Meanwhile in Barnsley (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Washington DC was preparing for its bombastic military parade. It seems the US president had been inspired by his new friend in Pyongyang. Meanwhile, a few thousand miles to the east, another more modest, though worthwhile, procession took place through the streets of Hoyland Common, Barnsley.

Led by a brass band an invited group walked from the Saville Square pub where they’d assembled along a short route to an unassuming terraced house. The occasion was the unveiling of a blue plaque honouring Barry Hines, the author of A Kestrel for a Knave. Written in the 1960s, it became the film Kes directed by Ken Loach who took part in this event.

The honour of unveiling the plaque fell to Barry’s surviving brother who delivered a short speech about how the son of a South Yorkshire miner came to write the book that made his name. Speeches concluded and, following a final couple of tunes, instruments returned to their cases, it was time to return to the Saville Square for lunch.

In the foyer of the pub stood a full-size fibreglass version of the bronze statue, sculpted by Graham Ibbeson, which is to stand in Barnsley in Barry Hines’ honour. The money for this has been raised through a vigorous funding campaign led by Ronnie Steele and a dedicated group of volunteers. Beginning in January 2018, through a mix of crowd funding, the sale of bronze maquettes and live public performances by an eclectic mix of musicians, the statue has been cast and paid for.

It depicts the central character of the story, young Billy Casper, his arm extended with the kestrel perched on his hand. It presently stands in Barnsley’s new library, but the group intend that eventually it will stand on a plinth outside for all to see. Ronnie Steele gave a brief speech of thanks to all involved before declaring the buffet open. While people ate there were songs by performers Dave Cherry and Del Scott Millar, and Celtic-style traditional music by Barnsdale Hood.

There are a few political points to be drawn from this event. Common arguments against socialism are that people will not work for free and, as people are naturally greedy, free access to resources will result in people taking far more than they need.

The many, actually uncounted, hours of often quite tedious work by Ronnie Steele and his group to organise the campaign and events was entirely voluntary. The performers who gave their time to play at those events did so unpaid. All they required was a shared objective.

The buffet itself was greatly over-catered. However, people did not eat more than they wanted, each more than capable of deciding when enough was sufficient and then stopping. People had to be almost pleaded with to take remaining food away and then no one scooped up armfuls. Just a paper plate or two for family or friends who would appreciate the largesse.

And this is very much in the context of capitalism where selfish individualism is supposedly the driving force behind how people act. While this is not socialism of itself, it is a glimpse of possibility, that people without state or company direction can organise and act in a social way.

The world of mining communities as depicted by Barry Hines has gone, but the potential of the working class remains, if still largely untapped.

Dave Alton

Film Review: Les Misérables (2013)

Film Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is the cinematic version of the Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubel stage musical based on the 1862 Victor Hugo novel.  Hooper’s film comes in at 158 minutes and is a ‘sung-through’ musical comprising about fifty songs, the most popular being, I Dreamed a Dream sung by Fantine, a ‘grisette’ turned prostitute played by Anne Hathaway. Hooper had all his actors sing live on set, there is no ‘count-in’ or predetermined tempo and the piano is following the pacing of the actor which is a first for a filmed musical. Orchestral music was added post-production. The outstanding voice is Eddie Redmayne’s tenor as revolutionary student Marius, especially in the song, A Heart Full of Love.

‘Les misérables’ are the working class, ‘the wretched poor’ of nineteenth-century French capitalism in Paris, but the film glosses over the poverty, disease, crime, prostitution, exploitation of the working class, and the inequalities of wealth in capitalism. Hugo was concerned with the ‘degradation of man by poverty and the ruin of woman by starvation’.  The ‘saintly’ Valjean, played by Hugh Jackman, has served 19 years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread. The film is Valjean’s search for redemption, and there is a Christian theme in songs, I Have Saved your Soul for God and Why did I allow this man to touch my Soul and teach me Love?  Hugo saw his novel as ‘a progress from nothingness to God.’ Valjean’s conversion supports Marx’s statement: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

The characters of Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, are the ‘comic relief,’ and their ‘rascally’ antics in Master of the House and Beggars at the Feast push the film into the Dickensian whimsy of Lionel Bart’s Oliver.  If the Thenardier couple are Fagin then the street urchin, Gavroche, with ‘cockney’ accent is the Artful Dodger.

