Pathfinders: Big Red Button (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow caused a minor stir with A House of Dynamite, an earnest and compelling warning against nuclear war in the tradition of Fail Safe (1964), or its comedy twin Dr Strangelove (1964). Unlike her other films it probably won’t win any gongs though, because it annoyed a lot of people.

Note, this paragraph contains spoilers. Critics complained that the film wasn’t a ‘proper’ story, with a beginning, middle and end, but instead was a looping repeat of the same chain of events from different character viewpoints. Nor did it have an ending. The viewer is just left hanging. Does the missile blow up the city? Does the US launch a retaliatory strike, and against whom? We don’t find out. But that’s ok, because the ending wasn’t the point.

The point of Dynamite is how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place. ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite… and then we just kept on livin’ in it,’ says one character. Jacobin magazine sniffily objected that the film doesn’t really say anything, and is essentially an ‘impotent and unserious exercise in handwringing’. We might sniffily object in turn that anyone who doesn’t advocate the immediate abolition of capitalism is also merely handwringing. Which would include all of the left including Jacobin magazine.

Because while capitalism has done a lot of good things for humanity, it’s also an out-of-control profit-making machine that comes with some catastrophic downsides. Runaway global warming isn’t even the worst of these. We can probably survive that, as a species. But who would survive nuclear Armageddon? Who would even want to?

For all the Boomer generation’s supposed privileges, like free higher education, affordable houses, job security and career advancement, they still had to grow up in the Cold War under the shadow of the Bomb, not knowing whether each day would be their last. Now Gen Z and Gen Alpha, on top of their other problems, may come to know what that feels like. ‘On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history’.

Who’s got nukes?

Nine countries today have a total of around 13,000 weapons, down from the Cold War’s 60,000, but arsenals are increasing again. You can see the distribution at a glance at armscontrol.org. Most belong to Russia and the US, but China is fast playing catch-up. These are not just nukes, but BIG nukes. ‘For example, the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea’ (ucs.org).

Who wants nukes?

Basically, every country’s ruling elite, following the National Rifle Association’s argument that in an armed society, you’re safer if you’re packing heat too. Ukraine gave up its nukes in 1994 and what happened? It got invaded. Iran keeps being bombed by Israel, but who dares bomb nuclear North Korea? The lesson is obvious and unavoidable. Disarmament is for losers. To paraphrase Mark Carney at Davos, if you’re not at the nuclear table, you’re on the menu.

There are fewer total nukes than in the Cold War era, so why is the threat worse today? Because treaties are easier when there are only two sides to negotiate. After the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War finally settled into stasis with arms control treaties. Now there are three major nuclear powers, and more on the way. In February this year the 2010 START nuclear non-proliferation treaty expired, and no nuclear power shows any interest in reviving or replacing it. Instead, with Russia fighting in Ukraine, China threatening Taiwan, India and Pakistan having cross-border skirmishes, and the US under Trump threatening to remove the ‘extended deterrence’ umbrella from its own NATO allies, the gloves are off. Any country that can get its hands on nukes and more nukes is going gangbusters to do just that, and never mind other internal costs like health and social welfare.

The upshot is proliferation. Now even America worries that, despite its gigantic arsenal, it won’t have enough to go round if adversaries like Russia and China decide to join forces. There is a terrifying escalatory logic at play, as the Economist points out. A country may opt for ‘minimal deterrence’, having just enough nukes to survive a first strike and still deliver unconscionable devastation on enemy cities. But beyond minimal deterrence, military planners aim for ‘damage limitation’, which means having enough missiles to take out all the other side’s nuclear silos, submarines and mobile launchers. If this capacity is achieved, it only drives the other side to acquire further weapons, and so on indefinitely (‘Nukes of Hazard‘).

Even if war is not the immediate result, this multi-sided arms race makes the prospects of any binding arms treaty look more remote, and the chances of a Fail Safe-like accidental launch greater than ever. But we, the vast majority of the world’s people, didn’t do this. We are merely the grunts who do all the work of maintaining what we like to call civilisation. It’s the rich who have built a world of dynamite and are sitting on top of it, smoking fat cigars. Our only mistake is continuing to support and vote for the market system which created the rich, and their nukes, in the first place.

J Robert Oppenheimer, the self-styled ‘destroyer of worlds’, was along with Einstein a founder of the Doomsday Clock that now ticks perilously close to midnight. There’s still time for humanity to claw its way back from the brink, and use its miraculous science and technology purely for the collective benefit, but only if it stops deluding itself. Capitalism is not sustainable, nor our best option. It’s a death cult with a Big Red Button.

Paddy Shannon

Between the Lines: After Warrington (1993)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Warrington

Colin and Wendy Parry lost their son, Tim, aged twelve, to an IRA bomb. Their response was to try to find out why he was killed. Panorama (BBC 1, 9.30 pm, 6 September) followed them as they visited the rival factions in search of their tribal motives. It was moving and compelling viewing, but, above all, it was frustrating. The Parrys are the kind of reasonable people socialists like to meet; their minds were genuinely exercised by the question "Why?". But the responses of those they met on their quest for knowledge ranged from the entrenchedly bigoted to the enthusiastically stupid.

This TV viewer has grown bored of watching ghetto catholics and protestants pleading a defence for their blinkered outlooks. The self-pitying nationalists who want us to imagine that the Great Famine is still going on and that it constitutes some kind of an excuse for blowing up children should dry their eyes and stop whining; nobody beyond the drunken barroom rebels of Boston cares less about their persistent self-indulging in a patriotism which puts kids in graves. And as for the protestant bigots, always shown to us on our screens from their siege headquarters in the Shankhill Road, they should be informed in no uncertain terms that their vociferous paranoia in defence of a Union which confines them to slums and slogans is a form of nationalist arrogance, made worse by the fact that they too are wage-slaves and have nothing but their illusion of ascendancy to defend. Who cares about these people with their shallow, offensive ethical defences for the prejudices which keep the undertakers busy.

But worse than these home-grown fools, whose only hope now lies in the recognition that instead of fighting to protect their poverty they have a world and not a nation to win, there were the fellow-travelling republicans in Boston — the Noraid brigade who want to see bodybags for their bucks. Who could but admire the patience of Colin Parry, a man whose son was murdered with the support of these remote-control warriors, when one of them (no doubt the son of a nephew of a man who claimed once to spend his boyhood in Kerry) told him that his position of opposing all violence was too easy? No doubt they would prefer it it he came to the war in Ireland by their lofty route: by sitting in a bar in Boston drinking imported stout, singing rebel songs which they do not understand and which decent people have long ago forgotten the words of, and putting dollars in collections so that more Tim Parrys can leave home one morning and arrive at the mortuary before it is dark.

