Orwell & socialism

Someone suggested in class that Orwell was strongly opposed to socialism. But it’s worth noting that not everyone reads him that way--including, for at least much of his adult life, Orwell himself.

He fought against the Facists in Spain, and after seeing the Stalinist tactics of the Soviet-supported Republican army against groups like the anarchist & syndicalist militia of the POUM, with which Orwell fought (on the same side, that is, against the Fascist National Front, which had narrowly lost the 1936 election), he became strongly anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian. But he continued to identify as a socialist. (Brief bio here )

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which he reports on the lives of miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he argues that

Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

And as late as 1946 in “Why I Write” he wrote that

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it

(also w/o italics here. I don't have a print text handy, so I don't know which is more reliable).

That was still before writing 1984, so one might argue that his views changed. But many read it as consistent with his earlier positons. So, for instance, Robert Resch in Boundary 2 reads 1984 as both socialist and anti-Stalinist:

Because Orwell’s democratic socialism is explicitly and militantly anti-capitalist, his concept of totalitarianism must be distinguished clearly from that of his cold war appropriators.

According to Paul Foot in Socialist Review

George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist - Stalinism.

More Orwell, of course, at the library.

easy in a police state

In Touch of Evil, Mike Vargas explains that "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Some would say we're on our way.
Some would say we should go farther--like this guy, who thinks Bush should emulate Julius Caesar, nuke Iran, & declare himself president for life. No, really.

Update: The site's been scrubbed, but here's the cache.

on zombies

I’ve been thinking about zombie movies, of which the twenty-first century has seen a resurgence. The zombie movie database lists nearly 1600 films since the year 2000, though that includes shorts, tv shows, and direct to video releases. Still, many of those have been quite successful theatrical features. In 2002, we got 28 Days Later, and this year its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. In 2004, we saw a remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead, as well as the British horror comedy Shaun of the Dead. The next year, 2005, Romero himself directed the fourth in his series, Land of the Dead. What’s more, there are games like Resident Evil (which itself spawned a series of films), and books like Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Zombies, it seems, are everywhere.

So, when I recently saw on the website commondreams.org an article by Olga Bonfiglio titled “Dead Nation Walking,” I naturally thought it must be about zombie movies. But of course the article was instead about capital punishment in the US, and the title a reference to the anti-death penalty work of sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking.

Still, in the midst of life we are in death. Surely the violence of our world has some bearing on the popularity of a genre about the walking, biting dead.

As one can confirm in Bonfiglio’s article and through her sources, most nations have recognized that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent to crime. The US is the only NATO nation that retains the death penalty, and we rank fourth in the world for the number of executions, behind only China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Not only are there significant racial disparities in sentencing, so that people of color are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death, but also many innocent people have been falsely convicted and sentenced to death. Since 1973 over 120 people have been released from death row because of evidence of their innocence.

But the 431 people who have been executed in the US since 2000 don’t necessarily account for the recent interest in the walking dead, since the yearly figures have actually been declining since they peaked in 1999, in part because of the work of activists like Prejean and Bonfiglio.
But we might consider the casualties in Iraq—including the over 600,000 “excess deaths” reported by the Lancet, or perhaps the deaths resulting here from the lack of access to health care. Or those who have died in US custody, or for that matter in the US in police custody

In the midst of life we are in death, indeed, and maybe death is also in us, as well. George Romero’s work, in particular, has tended to stress the blurring of boundaries between zombies and humans, the idea that zombies are us. In Land of the Dead, a human character observes of the zombies, “They’re pretending to be alive,” and another responds, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive?” Similarly, in Shaun of the Dead, some of the initial humor comes from Shaun’s failure to notice that the people around him are zombies, since they don’t seem to be acting all that differently than usual (though, as one character later notes, “they are a little bitey”).

This blurring of boundaries means that zombies figure differently in different films, or sometimes even within a single film. They may be emblems of frustration with routine, as when a character in Shaun of the Dead comments, before the zombie outbreak, “I want to live a little.” They may embody a rebellious underclass, as when they overrun the gated community of wealthy humans in Land of the Dead. They may provide opportunities for human characters to act out unacceptable and unconscious aggressive wishes, as when people are obliged to kill zombified family members. But the deadening effect of life under capitalism has long been a staple of the zombie tradition.

Writing in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, a psychoanalyst with the science-fictional name of Mark Borg suggests that the palliative care culture –which dovetails so nicely with the commodification of treatment, with selling drugs to cure sleeplessness, inattention, depression, anxiety, shyness, and all the ills the human mind is heir to—invites us to become emotional zombies, armored against social connection and empathy. He writes,

Human—that is, emotional—responses to everyday stimuli are increasingly pathologized, and we are increasingly promised the obliteration of all human suffering. Yet at the core of all these human responses to suffering that need remedy is a deep sense of empathy with the struggles associated with simply existing at this time in this society, in a state of perpetual dread over the immense social problems that infect those around us, and that seem (and often are) insurmountable.

The list of potential remedies for our discomfort is long enough to [ . . . remove] us from the emotional experience of painful and anxiety-provoking stimuli. In this state of amputated emotions and self-experience we can become zombie-like, unable to impact or be impacted by our world or by each other. (2)

One recurrent motif in zombie movies is the coming together of human survivor groups, often an affirmation of the human sympathy to which life under capitalism is so antagonistic. In Shaun of the Dead the title character quotes Bertrand Russell’s statement that “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” That film ultimately betrays the words of the pacifist Russell, when the characters are saved by military intervention, but most zombie films are quite critical of militarism and of war.

