Introduction
“A protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work.” – Trotsky
I
The majority of the film reviews, interviews and essays in this book appeared originally in the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org), the Internet-based publication launched by the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in February 1998. A number of items in this collection, which predate the founding of the WSWS, appeared in newspapers published by the Workers League and its successor organization, the Socialist Equality Party. The earliest pieces (1992–93) were written in New York City. I moved to the Detroit area in late 1993, almost simultaneously with the transformation of the Bulletin into the International Workers Bulletin (IWB), where the next selection of reviews and other material appeared (1994–96).
Tracing the provenance of these reviews and essays in terms of their general attitude toward art and culture, leaving aside for the moment questions of personal history and opinion, involves a discussion of both critical world events and the evolution of the Trotskyist movement, to which I have adhered for 40 years. The development within the International Committee of systematic work on problems of culture and art, and my own participation in this process, was the outcome of the ICFI’s response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
At its twelfth Plenum in March 1992, the International Committee examined the historic significance and political implications of that event. It clearly marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the international workers movement. Since the October Revolution of 1917, when the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government and established the first workers state in history, the social, political, intellectual and cultural development of the international working class was inextricably linked to this central event of modern world history.
As the Fourth International had foreseen, the policies of the anti-Marxist and nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy had destroyed the USSR. The international working class had suffered a major defeat. The question was thus posed: upon what basis would a new mass revolutionary socialist movement emerge? Notwithstanding the triumphalism of the ruling elites and the demoralization of legions of petty-bourgeois radicals, who were anxious to affix the preface “ex-” to their earlier and varied leftish political identities, the International Committee insisted that the fundamental objective contradictions of the capitalist system had not been resolved. Indeed, the global integration of capitalist production and the vast world-wide expansion of the working class were leading, more or less rapidly, to the intensification of economic, political and social contradictions that would find expression in a new upsurge of the international class struggle.
But what of the subjective prerequisites for socialist revolution? Through what process would the objective impulses for the overthrow of capitalism find subjective expression in the consciousness of the working class? In his report to the twelfth Plenum, David North, a leading member of the ICFI, sought to answer these critical questions through an examination of the history of the international workers movement, and, in particular, its development in the decades prior to the 1917 October Revolution.
The conquest of power by the Bolshevik Party was not a historical accident, the product of a chance interaction between an especially severe crisis of a bourgeois government and the determined action of a revolutionary party that just happened to be at the right place at the right time. No, the October Revolution was the outcome of a massive growth in the political consciousness of the international working class in the decades that followed the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and, especially, in the aftermath of the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. The forty six years separating the Commune in Paris from the Soviet in Petrograd witnessed an immense development of the political consciousness of the working class, whose most advanced expression was the founding of the Second International in 1889 and the emergence of socialist parties throughout the world, including the mass SPD in Germany.
The growth of socialist consciousness was not only the product of the struggle for specific economic and political demands. The development of art and culture—through the work of writers, painters, musicians (often, but not always, partial to socialism) and the Marxist critics who appraised their efforts—played an immense role in shaping and broadening the outlook of the working class; of sharpening its awareness of the injustices of capitalism; strengthening and refining the workers’ outrage and willingness to sacrifice; and making more ardent their belief and confidence in the possibility of realizing socialism and building a society based on genuine social equality and solidarity.
Socialism required a cultural awakening among a significant section of the working class, for such an awakening is essential to the development of a conscious, revolutionary critical attitude toward capitalist society. This awakening, however, did not occur independently of the efforts of the revolutionary party. Rather, it is the party—the most conscious section of the working class—that leads the fight for this development. The intellectual essence of socialist consciousness is a critical revolutionary attitude to the existing social relations and everyday political assumptions and concepts as they emerge and find “spontaneous” expression in bourgeois society. Thus, the development of the work of the party in the sphere of art and culture had to be an essential component of the struggle for revolutionary socialist consciousness.
The intellectual-political project outlined by the International Committee in 1992 was to have a profound effect on my life and work, and that of my companion Joanne Laurier, within the Trotskyist movement. In 1993 we met with David North in New York City. By this time, I had been working full-time on the Bulletin and the International Workers Bulletin for two years. He discussed the plans for a substantial expansion of the ICFI’s coverage of the arts. Would we agree, he asked, to relocate to Detroit, where I would join the staff of the IWB as its arts editor? We readily accepted the invitation, packed our belongings and arrived in Detroit in late November 1993. There, amidst comrades and friends, we enjoyed a collaborative environment ideal for the development of serious and sustained intellectual work.
Over the years that followed, the international discussion and coordination of political and cultural work within the Trotskyist movement made great strides, a process accelerated by various technological advances, including the Internet. Since 1998, the project of the World Socialist Web Site has been sustained by an extraordinary global political-intellectual collaboration of revolutionary Marxists.