Pretty Woman meets Reality

Not being much of a cinema-goer, ITV’s showing of Pretty Woman (9 m, 5 September), starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, was this writer’s first opportunity to see this tale of Cinderella encountering the delights of the free market. The romance is quite simple: Gere, a millionaire whose description of his uselessness as a property speculator was good stuff, picks up Roberts, a hooker who looks like a Hollywood movie star. He pays her huge amounts of money; she gives him sex and then falls in love with him. According to the Beatles, money can’t buy you love, but times have changed and if you want to spend the rest of your life with Julia Roberts, open a deposit account now. Then on Wednesday, 8 September BBC 1’s Inside Story ran the sequel to the film. It was not intended to be a follow-up; it was a documentary about prostitutes and their lives. None of them looked much like Julia Roberts did, but a few of them might have done had they not suffered years of being beaten up by ruthless pimps who wanted their money’s worth out of their investments. It was a story of the daily struggle which our opponents celebrate as the free marker. It’s a strange medium, TV: you watch a romance about buying sex and smile at the happy ending; if the documentary would have been shown immediately before the film its offensive message might just have been a little clearer.

Steve Coleman

Film Review: Miracle on 34th Street (1947) (2025)

Film Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We deconstruct a ‘classic’ film that is always shown on some TV channel over Christmas.

For those who don’t know, this is a Christmas film about a nice, elderly man – called Kris Kringle – who gets a job as a department store Santa Claus, but thinks he really is Father Christmas. Kringle befriends: a lawyer (whom he later moves in with); his girlfriend (whom he also works for at Macy’s department store); and her little girl from a previous relationship.

The story has two main plots that connect. The first is about a court case in which the lawyer has to prove that Kringle is the real Santa Claus in order to stop him from being put in a mental hospital. The second plot is about Doris (the single mother) who won’t let her daughter believe in Santa Claus or use her imagination in any way, because she wants her to have a realistic outlook on life. It’s not entirely clear why she decided to do this, but it has something to do with Doris’s husband/Susan’s father abandoning them both.

Even though this film is regarded by many as a Christmas classic, from a socialist point of view it’s terrible. Firstly, Kris Kringle is used as a metaphor for God, with the film being an allegory about why it’s important to have faith. In that respect, the famous ending of this film is what Americans would call a giant cop-out. The New York Post Office decides to send Kringle all the letters they get from children addressed to Santa Claus (they do this to cut down on their waste). Because of this, the judge rules in favour of Kringle due to the Post Office (a branch of the US government) recognising that he is Santa Claus.

The ending of the 1994 remake makes a lot more sense. In that version, Kringle is proven to be the real Santa Claus because ‘In God We Trust’ is written on US bank notes, which shows that if the US Treasury is allowed to put its faith in God on the currency – without the requirement of evidence that God exists – then the people of New York should be allowed to believe Santa Claus is real without evidence.

Another reason why this film is bad from a socialist perspective is because of a sub-plot in which Kringle uses his position (as the department store Santa) to advise parents to go to other stores to get what their children want for Christmas if Macy’s doesn’t have it. This leads to a lot of positive feedback from customers, and also to Gimbels (Macy’s main market rival) copying them. And, wouldn’t you know it, this leads to both stores making super profits, therefore, they don’t have to compete with each other anymore. How wonderfully reformist!

In conclusion, it’s not hard to see why this is regarded as a classic. However, it’s very preachy and believes that rival businesses can and should co-operate with each other in order to optimise the interests of both capitalists and customers.

Matthew Shearn

'Pack Up Your (Capitalist) Troubles' (1983)

Socialist Standard advert from the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pieces Together: Trust me, I'm a doctor! (2009)

The Pieces Together column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trust me, I'm a doctor!

“Dr. Hershel Samuels, an orthopedic surgeon, put his hand on the worker’s back. “Mild spasm bilaterally,” he said softly. He pressed his fingers gingerly against the side of the man’s neck. “The left cervical is tender,” he said, “even to light palpation.” The worker, a driver for a plumbing company, told the doctor he had fallen, banging up his back, shoulder and ribs. He was seeking expanded workers’ compensation benefits because he no longer felt he could do his job. Dr. Samuels, an independent medical examiner in the state workers’ compensation system, seemed to agree. As he moved about a scuffed Brooklyn office last April, he called out test results indicative of an injured man. His words were captured on videotape. Yet the report Dr. Samuels later submitted to the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board cleared the driver for work and told a far different story: no back spasms, no tender neck. In fact, no recent injury at all. “If you did a truly pure report,” he said later in an interview, “you’d be out on your ears and the insurers wouldn’t pay for it. You have to give them what they want, or you’re in Florida. That’s the game, baby.” (New York Times, 31 March)

No Profit, No Pill

“A pill which could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from heart disease, the biggest killer across the Western world, has been shown to be safe and effective in its first trials on humans. The magic bullet, containing five medicines in a single capsule, sharply reduced cholesterol and blood pressure levels and has the potential to “halve cardiovascular events in average middle-aged individuals”, the researchers say. The finding is a major boost for a medication with huge potential against the worldwide epidemic of heart disease and stroke. Doctors say that, if further trials prove successful, all men aged over 50 and women aged over 60 should be offered the pill in what would be the first example of mass medication for the middle-aged in Britain. Yet no Western pharmaceutical company has shown interest in developing the so-called polypill because it does not promise big profits. It would sell for pennies because its five constituent medicines are cheap, have been around for decades and their patents have expired.” (Independent, 31 March)

Fred and Forlorn 

“Oxfam is warning that the economic downturn is creating more poverty in the UK, making life tougher for the fifth of the population already struggling to get by. Kathleen Carter lives in poverty. At her home in Stockton-on-Tees, she cares full-time for her disabled son and husband. Her life is a constant round of cleaning, cooking, preparing medication and shopping on a very tight budget. The only income is from her pension and a small amount of benefits. She says: “It can be very soul-destroying. I’ve got to think of everything I buy, life is a real struggle because all the time you are thinking about what you are spending.” Mrs Carter is one of the so-called Freds. It is a term Oxfam has created standing for Forgotten, Ripped-off, Excluded and Debt-ridden.” (BBC News, 8 April)


Of all the slums in all the world . . .

“This seaside city is known as a rich stockpile of art deco architecture, the hub of Morocco’s economic growth and the setting of an all-time classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

But Casablanca is also the capital of a bleaker aspect of modern Morocco — sprawling slums, where huge families are packed into shanties with tin roofs rusted by the ocean winds, and goats and donkeys munch stray garbage.

