Tag: Politics

Analysis of ‘Shadow of a Doubt’

Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his favourite of all of his films, and the one he enjoyed making the most. Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt was based on a story treatment by Gordon McDonell called “Uncle Charlie,” which in turn was based on the true crime story of Earle Nelson, a serial killer, rapist, and necrophile from the late 1920s known as “The Gorilla Man.”

Most of Nelson’s victims were middle-aged landladies, killed by strangulation, and many were raped after death. The writers of Hitchcock’s film changed the victims into wealthy, elderly widows, and Nelson’s charm–as a mild-mannered Christian drifter–was retained in Uncle Charlie. I find the connection between landladies and wealthy widows as victims to be interesting, as I’ll get into later.

The film stars Joseph Cotten (as Uncle Charlie) and Teresa Wright, with Macdonald Carey, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Wallace Ford, and Hume Cronyn. McDonell was nominated for an Oscar for Best Story. The film received universally positive reviews upon release, and in 1991, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Here are some quotes from Shadow of a Doubt.

A crucial theme in this film is the sharp contrast between a man’s charming outer persona and his dark, evil inside. Note what Hitchcock himself once said as an overarching theme: “Love and good order is no defense against evil.” Uncle Charlie has such a good reputation among his own family, the Newtons, whom he’ll visit in Santa Rosa, California (in McDonell’s treatment, the small town the villain will visit is Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley), that the last thing they’d ever suspect is that he’s a serial killer.

Uncle Charlie’s sister, Emma Newton (Collinge), and her husband, Joseph (Travers), named their eldest daughter, Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Wright) after him because he’s idealized so much, an idealization that spreads out to the entire city of Santa Rosa, a location chosen for the film as a paragon of a peaceful, small, pre-WWII American city. Such a nice place for Uncle Charlie to hide out in reinforces this idea of a good, wholesome exterior hiding a shady secret.

On top of all of this is Young Charlie, a sweet, pretty young woman sharing the name of the villain. On two occasions in the film when she and her uncle chat, they speak of themselves as being twins, rather than uncle and niece.

Her wish to have him come over to Santa Rosa, to relieve the boredom and meaninglessness of their lives, coincides with him sending a telegram to her family, saying he wishes to pay them a visit. She imagines that her wish has been mental telepathy, sent to him to make him send the telegram; a Jungian would say this meaningful coincidence, a linking of her inner mental state with the outside world, is a case of synchronicity. In any case, this coincidence is yet another linking of the two Charlies, with her nice-girl Persona and his serial-killer Shadow.

Her adoration of her handsome, charming uncle borders on incestuous desire, a kind of transference of her Electra complex from her father to her uncle. Indeed, she beams at her Uncle Charlie, with a grin from ear to ear, thinking he’s “wonderful.”

So she’s transferring her idealization from the parental imago to her uncle. The idealized parental imago is one of two poles of the self, as Heinz Kohut conceived it, a self rooted in narcissism. Since the Oedipus complex is a narcissistic trauma, and she’s transferring hers to her uncle, then her love of him is really a narcissistic projection from herself to him. When she realizes his murderous nature, her heart is broken, and now she must split off and project what’s really her Shadow self onto him, hence, “Shadow of a doubt.”

So, on a symbolic level, both Charlies can be seen as two halves of one person, the good and bad sides of Two-Face‘s coin, if you will. Uncle Charlie’s being pursued by the two detectives at the beginning of the film causes us to sympathize with him for the moment, since we don’t yet know of his crimes, and so we believe, as his niece does, in how “wonderful” he is, until that shadow of a doubt comes with her growing suspicions of him.

A paralleling of the good outer Persona vs the dark, inner Shadow can also be seen in her father, Joseph, having ongoing discussions with a neighbour, Herbie Hawkins (Cronyn), of how one might commit the perfect murder. This little bit of black comedy between them is a light subplot for the dark main one, yet it also reminds us of how the dark sides in us, however seemingly slight, are on a continuum with those who commit actual crimes. The real difference is in how the hell of the real world has a way of pushing people over the edge to commit criminal acts…an issue I’ll deal with in more detail later.