In the course of this work, a remarkable group of commentators on film, music and art has emerged, including Joanne Laurier and Fred Mazelis in the US, Paul Bond in Britain, Sybille Fuchs and Stefan Steinberg in Germany, Richard Philips in Australia and the late Piyaseeli Wijetungasinghe in Sri Lanka, to name only a few of the comrades who have made significant contributions to the development of the cultural work of the WSWS.
The results recorded in the articles posted on our web site testify to the intellectual vitality and democratic spirit of the political and cultural life of the international Trotskyist movement out of which this work emerged. The integration of cultural work into the daily political life of the ICFI represents an extraordinary achievement, whose political consequences will become increasingly clear as dramatic political events unfold within the United States and internationally.
II
In writing about the global film industry, there is always the temptation to see its difficulties and failings in largely subjective terms. That is certainly how the industry generally sees itself. Given the quality of the products, the personalities and the vast sums of money involved, there is much to complain about. However, in the end, the narrowness and even perfidy of studio executives, the general turn to the right by a significant portion of the intelligentsia, the artistic weaknesses and failings of the filmmakers themselves, the prominence of various scoundrels and charlatans—while all of them genuine factors in the current problems—are subjective expressions of an objective process.
We seek to trace out the conditions and character of cinema in our time from the conditions and character of the world in our time. The evolution of filmmaking is embedded in social development. One of the critical tasks, in our view, paraphrasing the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov (and the nineteenth century Russian critic V.G. Belinsky), is to define at what point on the social path the film writers and directors found humanity. Cinema, a mass art form, is especially sensitive to the level of the class struggle, to the political and social activity and consciousness of the working class. Filmmakers have been nourished by social movements and, conversely, starved by their absence.
A number of essays in this volume point to the influence of the upsurge in the American working class, as well as the Russian Revolution and social upheavals in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, on Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s in particular. Many writers, directors and actors gravitated to the left, for the most part toward the Communist Party. That specific history has its ultimately tragic dimensions, but the ability of American movies to reflect life and entertain masses of people was indisputably bound up with this radicalization.
Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and John Ford, three of the greatest figures of the era, were all considered artists of the left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In reality, there were many in Hollywood, US-born and émigrés alike, prepared to criticize important features of American capitalist life, as a series of films in the postwar world demonstrates (Ruthless, The Lady from Shanghai, Force of Evil, Body and Soul, The Best Years of Our Lives, Caught, Flamingo Road, Key Largo and others).
The launching of the film industry blacklist in 1947 and the crude, brutal hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 and 1951–52 were not paranoid fishing expeditions. The possibility of a mass audience being exposed to radical views represented a genuine ideological threat to the US ruling elite that had to be dealt with.
The emergence of the United States as the leading imperialist power, signaled by the mass exterminations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anticommunist poisoning of the political and intellectual atmosphere shattered the illusion that a more egalitarian, even socialistic society was on the agenda in America.
The left-wing elements in Hollywood, the New York theater and elsewhere were entirely unprepared and ill equipped for the McCarthyite witch-hunts and, ultimately, the political retreat of the working class in the postwar period.
Miseducated and intellectually disarmed by Stalinism, these layers were working off a false reading of the critical experiences of the 1930s and 1940s. They had been all too easily convinced that Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, resolute defenders of capitalism, could lead the population out of the social misery of the Depression, something only accomplished by the outbreak of a new imperialist war.
Then, once the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941, the artists in and around the Communist Party threw themselves into supporting the war and, in the process, helped to disorient a considerable portion of the American population. The American left, in the thrall of the Communist Party’s pro-Roosevelt “Popular Frontism,” was to a great extent indifferent or even hostile to the great questions of historic and political principles raised by Trotsky’s fight against the Stalinist betrayal of the 1917 October Revolution. (Of course, there were honorable exceptions to this stance among actors and writers. The names of Edward G. Robinson, James T. Farrell, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy come immediately to mind).
The outright purging of left-wing film artists and the cowing of so many others had a devastating and long-term impact, whose consequences we still live with today. Nonetheless, the emergence of the explosive struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s, the growth of popular and cultural opposition to the Vietnam War and the general state of rebelliousness of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the major urban uprisings in Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit, continued to sustain the filmmakers, although in a politically more amorphous and diminished fashion.
The “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and 1970s (Penn, Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick, Cassavetes, Ashby, Cimino, Malick, Allen, Lumet, Pollack, Benton, Peckinpah, Nichols, Polanski et al.) produced some fresh and innovative work, which at times took a searching look at official American institutions and mythologies. However, even the most nonconformist films suffered from a diluted interest in the concrete conditions and life of the working class, as well as a profound lack of awareness about the events that had shaped the previous half-century and therefore their own times.