Heather Hendershot, writing in Flow, notes that there is a long history of non-vampiric walking corpses being used as anti-war symbols, going back to Abel Gance's J'accuse in 1919: “The film ends with the dead of the Great War returning to ask why they have been sacrificed.” More recently, Joe Dante’s 2004 “Homecoming,” part of the television series Masters of Horror, featured dead soldiers from the current conflict returning to vote against the politicians who falsely led them into war.

Meghan Sutherland, writing in Framework, argues that zombie movies offer a “scenario . . . familiar to us in the time of the Patriot Act, it is precisely the bleed or collapse of structural boundaries—between murder and law, power and the body, life and death—that constitutes the survival of sovereign power on the unpredictable terrain of modern politics.”

This certainly sounds like a description of the death penalty, as well as, often enough, the actions of US forces in Iraq, and the actions of US police and prison guards in the US.

Despite the recurrent appearance of zombies, however, there has been a twist in the recent films, in many of which the zombies are not slow and shuffling, but fast and surprisingly agile, as in the remade Dawn of the Dead. Indeed, in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, the source of the problem is described as the “rage virus.” The deadened affect, the lack of emotion registered in earlier zombie films seems now to have given way to return of repressed fury.

And why shouldn’t we be furious? We have been paying attention, and we are outraged.

resident evil

Why is Milla Jovovich in lingerie? I really want to cgi onto her a decent set of clothes. Something with sleeves, and legs. I do like the knee-high black boots, though. Something I know I always think of wearing when I’m lounging around in a strange house after waking up in the shower, bruised and amnesiac.

All those shots of elevators plunging through shafts and trains through tunnels.

Evil corporations, man; they creep me out.

watch out

So, the last time I flew, I couldn't check in through the computer kiosk because, the person behind the counter told me, my name matched that of someone on the watch list. But if my name matched, then how did they decide so easily it wasn't me? (And I had no trouble on the return trip.) And if it was the same name, did the other user of it steal it from me? Because it's not a name you'd think was common. Or was it really my name on the list for some reason (my visiting of leftist websites, perhaps)? None of it makes me feel any safer.

spectacle

"To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary."

(1968: seems to include a lot of nekkid young women)

knocked up

Knocked Up was written and directed by Judd Apatow, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the director of photography was Portland native Eric Edwards. It’s a beautifully shot film, and it’s been getting enthusiastically positive reviews (especially at sites like Reviews for Guys and Movie for Guys).

All that press may have made the storyline familiar, but here it is in brief. Alison (played by Katherine Heigl), has just been promoted from behind the scenes to doing on-air interviews with celebrities. Out dancing with her sister to celebrate, she meets Ben (played by Seth Rogen), who’s out with his stoner slacker roommates. They spend the night together and she’s clearly alarmed in the morning (he asks, did we have sex?). But, as it turns out, she’s pregnant, and with little discussion of her options, she decides to continue the pregnancy and try to develop a real relationship with Ben.

A number of critics have suggested that the emotional center of the film lies with Alison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete, played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The film is more interesting if we understand the Alison and Ben pairing as a kind of projection of the feelings of someone in Paul’s position (or Apatow’s).

At least one critic has suggested that the obvious thing for pretty, successful, upwardly-mobile Alison to do is the terminate the pregnancy and move on.

The problem is not that Knocked Up is “liberal” because it’s about casual sex and having a baby out of wedlock. The problem is that it is horribly conservative about embracing and enjoying an adult version of sexuality that has moved beyond dorm-room-esque groping. One night with some guy you don’t even know does not mean you must tie yourself to him for the rest of your life... unless you think that women must be punished for sex. Oh, but it’s not punishment: you get an adorable baby out of the deal! And you get to “train” a man!

Another observes that

It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.

The pro-natalist position is implicit; we never hear anything about Alison’s possible religious or moral scruples. But we know little about her character. Aside from her job and family, she seems to have no life, no friends, no interests, no psychology.

Clearly the movie is a Guy Fantasy that the gorgeous successful blonde will fall for the crass loser; that's pretty much the central joke. Comments on some blogs have been far more scathing:

first of all, the woman gives up her hope of love and compatibility. face it, it's a trade up for him, a trade down for her. second of all, when the woman's mother suggests she get an abortion, the woman digs her heels in for daughter rebellion. the guy writer obviously can't have a powerful older woman giving the gal advice. third, the woman has no women friends except bitches. Another guy fantasy. And the woman rejects her friends in favor of the guy. Another guy fantasy. Lastly, the guy gets to command the woman's sister to leave the birthing room because she doesn't belong there. Another guy fantasy - telling off the sister. . . . The message is - abandon all your friends and sisters and your mother for the chubby guy. Of course, he gets to keep his friends. Does anyone see how hateful that is?

The World Socialist Web Site notes that the film is very narrowly focused, entirely concerned with individual choices and relationships, and that despite the superficial lewdness, its values are conservative, signs of an "inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life":

At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book....

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

It’s perhaps worth acknowledging that the hedonistic idle life of Ben’s friends and roommates could be understood as a resistance to capitalism and the protestant work ethic, and that may be part of the appeal of those sections of the film, but surely there are better means of resistance.