Young Charlie’s suspicions of her uncle begin upon having received the gift of a valuable emerald ring from him…one that has the initials of another owner on it. He also gets upset to find a newspaper article about the pursuit of him as a suspect in the murder of the wealthy widows, and even Young Charlie’s naming of Lehár‘s Merry Widow Waltz must be interrupted by him at dinner. Indeed, the theme of this waltz is given numerous, often dark and eerie, variations by the composer of the film-score, Dimitri Tiomkin.

I’ll now give a political interpretation of the film as an allegory, one that some readers will no doubt find controversial, but please, hear me out. While Hitchcock was no friend to fascism, as can be seen in films like The Lady Vanishes and Notorious, and while he promoted progressive ideas in a subtle fashion in his stretching of the limits of movie censorship over the years, as well as in the gay subtext in Rope, he was also a reactionary in other ways, as I’ll go into soon in Shadow of a Doubt.

Indeed, Hitchcock can in some ways be compared to George Orwell, who on the one hand, as he said in Homage to Catalonia, went to Spain in the mid-1930s to fight fascism and was impressed with the revolutionary achievements, however short-lived, of the anarchists there, yet on the other hand, he was so bitterly opposed to the ‘totalitarian’ communists (whom he caricatured in his two famous fictional allegories) that he had a snitch list of ‘crypto-communists’ that he used to thwart the careers of those on the list. Hitchcock, as a bourgeois who was making quite a name for himself (and a lot of money, no doubt) in Hollywood as of the early-1940s, when this film was made, would have had his own class interests to protect.

At the beginning of 1943, when the film was released, the Tehran Conference–with the origins of the Cold War associated with it–was far away from happening, as was the Second Red Scare of 1947. The tide turning against the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad was still a month away from happening, too. There seems to have been little fear of communist revolution in January 1943.

The hardships that the working class had suffered during the Great Depression, however, caused them to rise up in an unprecedented way, forcing FDR’s hand in the legislation of the National Labor Relations Act and the New Deal. Many on the political right see little if any difference between the moderate and hard left, and between propagandistic nonsense, like the ‘Holodomor,’ and the truth of the killing of the Tsar’s family, there would already have been much bourgeois fear of leftists idealizing communism.

To get back to the film, and to tie all of these historical digressions to it, there is a crucial scene in which Uncle Charlie discusses what is actually his motive for strangling the rich widows. He refers, with a scowl, to how their husbands worked hard to make all that wealth and then died, leaving all their money to their “silly wives…these useless women”, whom he doubts are even human. In a later discussion with Young Charlie, her uncle describes the world as “a hell.” Given the neoliberal reality we’ve been in for the past forty years, I’d say it’s even more of a hell now.

In these hard-working husbands, I see an allegory of the working class; in their wives, I see the ruling class who take the fruits of their workers’ labour and live in luxury after the men have died from overwork and hazardous accidents. Killing the widows, therefore, allegorizes socialist revolution, but an allegory from the point of view of the frightened bourgeoisie, who want to propagandize against such revolution and call it cruel and violent, hence the representation of the capitalist class as vulnerable, helpless women, to inspire the audience’s sympathy for them.

Young Charlie, too, is concerned–towards the beginning of the film–with the struggles of her family (there is a similar sense of her family’s struggles in McDonell’s treatment), including how her mother works like a dog. Life seems meaningless to her, just a lot of going along with everything, eating and sleeping and nothing else. There’s talking, but little real communication. She seems to sense modern-day alienation. These grey days immediately turn sunny on the arrival of her uncle (who in my allegory represents communist ideals), but she, being liberal-minded like Hitchcock, would never espouse the violent overthrow of capitalism that her uncle’s murders represent.

If my anti-capitalist interpretation seems far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, consider how odd Uncle Charlie’s motive for killing the widows sounds, taken at face value. Misogyny, directed at women merely for being rich and not working, building in a flame of hate strong enough to want to strangle several of them and risk being charged with murder? The world is a hell just because of the widows’ indulgence? Earle Nelson, on whom Uncle Charlie was based, recall, was a sex offender, with a motive straightforward enough to see, but one that for obvious reasons couldn’t be presented on the screen at the time.