These weaknesses were essential ingredients, more generally, of the middle class protest politics of the day. As we have noted a number of times, the “New Left” rejected a socialist orientation to the working class and avoided a historical reckoning—above all—with the Russian Revolution and the nature of Stalinism, either because the issues were too complex or because they hit a little too close to home.
Contrary to the shallow notion that circulates in the media and the universities, the most important feature of the period 1968–75 was not the “counterculture” or even the student revolt. In a number of countries (France, Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Chile and others), genuinely pre-revolutionary conditions arose, which threatened the existence of the capitalist social order—and which could have altered the course of modern history. However, the Stalinists, social democrats and centrists were able to destroy the revolutionary potential in each circumstance and preserve bourgeois rule.
III
The severe decline of filmmaking in the last several decades has coincided with a period of social reaction. The militant working class movement in the US, not based on conscious opposition to capitalism and remaining under the political aegis of the Democratic Party, found itself in a blind alley. The American ruling elite, from the late 1970s onward, rallied and organized a counteroffensive, first under Jimmy Carter and then, more systematically, under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and, most recently, Barack Obama.
The processes of global economic integration dealt lethal blows to all the national-opportunist labor organizations and Stalinist regimes, and the resulting re-integration of Russia and especially China provided imperialism with a breathing space. Workers found themselves on the defensive and the ballyhoo about the “end of socialism,” as noted above, had a significant impact on those leftists and intellectuals who were already half-looking, in any case, for a means of climbing back “on board.” The stock market and real estate boom, and the money to be made in the media and entertainment industry, provided even more compelling incentives.
In its modern history, the US has never known a period of social quiescence like the 1990s and 2000s—the product of the forcible and artificial suppression of the class struggle. No improvement in the social circumstances of wide layers of the population—the material basis for the political (and intellectual) conformism and conservatism of the early 1950s—was occurring. Quite the contrary, those circumstances were deteriorating sharply and social inequality was growing like a cancer.
However, a combination of economic and ideological processes, including the worthlessness of the old trade unions and protest movements, left the working class temporarily paralyzed. It is here, in this confluence of social developments, that we have to locate the fundamental source of the decline of American filmmaking in the last third of a century. Under these conditions, the more principled and astute artists became discouraged, entered into crisis and either fell silent or went “with the flow”; the trivial, the self-absorbed, the socially disoriented came to the fore.
The already eroded state of historical and social consciousness, the product of decades of anticommunist propaganda and the campaign against socially oriented art, as well as the rejection by the anti-Marxist “left” (Frankfurt School, existentialism, postmodernism) of the concepts of objective truth, reason and progress, rendered the artists especially vulnerable.
Plekhanov once referred to “periods of social indifferentism” that “correspond to the stage of social development when the given ruling class is preparing to leave the historical stage, but has not yet done so because the class which is to put an end to its rule has not yet fully matured.” In such periods, he wrote, the artists’ “souls fall into a ‘cold slumber,’ their moral level sinks very low. They do not then ask themselves whether the cause is right or whether the order that they are serving with their talent is a good one. They seek only rich patrons, concern themselves only with the profitable sale of their works.”1
The revival of art and culture is dependent today on the revival of the class struggle and the workers movement on a new socialist and internationalist basis. Art cannot save itself, as Trotsky noted, “It will rot away inevitably … unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character.”2
The resurgence of widespread and tumultuous opposition to the profit system will help scatter the “clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind,”3 including the artists’ horizon.
IV
The International Committee of the Fourth International has been alone in taking on “Western Marxism,” the Frankfurt School and other reactionary “left” tendencies and subjecting them to criticism. The pseudo-left organizations wash their hands of the responsibility of examining artistic trends altogether, encourage banal protest or identity politics “agitprop,” leave the field open for the likes of various “left” academics, or do a combination of all three.
The lingering prominence of these “left” intellectuals, whose activity and thought are rooted in a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and hostility to Trotsky’s perspective of world socialist revolution, is a consequence of the protracted decline in the influence of classical Marxism. The genocide of socialists carried out by Stalin and the persecutions of the fascist regimes devastated an entire generation of Marxists. The most direct impact of this immeasurable loss was a terrible lowering of the political and cultural level of the international workers movement.
Paradoxically, the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided objective conditions for the renewal of the culture of classical Marxism within the international working class. But this renewal could not develop as an automatic process. The International Committee of the Fourth International understood the historical significance and political implications of the breakdown of the USSR and devised an intellectually creative response to this event.
In developing its cultural work, the ICFI could draw upon the tradition and example of the Trotskyist movement’s engagement in this sphere. One of the opening shots in the conflict with the incipient Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1923–24), aimed at the cultural backwardness within which the national-bureaucratic caste flourished. Published a decade and a half later, the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” (1938), co-authored by Trotsky and French writer André Breton, and signed by Mexican painter Diego Rivera, which argued that “true art is unable not to be revolutionary,” remains one of the strongest statements ever produced in defense of art and intellectual freedom.
