion salon.

Mariella, always opening her mouth without thinking, speaks of how only Rosetta doesn’t have a man, and not noticing that Rosetta has just walked by and heard her. Wishing to avoid losing face and to keep up the appearance of them all bearing no gossipy ill will toward Rosetta, Momina scolds Mariella for speaking so foolishly. When Mariella tries to defend her choice of words and repeats the tactless remark, Momina slaps her. Rosetta, however, prefers Mariella’s tactlessness to Momina’s hypocrisy. As another manifestation of animosity thinly veiled with phoney friendship, Mariella gets even with Momina for the slap by hugging and kissing Cesare in the sand, he being Momina’s boyfriend of the moment, then confessing her motive of revenge before hugging Momina in a pretence of reconciliation with her.

Clelia’s job as manager of a fashion salon is her participating in the business of keeping up appearances, producing glamorous clothes that allow their women wearers to maintain the illusion of exquisite beauty. Capitalism is compelling Clelia to reinforce women’s socially-induced need to hide behind the illusion of beauty, reinforcing this insecurity for the sake of making a profit. Her relationship with Carlo cannot last, him wearing that dull, scruffy coat as against her fur coat, because her association with him would tarnish her glamorous image–it’s bad for business. She even has to hide a love note between the two of them from her models, one of them finding it and laughing at her boss’s expense.

The two women among the girlfriends whom one would assume to be the most mutually rancorous are actually mutually empathic–Rosetta and Nene. The former has stolen the latter’s man; Nene has seen the proof from a sketch she knows Lorenzo did of Rosetta on a matchbox, then given to Rosetta. But instead of privately fighting with her while publicly smiling with her, to keep up appearances among their girlfriends, Nene has a sad, candid conversation with Rosetta about him in private. Rosetta can’t deny being in love with Nene’s man, yet she’s also remorseful about causing Nene’s suffering.

These two, ironically, are the most like friends of all the women.

The final moment of animosity that comes to a head is between Clelia and Momina after Rosetta’s successful suicide. Weeping, Clelia calls Momina a murderess for having goaded on Rosetta to continue her doomed relationship with Lorenzo, all for Momina’s narcissistic, cynical entertainment. That Clelia has blown up at Momina right in front of her boss, a scandalous loss of face in the salon, means Clelia assumes she will lose her job. Fortunately, her boss forgives her and offers her a job in a salon back in Rome, which Clelia accepts.

The boss actually envies Clelia for having been able to get her pain off her chest. The boss, always pressured to keep up appearances, has had to bottle up all of her feelings, a suppression she jokingly claims must be causing her some kind of gastrointestinal problem.

Le Amiche is a movie all about social hypocrisy, narcissism, pressure to keep up appearances, and punishment for those who dare to break society’s rules. It’s also about how class and sex roles divide us all. One hopes that those who watch this film will learn, by example, how not to be friends.

Analysis of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

A Tale of Two Cities is an 1859 historical novel by Charles Dickens, set just before and during the French Revolution, the two cities being London and Paris. The story is about the intersecting lives of Doctor Alexandre Manette, his daughter Lucie, and Charles Darnay in France, and Sydney Carton in England.

A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens’s most famous work of historical fiction, and it’s one of the best-selling novels of all time. It has been adapted for film, TV, radio, and the stage, and it continues to influence popular culture.

Here is a link to famous quotes from the novel.

Of all the themes in this novel, the dominant one seems to be duality, expressed in many forms: London/Paris, feudalism/capitalism, light/darkness, Darnay/Carton (two men so fortuitously similar in appearance as to seem twins), Lucie Manette/Madame Defarge (personifications of light and darkness, respectively), and life/death…or death/life, as manifested in symbolic resurrections in the story.

The famous beginning of the novel establishes this theme of duality: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…” The dualistic paradoxes continue with this famous long opening sentence: wisdom/foolishness, belief/incredulity, Light/Darkness, hope/despair, everything/nothing, Heaven/”the other way,” and good/evil.

These juxtaposed opposites represent their dialectical unity, the clash of contradictions. Though the above opposites are of the Hegelian dialectic of ideas, they refer to an epoch famously discussed by Marx as of the historical, materialist dialectic. The novel begins in 1775, just fourteen years before the French Revolution, when the old feudal system would be violently replaced by the capitalist mode of production.

Another duality is seen when Dickens compares the French Revolution to politically radical activity going on in England around the time of the novel’s publication. He fears that a similar bloodbath to that of the Reign of Terror may occur in England, though by the end of the novel, things seem more hopeful for England, even to the point of a tinge of nationalistic pride (recall patriotic Miss Pross‘s defiant words to Madame Defarge: “I am a Briton”–Book Three, Chapter 14, page 407).

The duality of death/life becomes apparent in Book One, Chapter 2, when it is learned that someone has been “RECALLED TO LIFE.” This enigmatic phrase, we later learn, refers to Doctor Manette, who in his 18-year incarceration in the Bastille–a kind of death–has been freed, a kind of resurrection. Other symbolic resurrections, two of them, will occur for Darnay, thanks to his look-alike, Carton.

The trauma of Doctor Manette’s incarceration stays with him after his release, when we find him still making shoes, his work in the Bastille, in the darkness, something he no longer needs to do, but a task he feels psychologically compelled to continue doing. His union with Lucie, the daughter he’s never known and who until now has thought him dead, will bring him back into the light. ‘Lucie‘ literally means ‘light.’

She is so shocked to learn that her father is actually alive that she faints. Symbolically, father and daughter have exchanged the states of life and death, unified opposites like so many others in this story.

Another example of duality is that of two spilled reds: wine, and blood. In Chapter 5 of Book One, a large cask of wine is dropped on the ground by the wine shop of M. Ernest and Mme. Thérese Defarge, in the Faubourg Sainte-Antoine, a suburb of Paris. The poor people of the area rush over to have as much of a drink of the spilled wine as they can. One of them smears BLOOD on a wall with the muddy wine (page 32).

This eagerness of the poor to drink wine off the filthy ground is a reflection of their desperation, want, and hunger. “Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.” (page 33)

Soon after, Dickens relates Want to violent imagery: “The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gun-maker’s stock was murderous.” (Dickens, page 34)

This juxtaposition of red wine and blood with hunger and want, and with references to “sharp and bright” knives and axes, heavy hammers, and with the “murderous” gun-maker’s stock, is altogether a foreshadowing of the violence in the impending revolution, when the poor and hungry will finally have their revenge on the rich.

Later in this chapter, we meet not only the Defarges, but also the three “Jacques.” These revolutionaries name themselves after the Jacquerie, a popular peasant revolt in northern France back in the 14th century. The nobles of the time derided these peasants as “Jacques” for the padded surplice, called “jacques” that they wore. The term jacquerie became synonymous with peasant uprisings in both France and England thereafter.

I don’t know if there’s a direct connection in meaning between the kind of Jacques the French nobility were scorning in the 14th century and the “sly, insinuating Jacks” (I, iii, 53) that Richard III was railing against in Shakespeare’s play, but there’s an interesting association that can be made in the “Jacques” of Dickens’s novel trading positions of power with the 18th century French nobility and the Duke of Gloucester’s contempt for such people of low birth when he famously says, “The world is grown so bad/That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch./Since every Jack became a gentleman/There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.” (I, iii, 70-73).

Meanwhile, Madame Defarge is typically seen knitting (see Book Two, Chapters 15 and 16 in particular). She will be a tricoteuse during the guillotine executions, doing her knitting there. This knitting symbolically suggests an association with the Fates, who in their spinning determined everyone’s life and death. Since Defarge is also seen knitting long before the revolution and its Reign of Terror, this early knitting is a foreshadowing of the violence to come.

She encrypts the names of those to be executed into her knitting, again connecting her with the Fates, but also, in a way, with Penelope, who wove a shroud while waiting ever so patiently for her husband, Odysseus, to come home and kill all of her suitors, who were eating her out of house and home. Madame Defarge, as she knits, is also waiting ever so patiently for the violent overthrow of those who, like Penelope’s suitors, have done violence of one form or another to her home (more on that later).