That the screenwriters changed the murder victims from being, of all people, landladies to wealthy widows adds to my argument. Landlords, male or female, are capitalists, owning private property–the apartments they make money off of renting them to tenants. The screenwriters changed the victims from one kind of capitalist to another, one whose wealth, unmistakably associated with the exploitation of the poor, is all the more obvious.

A few other things about Uncle Charlie can be associated with communism. He’s come out west from the east. Now, by the east in the film, it’s meant to be the east coast of the US, of course–New Jersey, to be exact. But one can associate “the east” with Russia. There was a growing fear of communist ideas coming to the west–to Western Europe and North America, allegorically represented in the film as California.

One reason I find it useful to link Uncle Charlie’s murders with anti-capitalism, even though he is no communist, is how his story can be paralleled with that of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Mangione has right-leaning political sympathies, but they weren’t enough to stop his rage against an American health insurance system that gets rich off of denying coverage for people who desperately need it, and often die without it. Mangione is regarded as a kind of working-class hero (despite him being from a well-off family), and Thompson’s murder is dismissed by the masses as a case of someone who got what was coming to him.

As for Shadow of a Doubt, though, the bourgeois moviemakers would have us booing at anyone who dares to kill the wealthy. Uncle Charlie’s charm and good looks are meant to be seen as superficial and nothing more.

When Uncle Charlie gives gifts to all the family members, including Young Charlie’s emerald ring, we could see such largesse as representative of a socialist redistribution of wealth. Since this film is actually an anti-communist allegory (as I see it), though, we are reminded, through such things as the initials of the previous owner on the ring, that this redistribution is actually to be understood as a theft from the rightful owners, the capitalist class.

When Uncle Charlie cuts out of Joseph’s newspaper an article about the widow murders, and later gets mad at Young Charlie for inquiring too much about the missing article, we can see in this a representation of an anti-communist accusation of Soviet media censorship. Now, such censorship surely did happen, as with Orwell’s two polemical tales being banned in the USSR, but right-wing, anti-Soviet propaganda (such as I suspect this film to be, allegorically) was a real danger: the “Holodomor” myth, as mentioned above, was originally Nazi propaganda that has persisted to this day, and all such propaganda has led to the counterrevolution that Stalin not only warned against, but also correctly predicted the outcome of, the turning-back of social progress.

Another change from McDonell’s story treatment to the screenplay that I find interesting is that of Young Charlie’s love interest. McDonell had him as a “ne’er-do-well” that she is engaged to, someone who is assumed by all in her town to be guilty of any crime committed there, including a hold-up.

In the film, this love interest becomes one of the two detectives pursuing Uncle Charlie. He is Detective Jack Graham (Carey). Just as with the switch from landladies to wealthy widows as Uncle Charlie’s victims, the switch from a criminal ne’er-do-well to a cop as Uncle Charlie’s rival seems to confirm my anti-communist allegory. Let me explain.

Fascists are fanatical anti-communists known for using violence to achieve their ends. Now, neither Detective Graham nor his colleague, Detective Fred Saunders (Ford) show any violence in the film, but other detectives out east, when pursuing another suspect in the widow stranglings, cause the suspect, whom we’ll know to be innocent, to run into and be sliced to pieces by the propellor of an airplane. Fascists have also demonstrated a peculiar charm to inspire the sympathies of the masses, as Hitler did with his speeches about ‘saving Germany’ from the Jews and communists.

Detective Graham, smitten with Young Charlie as soon as he and Saunders arrive at her house to pretend to survey a typical American family (actually to get photos of her Uncle Charlie as a suspect in the stranglings), puts on the charm to win her heart. His actions to this end allegorically represent fascism trying to charm liberals (whom she represents) into joining the far-right.

What we actually have in this film is a kind of perverse love triangle of him, her, and Uncle Charlie (recall the incestuous, Oedipal transference I discussed above between the latter two). Ideologically, it represents how the left and right vie for the liberal centre (the petite bourgeoisie that we see in Young Charlie’s family) to join them. We’re meant to believe that she should go for the detective who represents the right.

