Marxism, Anti-capitalism and the Mobilisation of the Political Left (Part 1)

September 22, 2010

Every now and then I go on information binges in order to satisfy one of two needs. The first need is the need for research and fact-checking in preparation for an article. The second need is to meet my curiosity and what has really made me curious over the past year has been politics. Having run the gamut of my political curiosity, I’d like to present three articles covering my overall views on politics and the future and how I came to form these opinions. Please enjoy, key references can be found in the final article.

There’s been a series of movies which have kick-started my interest in politics, in order of importance they are The Corporation (full public download), Capitalism: A Love Story, Food Inc and Sicko. Each of these movies, either directly or implicitly links the capitalist system to injustices of human rights, health, food and the environment. I won’t go into each movie’s arguments—you’re better off watching them yourself—however, the shared point is the same.

Capitalism

Capitalism, having a free market where any company can enter the market place and secure capital (the measure of profit, be it money, land etc), is a naturally competitive system. That is, for a company to retain its position in the market it needs to be competitive, otherwise other companies will overtake it and swallow up their market share. The principle is therefore that in order to hold onto valuable market share, companies will work to produce continually better product. This is only an ideal. The easiest and most widely used technique to be competitive is to cheapen the means of production.

Think of the big companies of today, they all got their starts through cheapening the way their products were made. McDonalds turned the restaurant into an assembly line by having one personal repeat one menial task over and over, just like a factory. What this means is that McDonalds can produce more burgers, more cheaply and quicker than anyone else. The job requires no real expertise, so finding replacement workers is relatively easy. McDonald’s cracked the code for riding the free market almost 90 years ago, no wonder they have so much power today.

Of course, by cheapening production, there are detrimental side effects, here are some simple examples:

Humanity – workers participating in menial pointless tasks which make the best out of the system, but fail to serve the creative talents and humanity of the workers
Food – the cheapest to produce materials in food (salt and sugar) have obvious negative effects on health
Environment – having an environmentally friendly workplace costs money, it’s better to not care
Ideological – a competitive economic system breeds competitive culture, rather than a co-operative one

And the effects that these have on society are significant:

Humanity – workers looking forward to weekend and loathing work, a search and abuse of escapism (alcohol, drugs, video games, internet)
Food – the obesity epidemic, diabetes
Environment – the current environmental crisis
Ideological – rifts between cultural groups of people, racism

The heart of all this is the profit motive. The market is free, everyone is fighting to get their share and then keep hold of it, therefore if profit cannot continually be maintained, companies face extinction. Profit is therefore the chief motivation for all companies (if it wasn’t they’d die) and it takes priority over everything else (see examples above) which is to the detriment of the workers and the planet.

The other issue is that those with power (companies like Maccas who cracked the code early on) will always work to maintain their power. This is where big business spills into the political realm through lobbyists etc in order to serve their own needs and secure growth. That is, big business honchos enter politics to change policy to meet their needs.

This is why only the rich can eat healthy in America, since government legislation supports the production of salts, sugars and corn (the latter for making animals fat beyond their capacity) which make them cheap options in the supermarket as opposed to fruits and meat. CEOs from food corporations enter politics where they can change policy to serve their vested interests, such as the modification of legislation to benefit and facilitate the production of cheaper food. Let us not even begin to discuss how media corporations and banks skew politics and break democracy through their efforts to keep us consuming and thereby providing growth.

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Digging Out Your Soul

September 19, 2010

“But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. If you said to them ‘don’t do this anymore’, they’d wonder what you’re talking about. Because it isn’t what they do, it’s who they are. They say ‘but this is me, it would be foolish of me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self’ ”.

Over the past two days I’ve been considering the prospects of changing my teaching contract over from full time to part time, that or effectively working less hours for a respective decrease in salary. Although I enjoy teaching, I am not really a teacher, I am working so that my employer gains more money. This is the foremost point of the modern corporation. I am not working for the profession, my students or myself and therefore teaching crushes my spirit.

On the other hand, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon writing, in turn unearthing my natural talent to think and think deeply. Most people never realise their natural talents, even after a life time of searching, so I feel blessed to have discovered mine and to have discovered it so early on in life. Being analytical through writing is my passion, I love it because it is who I am, so writing feeds my soul.

Selling my labour so that my employer can increase their market share, does not serve my humanity, it squanders it. Our society accepts that we cannot own our labour, and therefore we forfeit our destinies to our employers driven by the profit motive. There is an obvious contradiction between the corporation and the workers. My school wants to make money; it needs growth, otherwise it’ll die. Me, however, I just want to do my job and do it as effectively and happily as possible. When I work, I am not working for my own interests (the production), I am working for the interests of someone else.

It’s clear then why I want to “work” less. I want to work to enrich my life and not the balance sheets of a company. Teaching English, as I am now (and while it’s not as soul-crushing as most jobs, I’m quite lucky), dilutes my life, it stops me from better realising my capacities I’ve found in writing and I can’t accept that. I therefore have two choices: try to channel my talents to work within the free market or to decrease my dependency on it (via the companies which exist inside it). I am opting for the latter, hoping to somehow reach the former. It might not make me a rich, but then, I’m already pretty well off.

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Faust and German Expressionist Films

September 18, 2010

Lately I’ve taken a strong interest in German expressionist films from the 1920s. It all started with my interest in the character Count Orlock from the unofficial 1922 Dracula adaption Nosferatu. This type of film making is a real marvel. Black and white expressionist films use light and shadow to portray and exaggerate character. The silhouette of Orlock walking up the stairs is a classic as it evokes so much dread with such a simplistic approach.

After the success of Nosferatu director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was given a blown out budget where he could let his imagination run wild, and Faust is this creation. In Faust, alchemist Faust (protagonist) is tricked into becoming evil by Mephisto in order to win a bet and thereby allow the devil to rule the earth. It’s an intriguing tale observing the manipulation of intent. Mephisto is played with so much spite, heightened by the angle of shadows which only exaggerate his menace. As seen in the video below, he’s truly a frightening character. Furthermore, the technicality of the flight scene where Mephisto delivers Faust to Italy is nothing short of astounding. How did they ever manage such a scene 90 years ago? Yet, while I love these effects-driven sequences and the simple use of light to add menace to Mephisto or to portray Faust as tired and irrelevant, the rest of the movie, with Faust transformed into his younger self (convinced by Mephisto that he needs to be young again) ditches the fantastical for more of a drama. Alas, it’s quite a shame, but for the excellence of its production and the cohesiveness of cinematography and narrative, it’s more than worth your time.

(Scenes of Mephisto deceiving Faust and the flight to Italy)

I still have The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and two of Fritz Lang’s movies; Metropolis and M in my downloads folder. Of the three, I’m most anticipating Metropolis. If you are interested, please find links to the respective movies below, they are all under public license.

Extra Readings

A Primer on German Expressionist Films

Faust (download)

Nosferatu (download)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (download)

M (download)

(Can’t find a link to Metropolis unfortunately)

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