To jump ahead in Dickens’s story, we encounter the first time Carton saves Darnay, who is on trial for treason against the British Crown, by simply demonstrating to the court his uncanny physical resemblance to the accused. The witnesses, two spies, claim that they could pick Darnay out from any man; but their testimony is undermined by Carton’s likeness to him.

The doubles share more in common than just their looks. They share some sense of shame, Darnay’s by his association with his uncle, the wicked Marquis St. Evrémonde, and Carton by his life as a drunken wastrel. Both men redeem themselves: Darnay, by renouncing his uncle’s family and changing his name from Evrémonde to an Anglicizing of D’Aulnais (his mother’s maiden name); and Carton, by taking Darnay’s name and place in La Force Prison, from which he’s to be taken and guillotined, the former thus sacrificing his life to save that of the latter.

Yet another duality is to be found in the two systems of class oppression portrayed in A Tale of Two Cities–namely, the outgoing feudalist one and the incoming capitalist one. Though the revolutionaries, the left-wingers, were hoping for a genuinely new society based on the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité, this was a bourgeois, not a socialist, revolution. It was good that feudal France was no more, but a new form of class struggle was about to be born.

The despicable decadence of feudal times is personified in the unnamed aristocrat known as “Monseigneur.” In Chapter 7 of Book Two, we learn that he needs no less than four men, in “gorgeous decoration,” to get his morning’s chocolate into his mouth (Dickens, page 114)

The cruelties of feudalism, however, are personified in the marquis, whose carriage runs over a little boy, killing him. The marquis’s reaction to the death he’s caused is beyond insensitive: to compensate Gaspard, the dead boy’s grieving father, the marquis tosses him a gold coin and drives on. Gaspard will kill him in revenge, hide out for a year, then be hanged for murder.

The chateau of the marquis is vividly described in terms of the wickedness of the man who lives in it. The first paragraph of Book Two, Chapter 9, “The Gorgon‘s Head,” repeatedly uses the word “stone” or “stony” to describe so much of the marquis’s property as to suggest that Medusa‘s head had turned everything to stone two hundred years prior. This emphasis on stoniness, of course, reflects the marquis’s stony heart, just as the petrifying ugliness of the Gorgon’s head is a mirror to his moral ugliness.

It is this ugliness of feudal France that is the context in which the ugliness of revolutionary violence must be understood. Dickens’s tone, during his narration of all of the events from the storming of the Bastille to the Reign of Terror, gives the clear impression that he considered the actions of the revolutionaries to be no less evil than those of their former feudal oppressors.

As with A Christmas Carol, the Dickens who was otherwise thoroughly sympathetic to the poor is in this novel showing what we today would call peak liberalism.

For my part, I’m ambivalent about the wrongs the revolutionaries committed. Their main fault resides in ultimately leaving France with a new system of economic exploitation–capitalism–to replace the old system. The Defarges, after all, are the petite bourgeois owners of a wine shop. As for the violence of the revolutionaries, what can I say? Recall Mao’s words: “A revolution is not a dinner party.”

Were there excesses of violence? Undoubtedly. But revolutions are by definition chaotic, bloody, and messy. The oppressing class can’t be voted or legislated away…they can only be violently overthrown, for they will undermine every attempt to tax them or rein in their power over us. French revolutionary violence was, properly understood, a reaction to centuries of violence done to a starving, wretched populace of peasants.

As for Madame Defarge, her violent excesses may be wrong, but they’re perfectly explicable. Her sister was raped by Darnay’s uncle; her brother confronted the uncle about the rape and was run through with the uncle’s sword. Both her brother and sister died after the best, though failed, efforts of Dr. Manette, who was imprisoned for attempting to report the crimes, and who wrote of them in a manuscript in his cell. Having found the manuscript, which denounces the whole Evrémonde family, Madame Defarge uses it to avenge her dead siblings by trying to destroy not only Darnay, but his whole family, too.

She was “imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

“It was nothing to her that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them.” (Book Three, Chapter 14, page 402)

One set of excesses tends to lead to an opposing set of excesses, like the teeth of the ouroboros biting into its tail, a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites that I’ve used many times. Since we don’t like riots, we should recall MLK’s words: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Similarly, if you don’t like revolutionary bloodshed, you should bear in mind that such bloody excesses are the words of those who have hitherto been silenced by their oppressors, often spoken in gory fashion.

Madame Defarge is motivated by revenge, personified in one of the other revolutionary women, known literally as The Vengeance. She is the “shadow” of Madame Defarge, a darkness within darkness. All of those who have suffered under feudal rule have been in darkness, such as Doctor Manette in his shadowy prison cell, and in the garret of the Defarges’ wine shop where he is found obsessively making shoes (Chapter 5, The Wine Shop). So when the revolutionaries have their revenge, they put men like Darnay in the darkness of cells in La Force, too. Indeed, his second arrest occurs at night.

Lucie’s light is in dialectical contrast to Madame Defarge’s darkness. The former says of the latter, “that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.” (Book Three, Chapter 3, The Shadow, page 298) Her light, symbolized by each golden thread of her hair, pulls her father out of the dark. (Book One, Chapter 6, The Shoemaker, pages 47-49)

Elsewhere, we have Jerry Cruncher, the “resurrection man” who raids graves in the darkness, and is thus a dark parody of the real resurrection man, Carton, who by taking on Darnay’s identity recalls him to life, bringing him out of that dark cell and into the light, to be reunited with the light of his life, Lucie.

Thus Jerry, a nasty fellow who abuses his wife early on in the story, is the darkness to Carton’s light. Before he is to be guillotined, Carton compares his fate to that of Christ. He quotes the Gospel according to John: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” (John 11:25) Carton, as a Christ-figure, dies so Darnay can live. In this we see the dialectical relationship between life and death in Dickens’s novel. Recall in this connection another important quote from John: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

Though Carton loves Lucie, he knows he can never have her. After all, light doesn’t sit with light, but rather with its dialectical opposite: darkness. Carton will go into the darkness of Darnay’s cell so the latter can go out into Lucie’s light.

And while darkness and light are intertwined, so are life and death. Having approached the guillotine, Carton imagines a future world, one long after his death, in which Darnay and Lucie will name a son after Carton. He can “see the lives for which [he] lay[s] down [his] life,” (Dickens, page 417) and in his prophetic visions, as well as the son, Carton has his own resurrection, his own recalling to life after death.

Speaking of ‘resurrections,’ though, another resurrection can be seen today as compared with what was going on back in Dickens’s day and before: the exacerbated immiseration of the poor. A Tale of Two Shitties: the shittiness of Dickens’s time, and the shittiness of our world ever since the dissolution of the socialist states. In this, we see yet another duality: class conflict then, and class conflict now.

Dickens, sympathetic to the plight of the poor but horrified at revolutionary violence, was using this novel to warn the rich of the danger of aggravating class conflict to the point of provoking such violence. When one considers the extremes of income inequality today, as well as all these unending imperialist wars, climate change, and how fear of disease is a distraction from the contemplation of revolution, one would think the ruling class would be heeding Dickens’s warning.

Instead, would-be leftists virtue signal in such ways as AOC wearing a dress with the message “TAX THE RICH” (of which Dickens would have approved) while ignoring protestors outside the Met Gala. In some photos of that dress, the T in TAX isn’t really showing, a kind of fortuitous prophecy. Then there was that small guillotine set by the front door of Bezos’s mansion.

May the Evrémondes everywhere in the world watch out.

The modern-day Madame Defarge is doing her knitting.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Collins Classics, London, 1859

Mountains

The
haves
remain

on
peaks
because

the
state
protects

all
land
owners.

Our
work
creates

all
value,
raising

them
higher,
reaching

the
clouds.
Supposing

we
rose
against

our
rulers,
turning

everything
topside
down.

We’d flatten the bumps of the Earth.

Who
claims
workers

can
never
organize

and
move
mountains?

Analysis of ‘The Passenger’

The Passenger (Italian–Professione: reporter) is a 1975 drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and written by him, Mark Peploe, and Peter Wollen. The film stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, with Ian Hendry, Jenny Runacre, and Steven Berkoff.