“It’s as if we’re eating straight from the gutter,” said Mina Abujaman, 48, describing the squalor.

“We spend half our time cleaning up,” said the mother of seven and grandmother of two, pointing at the children playing in the mud while women carry water back from the communal fountain - all amid whiffs of sewage.

It’s not surprising, of course, that things do not go according to plan in a crowded Arab city where illusion is part of the atmosphere. Tourists’ snapshots of busy alleyways miss the squalor behind the walls, and the famous 1942 movie “Casablanca” was not filmed here at all, but mostly at studios in Burbank, Calif., with the misty farewell of hero and heroine shot nearby at Van Nuys airport.” (www.wtop.com)


Blogger's Note:
The wee piece, 'No Profit, No Pill', is not in the PDF version of the May 2009 Socialist Standard I have in front of me, whereas the piece, 'Of all the slums in all the world . . .', is in the PDF version of the Standard but is not on the website.

I decided to include both on the blog.

Casualties (1987)

USS Stark

From the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every day wars are fought. Every day the pressures inside this society erupt as some new battleground opens somewhere in the world. Every day capitalism puts new lives on the line to fight over land or minerals or markets. Or, as Ronald Reagan recently put it after the "accidental" rocket attack on a US frigate in the Gulf, "safeguarding the interests of the US and the free world in the Gulf, remains crucial to our national security and to the security of our friends throughout the world".

That sounds unequivocal but friends and relatives of the 37 American sailors who died on the USS Stark will be confused to find out that after the Iraqi Exocet attack, the US administration is portraying Iran, not Iraq, as the villain of the piece. As one Arab diplomat put it.

  the US said it was a mistake to sell arms to Iran, and now Iraq says it was a mistake that the frigate was attacked. Now the two sides are even. It's ironic but the only major consequence of this incident may be a warming of relations between Washington and Baghdad.

The lives were not lost in vain, however — the US armed presence in the Gulf exists (just as for any other country) in order to protect the small number of American-flagged vessels (owned by a small number of Americans) that need to use the Gulf.

There won't be a small number for much longer, hence the build-up in the US state's pressure. By mid-July, eleven oil tankers owned by the Kuwaiti Oil Tanker Company will be transferred to a Delaware-based corporation, putting them under US registration, under the US flag and. more importantly, entitled to the protection of the US navy. While the oil barons and their class shift from nation to nation, flying the flag of greatest convenience, workers of the world are expected to put up with the rhetoric of "the national interest" and to put down their lives, if necessary. In Mexico, lives are risked in trying to cross the border into Texas; in Ireland, workers have to enter a lottery to get a visa to work in the US; in America, Reagan announces the plan to test all immigrants for the HIV virus. At the same time as people are being barred from access to parts of the world, there's no problem, about becoming American if you are an oil tanker.

Of course, it's not just about oil. Capitalism produces many conflicts between nations. It produces many strategies, alliances and rivalries which cannot be ignored. Last December, Washington turned down a Kuwaiti request for help but following the news that the Russians were preparing to provide the naval escort, Washington quickly offered their help. Oil is just one example but it is part of a much bigger ballgame. and such small apparently insignificant disputes can easily turn into something much worse within days. Remember the Falklands War? But do you remember the almost comical news that preceded it, about the scrap-metal merchants from Argentina who had landed on something called South Georgia. Similarly, some small item on tonight's news about some far-off battle in some far-off place with a funny name could be the first kicks, the labour pains for the Third World War.

But whatever the battles are fought over, it’s not in the interests of the vast majority that are at stake. There's only a few people who stand to win or lose in times of war. The business pages of the papers make that quite clear:

 Shell, up 10p at 1011p. and BP. 11p ahead at 749. were the hot favourites as word filtered through that 2.000 lraquis had been killed in a new Iranian offensive. . .

(London Evening Standard. 9 January 1987)

Offensive is the word. And of course it's not the shareholders or the politicians who do the fighting. They stay safe in their offices rattling their sabres and letting others do the dying. According to diplomats in Washington, the deaths on the USS Stark, "provided President Reagan with a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the 'Gulf Cooperation Council' the US's determination to pay with its own lives to protect the oil lanes, despite the cooling in relations because of the American arms sales to Iran". (Guardian, 19 May 1987)

Where, for that matter, was Reagan when American teenagers were dying "to safeguard the interests of the US and the free world", during the Second World War? As someone who sometimes appears to welcome the prospect of a Third World War, he was in no hurry to appear in the last one — Reagan spent the war working for the FBI spying on any suspect communist subversives in Hollywood. One actor that he'd never need to worry about is Sylvester Stallone who has made millions out of encouraging American children to hate Russians in Rocky IV (like I-III). and to kill Vietnamese in Rambo (Rocky without boxing gloves). The actor though, doesn't quite match up to the wide range of characters he portrays: would Rambo have refused (as Stallone did last year) to travel to Cannes for the Film Festival, for fear of attacks from terrorists (or at least film critics)?

Recently our hero has been in Israel looking for a new location for an old script, as Rambo turns his attention to the Gulf after having finished off anyone with slanty-eyes in his previous film. But where was Stallone when the real Vietnam War was on, the one without the make-up and the blanks? Apparently Stallone saw out the war as a Physical Education instructor at a finishing school for rich young women in the jungles of Switzerland. Of course we've nothing against draft dodgers, quite the opposite in fact. But these are the people (and Stallone is just one of the more obvious) who encourage nationalism, who profit from warmongering, and who are all for dying for their country, just so long as it doesn't include them. But what of the sailors who did die in USS Stark? They died for precisely nothing — to help save Reagan's face after Irangate, to defend the American Oil Corporations.

There'll be another conflict in the Gulf, sooner or later. More names to be chiselled into the war memorial. But if the next conflict escalates, it won't just be the soldiers and sailors who suffer. We'll all be in the front line. If you put your trust in leaders, give up your power to politicians, and give up your imagination to film stars, the next thing you could find yourself giving up is your life.

Sting in the Tail: Life Wish (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life wish

Michael Winner, producer of such gore-fests as the Death Wish movies, now writes for the News of the World.

Surprisingly, he made a reference to Marx in his column (24 December). Unsurprisingly, he made the foolish assumption that Marx had something to do with the Soviet Union:

  "Communism contains a vast, almost religions appeal. Its principal slogan from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' is actually a wondrous idea . . . But it fails to take into account a crucial element. Human beings. They just aren't up to it."