The title of this book comes from Breton’s poem “In the beautiful half-light of 1934,” which I interpret as a reference to the attempt to see through the immediate obstructions to a brighter and broader reality.
These reviews and essays begin from the notion that art is a means of knowing and orienting oneself in the world, that the significant artist strives to make his or her work correspond to the actual nature of things and that work accomplishing this has an objectively true and enduring value. “Art points through and beyond itself,” in Hegel’s phrase, toward essential truths about the wider world of society, human relationships and psychology.
Art brings to our attention the greatest human concerns not in the form of scientific or philosophical reasoning, but in pictorial and sensuous form, in concrete images, which please or move or trouble, or do all three. The artist does not prove the truth of his or her conceptions, but shows it. “The true artist, like the true scientist, always adds to what existed before him.”4 However, this theoretical distinction between different modes of the cognition of objective truth—the scientific and artistic—must be understood dialectically.
The artistic search for emotional truth is not a license for indifference to historical, social and political context. Or, as Marx once aptly remarked, “Ignorance never helped anyone!”
Moreover, whatever the level of the theoretical and social consciousness of a given artist, the critic has no right whatever to base evaluations of artistic work on nothing more than his or her own unresolved and intuitive emotional responses. The critic never simply “feels.” He or she also must think. The critic must not indulge either the artist or himself. His or her thoughtful apprehension of the work at hand, bringing to bear not only an aesthetic sensibility but also historical knowledge and social insight, is essential to its evaluation and appreciation.
The claim that Marxist criticism consists of nothing more than a formulaic identification of the “class standpoint” of one or another artist, writer, filmmaker, or architect is—like most anti-Marxist shibboleths—a vulgar slander. Insofar as there are tendencies in the academic “left” that see their task as unmasking artwork as mere forms of bourgeois manipulation and the artist as nothing more than a “social construct,” they represent a thoroughgoing repudiation of scientific socialism.
Marxism, which has inspired the most sophisticated works of criticism, has polemicized relentlessly against the sort of tendentiousness that reduces art to the level of propaganda. Art has to be judged by its authenticity, depth, sincerity and beauty. These qualities depend, however, upon the artist’s capacity to express with honesty and fearlessness some critical aspect of the “ensemble of social relations” of which reality consists.
The class struggle, capitalism, exploitation, poverty, imperialism and war are not merely propagandistic terms. They are the objective categories, properties and elements of objective reality in which modern social life is embedded. And the fact that this is insufficiently acknowledged, ignored and even denied by so many would-be artists and “opinion makers” is a major symptom of the crisis of contemporary culture. Those who believe that it is possible to reveal “emotional truth” without shedding light mercilessly on social reality are deceiving their audiences and lying to themselves.
We have now entered a period of upheavals in which a new mass movement against capitalism will emerge. The resurgence of the class struggle will inspire a new generation of artists and suggest new creative paths and possibilities. In this process the struggle of the revolutionary party for the development of socialist consciousness within the working class will play a critical and indispensable role.
This volume is a contribution to the efforts of the ICFI over the past two decades to direct the attention of workers and young people to the state of artistic and cultural life, to raise their understanding and sensitivity and broaden their outlook. The aim of this book is to raise the consciousness of the working class and youth, by shedding light on the general problems of culture in our time, by calling attention to the most telling artistic successes and failures and by encouraging viewers, critics and artists alike to adopt a more searching attitude toward filmmaking and to see and feel the world in a new way.
At the same time, we certainly seek to influence artists attempting to climb out of the mire of the present culture. We are confident that from among the young, the unknown, those subsisting on little or nothing at present, will emerge filmmakers, writers, painters, who will put artistic truth before everything else.
In conclusion, permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades whose counsel was essential to the working out of the ideas that find expression in this book. The writings in this volume developed through the dialectic of close intellectual collaboration involving the continuous exchange of drafts, rewrites, discussion, disagreements, conflicts and reconciliations. I consider myself fortunate to be part of a world community of revolutionary internationalists whose conceptions of art are inseparably bound up with the struggle for the socialist liberation of the working class and all humanity.
1 Georgi Plekhanov, “V.G. Belinsky’s Literary Views,” Selected Philosophical Works, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), 204.
2 Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 106.
3 Ibid., 114.
4 Aleksandr Voronsky, “On Art,” Art as the Cognition of Life (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 1998), 214.
* * * * *
Note: The editors have made every effort to track down the original sources of the various comments by critics and filmmakers cited, and, for the most part, have succeeded. However, given the sometimes ephemeral character of information and even publications in the digital age, certain sources have apparently been lost in the mists of time.