The Passenger competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s been widely praised for its camerawork and its acting. Roger Ebert originally didn’t like it, but he revised his review in 2005, calling it a perceptive look at identity, alienation, and the human desire to escape oneself.

As of this blog post, the film has a rating of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

A link to quotes from the film can be found here.

One thing I found striking about The Passenger is how it can be compared and contrasted with Last Tango in Paris, and I’m not merely talking about how, in both films, Schneider plays opposite one of the greatest Hollywood male actors, playing his character’s love interest. In Tango, Paul (Brando) is also trying to escape from his painful past, and in a totally unrealistic way, by meeting with Jeanne (Schneider), not wanting to know her name or anything about her life, and her not knowing anything about him or his name.

The apartment in which Paul and Jeanne have their anonymous affair is an oasis from the pain of his past, which included not only the adultery of his wife, Rosa, but also her suicide. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) has an affair with the girl (Schneider), whose name we never learn, by the way; his wife, Rachel (Runacre), is having an affair with a man named Stephen (Berkoff), yet it is Locke who commits, so to speak, suicide by having the world believe he’s dead while he takes on a dead man’s identity.

Reality and the past catch up with Paul in the end; he is shot and killed. The same happens to Locke. Neither man can sustain his fantasy world for long.

References to French colonialism in Africa are made, if indirectly, in both films: in The Passenger, it is Chad; in Tango, it is Algeria. Related to this is the liberal hypocrisy of Jeanne and her fiancé wanting to name their children after communist revolutionaries (Fidel or Rosa), while she has such a love and admiration for her father–a colonel in Algeria in the 1950s whom revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon would have fought–that she won’t have Paul say anything bad about the colonel. In The Passenger, Locke is a liberal reporter who poses as a gun-runner for a Chadian liberation movement with Marxist leanings (one like FROLINAT), but all he does is take the money, without any concern for making sure that the Chadian rebels get their weapons.

The theme of duality pervades both films; see my analysis of Tango (link above) to find a discussion of duality in that film. In The Passenger, apart from the man/woman duality of the main characters that is also in Tango, there are the dualities of past vs present, the First and Third Worlds, the two Davids (Locke and Robertson, the latter played by Charles Mulvehill), and perhaps the most important duality of all, which is personified by the two Davids: liberal vs revolutionary.

We are meant to understand that Locke and Robertson are sufficiently similar looking for the one man to be possibly confused with the other (even if Nicholson and Mulvehill don’t look all that alike). Perhaps the African staff in their Chadian hotel consider all white men to look the same.

The similarity in these men’s looks is significant when we remember their political affiliations. Just as the identity of one David is swapped for that of the other, and just as one David is confused with the other, so is the liberal far too often confused with the radical leftist revolutionary, and the need to beware of such confusions is the political message that Antonioni was trying to impart here.

While being a ‘left-leaning liberal’ actually meant something (if not much) back in the 1970s, as opposed to the fact that it’s meant absolutely nothing since at least the 1990s (Bernie Sanders, AOC, et al are useless at opposing imperialism, and that’s speaking kindly of them), any real leftist knows that those 70s liberals’ activism was woefully inadequate at best, and at worst, an indirect aid to anticommunism. This is why Mao wrote “Combat Liberalism.” This is why Lenin didn’t trust the liberals. This is what Parenti meant when he distinguished the liberal analysis from that of the radical. And this is why even a moderate leftist like Phil Ochs satirized liberalism.

The real meaning of the film’s title (not the European one, mind you) is fully realized when seen in this political distinction between liberal and leftist. A passenger just sits passively while others do the work of moving. Locke is the (metaphorical) passenger, not the girl riding in his car, as many assume of the renaming of the film. Liberal opportunists are passengers: they go with the flow, blowing to the left…or to the right! depending on which way the political wind of the time happens to be blowing. The radical Marxist revolutionary, on the other hand, is the driver of the car, the steerer of the ship, one of its oarsmen, or the pilot of the airplane. The leftist actively brings about social and political changes; the liberal just goes along for the ride.

Conservatives–either out of stupidity and ignorance, or disingenuously out of a wish to exploit people’s confusion–like to conflate the liberal with the socialist. They’ll make idiotic claims like ‘hippies are communists,’ or assert that Biden and Harris are bringing about ‘toxic socialism,’ when the Democratic Party had already swung over to the political right back during the Clinton years (even Carter, with Brzezinski squirting his anticommunist poison in Carter’s ears, was hardly ‘left-leaning’ in any meaningful sense).

Locke personifies what I’ve characterized as the liberal mindset. His id would have him indulge in all kinds of pleasures: taking a huge wad of money (without even trying to supply the weapons he’s being paid for) and traveling around Europe (Munich and Barcelona), buying colourful clothes, and enjoying the charms of the girl. His ego would keep him safe from being found out by his BBC associate, producer Martin Knight (Hendry), Rachel, or the Chadian dictator’s secret police, those who kill him in the end. His superego, however, has him in an existential crisis wherein he’d report on the Chadian civil war in a manner sympathetic to the Marxist rebels, but Knight and the establishment media would have him keep his sense of “detachment,” have him remain ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ (translation: leaving the colonialist status quo unchallenged).

As a passenger, all Locke wants to do is keep moving: it doesn’t matter where he’s going, since he’s directionless, as long as he’s moving. His feeling stuck in “God-forsaken” Chad, his truck stuck in a sand dune, is symbolic of his existential crisis. Where can he go with his life as an establishment liberal reporter? He wants to feel as though he’s going somewhere, making some kind of advancement in his life. Not necessarily really going anywhere in particular, just feeling as if he’s moving. And that’s what makes him different from men like Robertson.

In the hot desert of Chad, he feels himself to be in a hopeless situation. He can’t find the guerrillas he wants to interview, to get a perspective opposing that of the dictator. He has recorded largely only the biased and dishonest point of view of the country’s ruling class; he’d might as well be supporting them. Here we see the existential crisis of the liberal who would be a revolutionary…if only he had the guts.

He feels dead in terms of the meaning of his life; it’s fitting that his truck is stuck in the desert sands. This sand is like the dust from which Adam sprang, and to which Locke will return when he dies (Genesis 3: 19; Ecclesiastes 3:20). All is vanity, the absurdist vanity of living in a meaningless world in which his only end will be death.

So when he finally returns to his hotel, exhausted and crestfallen, and he finds Robertson lying dead on his bed, Locke decides to die himself, by taking on Robertson’s identity. Adios a la pasada for Locke.

Though the past and present are bitterly opposed for Locke, there is nonetheless a link between the two that he can’t break, and this inability of his is foreshadowed in the scene when he’s switching his and Robertson’s passport photos. Locke has recorded a conversation between himself and Robertson, which he plays back while switching the photos.

The tape recording isn’t the only link with the past, though. In one of Antonioni’s famous long takes, we see bare-chested Locke at the table with the passports as the tape plays; he looks over to the side and the camera moves away from him to where the balcony shows a living Robertson and…Locke in a shirt! There is no cut in this camera shot. Antonioni has fused the present with the past in a manner bordering on the surreal; he had experimented with the border between the real and unreal, between certainty and uncertainty, in Blowup. The shot immediately after the balcony one, also without a cut, shows the flashback with Robertson return to the present with bare-chested Locke changing the passport photos. He’d cut himself off from his past, but not even the camera will cut away from it.

Earlier, Locke is sitting on Robertson’s bed, looking at the face of the corpse up close. This dead man, whose life was so different from the dead-end one that Locke wants to escape, is someone he now idealizes. He looks at the face, of this similar-looking man, as one would see oneself in a mirror; recall how Lacan spoke of seeing one’s ideal-I in a mirror, that perfect, unified image one sees, as opposed to the fragmented self one feels oneself to be.

Locke feels just this inadequacy compared to his dead twin; he feels even less alive than Robertson. Soon after, he finds Robertson’s pistol–not only representative of the dead man’s revolutionary leanings, but also a phallic manhood that Locke lacks. This ineffectual liberal now feels all the more inadequate.