Winnie’s view of “human nature” is best illustrated by his film hero, Charles Bronson “blowing away” muggers in the New York Subway. This is the view of a pathetic money-grubber and not the view of anyone who has studied human behaviour.

To Winner, any concept of human cooperation must indeed seem a “wondrous idea”.

A tale of two mums

The Duchess of York is feeling the pinch these days. Reputed to owe £3 million, she recently changed her Concorde trip to New York to first class on a scheduled flight. She and the kids had to rough it with the plebeian hordes.

Not on the trip was Maureen whose plight was reported in the Observer (21 January):

  “Maureen is bringing up her eight-year-old son alone in her former council flat in Devon on £77.97 state benefit a week . . .  "I might go two days without a main meal—I just eat, like, a sandwich at lunchtime or supper if we have enough bread. Tuesday is my best day. I collect my Giro cheque then. I usually buy something like mince and we’ll have spaghetti or something . . .  Sometimes when he has said to me he's hungry I just feel very desperate and alone . . . and a bit of a failure really. "

Maureen is not a failure. She is a worker who feeds and clothes her child on state “benefits”. Maureen is not a failure. Capitalism is. The gap between the Duchess and Maureen is proof of that.

The big knife farce

What a farce the amnesty on knives was. 40,000 were handed in, but this is a tiny fraction of the number of knives in circulation, and the fact that one individual contributed 3,000 proves that.

Indeed, Watchdog (BBC1, 22 January ) showed that there are hundreds of shops and mail-order firms all selling knives.

Of course, the politicians have their “solutions”, among them labour’s call for a ban on the sale of knives to anyone under the age of 16, but similar bans on the sale of lottery tickets, alcohol and tobacco arc simply ignored by many retailers. If there’s money to be made then there will be illegal sales.

Years ago, when the use of knives was considered un-British, razors, lead piping and bicycle chains were in vogue, and even if knives were eliminated then some other weapon will take their place. Capitalism’s poverty, tensions and conflicts guarantees that.

Arthur’s dead duck 

The launch of Arthur Scargill’s new Socialist Labour Party provided him with another chance to demonstrate what a political muddle-head he is. This was evident when, having accused the Labour Party of abandoning socialism, he admitted it never had been socialist anyway.

Even worse was his absurd claim that unemployment could be eradicated “even within a capitalist society” (Guardian, 15 January). Incidentally, his promise that the SLP will “support all the ‘single issue campaigns’” in order to gain recruits, should mean that the various Trotskyists and anarchist groups will face more competition there!

Left-wing breakaways from Labour have never lasted: the Scottish Labour Party headed by Jim Sillars MP in the late 1970s is an example, and Scargill’s lot will no doubt follow them into oblivion.

Going for the Big One

We are often asked why we don’t join in campaigns for reforms of capitalism. To begin with, reforms rarely achieve their aims—for example, laws against racism haven’t reduced discrimination, assaults, abuse, etc.

And reforms which do benefit workers will inevitably provoke demands for them to be scrapped when capitalism’s economic situation worsens, and an example of this is provided by Warwick Lightfoot of the think-tank Politcia, who urges the Tories to

  ". . .  repeal existing rules on redundancy payouts and unfair dismissal, arguing that they damage the labour market" (Guardian, 8 January).

What kindly Mr Lightfoot and many others want is a “flexible labour market” where employers can do whatever they like with workers.

Of course, this would depend ultimately on whether the working class would accept it, but the fact is that even the crumbs we get at present are under threat, hence our insistence that socialists must demand the bakehouse and nothing less.

Living it up in Palm Springs

A party member had occasion to rush to the hospital where his mother had been admitted only to be informed that there was a ten hour wait until a bed became available (in the event it was only six-and-a-half hours).

Whilst perusing the usual jumble of magazines in the waiting room, he happened to pick up a colour supplement which features a grizzled, old chimpanzee, and revealed that this was none other than the original “Cheetah” who could be seen swinging through the trees with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s.

Now aged 63, this hirsute thespian is apparently living the life of Riley in a retirement home in Palm Springs!

It wasn’t lost on our comrade that in capitalism, even elderly animals, with the right financial credentials, are treated with greater regard than poor members of the working class, retired or not.

Sting in the Tail: Time to think (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time to think

At the last count there were 171,434 registered charities in this country. Most of these charities are engaged in trying to alleviate the plight of the poor.

One of these charities recently sent out a leaflet appealing for funds. It is called Actionaid. Like all of the other charities, it is a futile organisation. It believes World Hunger can can be solved by workers sending a pittance to save a child in "the developing world".

The facts it quotes are heartbreaking. "Tomorrow 40,000 children will die in the developing world." There is a photograph of a beautiful little kid called Sanu and the chilling information that "every two seconds a child like Sanu dies in the developing world."

What a heartless brutal system. All of these children dying of malnutrition and poverty-related diseases could lead useful worthwhile lives if we got rid of capitalism and brought about socialism.

Think about it. It will take you about 80 seconds to read this article. In the same time another 40 children will have died needlessly.

Come and join us

The Bishop of Birmingham, Mark Tranter, complains that market reforms have made the NHS a "system in distress":

   "The patient is reduced to the status of a unit of consumption and exchange. That, in the Christian view, must be wrong" (Independent, 4 July).

Has he not noticed that capitalism reduces just about everything we need to this same status? And does he think it equally wrong that food, clothing and shelter should be subject to the market? After all, they are as essential to our wellbeing as is health care.

To be consistent the Bish should be coming out against the market in its entirety and not just its application to one of the necessities of life.

Loadsamoney (1)

"Art for Art’s sake", was a cry of the aesthete in the last century. It wasn’t true then, but it is even less valid in the crass, commercial world of today.

Commenting on the career of the film actor Jack Nicholson, the Observer (10 July) recalled the words of the head of Columbia Studios in Hollywood on learning of the financial success of the film Easy Rider:

 "I don’t know what the fuck it’s about, but it’s going to make us a fuck of a lot of money."

Films, like novels and other "artistic" creations are mere commodities in the mad market system that is capitalism. Like everything else they are produced for profit, not for their own sake.

Loadsamoney (2)

While workers of Railtrack engage in a bitter struggle for a few pounds a week, it is worth nothing the values put on human efforts by the market place.

Reporting on the financial bonanza of one speculator in the Anglia TV takeover, the Observer (10 July) gave an indication of the loot enjoyed by the owning class:

   "The shares were bought by Lord Archer’s friend shortly before the £292 million takeover bid from MAI last January. The deal netted a profit of £80,000 when the shares were sold a few days after the bid was announced on 18 January. The buyer did not even need to pay for the shares - just collected the profit."