The use of computer-generated imagery recreates the Parisian working-class districts of faubourgs and ‘cour des miracles,’ comprising dense streets and medieval alleyways, later destroyed by the ‘renovations’ under Haussmann which would better able the bourgeoisie to control the Parisian working class. A replica of ‘the Elephant of the Bastille’ was built in Greenwich which adds authentic historical context to the film.

The climax of the film is a futile, student-led Republican uprising, which actually took place in June 1832 against the ‘haute bourgeoisie’ monarchy of Louis Philippe and is portrayed in the songs At the Barricades and Do you hear the People Sing? Sixty million people worldwide have seen the stage musical, Les Misérables, but if going to see it could change the world then it would have been made illegal.

The 1831 working-class uprising of silk workers in Lyons who sang, ‘When our rule arrives, when your rule shall end, then we shall weave the shroud of the old world. Listen! Revolt is rumbling,” is a better subject for a ‘revolutionary’ film musical.

Steve Clayton

Rear View: Class War (2018)

The Rear View Column from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class war

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, one of many brutal battles in capitalism’s ongoing class war, which saw a peaceful gathering of radicals in Manchester charged by a gentry militia and resulted in 15 deaths and 400-700 non-fatal injuries. Those attending had come to hear Henry Hunt, who advocated parliamentary reform and repeal of the Corn Laws, and carried banners calling for Parliaments Annual, Suffrage Universal, echoes of the French Revolution’s Liberty and Fraternity. There was, however, a general lack of political clarity, well illustrated when a band played God Save the King before the meeting started. The Times four days after the slaughter was both candid and clear: ‘The more attentively we have considered the relations subsisting between the upper and labouring classes throughout some of the manufacturing districts, the more painful and unfavourable is the construction which we are forced to put upon the events of last Monday…The two great divisions of society there, are the masters, who have reduced the rate of wages; and the workmen, who complain of their masters having done so. Turn the subject as we please, to this complexion it must come at last’. The anniversary is marked early with the release of Peterloo. ‘Mike Leigh’s period drama has immediacy and a sense of anger. It will ensure that the bloody events in St Peter’s Fields nearly 200 years ago are put back on the radar of politicians, historians and cultural commentators alike’ (theindependent.co.uk, 1 September). The film will be released next month, and if it registers with a less exclusive audience, reminding us that the class struggle, which throws up countless victims – from Peterloo to Marikana, Tolpuddle to Gdansk, and Kronstadt to Orgreave – has not gone away, it should be welcomed. The class war will not come to an end until the capitalists are defeated by the workers. That defeat will not require workers to use violence against the bosses – unless, of course, the capitalists have undemocratic ideas about making martyrs of themselves by defying the will of a conscious, socialist majority.

Star wars

The dailycaller.com (31 August) is one of many conservative websites lamenting loudly that a MOVIE ABOUT ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY DOESN’T FEATURE AMERICAN FLAG. ‘The upcoming film about Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s iconic moonwalk does not feature arguably the most important moment of the entire event. “First Man,” starring Canadian actor Ryan Gosling and directed by Damien Chazelle, does not feature a scene of the American flag being planted on the moon’s surface because Armstrong’s accomplishment “transcended countries and borders,” according to Gosling. “I think this was widely regarded, in the end, as a human achievement [and] that’s how we chose to view it” Gosling argued. “I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again, he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.” “He was reminding everyone that he was just the tip of the iceberg – and that’s not just to be humble, that’s also true.” Gosling continued to say that he doesn’t think “Neil viewed himself as an American hero. From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite. And we wanted the film to reflect Neil.”’ Hear hear! Worth remembering on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing next year by those who are amazed and enthralled by the recent space-related discoveries or not is the fact that as long as capitalism remains on Earth, its rockets, its space stations, its whole space technology will be used as a means to solve the problems thrown up in the competitive struggle for markets by the major powers. That is, as the ultimate weapons of war.