That her initial attraction to her uncle is incestuous is meant to make us abominate the adoption of leftist ideas, however charming they may be about sympathizing with the poor. That the violence of the far right is more or less completely excised from the detectives (that propellor death mentioned merely in passing) is meant to make us believe that the right is harmless.

Graham and Saunders are very interested in getting a photo of Young Charlie’s bedroom (Since her uncle, as a guest, is sleeping there, the detectives hope to get closer to him.). Apart from the detectives’ continued pursuit of her uncle, this getting into her bedroom has obvious sexual overtones.

When Young Charlie learns that the two men are detectives and not surveyors of a typical American family, she’s furious with Graham for lying to her, and she’s even more upset with him when he claimed her “wonderful” uncle could be a murderer. Graham has to put on some extra charm to win her over to him.

My associating of the detectives with fascism, again, as far-fetched as it sounds on the surface, might begin to make sense to you, Dear Reader, when we consider this film as an anti-communist allegory. While liberals, of whom Hitchcock can be counted as one, may publicly abominate fascism, secretly they will feel drawn to it if their class interests feel in danger from crisis or an organized working class.

If there’s one thing fascists are useful for, it’s fighting communism: one need only look into Operation Paperclip, Gladio, and the underground activities of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers during the Cold War years, among many other examples, to see my point. Their violence and subterfuge are typically hidden or downplayed by the liberal media, as has been the case with the years since the US/NATO-backed coup in 2014 that replaced democratically-elected Yanukovych with a Ukrainian government and military that includes neonazis.

Such a hiding of violence and conspiracy can be seen allegorically in the activities of Graham and Saunders. One must wonder how detectives chasing a suspect in the eastern US, as it turns out, an innocent suspect, escalates to him running into an airplane propellor and getting sliced up. How is this just an unfortunate accident? There must have been considerable aggression on the part of the detectives to have led to that bloody end.

Fearing that Young Charlie will inform on him sooner or later, her uncle makes several attempts on her life. First, he sabotages the porch steps so she’ll fall down them. Then, he leaves the family car idling in the garage–whose door is stuck, making it almost impossible to get out–so when she goes in to use the car that night, she almost dies from inhaling the exhaust fumes. Finally, on the train to leave Santa Rosa with her there, he tries to throw her off as it’s going; but in the struggle, he falls off and dies under the tracks of an oncoming train.

A funeral is given to honour Uncle Charlie, whose crimes will never be known for fear of the crushing disgrace it would do to her family, surely causing her mother Emma to die of a broken heart. Only Young Charlie and Graham, still wooing her, know the truth.

According to my allegory, the film seems to be saying that the ‘truth’ about socialism would be too hurtful for the working class to know if bluntly stated, hence the telling of that ‘truth’ in this indirect manner, to soften the pain of its revelation.

Graham and Young Charlie doubt her uncle’s characterization of the world as a hell. When one is a member of the petite bourgeoisie (as she is) or higher up, it is fairly easy to suppose that the world has more than enough good in it to offset the bad. The global proletariat–especially those in the global south, as well as so many of us experiencing the neoliberalism of the past forty years (even well-off Luigi)–tend to have a less rosy image of the world.

Dunes

Men erect
edifices, imagining
we’ll look on them and despair.
But these are houses built on the sand–
one day, they’ll crumble, like sand castles, and be dunes.

One tears
up the trees, imagining
the plant life of the Earth is limitless.
But when grass no longer grows, and green turns brown,
those castles made of sand will turn into barren dunes eventually.

One wages war
and heightens heat, imagining
that gold and paper green will last forever.
But these are worthless colours without the green of the ground.
Dunes will one day make us look on these works of the wicked, and despair.

Leftist Fundamentals

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I: Introduction

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

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

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

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

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II: The Fundamentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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III: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s do it, comrades.