Toiling on their rest days, working overtime and taking home about £200 a week to keep a family, signalworkers may reflect that a system that allows some parasite, with influential friends, to pocket £80,000 with just one phone call makes a mockery of the capitalist apologists’ claim that this system rewards hard work.

The sad warriors

When it suits them the Labour Party like to project the image of being the Party of Peace. At election times they con voters into the belief that they are less militaristic than their Tory counterparts.

The recent threat of closure of the Rosyth Naval Dockyards revealed them in a different light. They spoke patriotically about the Tories threatening the defence of Britain. The threat of less battleships filled them with nationalistic dread.

How vigorously they have pursued this cynical vote-catching stance (there were thousands of jobs - and votes - at stake) can be seen by the letter in the Guardian (19 July) written by Dr David Clark MP, Shadow Defence Secretary.

Replying to the accusation that he had been absent from the House of Commons when defence cuts were announced, he defended himself on the grounds he was attending his daughter’s graduation ceremony and stated:

   "After all my daughter’s graduation ceremony cannot be repeated - but sadly, there will be many more commons statements on defence cuts."

Horror of horrors - there may be more defence cuts by those wicked Tories, hence the sabre-rattling lickspittle’s use of the term "sadly"!

Different class

The TV programme recalling the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 was an interesting account of the eve of World War One, but even better was Diary of a Debutante, shown the same evening, in which an upper-crust young woman described her social whirl during that same June.

And what a whirl! Ascot, Henley, the Royal Horse Show, lunch with daddy at the Cavalry Club, afternoon teas by the river and grand balls in the evenings.

There were problems, though. She constantly fretted about what to wear, and on one occasion simply couldn’t find a new dress to match her hat, but whatever the problems, money certainly wasn’t one of them.

Such was the life of some people during June 1914. The Socialist Standard that month reported how some other were faring. Old-age pensioners received five shillings (25p) a week and a 72-year-old Pimlico woman cut her throat. Her husband told the coroner that their joint weekly income was twelve shillings (60p).

When Johnny Comes Marching Home (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

In many movies after the second world war there was a scene where the local boys came home to their little US town. The band played, hats were thrown in the air and the old frosty school mar'm could be seen to shed a secret tear.

It is a beautiful fantasy and if you add Van Johnson, Elizabeth Taylor and whoever happens to be the present teen dream to the scene it could play for ever today. There is only one snag, it is not true. Some of the homeless people that try to beg money from you on Waterloo Bridge fought in the Falklands. Some that will try to tap you in the future fought in Afghanistan or Iraq. From North America we read in the Toronto Globe and Mail (19 February): "Since Vietnam, we've learned that there's on average a 12 year delay between returning from war and begging on the streets," Linda Boone of the Washington-based National Coalition for Homeless Veterans told me. She said governments should start getting ready for vast numbers of beggars and vagrants, all created by war.

It is a well-known phenomenon, albeit one that governments have never properly acknowledged: After any war ends, the number of people living on the streets increases dramatically.' Does this mean that the ElizabethTaylor and Van Johnson charachters ended up sleeping rough, surely not! From the same article we learn that "in Britain, the government has estimated that a quarter of the people 'sleeping rough' - on the streets - are military veterans. If you want to find someone who fought in the Falklands war, you'd best look in the tunnels beneath Waterloo Bridge."

The facts seem obvious to us - Johnny, stay at home and read your Socialist Standard.

Richard Donnelly

The Happiest Man In The World (1943)

Film Review from the June 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news cinemas are now showing a 15-minute “short" with the above title, based on a short story by the American prince of short story writers, O. Henry.

The dramatisation of a tiny commonplace incident in the everyday life of capitalist society, acted by two characters only, dwarfs into insignificance all the “colossal,“ "stupendous,' etc., etc., epics of the Hollywood dope works. Briefly, the story consists in the application by a desperately anxious unemployed man from Kansas, to his brother-in-law, the transport manager of an oil company in Texas, for a job. The job is vacant, because it is deadly dangerous; driving a truck-load of nitro-glycerine. "If a wheel hits a rock, there's no truck, no load, no driver any more." The pay is high, six dollars a run. The whole action of the film consists in the dialogue between the two men in the office of Tom, the foreman. Jesse (the unemployed man) begs, pleads and entreats. Tom is adamant. "Think of your wife and kids," says he, "go back home. I'll send you something." "Tom," says Jesse, "I am thinking of 'em. I've been on relief six years. My kids' bones are soft, they've got rickets because they've been fed on relief for six years." "But you won't last a month," rejoins Tom. "Even then," says Jesse, "I'll have made 600 dollars. I can get my wife and kids some clothes and shoes, maybe even some for myself." At last Tom gives in. "All right! report to-night for your first run." Jesse is overjoyed, thanks Tom with tears in his eyes, as he steps out into the sun, and remarks, "I guess I'm the happiest man in the world."

This is the sort of thing that takes places often in capitalist society, especially in the prosperous United States of America.

How farcical the chatter about "freedom from want" in a society based on a tiny minority giving the vast majority "jobs"—which the majority must have or starve. And how trifling the uneasy qualms of humanitarian pacifists about human life—in war time only. Working men are slaughtered every day in peace time for capitalist profits.

This short film, which exposes the misery created by capitalism like a lightning flash in a dark sky, is the prototype of what might be possible when the Socialist Party has sufficient resources to apply modern technical developments, like the cinema, to the task of Socialist propaganda.

Horatio.

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, I couldn't find the short film on YouTube, but I did find the text of the original short story on a Russian website. The bare bones of the story - as described by 'Horatio' in his review - suggests the short story might have been the inspiration for Clouzot's 'The Wages of Fear'.

It turns out that the original story was not by O. Henry but by Albert Maltz, an American Communist writer of that period. The story first appeared in the June 1938 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was an honest mistake by 'Horatio' (Harry Young) because the short story was in fact the recipient of the O. Henry Award for 1938. An award given out annually for outstanding short stories.

Throw Away the Stick (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month's headlines were dominated, to the surprise of many, by the revelation that a Hollywood producer was in the habit of using his position of power and influence to get aspiring young hopefuls to have sex with him.

This can't have been news to anyone but the naive. Theatre like everything else in capitalism has been reduced to a squalid money business where the rich exploit the efforts, and sometimes the bodies, of young people desperate for advancement and not rich enough to say no. Actors are workers and workers have to sell themselves as commodities on the labour market. That labour market is nearly always a buyer's market, and when the buyer is a man who has sex instead of scruples on the brain, it's not hard to grasp what is likely to happen.