Peace on Earth

‘The task of creating a coherent and free society is the mightiest to which man has summoned himself, and it is the task which now presses urgently upon us” (Professor G. D. Herron, Why I Am a Socialist, 1900).

‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do’ (H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World, 1924).

‘You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful—to make this life a wonderful adventure’ (Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940).

A Common Belief (1942)

Film Review from the January 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Well, why not?” With that question in their ears and with the appealing close-up of the old man in their minds, the audience saw the end of the film, "The Common Touch.”

I had read only a few hours previously that this film was rather more intelligent than usual, but I doubt if the critic who made that remark saw it in the way that I did. It was a propaganda type of show and was certainly more intelligent than usual in its artful and subtle appeal to the mass of people to believe that all will be well with the world if things are left in the hands of the wiser and more decent type of master.

The film finished where the crooked director of a firm of builders had been caught trying to put a fast one over the owner of a doss-house. The brave, clean, young hero, son and heir to the late head of the firm and now its chief, promised, in a letter to the habitués of the doss-house, to find alternative accommodation for them while the old building was to be demolished. The new building, when erected, would contain some of the things that they now needed, but the atmosphere would remain the same. Titch, the odd-job man of the place, turned to the old man and asked, ” Do they mean it?” The old man replied, ”They mean it this time,” which caused Titch to exclaim that it would be heaven on earth, and the old man closed with, "Well, why not?” and I felt that the audience thought likewise, that it was meant this time, as also were the promises of better world this time after the present trouble is finished.

In so far as the film implied that the distress of these wretches was aggravated by the crookedness and selfishness on the part of some of the rich, and that it could be lessened by intelligent, understanding action by the "decent” ones of the upper class, the film was largely true. But we could not expect the film to show that the poverty and hardship was caused by the same system of society that made the rich possible, and that all the understanding and intelligence and goodness on the part of these rich could not abolish this wretchedness. Nor could we expect the film to show directly that in such a society as we now have there will always be plenty of causes and room for such crookedness, and that as fast as one evil had been dealt with more would arise.

Moreover, in practice there is nothing to determine that the enlightened rich could have their own way even if they did desire to make the workers’ lot any easier; it is just as likely that all their work would be lost in trying to get their ideas adopted by the other members of their class, and while such a hypothetical position lasted the workers’ troubles would continue, and supposing that the “decent ” ones were defeated, what then?

As all Socialists know, the only people who can alter the society in such a way as to remove the causes of poverty, not merely to lessen it, but to remove it once and for all, and with this the cause of war in the world, are the workers. They will do this as quickly as they understand the basis of the system of the society in which they live. It is therefore incumbent upon Socialists to spread this understanding, and anything short of this is a waste of time, which soon leads to a waste of lives, by malnutrition (a euphemism for slow starvation), and sooner or later, by war.

S. C. Greenwood

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.

The Nut. (1922)

From the November 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there is one thing more than another which Socialists resent, it is the master's contempt of working-class intelligence. Think of the recruiting posters of six and seven years ago, of the kind of nursing the constituencies get prior to a general election. Look at the public speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, with their inevitable and ludicrous metaphor. A picturesque figure catches the workers’ fancy; they take up a pat phrase like the latest comic song, and he knows it. The capitalists and their apologists have taken the measure of proletarian simplicity, and the workers generally prove their calculations right.

But to see what, downright insolence our class will tolerate it is necessary to go with them to the theatre or cinema, and see some of the things they applaud. A recent popular Douglas Fairbank’s film is a gem of this kind. The heroine of “The Nut,” a girl of the upper class, has a bright plan for bringing the millennium. "If everybody with a refined home,” she declares, "would open their doors for an hour each day to a child or two from the slum districts, the influence of these surroundings would be so great that the children would be bound to grow up better citizens in every way.” This hour, she is sure, will so colour the child’s growing mind that it will as naturally seek the good and beautiful as a growing flower seeks the sun.

Can you beat that?