But he can fake being a revolutionary, like those liberals who wear Che Guevara T-shirts and vote Democrat?

In trading Robertson’s identity for his own, Locke is establishing a narcissistic False Self and projecting his hated True Self onto Robertson’s corpse. Taking the pistol, Locke no longer feels psychologically castrated. Ironically, Robertson has said he’s in Chad “on business,” as if he were a bourgeois, when it is Locke who is the bourgeois, swapping identities with the revolutionary.

Antonioni’s films give great importance to location, including architecture, and The Passenger is no exception. In this film, we find a recurring motif of architecture, including churches or at least buildings whose names are associated with religion, like the Plaza de la Iglesia and the Hotel de la Gloria. Then, of course, there are the buildings of Gaudí, seen when Locke meets the girl, a student of architecture who knows Gaudí’s work.

Gaudí’s earlier career involved making buildings for bourgeois clients, though religiosity preoccupied his thoughts in his later life, through his focus on the Sagrada Família. The significance of these changes in Gaudí’s work for The Passenger is in how they can be said to parallel the change in Locke’s: his existential crisis, his search for meaning, can find a symbol in Gaudí’s search for God.

Now, none of this is to say that Locke’s search for meaning is anywhere near as noble or lofty as Gaudí’s; but in Locke’s narcissistic imagination, in his False Self as ‘gun-running revolutionary,’ he’d like to think of his search as comparable to a spiritual quest. Linked with this would-be quest is his meeting of the girl, who as a kind of guardian angel to him in her pressing of him to continue showing up for every meeting in Robertson’s little appointment book, is like a reincarnation of Robertson. When one considers Locke’s sexual relationship with the girl, that she can be seen as Robertson come back is in how, when Locke looked at his corpse up close, his face was so close to dead Robertson’s as to imply a wish to kiss him; after all, Robertson is his ideal-I, just as the girl, as his lover, is in a sense his other self.

While wearing that fake moustache in England, symbolic of a mask for his False Self, Locke sees the girl and will later remember her, as if it were fate bringing them together. In Munich, he is paid for papers with gun illustrations, in a church, of all places, one in which one can see the Stations of the Cross in the background. Since The Passenger is, in effect, the film documenting Locke’s life that Knight and the BBC would be making for their ‘deceased’ colleague, all these associations with spirituality and revolutionary heroism would seem to indicate that this ‘documentary film’ is an idealizing of his flawed life, in true narcissistic fashion.

He, of course, isn’t helping any revolutionary cause, nor has he found God. Like Paul in Last Tango in Paris, Locke is being completely irresponsible, throwing away his wife and his past, taking the rebels’ money without providing anything more than pictures of weapons, and having an affair with the girl. Like that fire he burns in his yard in his home in England (one of the flashback scenes) with Rachel wondering what he’s doing, Locke wants only to destroy the old, not build the new. What’s he running away from? Look back with the girl and see the road that Locke’s car has driven on: he’s in constant motion, getting away from the past, but with no discernible future or destination.

He can try to destroy the past, to run away from it, and (like Paul) try to live in a fantasy world, but he won’t succeed. Hitherto unfaithful Rachel becomes guilt-ridden over his ‘death,’ and wants Knight to contact the Robertson she understands to be alive. When Knight fails to find him in Barcelona, Rachel is all the more driven to find this mysterious man.

She isn’t the only one searching for “Robertson.” So are the secret police of the Chadian dictator, who–as Rachel learns at the Chadian embassy when she collects Locke’s things–wants to stop the illegal sale of guns to rebels in his country. Rachel is unwittingly helping these men find “Robertson,” whom she soon learns is really Locke. Incidentally, one of the secret police is a white man, presumably French (we hear him speaking to the girl in French at the Hotel de la Gloria when his associate is off to shoot Locke), strongly implying French neocolonial involvement in the Chadian Civil War, to root out the Marxists.

[As a side note, the Wikipedia article for The Passenger refers to the two men who follow and kill Locke as working with the rebels: on this assumption, the white one beats the crap out of Achebe (played by Ambroise Bia) because the rebels are mad that he gave the money to the wrong man. I disagree with this interpretation. I don’t think the rebels would react that violently to one of their comrades for what was an honest mistake, and would kill the thief of their money rather than angrily demand he give at least what he hasn’t spent back to them…and beat the crap out of him. Agents working for the Chadian dictator, on the other hand, would be that violent. Besides, I have the authority of Theodore Price, whose article on the movie includes references to the complete, uncut script, and who calls the men Chadian secret police.]

The film begins among the sands of Chad, a dictatorship persecuting the leftist resistance within it. The film ends in Spain, at a hotel surrounded in dust. Though Antonioni is too subtle a director to point this out, the viewer who knows his history will be aware that the Spain when The Passenger is set (1973) was also a dictatorship, that of Franco, who had leftists holed up and ‘reeducated’ in concentration camps, and who died the year of the film’s release, after which Spain only slowly crawled back into the realm of liberal democracy. The film thus, like music, has a kind of ABA structure: from dusty dictatorship to pretty democracy, and back again.

Before the penultimate scene with his death, Locke tells the girl a story about a blind man who regained his sight. The man was “elated” at first to be able to see, but he was soon disillusioned when he saw so much “dirt” and “ugliness” in the world. When blind, he easily crossed the road with a walking stick; with his sight, he became afraid even to leave his room. In three years, he killed himself.

This story seems to reflect, though one isn’t sure if Locke realizes it, that through those changes we make in our lives, we think we’re liberating ourselves, but we are only putting ourselves in different chains. Locke thought his trading identities with Robertson would free him from his past, but the pursuits of Knight and Rachel have proven that he’s escaped from nothing.

The girl leaves him in the hotel room and walks around on the dusty ground outside, as if to continue her work as his guardian angel, to be able to return if he needs her. The famous penultimate scene of his death, curious in being a long take largely without him in it, deserves special attention, obviously; I’d also like to give my personal interpretation of it.

Antonioni said that we don’t see Locke when he is killed because he was already dead when he chose no longer to be Locke. I’d like to expand on that idea by saying that, instead of seeing him, we see a POV shot of his spirit, even before the shooting, looking out onto the dusty square where the girl is walking about. His spirit approaches the bars on the window and passes outside; he has freed himself from the prison of a human body. Locke is rid of the lock on the door of his caged existence. Like Gaudí, he has found God, in a way, in the Hotel de la Gloria, its very name suggestive of religiosity.

Just as pious Gaudí was killed by a tram, so have vehicles arriving at Locke’s hotel brought his death: the car of the Chadian secret police, who followed Rachel to find him, her own vehicle with the police arriving too late. Locke is dead lying on the bed of his hotel room, as Robertson was found dead; both men have died thus in countries that are dusty dictatorships–ABA structure.

For dust Locke is, and unto dust shall he return.

His murder by the Chadian secret police is interesting in how he, having only received money, but having never provided weapons to the rebels, is actually innocent of being any kind of danger to the dictator of Chad. Pilate, learning from Jesus that His Kingdom “is not of this world” (John 18:36), also concluded that the man to be crucified was innocent of any revolutionary crime against the Roman Empire. Locke is thus a Christ figure, his holy spirit, as it were, slowly floating out of that room, through those bars, and out into the dusty square. In this way, Locke’s death is also comparable to that of the mystic architect.

Now, this making of Locke into a Christ figure is to be seen from the point of view of fascist, imperialist dictatorships. Men like Franco justified their authoritarian rule by claiming that they were saving their country from ‘satanic’ Marxism and preserving its Christian traditions. In this way, Christ-like Locke, like a good liberal who only pretends to be a revolutionary, is doing the Lord’s good work, keeping the strongmen in power by doing nothing to threaten their hold on it.

When Rachel finds her husband’s body on that bed with a bullet in him, she says she “never knew him,” echoing Peter’s denial of Christ three times before the cock crowed (Luke 22:34). This is the perfect ending to Locke’s ‘documentary,’ for in his narcissistic imagination, he’s died a martyr, and yet his spirit will always be with us.