When Tech Is Dreck

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As a Canadian expatriate having lived in Taiwan for the past 28 years (as of the publication of this post), I have seen many instances of the locals’ fetishization of the latest in technology. They typically link high-tech with ‘convenience,’ which of course is its ostensible raison d’être.

One time, perhaps about fifteen to twenty years ago, I was a guest teacher in a class of high school English students. I was doing lectures on topics based on newspaper articles chosen by the regular teacher of the class. She typically chose articles on the topics of science and technology, since her students were probably mostly going to go into STEM fields.

Such choices of topics were fine with me, but at one point I suggested news articles based on current events in politics, which I thought would not only be far more interesting to the students, but also an important way to immerse the kids in the goings-on of other countries, as well as getting them to be more aware of the major political issues affecting the world. After all, I had noticed something of an island mentality among far too many of the locals, a tendency to be insular and show no interest in the world beyond Japan, South Korea, and mainland China.

That teacher was adamantly opposed to the idea of current events as lecture topics. I found her opposition utterly baffling. Apart from suggesting she get someone other than me to do the lectures for the class (for my apparent belabouring of the change in subject matter…!), she gave the following as her reasons: classrooms in general avoid discussions of current events, for such avoidance is “common sense.” It’s sensible to avoid the topic, because everybody else avoids it.

???

A discussion of political issues in class, far from being inappropriate, could be made into practical English conversation practice, in the form of debates in which students can be put into teams and argue the various points of view, regardless of whether or not they actually hold such points of view. But no: making students in any way politically literate was a no-no. We just stuck to topics on technology.

As an English teacher here, I’ve noticed over the years that kids in the Taiwanese education system are generally geared towards careers in engineering, computers, semiconductor and cellphone manufacturing, and that sort of thing. It’s about getting them to have jobs in high tech in order to make lots of money, in other words. One is totally indoctrinated into the capitalist system, never to question it. After all, TINA.

Now, my political leanings as of those years hadn’t yet drifted to the left (so I wasn’t trying to impose my personal political opinions on the kids), but the education system here shows no desire whatsoever to instill any kind of political consciousness in the kids, be it right-wing, left-wing, or centrist. As a result, all that’s left for the kids to espouse is the default worldview: neoliberalism, treated as if it were the universal truth, an ideological ‘end of history,’ in which prostrating oneself to the mercies of the all-mighty market is the only way to live. It isn’t even an ideology: it’s just ‘the truth.’

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Further Taiwanese fetishizing of high-tech can be seen with the locals willingly buying things with their smartphones instead of using cash. Oh, boy–we have another excuse to play with our phones! It’s so convenient! Oh, really? Standing there, fumbling around with your phone, clicking things, making mistakes here and there, then clicking on them again…somehow, this fiddling around is more convenient than taking cash out of your wallet, giving it to the cashier, taking your paid-for items and change, then promptly leaving the store?

Using smartphones instead of cash to pay for things is leading to the idea of a future cashless society, something many of us have a legitimate fear of. Paying digitally increases our dependence on the internet. What if there’s an outage? What if we’re hacked? What if we, for some reason, get locked out of our accounts and cannot buy food or other necessities? What if our being locked out of them is because we’ve expressed an opinion that the snooping government doesn’t like?

In this imagined, and very possible, future scenario, we can see the duality of a fetishization of technology vs. a total lack of engagement with what’s happening in the world politically. But the problem doesn’t end with digital payment.

The latest technological trend, of course, has been AI, and in recent months I’ve seen the TV news here in Taiwan awash with stories on Jensen Huang and his company, in my opinion aptly named Nvidia (Invidia, a Latin word from which we get envy, means ‘looking at (someone) with the evil eye, with hostility.’). The locals are treating Huang like a celebrity, not least of all because he’s Taiwanese-American, but also, of course, because of their ongoing fetishization of the newest in technology.

Now, AI can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how it’s used. Put another way, AI can be used to do all of our work, which, depending on which economic system we have, can be a good or a bad thing.

If we have an economic system in which commodities and services are provided to fulfill everyone’s needs, then AI will be the great liberator of all of humanity. That is, if everyone around the Earth was provided with and guaranteed access to food, housing, education, healthcare, and all other forms of wherewithal, we’d never have to work again to survive. We could all actually enjoy life.