Some of the online comments from readers of these news stories accused the women who had spoken up of being prostitutes, who had been willing to sleep their way to riches and were now hypocritically whingeing about it. Many of these comments were from women. The anger and bitterness behind such trolling is all too obvious. To poor people, there's no such thing as a rich victim. The fact that male actors can get ahead without supposedly resorting to prostitution didn't enter the debate.

What became plain, as the story grew, was how widespread the problem is. Women often experience harassment in some form, whether it's being whistled at, groped, or inappropriately chatted up. They generally keep silent because they feel powerless. Society generally keeps silent because it doesn't care. And this is just the everyday stuff. Underneath this culture of silence lies a nightmarish landscape which includes rape, domestic abuse and murder. Any woman living in this terrifying landscape is almost bound to think that the world is primarily defined by male power and dominance.

Historically there's no question that this has been true, and still is in many parts of the world where the hangover of the pre-capitalist past still hangs heaviest. In advanced capitalist countries the trend has been more towards political, legal and economic parity, partly so that employers can cherry-pick exploitable workers from the largest possible bowl. But these limited freedoms have been offset by an intensifying commodification of women through advertising, the media, and the film and music industry, a commodification now also turning its attention to men. We are not even human beings anymore, just products with a package and a price and a sell-by date.

If society is primarily patriarchal, as some think, then most men are doing astonishingly badly out of it. This is really because they, along with women, are ultimately in thrall to a higher power, a tiny fraction of people who own and control all of society and most of the world. What is decisively important about this power elite is not actually their gender at all but their property portfolio.

To socialists, it doesn't matter what colour or gender you are. What matters is that you are a worker. The politicisation of gender, like ethnicity, helps keep the working class divided and thus too weak to break out of its own misery. Capitalism is a master at instilling its oppressive and divisive structures at an early age. The task of revolutionaries is to identify and break those structures. And we can do it, so long as workers are willing to try to understand each other. Women have been speaking out, and must continue to do so in order to lift the veil of silence. For their part, men need to understand that ignoring women's subjective experience of patriarchy is the same as perpetuating it. Either you are fighting oppression or you are complicit in it. When a man suffers rage, helplessness and frustration, he is experiencing what it means to be a worker. But when he takes his rage out on a woman he is doing the bosses' dirty work for them and he is a class traitor. A class that wants to be free also has to know how to take responsibility. Socialism is not possible otherwise.

There is, incidentally, nothing in the rules of capitalism that forbids it from being gender-neutral. In a gender-neutral capitalism, workers would still be poor, overworked, exploited, powerless and bitter.  And capitalism would still be hell-bent on self-destruction through war and environmental damage. The identity of the oppressor can and has changed among and between cultures and over time. What hasn't changed, and what will never change in capitalism, is the ability of some to oppress others. This is one reason why socialists call for the abolition of the property-owning principle. Private ownership is a big stick, whoever wields it. If you don't want to be beaten, you need to throw away the stick.

Paddy Shannon

Alien America (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twentieth century American culture – the media context of my generation. Rock n' roll, jazz, blues, soul, hotrods, superheroes, fast food and, of course, Hollywood. Monsters, gangsters, westerns and science fiction; I have loved them all. That all of this was and is generated by the profit system which exploits us is only part of the story. To see our generation as purely the victims of a remorseless marketing campaign is to overlook the dialectical forces that lie beneath the empty glamour and desperate novelty of American culture. Human imagination itself is defined by its economic context and the capitalist context is rich in deep and unresolvable contradictions. Hollywood's fantasies are powerful examples of the need to both defend and celebrate its cultural values and also to escape from them.

To illustrate this let us consider the science fiction genre and its escapism which, in its better incarnations, is always combined with a political/cultural narrative. These themes are sometimes personified in the character of the 'alien'. Star Trek was a series that began as a TV drama in the sixties and subsequently spawned many movies and other TV spin-offs. Its menagerie of aliens can be seen as expressions of American characteristics; the naïve 'gung-ho' Klingon warriors, the inhuman logicians of Vulcan, the business greed of the Ferengi and, not least, the fascistic militarism of the Borg. Most intriguing of all is the alien 'Q' who is an omnipotent tragic fool (God in man's image). All of these aliens are contrasted with the crew of the 'Enterprise' (the future Americans) who, amazingly, have no money, no gods and no prejudices! It is as if this is one of the few arenas where Americans can truly see themselves, not as the human characters but as their alien incarnations. This perverse identification does not stop there; it has evolved into a full blown 'post-modern' cultural synthesis aided in no small part by the high priest of alien iconography – Steven Spielberg.

        

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was my first encounter with the subsequently ubiquitous 'grey' aliens. Whether or not it was Spielberg who actually invented them, his mystical insect-eyed, monochromatic, androgynous extra-terrestrials have come to dominate the science fiction of the past few decades. Countless books, movies and TV dramas have featured this species of alien all over the world – yet another example of US cultural imperialism. No longer confined to 'fiction' they now feature in the symbiotic cultural phenomena of alien abductions. One is reminded of the appearance of witches and demons to people immersed within the Christian cultures of the past. Surrounded as they were by paintings, sculptures and stained-glass representations of angels and devils we can see that such media inspired experiences are nothing new. Even the Christ himself seems to have been inspired by Old Testament prophecies of the coming of a Jewish 'messiah'. But, some might legitimately inquire, how do we know that at least some of these events are not 'real encounters' instigated by the activities of extra terrestrials? This is precisely the subject of Spielberg's latest TV series.

Taken is the story of alien abductees and their struggle to be taken seriously. These characters are continually thwarted in this by the conspiratorial activities of a US government agency. With references to previous media versions of this story within the narrative we have a series that feeds on both its own predecessors and the cultural experiences they helped to create. Just as religion was once 'the opiate of the people' now it is the media that provides the escapism from the day-to-day realities of the class struggle. It also provides that other ingredient so crucial for successful escapism – justice. No other culture has been so obsessive in its zeal for 'freedom and justice' and so fearful of its reality as America. In the character of the child-alien in the series we have yet another example of a messianic figure complete with miracles. Why does the land of technological miracles need the super-natural variety as well in its stories? Only because technology has failed to deliver the human necessity of social justice in its capitalist context. As with religion these stories are a projection into another realm of this basic human need. The greys and their 'hard-ware' represent both the fear and disappointment associated with technology and its still unfulfilled promise of a better world. It is hard not to conclude that the greys are the actual cultural incarnation of man's alienation from his own technical creations. Socialists are often told to just enjoy the story and stop analysing everything – but to us this is the story. Once you've seen the world through the lens of a new consciousness you cannot see the 'Emperor's new clothes' ever again. Although the owners of the media allow the telling of these stories, they do so because of their popularity and so profit potential. Quite possibly they are as unaware as their public as to the underlying political/dialectical reasons for its success. Where the politically naïve see evidence of aliens, socialists see evidence of alienation – I leave it to the reader to decide which is more plausible.