This martyr-like status, of course, is just part and parcel of Locke’s narcissistic False Self. He couldn’t really be Robertson to save his life…literally. Locke deals in “words, images”; Robertson deals in “concrete things,” so the people understand him straightaway. Locke thus personifies Hegelian idealism, while Robertson personifies Marxian materialism.

Locke’s existential search for meaning is just a Camus-like absurdist one: Locke has tried to escape his liberal past by merely posing as a revolutionary; and like Sisyphus’ futile rolling up of that rock, Locke has failed miserably. We defy the Fates and attempt to give our lives value, and we’re happy in the attempt, as Camus says Sisyphus is, and as Locke briefly has been (think of that scene of him in the cable car in Spain, when he pokes his upper half out the window and stretches his arms out over the water…he feels as free as a bird); but the certainty of death assures us of the ultimate futility of our attempt.

So the lesson we must learn from The Passenger is, do we as leftists want to be engagé revolutionaries in the driver’s seat, or do we want to be mere liberal passengers, going along for the ride, hoping to share in the glory, but doing none of the heavy lifting? Certainly, when Antonioni filmed Chung Kuo, Cina, the Chinese Communists hated it, regarding him as a mere liberal, pandering passenger. Deeply hurt by this reaction, he made his 1975 masterpiece in response.

Now, what will we do in today’s neoliberal hell? Shall we try to throw away our pasts and live in a fantasy world, à la Paul and Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris? Shall we carry Robertson’s pistol around, feeling tough with it, but be too scared to use it? Shall we try to take the easy way out and avoid our painful reality? As Robertson warns us, “the world doesn’t work that way.”

The Ouroboros of Philosophy

I: Introduction

My concern here is not with presenting an encyclopedic understanding of philosophy and its history; I am in no way qualified even to attempt that. Instead, I will look at selected examples of philosophical ideas as manifestations of what I see the ouroboros as symbolizing.

As I’ve explained in a number of posts, I use the ouroboros to symbolize the dialectical relationship between opposites. The serpent, coiled in a circle and biting its tail, represents a circular continuum whose extreme opposites meet and phase into each other, the biting head being one extreme, and the bitten tail being its opposite. The coiled middle of the serpent represents all the intermediate points on the continuum, the moderate points between the extremes.

The dialectic, often being a dialogue of two disagreeing philosophers presenting their opposing opinions in a back-and-forth debate, has been the basis of so much of the history of Western philosophy that I find it illustrative to use my ouroboros symbolism to systematize the dialectic. Such a systematization is what I will attempt here.

II: Ancient Greece, and the Ancient East

Thales, interestingly, conceived of the universe as having originated in water. He believed this origin to be literally true, as Aristotle explained it in his Metaphysics:

“Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things. For they say that the element and first principle of the things that exist is that from which they all are and from which they first come into being and into which they are finally destroyed, its substance remaining and its properties changing…There must be some nature–either one or more than one–from which the other things come into being, it being preserved. But as to the number and form of this sort of principle, they do not all agree. Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that it is water (that is why he declares that the earth rests on water). He perhaps came to acquire this belief from seeing that the nourishment of everything is moist and that heat itself comes from this and lives by this (for that from which anything comes into being is its first principle)–he came to this belief both for this reason and because the seeds of everything have a moist nature, and water is the natural principle of moist things.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b6–11, 17-27…Barnes, page 63)

I, on the other hand–and as anyone who has read enough of my blog knows–interpret the water origin metaphorically, hence the name of my blog, Infinite Ocean. The rising and falling of the waves symbolize the opposing sides of the dialectic, the movements up and down each being a sublation of thesis (crest) and negation (trough).

It is from this notion of water that we move on to Heraclitus and his notion of endless movement. I discussed his ideas here. Diogenes Laërtius, in his Lives of the Philosophers, had this to say about the beliefs of Heraclitus: “All things come about through opposition, and the universe flows like a river. The universe is finite, and there is one world.” (Barnes, page 107)

To make a temporary digression from ancient Greece to ancient India, the endless, watery flow of everything in the universe has been used to describe Brahman, Atman being but a drop of this water. Furthermore, this universal Oneness, this monism that has been attributed to Thales, Heraclitus, and the Hindus is described as flowing and moving; yet this monism, pushed to its extreme, from its flowing to its extreme opposite, a Oneness of motionless stasis, is found in the philosophy of Parmenides and Zeno.

Parmenides insisted that notions of motion and plurality are illusions, the maya of the Hindus. All is one according to him; the universe has always been, is now, and always will be, an unmoving, unchangeable sphere. This Oneness is a reaction against Heraclitus (or vice versa) and against the philosophical pluralists, movements from the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head, shifts from one extreme to their dialectical opposites.

In fact, Parmenides’ young pupil (and lover), Zeno, went so far as to defend his teacher’s rigid monism by devising a number of paradoxes to show the illusory nature of motion, change, and divisibility. His paradoxes, again, were a reaction, a dialectical shift from bitten tail to biting head, against the pluralists. Zeno’s point, as understood by Plato, was that if his paradoxes–for example, of infinitesimally divided walking distances precluding the possibility of getting anywhere, or Achilles never catching up to the tortoise, or a never-moving arrow in flight–are absurd, so much more absurd are the pluralists’ ideas.

As Plato expressed Zeno’s meaning: “My book attacks those who say that several things exist, aiming to show that their hypothesis, that several things exist, leads to even more ridiculous results, if you examine it properly, than the hypothesis that only one thing exists.” (Plato, Parmenides…Barnes, page 152) It isn’t about the ideas in themselves; it’s about ideas in dialectical opposition to others.

Parmenides’ and Zeno’s unchanging monism can, in a way, be compared to the eternal soul of Atman in Brahman, which in turn was reacted against in Buddhism’s adoption of the doctrines of anattā (or anātman) and impermanence. Again we see the dialectical movement of one doctrine, felt to have been pushed too far (e.g., Atman is believed to exist despite a lack of empirical evidence), over to its opposite (no soul or permanent self), a shift from the biting head to the bitten tail of the ouroboros.

The dialectical relationship between opposites, as I symbolize with the serpent’s head and tail, can also be seen in the yin/yang symbol of Taoism. The white dot in yin, and the black dot in yang, are like the teeth of the head stabbed into the tail. One opposite is experienced in the other.

III: From Doubt to Certainty

Another example of the ouroboros of philosophy can be found in the radical doubts of René Descartes. His doubting of the certainty of any kind of existence, including his own, found him passing beyond the bitten tail of extreme doubt to the biting head of cogito, ergo sum, which given more fully is dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”

His very doubting, brought to such an extreme of doubts of existence, becomes the very existence, his own existence since he’s the one doing the doubting, that gives him a certain foundation for knowledge on which he can at least hope to build further certainties.

IV: Hegel and Marx

A few centuries later, we come to Hegel, who systematized the dialectic as a confrontation of, and resolution of, contradictions simplified in Fichte‘s triad of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,” a formula Hegel neither used nor liked. For my part, I prefer the terms thesis, negation, and sublation, which instead of being in the simplified form of a triad, go round and round in a circle of endless manifestations of contradictions to be clashed together and sublated, over and over again.

A simple but convenient example of Hegel’s dialectic can be found in his Science of Logic. He opposes being and nothing, which I would represent respectively as the serpent’s biting head and bitten tail. Then, his sublation of these contradictions, becoming, I’d represent as the coiled middle of the ouroboros.

Another example of the ouroboros of philosophy, as seen in Hegelian thought, can be found in his master/slave dialectic. Two men confront each other: a struggle ensues, and one attains mastery over the other. In my ouroboros symbolism, the master is the serpent’s biting head, and the slave is its bitten tail.

Over time, the slave’s creative efforts build up his sense of worth and usefulness to his master, as well as his own recognition of self-consciousness, a moving along the coiled body of the serpent from its tail to its head, to the point where his master finds himself utterly dependent on the slave for recognition of the master’s existence, and for the products the slave makes. Now the slave reaches the serpent’s biting head, and he trades places with his master. The other way to see this trading of places is to imagine the slave going in the opposite direction: right from the bitten tail over to the biting head, an excess of servitude phasing into its dialectical opposite, mastery.