October 7, 2013
I
The majority of the film reviews, interviews and essays in this book appeared originally in the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org), the Internet-based publication launched by the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in February 1998. A number of items in this collection, which predate the founding of the WSWS, appeared in newspapers published by the Workers League and its successor organization, the Socialist Equality Party. The earliest pieces (1992–93) were written in New York City. I moved to the Detroit area in late 1993, almost simultaneously with the transformation of the Bulletin into the International Workers Bulletin (IWB), where the next selection of reviews and other material appeared (1994–96).
Tracing the provenance of these reviews and essays in terms of their general attitude toward art and culture, leaving aside for the moment questions of personal history and opinion, involves a discussion of both critical world events and the evolution of the Trotskyist movement, to which I have adhered for 40 years. The development within the International Committee of systematic work on problems of culture and art, and my own participation in this process, was the outcome of the ICFI’s response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
At its twelfth Plenum in March 1992, the International Committee examined the historic significance and political implications of that event. It clearly marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the international workers movement. Since the October Revolution of 1917, when the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government and established the first workers state in history, the social, political, intellectual and cultural development of the international working class was inextricably linked to this central event of modern world history.
As the Fourth International had foreseen, the policies of the anti-Marxist and nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy had destroyed the USSR. The international working class had suffered a major defeat. The question was thus posed: upon what basis would a new mass revolutionary socialist movement emerge? Notwithstanding the triumphalism of the ruling elites and the demoralization of legions of petty-bourgeois radicals, who were anxious to affix the preface “ex-” to their earlier and varied leftish political identities, the International Committee insisted that the fundamental objective contradictions of the capitalist system had not been resolved. Indeed, the global integration of capitalist production and the vast world-wide expansion of the working class were leading, more or less rapidly, to the intensification of economic, political and social contradictions that would find expression in a new upsurge of the international class struggle.
But what of the subjective prerequisites for socialist revolution? Through what process would the objective impulses for the overthrow of capitalism find subjective expression in the consciousness of the working class? In his report to the twelfth Plenum, David North, a leading member of the ICFI, sought to answer these critical questions through an examination of the history of the international workers movement, and, in particular, its development in the decades prior to the 1917 October Revolution.
The conquest of power by the Bolshevik Party was not a historical accident, the product of a chance interaction between an especially severe crisis of a bourgeois government and the determined action of a revolutionary party that just happened to be at the right place at the right time. No, the October Revolution was the outcome of a massive growth in the political consciousness of the international working class in the decades that followed the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and, especially, in the aftermath of the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. The forty six years separating the Commune in Paris from the Soviet in Petrograd witnessed an immense development of the political consciousness of the working class, whose most advanced expression was the founding of the Second International in 1889 and the emergence of socialist parties throughout the world, including the mass SPD in Germany.
The growth of socialist consciousness was not only the product of the struggle for specific economic and political demands. The development of art and culture—through the work of writers, painters, musicians (often, but not always, partial to socialism) and the Marxist critics who appraised their efforts—played an immense role in shaping and broadening the outlook of the working class; of sharpening its awareness of the injustices of capitalism; strengthening and refining the workers’ outrage and willingness to sacrifice; and making more ardent their belief and confidence in the possibility of realizing socialism and building a society based on genuine social equality and solidarity.
Socialism required a cultural awakening among a significant section of the working class, for such an awakening is essential to the development of a conscious, revolutionary critical attitude toward capitalist society. This awakening, however, did not occur independently of the efforts of the revolutionary party. Rather, it is the party—the most conscious section of the working class—that leads the fight for this development. The intellectual essence of socialist consciousness is a critical revolutionary attitude to the existing social relations and everyday political assumptions and concepts as they emerge and find “spontaneous” expression in bourgeois society. Thus, the development of the work of the party in the sphere of art and culture had to be an essential component of the struggle for revolutionary socialist consciousness.
The intellectual-political project outlined by the International Committee in 1992 was to have a profound effect on my life and work, and that of my companion Joanne Laurier, within the Trotskyist movement. In 1993 we met with David North in New York City. By this time, I had been working full-time on the Bulletin and the International Workers Bulletin for two years. He discussed the plans for a substantial expansion of the ICFI’s coverage of the arts. Would we agree, he asked, to relocate to Detroit, where I would join the staff of the IWB as its arts editor? We readily accepted the invitation, packed our belongings and arrived in Detroit in late November 1993. There, amidst comrades and friends, we enjoyed a collaborative environment ideal for the development of serious and sustained intellectual work.
Over the years that followed, the international discussion and coordination of political and cultural work within the Trotskyist movement made great strides, a process accelerated by various technological advances, including the Internet. Since 1998, the project of the World Socialist Web Site has been sustained by an extraordinary global political-intellectual collaboration of revolutionary Marxists.