But, in our current economic system, in which commodities and services are here to maximize profits, with no consideration given to the needs of the poor, then AI taking our jobs away from us would be an absolute nightmare. I see no indications of our current economic system changing from a capitalist one to a socialist one any time in the foreseeable future. The shift from the US/NATO alliance to a BRICS one will still be largely of countries with a capitalist economic system.

It’s been argued that old jobs lost to AI can, in some cases, be replaced with new jobs operating the AI. Not everybody losing the old jobs, however, will have the ability, the desire, or the finances to be trained to do the new jobs. As an English teacher here in Taiwan, I’m very worried that, in the next few years, I’ll be replaced by a robot in at least some, if not most or even all, of my classes; and since the beginning of all the Covid hysteria, I’ve been chronically underemployed as it is.

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Furthermore, AI can be used in aid of surveillance by the government and corporations, eroding our right to privacy. It was bad enough to know what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA’s snooping around with our cellphone calls and email messages years ago. What is Facebook, but a large profile of each and every person’s likes and dislikes, political opinions, geographic location, friends and family, etc.? Then there’s surveillance through such things as Google. Our constant use of smartphones makes it easy to track us. AI is only going to make this monitoring easier, more meticulous, and more thorough.

Big Broadband is watching you. All of this surveillance, being expanded into such things as smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities, is eerily Orwellian. Indeed, that smart TVs have cameras installed in them, so the watcher becomes the watched, reminds me of the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four. Now, while Orwell’s dystopia was meant as a satire of totalitarianism, and of Stalin in particular, we shouldn’t be so dull-witted as to think that any of this oppressive new technology is in the service of socialism–quite the contrary.

First of all, contrary to the alarmist right-wing nonsense we hear in the media (including the verbal flatulence we hear from the puckered mouth of Trump), our society is not being inundated with Marxist ideology. If anything, Marxism is moribund. The only Marxist-Leninist governments in the world currently are Cuba, North Korea, and (arguably) China, Vietnam, and Laos.

What the far-right idiotically calls ‘extremist, far-left, Marxist’ politicians are typically just liberals. A genuine communist would push for revolution to help the poor, not vote Democrat. Leftists are anti-Zionist, unlike any politician in the mainstream. Etc., etc.

But more to the point is that all this high-tech surveillance is in the service of capitalism and imperialism, not socialism. Right-wingers have to get over this cretinous idea that if the government does something, it’s automatically socialist, and that any form of political corruption is also socialist. There is such a thing as capitalist government, and it’s every bit as capable of being huge, bloated, and bureaucratic as a socialist state can be.

The kind of government we find in the vast majority of countries in the world are those supportive of the neoliberal ‘free market.’ Their governments intervene in and regulate the economy in ways that help the big corporations, which are capitalist—‘corporatism’ is needless verbiage used by right-wing libertarians to deflect responsibility away from themselves for having supported an economic system that has been, especially over the past 45 years, an unmitigated disaster.

Anyway, the state will use all of this AI surveillance, as well as the eventual disappearance of cash, to seek out and punish anyone who tries to make the people rise up in revolution and attempt to overthrow the capitalist system that continues to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Much censorship of Facebook and Twitter posts is for those who, for example, protest the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Support for Israel is extremely important to the Western empire and the maintenance of the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ Some have argued that the liberation of Palestine will lead to a toppling of the capitalist/imperialist system. We who want that liberation are thus seen as a threat to the system: as AI surveillance and cashless societies flourish, we will surely be punished with far more than mere censorship.

The surveillance serves the interests of the bourgeois state because, of course, it also serves the very interests of the bourgeoisie itself. Most of us have surely seen by now that any time we show an interest in this or that product online, similar ones pop up in ads on our devices when we, for example, are scrolling on Facebook. Big Business is watching you.