The master/slave dialectic was a great inspiration for Karl Marx, who saw the Labour Theory of Value as the mechanism whereby the proletariat would one day overthrow the bourgeoisie. The workers need to know how it’s the total amount of their socially necessary labour time, not their bosses’ management, that creates value in commodities; and armed with this knowledge, they will be inspired to get organized and bring on a proletarian revolution.

Now, another dialectical shift from the biting head to the bitten tail can be found in Marx’s materialist reaction to Hegel’s philosophical idealism. Marx’s reversal of the notion that the world of ideas, of the spirit, brings about the physical world–typical of religious thinking–and making it instead that it’s the physical (i.e., having a brain) that creates the world of ideas (thinking), was him turning Hegel upside-down, standing him “on his head.” Though as Marx would have had it, Hegel’s dialectic was already “standing on its head,” and Marx simply put the dialectic back on its feet (Marx, pages 19, 102-103).

For Marx, the dialectic presents itself in physical manifestations throughout history, going from the ancient master/slave contradiction to that of the feudal landlord vs. the poor peasant. Within feudalism, though, a growing mercantile class, the first capitalists, would eventually overthrow their feudal lords and become the next ruling class, the bourgeoisie.

The suffering and struggling of those held down by the feudal lord, those including the rising capitalists, are thus symbolized in my system as those moving from the bitten tail of the ouroboros, along its coiled body in the middle, up to its biting head, where they would replace feudalism with capitalism. Such a bourgeois revolution was vividly depicted in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.

The bourgeoisie, now the head biting the tail of the proletariat, are no longer revolutionary. The working class has attempted revolution in, for example, the Paris Commune, the USSR, the Eastern Bloc, and Afghanistan‘s attempts at modernization in the late 1970s, but counterrevolution ruined all their hopes. We’ll have to see if a new socialist movement will rescue us all from late stage capitalism, and will sustain itself by repelling all future attempts at counterrevolution.

V: Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer‘s pessimism was inspired by the reading of translations of ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts. Interestingly, his idea of the thing-in-itself, the essence of everything as understood without the deceiving senses, is will, the striving to be alive (“On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance,” 1; Schopenhauer, page 55). This conception is in contrast to the Eastern idea that the Oneness of everything, Brahman, Tao, etc., is the source of peace and bliss.

Now, this contrast I speak of is a dialectical one, for Atman, the soul of the willing individual, is to be identified with Brahman, the peaceful Oneness of the universe. The world is will, but it’s also representation, maya, a deception of the senses that, in its illusory nature, causes suffering. One ends suffering by negating the will-to-life, and thus tranquilizing it. When one understands Atman to be the same as Brahman, and to see plurality as an illusion, the ego is neutralized, the selfish desires of the will are extinguished, and one attains nirvana.

So life, for Schopenhauer, is essentially not worth living; being trapped in a body, with all its aches, pains, and ageing, is like being in a penal colony (“On the Suffering of the World,” 9, Schopenhauer, page 49). The extreme sadness such a realization engenders, though–the reaching of the serpent’s bitten tail–isn’t necessarily so bleak. One can pass the tail to the biting head of bliss by, paradoxically, extending one’s suffering, by suffering not all alone, but with other sufferers. Compassion is the basis of moral edification, according to Schopenhauer, and in compassion we find liberation from suffering, since compassion will drive us to end our suffering by ending that of those others we identify with in our pity for them.

The dialectical reaction against Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be seen in Nietzsche’s affirmation of the will-to-life, and his existentialism leads us to the next topic.

VI: From Absurdity to Meaning

In existentialism, one confronts the meaninglessness of life, the bitten tail of the ouroboros, by giving life meaning, one’s own personal purpose, a shift over to the serpent’s biting head. In Kierkegaard‘s Christian existentialism, this giving of meaning to life, as an escape from meaninglessness, is in the form of a leap of faith in God, believing in Him despite a lack of proof of His existence.

With the atheistic existentialism of such writers as Nietzsche and Sartre, though, one lacks the crutch of a leap of faith in God, so one must create one’s own, personal meaning in life. This, after Kierkegaard’s counsel has failed us, means a revolution around the body of the ouroboros, from the biting head after our leap of faith from the tail, going all the way back to that tail the long way, then to go past to the biting head again.

With Camus‘s absurdism, though, even the making of one’s own meaning rests on flimsy ground, since the contradiction between unescapable meaninglessness and man’s need to find meaning is equally unescapable. Camus’s advice, therefore, is to act in defiance against meaninglessness, to strive for flashes of meaning, however evanescent such flashes may be, since one must accept meaninglessness along with our defiance of it.

Just as Sisyphus must endlessly roll that boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down and to have to roll it up again…and again, and again, and again, so must we go in endless cycles along the coiled body of the ouroboros, shifting past the biting head to the bitten tail, and back around the body to the head again…and again, and again, and again…

Small wonder the ouroboros is a symbol of eternity, Nietzsche’s myth of the eternal recurrence.

VII: Conclusion

So this absurdist advice can be seen as a variation on much of what I reviewed before: Zeno’s paradoxes of walking and getting nowhere, of swift Achilles never catching up to the tortoise, and of a flying, yet motionless arrow. Similarly, one is only certain of one’s existence through one’s extreme doubting; the sublation of two contradictions leads only to a new thesis to be negated and sublated, again and again and again. Will a socialist revolution lead to a classless, stateless, and money-less society? I continue to hope for it, in spite of the miserable state the world is in right now.

In Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the way to blessedness is through compassion, or suffering on a larger, more magnanimous scale; this in a way is strikingly similar to Kierkegaard’s leap of faith (i.e., a faith coupled with deeds of Christian charity), which is odd given Schopenhauer’s atheism…an atheism coupled with the inspiration of Eastern religion! And finding meaning is the solution to the impossibility of ever finding meaning? Again, it sounds like the bitten tail of atheism shifting over to the biting head of theism!

Reflecting on these observations, I find that the unchanging unity of all that Parmenides and Zeno insisted on is actually the ever-changing fluidity of Heraclitus. Parmenides’ stony sphere is really Thales’ water.

Atman = Brahman = anātman

Analysis of ‘Rope’

I: Introduction

Rope is a 1948 thriller film produced (with Sidney Bernstein) and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted by Hume Cronyn and with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. It is based on the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play of the same name (called Rope’s End in American productions), the play in turn having been inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder case of 1924.

The film stars James Stewart, John Dall, and Farley Granger. It’s the first of Hitchcock’s Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited to seem a single, continuous shot through the use of long takes. It’s also the second, after Lifeboat, of his “limited setting” films, since Rope takes place entirely inside an apartment (the outside showing only during the beginning credits and through windows throughout the rest of the film).

Contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, it did poorly at the box office, and neither Hitchcock nor Stewart were happy with the results of the real time experiment. The film’s reputation has improved over the decades, though, and it has, as of this writing, a score of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 49 reviews), with this consensus: “As formally audacious as it is narratively brilliant, Rope connects a powerful ensemble in service of a darkly satisfying crime thriller from a master of the genre.”

Quotes from the film can be found here.

II: Getting a Grip on the Rope

The symbolism of rope, and of rope’s end, ought to be discussed first. The continuous length of rope suggests the continuance of life, just like the real time continuity of the film. Still, the rope must come to its end, rather like the thread of life spun by Clotho, of the Fates, and cut by Atropos.

Similarly, though the film tries to simulate the effect of one seamless take of eighty minutes, back in 1948, takes couldn’t be any longer than ten minutes; so such tricks as having actors’ backs, or those of furniture, block the screen to allow unnoticed switches of reels, were necessary. Also, several cuts are unmasked, as at 19:45, 34:34, 51:56, and 1:09:51. So, there’s the continuity of Rope, as well as the Rope’s End cuts.

The symbolism thus is of life juxtaposed against death, for the ‘life’ of the party that carries on through most of the film coincides with the knowledge that there’s a dead man’s body hiding in a large antique wooden chest, on which dinner is served. Rope, of course, is also the murder weapon.

