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Nice to see Kenny back on the scene after the wild and wooly days of the early Marxism lists. Did you know that your tormentor Ralph Dumain was not really an African-American, by the way? He's a Jewish guy with some major hangups.
Getting back to some points that my friends Gary McClennan and Carrol Cox made yesterday, which have a bearing on the question of "irony" and working-class representation. One of the great socialist artists of the 20th century was Bertold Brecht, who nobody could ever accuse of romanticizing the workers. Mother Courage is the portrait of a woman who goes around the battlefields after the combat has died down in order to pick through the corpses for valuables to salvage. Is this more unflattering than the portrait Michael Moore draws of the woman who sells rabbits for meat? Tch-tch.
Carrol thinks that "Salt of the Earth" will have a longer shelf-life than "Roger and Me." This is a spurious comparison. The first movie is tied esthetically and politically to the tug at the heartstrings Steinbeck novels, while Moore's flick seems much more closely related to James T. Farrell, Nathaniel West or Jon Dos Passos. The depression era novel of the latter group had more bite and more honesty in many ways. No heroes in these novels.
The plain truth of the matter, as I already stated, is that "Roger and Me" conveyed the late 70s a lot better than "Norma Rae." Speaking as somebody who was on the shop floor and who was surrounded by a bunch of Trotskyites who aspired to be the new Norma Rae, there was nothing like "Salt of the Earth" going on, let alone the sit-down strikes of Flint in the 1930s. The truth hurts.
Gary mentioned Barbara Kopple. Now there's a sad story. After the disappointment of P9, she has become Woody Allen's court portraiteur. Her documentary manages to leave all the unpleasant truths about this geek unaddressed. Who cares about his relationship to Soon Yi, I am talking about the god-damned whitebread sensibility of his movies and his personal life. Prairie Miller, the WBAI film critic, asked Kopple why she didn't ask Woody Allen why he didn't play with black musicians. She said that it wasn't germane to her film. Talk about self-censorship. Who knows where she goes next with her career. Calvin Klein commercials?
The real discussion that underlies all the chitchat about Michael Moore, Mark Twain, et al is how we can reach the working-class in advanced capitalist countries. This is one of the most important topics we can discuss. It is not just humor that is a factor, although we have been stressing this. Another factor is language. The "Russian" roots of American left groups in the 1960s and 70s was one of the biggest impediments to our success. Whenever I used to have to go out and sell the Militant newspaper in front of the Piggly-Wiggly grocery store in Houston's Montrose neighborhood (where I competed for space with Harekrishna mendicants), I'd always worry whether a potential customer for the paper might be turned off by Leon Trotsky's "Speech to Spanish workers in Barcelona, 1937!!!" or some such thing. Try and imagine the effect of something like that on a guy in a leisure suit and cowboy boots.
So, some SDS'ers figured this out and they started something called the New American Movement. The trouble is that they weren't just against mumbo-jumbo, they were also against revolution. They hooked up Michael Harrington's socialist party and formed the DSA. Yeah, the DSA doesn't spout "Bolshevik" jargon, they just promote a bunch of ideas that are virtually indistinguishable from the inside-the-beltway liberal thinktanks.
Staying on target against the capitalist system, while not losing yourself in sectarianism is a real challenge. At least sectarianism is pretty dead nowadays. The big job seems to be making revolution a serious goal for the left once again.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)