I found it odd that so many people on this list hate "Reds" so much. I enjoyed it a great deal as did many older people of my acquaintance who had been communists. I think Louis Proyect put it quite nicely:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/elena-kagans-senior-thesis-on-the-socialist-party/
> If you want a popular culture version of this fascinating period, I can’t
recommend Warren Beatty’s “Reds” highly enough. The movie is laced with
testimony from people of Cannon’s generation, including Arne Swabeck, a
founding member of American Trotskyism along with Cannon who was 90 years
old at the time the movie was being made.
Not that Reds did not have plenty of flaws LP....
Gar Lipow -------------------
Maybe if I hadn't just come away from reading Trotsky's riveting and breathless accounts, from both historical and personal experience, I might have been more generous. Yes it was nice to see the old timers. On the other hand very little of the wealth of their experience was developed. They simply made statements that went nowhere.
As for the word Trotskist, that's a mistake. Trotsky spent pages trying to get his reader to understand this was a Stalinist word, used to deform and distort understanding of what Trotsky had said and done.
As far as I could tell, there was no such thing as Trotskism. In the un-informed US mind it sounds like some form of anarchism. From Trotsky's point of view what he wrote about and did was direct contact, understanding, and collaberation with the working urban and rural masses within their ad hoc (Soviets) organizations. That was his method of mobilization
Since I am reading here and there in the vast writings of Marx, I can see Trotsky's (and Lenin's) imagination at work, especially on the issue of parliamntarianism, reform, and the struggles with the big bourgeois. The conflicts and domestic battles between February and October with reformism v. revolution was fascinating in its mirrors leading up to 1848 and lost in the sequel, which Marx spends a great deal of effort to illucidate---which is highly condensed in the Manifesto, but given much greater range in the aftermath.
I haven't read Ten Days, but will order it next month along with a paper copy of My Life. This month has too many Amazon orders on the credit card. However, I have a sense of what must have happened to Reed. He got caught up in the vast mobilization that Lenin, Trotsky and the others (Zinoviev et al.) engaged in their battle to recapture the revolution.
I am of course certain the actual experience must have been many fold greater than just reading about it. And that excitment, its desparation and promise looming on the horizon of some immediate future was precisely what I wanted to see and didn't.
Well the movie couldn't capture that. It couldn't because the writing and production people had never read or experienced anything like it and neither had the actors/actresses. I assume they had to read Ten Days. But they had no center to work from no matter how good they were at their job.
CG