Andrew Westley

Marilyn Monroe: A Cultural Phenomena (1954)

From the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Beauty is only skin-deep," wrote the Self-Made Merchant to his son, "but that's deep enough to satisfy any reasonable man." That was sixty years ago, before it became customary to used the hands for describing beauty and when beuty, however deep, kept most of its skin under cover. The reasonable man's pleasure to-day is Marilyn Monroe, and the publishers and booksellers, with their empirical knowledge of his tastes cannot give him enough of her—at second hand, of course.

Reigning beauties of the past, for all that poets have made of them, reigned only in courts and castes. Miss Monroe's sovereignty is practically unlimited, geographically or socially. Not long back, manchester City Councillors averred her to be preferable to one of Henry Moore's sculptures, and a Work of Art: a national columnist went farther and said she was an Act of God. Even the Communists' censoriousness of her as a dollar princess has the scent of sour grapes. Marilyn Monroe, in fact, represents the acme of desirability in this day and age.

Times have changed, of course. This writer once heard an old lady describe how, mounting her bicycle in the eighteen-nineties, she was attacked by a woman who screamed: "You brazen thing! I can see your ankles!" It is not only that people in the 'nineties would have been shocked by Miss Monroe, undissembled in tight or negligible clothing: they would have thought her ugly, too. The beauties of the day—Lily Langtry, Olga Nethersole, La Belle Otero—were strapping girls with all the appearance of good living. Nobody talked of slimming, and the ladies' magazines advertised a treatment called Diano which, if it was all true, was nothing short of an inflationary measure.

The case for eternal beauty becomes as illogical as the argument that there is eternal morality, when one considers the variations in both according to time and place. Metropolitan man may pull faces over the Congo's idea of pulchritude; it is certain that the African native in turn would not think a lot of Marilyn Monroe. It is a question of what you esteem, and that itself is a question of what your world finds necessary. There is an old but appropriate story of a farmer and his guest together gazing across the countryside: the townsman rhapsodizes about the rolling vista, the farmer spits and says, "Thirty-bob-an-acre stuff." Most likely the African, as well as the Eskimo and some others, would say something of the sort about Miss Monroe.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a fair enough statement of fact, but it leaves the important question unanswered. Man is the beholder: what puts, and transforms, beauty in his eye—his mind's eye? In primitive communities it is chiefly physical function, the apparent capacity for child-bearing and hard work. In class-divided societies, beauty has always been seen to a large extent in terms of conspicuous leisure; the sirens of all western civilization seem to have done little else through history but loll on divans (if you believe it, look in the art galleries). And, of course, every age creates its own motives and needs which help to shape its concept of beauty. According to the franker historians, mediaeval ladies often assailed the nostrils as well as the heart, but nobody minded much; nowadays, with a century's public health behind and the soap advertisements before us, a whiff of perspiration kills romance.

Marilyn Monroe is the personification of what popular consciousness in our time deems desirable. The rubato walk is a source of delight; in Victorian England, when no respectable woman thought sex pleasurable, it would have brought an indignant flush to a decent man's face. When the family was sacrosanct (because the economic ties which held it were still fairly strong) sexual provocation was shameful. Now the ties have sagged, the morality has sagged too, and beauty can present itself to arouse the instinctive polygamist in every man. And the conspicuous leisure is still there—in impractical dress as well as the sultriness and aura of wealth.

There is more to Marilyn Monroe than merely physique, however. She is "the sexiest girl in Hollywood," the girl who posed naked for a calendar and takes an interest in Freud. Almost every day there is a fresh tale and a fresh photograph; her skirts blow over her head, she distorts perspective with her callipygous charms. Her marriage to Joe DiMaggio was a feast for the papers and everybody's imagination. The husky, virile Joe, a masculine idol, and the supremely nubile Marilyn saying: "You can't take a career to bed and cuddle it," and: "I like honeymoons." Miss Monroe is, in fact, a dream. In Hollywood they make dreams; she is the most delectable dream of all.

The visual promise of pneumatic bliss is only the beginning. The real secret is the legend. Earlier film beauties, the vamps, the sweater girls and the rest, established conventions for exciting without intent to gratify; the Monroe legend is all of intent to gratify. Miss Monroe suggests not merely that she would please you but also that you would please her. From the humbleness-to-riches story, to the fabulous marriage and the scene where a plumber gropes for his pipe-wrench in her bath, the whole is a gorgeous fantasy into which every unsatisfied person of either sex can project every longing. It is Cinderella up-to-date, in glorious technicolour, and they live voluptuously as well as happily ever after.

None of this reflects any particular discredit on Miss Monroe or her employers, the film magnates. People who sell things, even dreams, are simply cashing-in on other people's needs—the only important criticism is of the world which creates such needs on so large a scale. The brevity of Marilyn Monroe's marriage indeed suggests that she herself is no more satisfied than a good many of her admirers. Certainly she knows no greater security—the careers of public entertainers are as precarious as those of any other people.

One of the paradoxes of our time is that, as fast as morality has slackened and so removed apparent obstacles to well-fulfilled sexual lives, the lack of satisfaction has grown. It is impossible to imagine a stable, sane community deifying a dream, but modern culture is largely made up of dreams. There is Miss Monroe; there are the revenge dreams of the brutal gangster stories, the escape dreams of popular romance, the vicarious thrills of speedways, space-fiction and the big fights. Our society, despising primitive people who incorporate sex practices in their cultures, has erected Marilyn Monroe as its tribal symbol—the symbol of frustration and unsatisfied desires.

Robert Barltrop

Writers and Society—4: Scott Fitzgerald (1956)

From the Writers and Society series published in the October-December 1956 issue of Forum

It is a convenient fact that American outlook in recent years, and consequently American Literature, can be divided fairly accurately into decades—the 'twenties, the 'thirties and the 'forties. After the first world war, the first period takes us to the financial crash and the depression, and the next lasts until the beginning of the second world war.

The 'twenties were remarkable years in American history, and the films, plays and books of the period bear convincing testimony of the post-war disillusionment, the denial of former moral values, and the gangsterism and political corruption of the time. It was an age of bitterness and frustration, but a frustration that was expressed, at least among the middle and upper classes, by wildness and irresponsibility. Hip flasks, cocktail parties, speakeasies, petting parties, flappers and jazz-mania were all aspects of this breakdown of pre-war values.