In the course of this work, a remarkable group of commentators on film, music and art has emerged, including Joanne Laurier and Fred Mazelis in the US, Paul Bond in Britain, Sybille Fuchs and Stefan Steinberg in Germany, Richard Philips in Australia and the late Piyaseeli Wijetungasinghe in Sri Lanka, to name only a few of the comrades who have made significant contributions to the development of the cultural work of the WSWS.
The results recorded in the articles posted on our web site testify to the intellectual vitality and democratic spirit of the political and cultural life of the international Trotskyist movement out of which this work emerged. The integration of cultural work into the daily political life of the ICFI represents an extraordinary achievement, whose political consequences will become increasingly clear as dramatic political events unfold within the United States and internationally.
II
In writing about the global film industry, there is always the temptation to see its difficulties and failings in largely subjective terms. That is certainly how the industry generally sees itself. Given the quality of the products, the personalities and the vast sums of money involved, there is much to complain about. However, in the end, the narrowness and even perfidy of studio executives, the general turn to the right by a significant portion of the intelligentsia, the artistic weaknesses and failings of the filmmakers themselves, the prominence of various scoundrels and charlatans—while all of them genuine factors in the current problems—are subjective expressions of an objective process.
We seek to trace out the conditions and character of cinema in our time from the conditions and character of the world in our time. The evolution of filmmaking is embedded in social development. One of the critical tasks, in our view, paraphrasing the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov (and the nineteenth century Russian critic V.G. Belinsky), is to define at what point on the social path the film writers and directors found humanity. Cinema, a mass art form, is especially sensitive to the level of the class struggle, to the political and social activity and consciousness of the working class. Filmmakers have been nourished by social movements and, conversely, starved by their absence.
A number of essays in this volume point to the influence of the upsurge in the American working class, as well as the Russian Revolution and social upheavals in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, on Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s in particular. Many writers, directors and actors gravitated to the left, for the most part toward the Communist Party. That specific history has its ultimately tragic dimensions, but the ability of American movies to reflect life and entertain masses of people was indisputably bound up with this radicalization.
Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and John Ford, three of the greatest figures of the era, were all considered artists of the left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In reality, there were many in Hollywood, US-born and émigrés alike, prepared to criticize important features of American capitalist life, as a series of films in the postwar world demonstrates (Ruthless, The Lady from Shanghai, Force of Evil, Body and Soul, The Best Years of Our Lives, Caught, Flamingo Road, Key Largo and others).
The launching of the film industry blacklist in 1947 and the crude, brutal hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 and 1951–52 were not paranoid fishing expeditions. The possibility of a mass audience being exposed to radical views represented a genuine ideological threat to the US ruling elite that had to be dealt with.
The emergence of the United States as the leading imperialist power, signaled by the mass exterminations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anticommunist poisoning of the political and intellectual atmosphere shattered the illusion that a more egalitarian, even socialistic society was on the agenda in America.
The left-wing elements in Hollywood, the New York theater and elsewhere were entirely unprepared and ill equipped for the McCarthyite witch-hunts and, ultimately, the political retreat of the working class in the postwar period.
Miseducated and intellectually disarmed by Stalinism, these layers were working off a false reading of the critical experiences of the 1930s and 1940s. They had been all too easily convinced that Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, resolute defenders of capitalism, could lead the population out of the social misery of the Depression, something only accomplished by the outbreak of a new imperialist war.
Then, once the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941, the artists in and around the Communist Party threw themselves into supporting the war and, in the process, helped to disorient a considerable portion of the American population. The American left, in the thrall of the Communist Party’s pro-Roosevelt “Popular Frontism,” was to a great extent indifferent or even hostile to the great questions of historic and political principles raised by Trotsky’s fight against the Stalinist betrayal of the 1917 October Revolution. (Of course, there were honorable exceptions to this stance among actors and writers. The names of Edward G. Robinson, James T. Farrell, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy come immediately to mind).
The outright purging of left-wing film artists and the cowing of so many others had a devastating and long-term impact, whose consequences we still live with today. Nonetheless, the emergence of the explosive struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s, the growth of popular and cultural opposition to the Vietnam War and the general state of rebelliousness of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the major urban uprisings in Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit, continued to sustain the filmmakers, although in a politically more amorphous and diminished fashion.
The “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and 1970s (Penn, Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick, Cassavetes, Ashby, Cimino, Malick, Allen, Lumet, Pollack, Benton, Peckinpah, Nichols, Polanski et al.) produced some fresh and innovative work, which at times took a searching look at official American institutions and mythologies. However, even the most nonconformist films suffered from a diluted interest in the concrete conditions and life of the working class, as well as a profound lack of awareness about the events that had shaped the previous half-century and therefore their own times.