Hamilton’s play is also continuous in action, adhering to the three unities of place (one setting: the apartment), of time (that of the evening’s party, and no other), and of action (only the one plot of the party and the secret murder). Even this continuous action, though, is divided by the curtain fall at the end of each act: Rope‘s continuity is cut at Rope’s End.

Hamilton’s is what one would call a “well-made play,” whose characteristics are combined with the classical unities mentioned above; this form that it’s in is also symbolic of the elitist thinking of the murderers, who fancy themselves ‘well-made men.’ They are Wyndham Brandon and Charles “Granno” Granillo in the play, but respectively renamed Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger) in the film.

These well-to-do young men would end a man’s life to clear the way for the lives of “superior” men like themselves. They use rope as an executioner would, and as Rupert Cadell (Stewart in the film) says at the end of the play, they’ll hang (i.e., by rope–perfect karma) for their crime (Stewart’s Cadell says they’ll die).

Apart from the paradoxical life/death symbolism, the rope can also represent a link between words and deeds. As Slavoj Zižek explains, ‘By means of a prohibition of montage, Rope enacts a psychotic passage à l’acte (the “rope” from the title of the film is, of course, ultimately the “rope” connecting “words” and “acts,” i.e., it marks the moment at which the symbolic, so to speak, falls into the real…the homosexual, murderous couple take words “literally,” they pass from them immediately to “deeds,” realizing the professor’s [James Stewart’s] pseudo-Nietzschean theories that concern precisely the absence of prohibition–to “superhumans,” everything is permitted).’ (Ziźek, page 42)

Another symbolism for the rope is to be understood in light of how the murder of David Kentley (played by Dick Hogan; in Hamilton’s play, the victim is named Ronald Kentley) is, metaphorically speaking, an act of gay sex. In this context, Kentley’s head and neck are the phallus, and the rope is–pardon my crudity, Dear Reader–the tightening sphincter.

This all ties in with the next topic of discussion.

III: Of Homosexuals and Homicide

With the prudish Production Code at the height of its authority and power in the late 1940s, one would think it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to include any gay innuendo in a film. Nonetheless, Hitchcock managed to pull it off with Rope, as he would later do in Strangers On a Train.

Though Hitchcock was a bourgeois liberal, he actually had quite a progressive attitude towards homosexuality for people of the time, and he was intrigued with the idea of suggesting that not only the two young killers, but also Cadell, were gay. Hitchcock often pushed the censors as far as he could (recall the kissing scene in Notorious between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and how close we seem to come to seeing Janet Leigh naked in the shower scene in Psycho); so it would have been irresistible to him to drop many, many hints that the two young killers in Rope are a couple.

Not only are the characters gay, but so were the actors: Dall (closeted) and bisexual Granger. In fact, even the scriptwriter, Laurents, was gay…and he often wondered if Stewart knew that the character he was playing was gay. So Hitchcock had no bigotry towards LGBT people (recall that Anthony Perkins was also bisexual).

These characters in the film are gay because Brandon and Granno are hinted at being gay in Hamilton’s play, too. This is so because, in turn, Leopold and Loeb were actually gay lovers. Hamilton was a socialist, as Hitchcock was socially liberal, so both playwright and auteur would have wanted to address homosexuality in their productions of this story.

Now, the film begins with the strangling of (or symbolic sex with) David, who gives off quite an…orgasmic…scream. The lights are off, the curtains drawn in the middle of a sunny day outside; after all, we generally prefer to screw in the dark, don’t we? Especially if it’s in the socially taboo form of gay sex, something especially taboo before the second half of the twentieth century.

Phillip/Granno wants to keep the lights off and the curtains drawn for a while longer, since he’s the weaker-willed of the killers. Brandon fittingly lights a cigarette. Both are panting. They put Kentley’s body in the wooden chest, on which Brandon would proudly have dinner served.

After handling a phallic champagne bottle, Phillip asks Brandon how he felt doing “it,” a euphemism at the time for homosexual sex, but also of course referring to the murder, since the latter sin is symbolic of the former in Rope. Brandon answers that when David’s body went “limp” [!], he felt “tremendously exhilarated.” Now, how should we think about associating gay sex with murder?

The Legion of Decency–a group of Catholics working in association with the Hays Code, and watching every film of the time like a hawk to see if anything even suggestive of lewdness was there, and thus needing to be censored, boycotted, or banned–surely must have sniffed out the homosexual innuendo in Rope. Still, they approved of it. I suspect that they allowed Rope to go past the censors because, in their Catholic bigotry, they were happy to present to the public a film that associates homosexuality with homicide, a morality tale to deter the Christian flock from ever practicing…it.

But surely neither Hitchcock nor Laurents wanted to promote such an idea, did they? This seems to be where the good gay character, Rupert Cadell, comes in. Now, with Jimmy Stewart’s box office draw and charm as a movie star, the homosexuality of his character had to be toned down. The scenes in which Brandon and Cadell discuss “strangling chickens,” though, would be enough of a hint at Cadell being as gay as the killers.

The association of homosexuality with murder also hints, however subtly, that Cadell is either gay or at least philosophically approving of homosexuality. His defence of murder can thus be seen as a code for defending homosexuality. He is a liberal defending something deemed a sin by society; but like many a liberal hypocrite, he’s disgusted and horrified when presented with a graphic presentation of the act, as we see symbolized by Kentley’s murder, at the end of Rope.

The association of homosexuality with murder, in a way, can be seen historically in the homophobic fear–a totally irrational fear given the low percentage of the world’s gay people (as can be seen, for example, in these statistics of LGBT people in the US)–that tolerance of such sexual practices (anal and oral sex, mutual masturbation, or…choking chickens!) would result in a society producing far fewer children than an exclusively heterosexual, monogamous one. Such “murderers of [their] own posterity” as gays and perpetual bachelors were seen to be detrimental to the survival of any society (Farrell, pages 73-74).

Now, empires, in their political strength, have been somewhat more tolerant of homosexuality; but the Abrahamic religions started out as persecuted minorities, in whom a quick population increase was desperately wanted. Hence the homophobic passages unfortunately immortalized in the Bible (Leviticus 20:13) and the Koran (Al-Nisa, verse 16), meant to discourage gay sexuality, or similar scriptural passages condemning any sexual acts that didn’t result in children protected through the institution of heterosexual marriage.

Small wonder the Nazis condemned homosexuality as contributing to ‘race suicide,’ and put gay men in concentration camps. There was, however, Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, and a practicing homosexual. His sexuality was known, and Hitler grudgingly tolerated him for a while, because Röhm was so highly placed in the NSDAP; but when Hitler had come to power and needed to wipe out anyone who was deemed a threat to him, Röhm’s homosexuality was conveniently used as part of the rationale for having him killed.

A discussion of Nazi ‘superiority’ over homosexual ‘inferiority’ thus ties in with the next topic.

IV: From Untermenschen to Übermenschen

One of Hitchcock’s main purposes in making Rope was to discredit the Nazi notion of the ‘superior Aryan.’ We can see an irony in having two gay men, considered ‘inferior’ not only by Nazis but also by conservative society in general, who fancy themselves examples of the Nietzschean Superman. Röhm would have seen himself racially thus, too, as would his gay deputy, Edmund Heines.

[It’s interesting to note in passing that some have speculated that Nietzsche was gay. Also, one should recall how his younger sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, edited his writing to make his notion of the Superman seem proto-Nazi.]

To get back to Hitchcock’s intentions for the film, though, and his commendable use of Rope as a condemnation of Nazi thinking, on the other hand one mustn’t forget his reactionary stance as a bourgeois liberal, who during the late 1940s would naturally have been eager to distance himself from fascism as much as he could. All the same, consider in this connection what Stalin once said about liberals and their ilk: “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Nazis are to be crushed, not merely distanced from; and Western liberals were using unpunished ex-Nazis to help them fight the Cold War, starting right around the time that Rope was made.