As far as literature is concerned, the most significant spokesman of the age was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who actually gave the period its name — "the Jazz Age." Fitzgerald himself was one of that class fresh from Princeton or Yale, who found themselves pushed into a war whose cause they were unable to appreciate. The war over, they found life unreal and purposeless. The sons of the rich families, or poorer boys infected by the easy money ideology, they had not time for the outmoded doctrines of Carnegie or Rockefeller exhorting them to "win wealth by hard work." The pace of life for them quickened until it became a crazy merry-go-round that crashed to the ground with the stock market in 1929.

Fitzgerald's earlier novels, "The Beautiful and Damned" and "The Far Side of Paradise," are skillful and often moving accounts of the emptiness and pointlessness into which these people's lives were channeled. They do show, on Fitzgerald's part, a struggle to express himself and also to express the frustration of his age. Although not a "social critic" in the direct sense, he became a far more important social critic in the sense that he accurately presented the lives of people in this situation, of whom he was one, and consequently made the greater impression. The first novel is an account of the childhood, schooling, and college days of one of these sons of the rich, and the second is almost a continuation, dealing with the lives of a young man a flapper, and their hardening by the conditions of the futile world they knew.

The focal point in Fitzgerald's career was "The Great Gatsby." Although some might argue that it is not his best novel, it is certainly the hub of his work. The early works look forward to it, and the latter ones seem to refer back to it. It is the story of an ambitious nobody, Jay Gatsby, who achieves his riches by racketeering, and becomes almost a legend in the display and extravagance of his parties and style of living. His tragedy is basically that of all the people around him-they have not what they want, and do not even know what it is they want.

The irony of the novel is that in spite of Gatsby's lavish hospitality and the enormous parties that he gives, he is almost completely friendless, and his funeral produces only two mourners—the one friend who tries to help Gatsby find his desires, and one out of the thousands of people who had taken Gatsby's hospitality.

The novel is much tighter in construction than the earlier works, and has a much more stimulating plot. The narrator is Gatsby's  friend, and, because it is the view of an outsider looking in, the tragedy is made the more intense.

This was a period when current psychological thought had a considerable effect on American, and other literature. Fitzgerald himself, although sufficiently interested in Freudian psychology to make extensive use of it in his novel "Tender Is The Night," never closely examined the background of the life of his characters, and never enquired into the basic motives and causes that gave rise to them. It could be said that this is the secret of Fitzgerald's success as a writer. He does no more than honestly and skillfully depict the lives of people as he knew them, and for this reason his characters and situations have far more conviction and applicability to life that the intentional propaganda works of writers such as Upton Sinclair and Jack London.

"Tender Is The Night," has been regarded by many literary critics as a failure, although Fitzgerald himself thought highly of it. In order to overcome what he considered to be the main flaws in construction, he revised the form of the novel in 1940, and it was subsequently published in this form (it is available in Penguins). The latter version certainly seems to have gained clarity and interest, but the basic faults remain, that is, the veering between an onlooker's view and the writer's omniscience, and a tendency to over-complicate the story by an unnecessary wealth of characters and incident.

This novel takes us from the world of flappers and speakeasies to the world of the older rich expatriates at play on the Riviera, and having their psychological problems sorted out at the clinics of Zurich. Even if it does not come up to Fitzgerald's intention of making it the best American novel of the century it certainly presents a superb and engrossing picture of the lives of these people.

Fitzgerald's last and unfinished work, "The Last Tycoon" (published in 1941 in a form edited by Edmund Wilson), reverts to the earlier successful method of "Gatsby" and the story is told through the eyes of Cecelia Brady, a daughter of a Hollywood producer. Here also, we have a story of tragic failure, this time of a "wonder-boy" producer of the order of Irving Thalberg. Many of the characters are recognizably real-life Hollywood titans, and the book represents the most convincing and authentic account of Hollywood in literature (with the possible exception of Nathanael West's satire, "The Day Of The Locust"). In possessing this authenticity, it becomes a damning indictment of the American film factory, and clearly indicates that the horrors of "The Big Knife" and "The Day Of The Locust" are no exaggerations.

Some of Fitzgerald's short stories, too, well repay attention. Many of them are trite and banal, and were produced not as a labour of love, but merely as a means to provide the wherewithal to pay for an extravagant existence. On the other hand, some of them are brilliantly contrived, and rank with the novels as examples of efficient and persuasive writing. "May Day" or "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz" are stories which favourably bear comparison with any American short story writing of the period. The best of the stories are published in a collection entitled "Borrowed Time."

As with many other novelists, much of Fitzgerald's work is plainly autobiographical. The first two novels are apparently based on his early life at Princeton and after, and even in his later works, the echoes of his own existence are apparent. Dick Diver's failure in "Tender Is The Night" is a reflection of Fitzgerald's own failure in life, and even the reference to Diver's publication of a "popular" work on psychology and the perennially unfinished treatise, seems to indicate a conscience troubled by the glib short stories that Fitzgerald turned out in order to raise easy money, at the expense of his serious work.

"The Last Tycoon" too, reflects Fitzgerald's own experiences in Hollywood. With regard to this part of his life, "The Disenchanted" by Budd Schulberg, is based on Scott Fitzgerald's experiences as a script writer, and is well worth reading as a novel, in addition to the light that it throws on Fitzgerald's life and Hollywood generally.

A competent biography of Fitzgerald—"The Other Side of Paradise" by Arthur Mizener, also makes interesting reading, and helps considerably in an appreciation of Fitzgerald's work, as does a collection of notes and observations entitles "The Crack-Up," which also gives an insight into the tragedy of Fitzgerald's last days. Fitzgerald's life, like those of his heroes, was a failure. Like so many of his contemporaries, he saw his age, tied to a thriving industrial and financial giant, come crashing down in 1929, and after this he never again really got to grips with the world. He suffered nervous breakdowns, mainly caused through heavy drinking, and eventually died in 1940.

So much then, for the work of an absorbing writer, who in the words of Frederick Hoffman in "The Modern Novel in America," was successful beyond all of his contemporaries in keeping his work free of the pretentious intellectual faking that has handicapped so much of American fiction since Norris and Dreiser." In spite of all his flaws, Fitzgerald sums up an age of capitalism in an entertaining and stimulating way, which is more than be said for nine-tenths of the so-called social historians.

Albert Ivimey

Blogger's Note:

Other writers featured in the Writers and Society series:

• William Faulkner
• Carson McCullers
• John Steinbeck