These weaknesses were essential ingredients, more generally, of the middle class protest politics of the day. As we have noted a number of times, the “New Left” rejected a socialist orientation to the working class and avoided a historical reckoning—above all—with the Russian Revolution and the nature of Stalinism, either because the issues were too complex or because they hit a little too close to home.
Contrary to the shallow notion that circulates in the media and the universities, the most important feature of the period 1968–75 was not the “counterculture” or even the student revolt. In a number of countries (France, Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Chile and others), genuinely pre-revolutionary conditions arose, which threatened the existence of the capitalist social order—and which could have altered the course of modern history. However, the Stalinists, social democrats and centrists were able to destroy the revolutionary potential in each circumstance and preserve bourgeois rule.
III
The severe decline of filmmaking in the last several decades has coincided with a period of social reaction. The militant working class movement in the US, not based on conscious opposition to capitalism and remaining under the political aegis of the Democratic Party, found itself in a blind alley. The American ruling elite, from the late 1970s onward, rallied and organized a counteroffensive, first under Jimmy Carter and then, more systematically, under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and, most recently, Barack Obama.
The processes of global economic integration dealt lethal blows to all the national-opportunist labor organizations and Stalinist regimes, and the resulting re-integration of Russia and especially China provided imperialism with a breathing space. Workers found themselves on the defensive and the ballyhoo about the “end of socialism,” as noted above, had a significant impact on those leftists and intellectuals who were already half-looking, in any case, for a means of climbing back “on board.” The stock market and real estate boom, and the money to be made in the media and entertainment industry, provided even more compelling incentives.
In its modern history, the US has never known a period of social quiescence like the 1990s and 2000s—the product of the forcible and artificial suppression of the class struggle. No improvement in the social circumstances of wide layers of the population—the material basis for the political (and intellectual) conformism and conservatism of the early 1950s—was occurring. Quite the contrary, those circumstances were deteriorating sharply and social inequality was growing like a cancer.
However, a combination of economic and ideological processes, including the worthlessness of the old trade unions and protest movements, left the working class temporarily paralyzed. It is here, in this confluence of social developments, that we have to locate the fundamental source of the decline of American filmmaking in the last third of a century. Under these conditions, the more principled and astute artists became discouraged, entered into crisis and either fell silent or went “with the flow”; the trivial, the self-absorbed, the socially disoriented came to the fore.
The already eroded state of historical and social consciousness, the product of decades of anticommunist propaganda and the campaign against socially oriented art, as well as the rejection by the anti-Marxist “left” (Frankfurt School, existentialism, postmodernism) of the concepts of objective truth, reason and progress, rendered the artists especially vulnerable.
Plekhanov once referred to “periods of social indifferentism” that “correspond to the stage of social development when the given ruling class is preparing to leave the historical stage, but has not yet done so because the class which is to put an end to its rule has not yet fully matured.” In such periods, he wrote, the artists’ “souls fall into a ‘cold slumber,’ their moral level sinks very low. They do not then ask themselves whether the cause is right or whether the order that they are serving with their talent is a good one. They seek only rich patrons, concern themselves only with the profitable sale of their works.”1
The revival of art and culture is dependent today on the revival of the class struggle and the workers movement on a new socialist and internationalist basis. Art cannot save itself, as Trotsky noted, “It will rot away inevitably … unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character.”2
The resurgence of widespread and tumultuous opposition to the profit system will help scatter the “clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind,”3 including the artists’ horizon.
IV
The International Committee of the Fourth International has been alone in taking on “Western Marxism,” the Frankfurt School and other reactionary “left” tendencies and subjecting them to criticism. The pseudo-left organizations wash their hands of the responsibility of examining artistic trends altogether, encourage banal protest or identity politics “agitprop,” leave the field open for the likes of various “left” academics, or do a combination of all three.
The lingering prominence of these “left” intellectuals, whose activity and thought are rooted in a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and hostility to Trotsky’s perspective of world socialist revolution, is a consequence of the protracted decline in the influence of classical Marxism. The genocide of socialists carried out by Stalin and the persecutions of the fascist regimes devastated an entire generation of Marxists. The most direct impact of this immeasurable loss was a terrible lowering of the political and cultural level of the international workers movement.
Paradoxically, the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided objective conditions for the renewal of the culture of classical Marxism within the international working class. But this renewal could not develop as an automatic process. The International Committee of the Fourth International understood the historical significance and political implications of the breakdown of the USSR and devised an intellectually creative response to this event.
In developing its cultural work, the ICFI could draw upon the tradition and example of the Trotskyist movement’s engagement in this sphere. One of the opening shots in the conflict with the incipient Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1923–24), aimed at the cultural backwardness within which the national-bureaucratic caste flourished. Published a decade and a half later, the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” (1938), co-authored by Trotsky and French writer André Breton, and signed by Mexican painter Diego Rivera, which argued that “true art is unable not to be revolutionary,” remains one of the strongest statements ever produced in defense of art and intellectual freedom.