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At the beginning of this article, I wrote specifically of the Taiwanese fetishizing of technology not to suggest that only the locals where I live have this problem, but rather that seeing specifically the locals’ adoration of AI et al is just something I see right before my eyes. There’s little doubt in my mind that there’s at least a comparable, if not sometimes even greater, fetishizing of high-tech elsewhere, all over the world. As a symptom of a very global neoliberalism, fetishization of technology is a manifestation of what Marx called the fetishization of the commodity.

The worship of things, as opposed to acknowledging their origins in the workers’ production process, that is, focusing on things instead of on people, is what keeps us all, whether here in Taiwan (i.e., lectures on tech instead of on the current events that affect us all) or anywhere else in the world, under the spell of the ruling class. It’s one of many ways they keep us under their control.

There’s the brute force, surveillance, and gaslighting as depicted in Nineteen Eighty-four that is used to keep their power over us secure and intact; there is also the seducing and distracting of us with pleasure, as depicted in Huxley‘s Brave New World, with drugs and sexual indulgence. In our world, those drugs can be literal narcotics or the metaphorical opium of the people–religion. The sexual indulgence can come in the forms of internet porn, OnlyFans, or those countless photos of curvaceous beauties in string bikinis we see as we scroll down our Facebook feeds. The ruling class keeps us in check through bullying (militarized police, imperialist invasions, coups d’état), high-tech surveillance, propaganda, or addictions to pleasure.

I tried to allegorize all these issues in several short stories I’ve written over the past several months. In particular, these include “The Harvest,” “The Portal,” and “Neville.”

In “The Harvest,” reptilian aliens come to Earth and take over a town guised as doctors and nurses who take advantage of sick people and drug them so they can harvest all their organs. In “The Portal,” a young woman–while high on acid–stumbles into a portal that takes her to…a spaceship, or an alien planet?…where she discovers that aliens are working with human collaborators to conquer the Earth as part of an alien agenda of imperialism and colonization, enlisting the help of powerful human organizations like DARPA, with such forms of oppressive technology as robot dogs. In “Neville,” aliens invade Earth by impregnating women (through great sex!), having them give birth to half-alien children–all identical-looking and unusually large, growing fast–who hog all the food, starving the rest of humanity.

In these stories, I was using the invading aliens as personifications of imperialists who kill and plunder the Third World for resources. The use of drugs and sex in the stories was meant to represent how the ruling class uses these forms of pleasure to distract and control us.

Caitlin Johnstone made a comment that I assume to be a passage from one of her many articles, which I cannot for the life of me find so I can link it here. But to paraphrase the essence of what she said, it was that, while the potential for abuse of all of this new technology (digital payments, AI taking our jobs, surveillance through AI, smart TVs, cars, and cities, etc.) should be cause for alarm, the greatest form of control the ruling class has is through the control of our narratives via propaganda. Propaganda is a modern form of manipulative know-how.

Part of our liberation from all of these oppressive forces will be through the transforming of our narratives from ones that keep our eyes shut–dreaming all the time, as it were–to waking us all up. Addictions to pleasure–the drugs of religion or the literal ones, pics and video of beautiful nude or seminude women, video games, Hollywood movies (with CIA approval!), etc.–keep us asleep. Waking us all up, though, threatens the ruling class. Perhaps that’s why the political right speaks disparagingly about being ‘woke’? So, apparently, it is smarter to remain asleep?

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On my blog, Infinite Ocean, I try to weave new narratives that can raise people’s political consciousness to lead to our liberation. I do this in the form of political articles like this one as well as, whenever applicable, my analyses of literature, film, and music.

We need new, liberating narratives. We need to find ways to take this new tech and use it for our benefit, not that of the ruling class. Most of all, we have to stop fetishizing tech and other commodities at the expense of the people; we need to start caring about the welfare of our communities, for while the ruling class are few, WE ARE MANY. If we take control of tech–to liberate us from work instead of depriving us of it, or having its pile-up of garbage destroy our Earth–then tech will no longer be dreck.

‘African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine

Scholar Charles Onana is being falsely accused of genocide denial, with regards to the tragedy in Rwanda, while his Western accusers look the other way as the genocide in Palestine continues.