Connected to all of this is a passage about homosexuals in Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: ‘homosexuals or inverts…are men and women who otherwise have reached an irreproachably high standard of mental growth and development, intellectually and ethically, and are only afflicted with this one fateful peculiarity. Through the mouths of their scientific spokesmen they lay claim to be a special variety of the human race, a “third sex,” as they call it, standing with equal rights alongside the other two. We may perhaps have an opportunity of critically examining these claims. They are not, of course, as they would gladly maintain, the “elect” of mankind; they contain in their ranks at least as many inferior and worthless individuals as are to be found among those differently constituted sexually.’ (Freud, pages 313-314)

I bring up this quote because Hitchcock was known to have been heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis, and gay Brandon’s and Phillip’s preoccupation with Nietzschean ‘superiority’ causes me to wonder if Hitchcock ever read the above-quoted book by Freud, its ideas influencing him in his making of Rope.

In any case, Brandon’s (especially) and Phillip’s/Granno’s sense of superiority doesn’t stem from their homosexuality, but rather from malignant narcissism, in which we see a huge overlapping of extreme narcissistic and psychopathic (ASPD) personality traits. Though the two may have felt narcissistic injury from being regarded by society as ‘sex perverts,’ and therefore wish to assert their ‘superiority’ by displaying the courage to kill, the thrill factor in killing Kentley seems to indicate the psychopathic side to Brandon’s personality, an impatience with boredom.

Now, Phillip/Granno, being the weaker-willed of the two killers, and lacking Brandon’s ability to tolerate stress (even though it is Phillip who does the actual strangling of Kentley!), is racked with guilt and stress throughout the film. While this guilt is surely a factor in his outburst, denying he’s ever strangled a chicken, this denial seems more connected with the implication, as stated above, that he’s gay rather than a killer. In other words, his lie that he’s never strangled a chicken seems to be his narcissistic rage at being implicitly labelled ‘queer.’

The narcissism of the two young killers can be linked to something else, in fact, something far more significant than being gay or wishing to emulate the philosophy of Nietzsche: it’s their elevated social class that gives them a false sense of superiority to most other people.

This ties in with the next point.

V: The Übermenschlichkeit of Capital

Brandon and Phillip/Granno, just like their real-life inspirations, Leopold and Loeb, are spoiled, well-to-do kids from affluent families. They’re preppy students living in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, wearing nice suits, drinking fine champagne, and inviting similarly upper-middle-class friends to their evening party. They also have a servant in their employ, played by Edith Evanson.

Their smug belief in their supposed superiority is therefore symbolic of the narcissism of capital in general. Capitalist imperialists, like those in the British Empire, and now the US, have justified their plundering of the world–killing millions in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia (whether directly or indirectly)–by imagining their stock and civilization to be superior to all the brown people they’ve brutalized. Killing a fellow preppy like Kentley doesn’t deflate my argument, for those white imperialists, the Nazis, killed such whites as Jews and Slavs in their racist hubris, too.

Cadell’s ‘defence’ of murder is meant to be heard as a sardonic take on the hypocrisies of bourgeois society, not as a green light for Brandon and Phillip/Granno to kill. Cadell’s words, like Sade‘s glorification of the most heinous of crimes, are cloaked in irony. Cadell points out, in Hamilton’s play, that war is murder on a mass scale, and thoroughly approved of by patriotic society. Similarly, Hamilton’s Cadell approves of theft because society already condones capitalists’ theft of the poor through their ownership of private property: in this observation, he refers to Proudhon‘s notion that property is theft. Hamilton the socialist would have wanted to make this point to his audience, in the hopes of promoting progressive social change. In these ways, Cadell’s approval of crime is the opposite of capitalist Brandon’s relishing in crime.

…and the notion of narcissistic, bourgeois hypocrisy ties in with the final topic.

VI: Opening the Chest

Another part of narcissism is presenting a False Self to the world, a hiding of one’s True Self. Brandon’s and Phillip’s/Granno’s pretensions to superiority are an example of the False Self, while the concealment of their crime in the chest symbolizes the hiding of the True Self.

Since the crime is also symbolic of gay sex, the two killers are presenting themselves publicly as straight, ‘respectable’ members of society with their innocuous, high-class party. Phillip’s vehement yet dishonest denial of having ever strangled a chicken is an example of such pretending. Cadell, who knows better, and who is growing increasingly suspicious of his two young hosts, cross-examines Phillip, so to speak, while the latter is playing the piano. Cadell has witnessed the…choking of chickens…and knows Phillip has lied in his denial of committing the act. This cross-examination happens while Phillip has been playing, over and over again, the first of Francis Poulenc‘s Trois mouvements perpétuels. (Poulenc, incidentally, was also gay.)

The harmonic construction of the piano piece is a perfect parallel to the growing tension in the movie. It starts off with a pretty, light tune, the ideal sort of musical setting to a party with such people as the father (played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke), girlfriend (played by Joan Chandler), and friend (played by Douglas Dick) of the murder victim, none of whom of course know of the murder. But as the piano piece carries on, it grows–however subtly–more and more dissonant, something paralleled in the unease that the guests are feeling over Kentley’s never showing up for the party. Though Phillip never plays the first movement to the end, anyone who has heard it knows it ends at the height of inconclusive dissonance, just as the film ends at the height of tension and uncertainty for the two killers.

Now, Phillip has been revealing his guilty True Self through such parapraxes as breaking a wine glass in his bloodied hand and letting out nervous outbursts; his heavy drinking is also facilitating his disclosing of guilt. Brandon, on the other hand, enjoys suggesting that he’s guilty of murder, for he fancies himself above the common man’s hypocritical pretences of virtue.

In these ways, just as Rope demonstrates the dialectical relationships between life and death, continuity and breaks in it, ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority,’ and pride (Brandon) vs. shame (Phillip), so does it demonstrate the dialectical opposition between hiding one’s True Self behind a mask of one’s False Self on the one hand, and on the other, removing the False Self mask to reveal the True Self, be such a removal through parapraxes or through the criminal’s vanity, his proud wish to display his murder to the world.

Just as the murder symbolizes gay sex, so does hiding the body symbolize hiding one’s homosexuality, while Brandon’s unconscious wish to have his mentor, Cadell, know of the crime represents a wish to come out of the closet…or come out of the casket, as is the case here…Brandon’s defiant wish to tell the world that homosexuality is no crime.

In keeping with the gay interpretation, though, we find that liberal Cadell, in his condemnation of the two young men’s symbolic gay sex act, is a hypocrite himself. He has philosophically condoned the act a mere 40 minutes before this condemnation, an unmasking of his own False Self. He thanks Brandon for this unmasking, just as Brandon has wished to be unmasked, too.

At the same time, though, in keeping with the capitalist/imperialist interpretation (particularly in Hamilton’s play), Cadell redeems himself by, first of all, frankly acknowledging his own guilt in killing in war and stealing in his ownership of private property, and second of all, condemning Brandon’s and Granno’s murdering of Kentley (an excess Cadell would never lower himself to), all out of a narcissistic fancying of themselves as superior.

Cadell’s redemption, however, is only partial: for as a liberal (as Hitchcock was), he is symbolically condemning the excesses of fascist delusions of superiority used to justify killing, while maintaining the bourgeois liberal class structure of society out of which fascism arises in times of crisis…just as Cadell’s verbal approval of murder inspired these two bad boys’ achievement of murder.

The rope that links the teacher and his pupils doesn’t end here, doesn’t get cut off, through the difference between word and deed. The continuity between the former and the latter is as smooth as Hitchcock’s deft camera tricks hiding the cuts between long takes.

Rights

The right,
left, and the centre are defined
in terms of their relations to each other.

The right,
were left and shifty centre moved
(along the spectrum, from their proper places)

rightwards,
wouldn’t seem extreme, like its sworn foe,
the oft-forgotten left. The centre, thus

more right,
would seem a milder kind of right,
while what to us seems left is centre. Our rights

fade right
into oblivion. Fascism
is normalized. The left and centre die.

The right
is all there is, and human rights
are all left in the centre of a dungheap.

We’re right
back where we started, when Hitler
was snuffing leftists, making centrists right.

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