The title of this book comes from Breton’s poem “In the beautiful half-light of 1934,” which I interpret as a reference to the attempt to see through the immediate obstructions to a brighter and broader reality.
These reviews and essays begin from the notion that art is a means of knowing and orienting oneself in the world, that the significant artist strives to make his or her work correspond to the actual nature of things and that work accomplishing this has an objectively true and enduring value. “Art points through and beyond itself,” in Hegel’s phrase, toward essential truths about the wider world of society, human relationships and psychology.
Art brings to our attention the greatest human concerns not in the form of scientific or philosophical reasoning, but in pictorial and sensuous form, in concrete images, which please or move or trouble, or do all three. The artist does not prove the truth of his or her conceptions, but shows it. “The true artist, like the true scientist, always adds to what existed before him.”4 However, this theoretical distinction between different modes of the cognition of objective truth—the scientific and artistic—must be understood dialectically.
The artistic search for emotional truth is not a license for indifference to historical, social and political context. Or, as Marx once aptly remarked, “Ignorance never helped anyone!”
Moreover, whatever the level of the theoretical and social consciousness of a given artist, the critic has no right whatever to base evaluations of artistic work on nothing more than his or her own unresolved and intuitive emotional responses. The critic never simply “feels.” He or she also must think. The critic must not indulge either the artist or himself. His or her thoughtful apprehension of the work at hand, bringing to bear not only an aesthetic sensibility but also historical knowledge and social insight, is essential to its evaluation and appreciation.
The claim that Marxist criticism consists of nothing more than a formulaic identification of the “class standpoint” of one or another artist, writer, filmmaker, or architect is—like most anti-Marxist shibboleths—a vulgar slander. Insofar as there are tendencies in the academic “left” that see their task as unmasking artwork as mere forms of bourgeois manipulation and the artist as nothing more than a “social construct,” they represent a thoroughgoing repudiation of scientific socialism.
Marxism, which has inspired the most sophisticated works of criticism, has polemicized relentlessly against the sort of tendentiousness that reduces art to the level of propaganda. Art has to be judged by its authenticity, depth, sincerity and beauty. These qualities depend, however, upon the artist’s capacity to express with honesty and fearlessness some critical aspect of the “ensemble of social relations” of which reality consists.
The class struggle, capitalism, exploitation, poverty, imperialism and war are not merely propagandistic terms. They are the objective categories, properties and elements of objective reality in which modern social life is embedded. And the fact that this is insufficiently acknowledged, ignored and even denied by so many would-be artists and “opinion makers” is a major symptom of the crisis of contemporary culture. Those who believe that it is possible to reveal “emotional truth” without shedding light mercilessly on social reality are deceiving their audiences and lying to themselves.
We have now entered a period of upheavals in which a new mass movement against capitalism will emerge. The resurgence of the class struggle will inspire a new generation of artists and suggest new creative paths and possibilities. In this process the struggle of the revolutionary party for the development of socialist consciousness within the working class will play a critical and indispensable role.
This volume is a contribution to the efforts of the ICFI over the past two decades to direct the attention of workers and young people to the state of artistic and cultural life, to raise their understanding and sensitivity and broaden their outlook. The aim of this book is to raise the consciousness of the working class and youth, by shedding light on the general problems of culture in our time, by calling attention to the most telling artistic successes and failures and by encouraging viewers, critics and artists alike to adopt a more searching attitude toward filmmaking and to see and feel the world in a new way.
At the same time, we certainly seek to influence artists attempting to climb out of the mire of the present culture. We are confident that from among the young, the unknown, those subsisting on little or nothing at present, will emerge filmmakers, writers, painters, who will put artistic truth before everything else.
In conclusion, permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades whose counsel was essential to the working out of the ideas that find expression in this book. The writings in this volume developed through the dialectic of close intellectual collaboration involving the continuous exchange of drafts, rewrites, discussion, disagreements, conflicts and reconciliations. I consider myself fortunate to be part of a world community of revolutionary internationalists whose conceptions of art are inseparably bound up with the struggle for the socialist liberation of the working class and all humanity.
1 Georgi Plekhanov, “V.G. Belinsky’s Literary Views,” Selected Philosophical Works, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), 204.
2 Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 106.
3 Ibid., 114.
4 Aleksandr Voronsky, “On Art,” Art as the Cognition of Life (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 1998), 214.
* * * * *
Note: The editors have made every effort to track down the original sources of the various comments by critics and filmmakers cited, and, for the most part, have succeeded. However, given the sometimes ephemeral character of information and even publications in the digital age, certain sources have apparently been lost in the mists of time.
October 7, 2013