A regular contributor to the Star, G.F.M., had a few words to say about it when the film was first shown, thought it a most beautiful idea in the abstract, and practicable, possibly, in America, where the poor have a "different attitude” towards the rich, but foresaw a little difficulty, somehow, in working it in London. She couldn't see herself going to a woman’s door in Bethnal Green, and explaining "how much more refined my home was than hers, and how greatly her children would benefit by a daily visit.”

On the whole, we think G.F.M.'s instinct was sound. The idea being, presented not on the screen, but on her own doorstep, the woman worker would almost certainly say many things not printable in the Socialist Standard. Let us hope she would go further, and having heard and thought upon the message of our speakers in the open places and at street corners, would add, “You can boast of a refined home because we and millions like us spend our days in toil. You can point to our squalor because you and a few thousand like you steal what our toil brings forth. You want our children to have high aspirations. They shall; we will attend to that ourselves. For we are learning at last that the power is ours to despoil you, and make the world our own.”

A.

Class Dismissed - How TV Frames the Working Class (2012)

Film Review from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s almost taken for granted that television doesn’t accurately reflect how we live, but it’s not always easy to articulate how it distorts the real world. Class Dismissed: How TV Frames The Working Class is a useful examination of the ways the goggle-box deceives us. The film was made in 2005 by Pepi Leistyna of the University of Massachusetts - Boston, and is easy enough to find on the internet. It only discusses American television, but the trends are recognisable elsewhere.

To follow the film, you have to tune in to the definitions of ‘class’ used. When its talking heads refer to the ‘working class’ they use the narrower meaning of people with low incomes, little power and less “cultural capital” (or what could be called sophistication). This is contrasted with ‘middle-class’ people who are a notch above on each of these scales. The ‘middle class’ is living the American Dream of gleaming affluence and clean-cut leisure.

According to Leistyna, ‘middle class’ characters on television are depicted as empowered, independent and sassy because the social and economic forces which often prevent these traits are downplayed. These characters only need to struggle against aspects of their personality which might stop them living the American Dream. Programme makers are less interested in showing issues relating to wider social forces or being dealt with collectively.

So, TV tells us how we should define success and that this is to be achieved individually, rather than through political action. An exception to these trends was Roseanne, an early nineties sitcom which retained some left-wing ideas thanks to the persistence of its show runner Roseanne Barr. However, even in this show, the family ‘made it’, and became wealthy. A British equivalent would be the Trotters becoming millionaires in Only Fools and Horses.

Leistyna gives another example of how ‘middle-class’ culture is shown on television in ways which hide wider problems: if a television show depicts a well-off black family, then this disguises the real inequalities that exist between communities. Programme makers would see it differently, of course. They would say that minorities can be shown in a positive way to challenge stereotypes and to improve how they are represented. However, Leistyna would reply that television only depicts successful characters from minority groups in ways compatible with ‘middle class’ values. He’s saying that television tolerates minorities as long as they are living that American Dream.

This depiction of those who have ‘made it’ differs from how ‘working-class’ people are presented on television. When a ‘middle-class’ character makes a mistake, it’s seen as an aberration from the confident, successful person they should be. When a ‘working-class’ character makes a mistake, it’s because that’s just what they’re like. Leistyna reels off a list of characteristics associated with ‘working-class’ people on television: bad taste, lack of intelligence, reactionary politics, poor work ethic and dysfunctional family values. Imagine a racist Homer Simpson who pushes Marge around, and you get an amalgamation of these traits. Leistyna describes how the ‘working class’ is portrayed as an underclass of hillbillies, rednecks and trailer trash whose lives are there to be ripped open on The Jerry Springer Show. Or its closest British counterpart The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Leistyna’s argument could be boiled down to saying that television reinforces ‘middle-class’ ideology as an attack on the working class. This is television as propaganda to sell the American Dream and distract us from thinking about how capitalism really works. While his argument has merit, it would be more accurate to say that the mindset Leistyna associates with a ‘middle class’ is just mainstream capitalist ideology. ‘Middle-class’ people are also alienated and exploited within capitalism, even if they don’t always have the same pressures as those lower down the social scale. The film ends by recognising that changing the ideology presented on television requires changing the society which creates that ideology. And that’s something else worth switching off your television for.

Mike Foster

Room At The Top (1959)

Film Review from the March 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Room at the Top, directed by Jack Clayton

Those who doubt that contemporary society fails to satisfy the needs of the majority of people should look at the ways in which so many cherish remote hopes of escaping from their position in it. It is natural to want to break away from wage slavery. The chances are slim, but the likelihood that one’s subject position in the present order of things will continue without respite until one’s dying day, is a dismal contemplation. How many dreams, we wonder, are sealed down with the football coupon?

The new film Room at the Top, which is based on the best-selling novel by John Braine, portrays a young man who is fed up with the compromise and blows to his self-respect imposed in holding his Town Hall clerkship. Determined to get out of the rut of the grim northern industrial town he was born into, he goes to settle on the fringe of a world of big houses, spacious gardens, expensive cars. Once there, he pursues his aim of making the right social contacts in order to gain the highest rung of the ladder of success.

Lucky Break Story

“The Top” for him is really that no-man’s land where higher paid members of the working class mingle with the smaller industrialists and the like. But fortunately for our social climber, the daughter of one of the bigger fish is a member of the local dramatic society and this gives him his chance to break in.

This is another cherished notion for those who find it unpleasant to face dreary reality. Known as the "lucky break,” here it takes the form of marrying the boss’s daughter. Stories in popular magazines rely heavily on these situations, but some of today’s best-selling novels, widely acclaimed by the critics, fall back on them, too. The trend in this field is for boys of the working class, who have achieved grammar school education, to be recognised by employers as superior to the pampered products of their own class. Acceptance and promotion to executive positions soon follow and the boy moves up in the social scale.

The storm of praise that greeted Room at the Top when it was published in 1957 revealed the critics agreeing that this was the stuff of which contemporary dreams are made.

Signs of Success

The ambition to “get on” and achieve a higher status in life helps to give stories such as these their wide popularity. It is recognised that only money can bring this status in such an acquisitive world as we live in. The desire for recognition in this sense is reflected in the outward signs necessary to prove to the world and oneself that you are a success. The competitive nature of the Capitalist way of life breeds the feelings of insecurity and isolation that make people strive for this kind of success.

The process is endless. The same forces that make a £10-a-week person believe that he can only be contented on £15, will still make him, once he gets it. dissatisfied on less than £20. Not to mention the sacrifices that might have to be made in order to get it. This does not mean that we should not aim to get as much from Capitalism as we can. It does mean that this approach to the satisfying of human needs is a limited one. It cannot solve the predicament with which human beings are faced in Capitalist society.

Better Human Beings

For the fact is that the working class cannot opt out of the ill effects of Capitalism without deciding to get rid of it. Reformers in spite of good intentions and with the best will in the world and the support of electors, have made plain the futility of trying to obtain beneficial results from a system that is basically harmful. Success for a few at the expense of failure for most is all that this profit-motivated system can offer. In the long run the solution for the individual is the solution for mankind as a whole: to organise the world in accord with the needs of humanity.

What are these needs? To live in harmony and peace in a world where the interest of the individual is aligned to that of society as a whole. Socialists realise that only with a foundation of common ownership can society create the conditions for the betterment of human beings.

Anyone can sympathise with those like the character in the film who want to get away from the squalor of their childhood days. But if they do, let them remember that the system which causes their and other people’s problems will still be there. The economic structure that leads to slumps and wars and sets man against man in the struggle, not only to get to the top, but to avoid being shoved to the bottom, is unaltered. The competition for more things, higher status, greater power, will remain with its ill effects.

A positive alternative

Dreams of success today have their counterparts in the nightmares of failure. The evidence of mental ill- health indicates the high number of people unable to cope with modern modern life. The inability or reluctance to face the facts of life in a class-divided, money-collecting system indicates the failure of the social organisation. Let us see it for what it is and consider the positive alternative that Socialism offers.

It is obvious that room at the top is strictly limited. For the majority of people the lower portion of the social pyramid is where they must remain until society is changed. The important thing for workers is to recognise the need for such a change. To work for that end is the most worthwhile task of our time.

S. D.