a whole 6 hour film on the Paris Commune

La Commune (2001) - a self-reflective film about the short-lived commune that arose out of social tension and upheaval in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. This is a groundbreaking film that did not show up on too many radar screens.

The film asks you to imagine you're walking in the shoes of Paris communards during a massive revolt, and reflect on your own experiences and what it means to live a revolutionary life. And over the course of six hours, you are invited to share the experience of filmmaking with cast members themselves. At times they wonder out loud why they couldn't get support for this film by any television channel or media business. They also wonder what the role of humanitarian organizations should be in relation to revolutionary organizations.

Karl Marx wrote a tract on the Paris Commune, called Civil War in France. Lenin wrote a tract, The Paris Commune. Kropotkin also wrote a tract, The Commune of Paris. Bakunin has one, The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State. As well as many others.

How did the 1871 Commune start?

After Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, Otto von Bismarck drove the French forces back, and would eventually siege and destroy Paris. Bismarck and the Prussian army figured the "soft and decadent" French workers would be easily overcome. After the occupation, Prussia allowed Parisians to hold onto their weapons because of their persisting autonomist spirit. They installed a conservative pro-Prussian and monarchist French assembly, located at Versailles, with the repressive Adolphe Thiers as the chief executive.

On March 18th, 1871, when Thiers tries to regain power over the Paris workers violently, the soldiers were overcome by the women of the working class, and refused to fire on the Parisians. Soldiers and workers fraternized. When popular resistance broke out and spread among the working classes all over Paris, class war took place. This is where the film La Commune begins.


French workers took control of the factories, setup barricades throughout Paris to block the invading army, and initiated a municipal council with a state-like structure known as the Commune.

In the film, the story is told by two television reporters for "Commune TV". The reporters tell us that this anachronistic narrative is actually a critique of the bourgeois media. Instead of showing us clips from newspapers from the time period, La Commune caricatures the media establishment by showing the bourgeois media and the Commune media on separate television channels. We watch the revolution through the television, literally. We see that the bourgeoisie watch the bourgeois news; while the proletariat watch Commune TV. Each social strata debates what they learn from the TV, and decide what needs to be done from their class perspective. Some say nothing can be done, others want to see more revolt. The bourgeoisie say the communards are severely outnumbered and stupid.

Here is an example of the bourgeois television broadcast, with a guest "expert" discussing and criticizing the statecraft schemes of the commune, in opposition to the monarchist state system. Following that is a short segment from Commune TV, discussing with workers the role of abandoned workshops.

At other parts in the film, the cast steps out of character, and ask each other if they are representing these events truthfully. They reflect on what the 1871 commune means to them and what they have learned from it for the future. The director goads the audience to action throughout the film with provocative questions and situations. After one scene emphasizing income inequalities in France, director Peter Watkins places this narrative onto the screen to sum up the impressions we have of Paris in 1871:

"In 1870, the wealthiest 20% of the world population had 7 times the income of the poorest 20%. In 1997 the difference was 74 to 1."

In 1870, the French proletariat and Blanquists, who held that a socialist revolution must be carried out by small group of highly-organized conspirators, demanded the overthrow of the French government and the establishment of a commune beginning in Paris. In La Commune, there is an extensive bourgeois debate about the "foreigners" who have taken advantage of the revolutionary spirit in France. These Blanquists - among them are Polish and other Eastern European soldiers, generals and revolutionaries - are talked about as non-French outsiders who cannot be trusted, and must be killed because they are manipulating the French working class. The bourgeoisie becomes even more nationalistic as the film goes on.

Among the proletariat, other debates break loose. The women discuss their role in workings of a revolutionary society, and question gender hierarchies: their duties, their restrictions, the way they are treated by the men, etc. Many women question religious authority and place the Church within the context of the creation of the new social model - they call for a "separation of church and state".

The newly-created commune bureaucrats, too, question their role in an increasingly authoritarian and uncaring state structure that neglects the needs of workers and helpless proletarians. At first this bureaucracy was merely a "sub-committee" of the commune body. It takes increasing control over the political structure until it has monopolized all power. The Jacobin vote had assumed the power over the wishes of anarchists who desired a system of de-centralized cooperatives.

One of the strongest characteristics of this film is its ability to engage the viewers and their views about their political beliefs and aspirations. At certain breaks in the narrative, the cast members get together around one of the bar tables and discuss what is happening in today. The following scene is a good example. One actor says that more people should vote, and all we need to do to help the situation in Africa is open the phone book and call an NGO. Another actor then criticizes him for this shortsighted view on international political hierarchies and how to make real change.

Capitalism Hits the Fan - Richard Wolff's look at the collapse

JCD posted this video, but I found a less grainy version of it. This is Richard Wolff, economist at UMass Amherst.

In Understanding Marx, a book by a another Marxian professor at Amherst, Robert Wolff, says that the economics faculty at Amherst are the finest of American radical and Marxian theorists...

"... the entire university is virtually unique in this country as a center of serious radical thought."

One way to study Marx is to learn linear algebra and differential calculus, he notes. In Understanding Marx Robert Wolff offers a less formulaic and more of an annotated walkthrough of Das Kapital. Here is a good excerpt from his chapter on Marx's theory of natural price, something JCD is discussing over on his blog.

"The truth, Marx asserted, is this: profit, ground rent, and interest, all originate as surplus value extracted from workers in the process of production. The total amount of surplus value generated in the eocnomy as a whole in a single cycle of production is deteremined by the difference between the number of hours of labor performed by the wage laborers and the number of hours of socially necessary labor directly or indirectly required to reproduce the work force (to feed, clothe, and house them and their families) for another time period. Competition moves capital around in search of the highest rate of return on the total money value of invested capital, with the result that natural prices in general deviate from labor values."

After that, a slew of managerial types - the bankers, landowners, retail merchants, and financiers, etc. - appropriate another chunk of the total surplus value generated by workers in the form of rent, profits, and interest. I think this is the point Richard Wolff is getting at in this video above when he talks about the American working class. More financial tools were created in this "bonanza" of capital accumulation and worker exploitation. These tools and tricks made it easier for Americans to take debt out on everything. But their wages, flat. So the overworked American takes on more debt to finance real wage stagnation, and then eventually a bubble came out of this. And we know, of course now, that the bubble is bursting.

Museum Slave Labor

I am convinced that museums despite all their public displays of concern for the history and cultures of a people, really care little for the people who work for them. Museum organizers and directors spend all their time pandering to very rich people at upscale cocktail parties raising money for their next showcase, but pay a pittance to people who work and offer their services to enhance the museum's public image. For example, I created this video with a friend of mine for the Tacoma Art Museum to get its great work with South American artists out in the community. The transportation costs to/from/to/from the museum were about $4; a set of five mini-DV tapes costs $24.99; the filming took three and half hours of patience and creativity; the editing took four hours of patience and creativity; and in less than a week we gave the museum a high-quality version and a YouTube-quality version of their video. Not to mention the fixed capital costs of operating an editing studio. For all this the museum paid me $25. How is this possible?

Easy, museums operate by draining surplus value from volunteers and interns to pay for their appeasements at expensive parties.

Why should I accept such a low commission, as if I am myself some kind of "degenerate" artist, entartete Künstler? Well, I considered it pro bono work at the time. Can I be a pro bono artist? I normally make $14 an hour doing my technology consulting gig. Last month the museum told me they were interested in a longer documentary about the "history of art in Tacoma", yet nobody is willing to pay up. Perhaps I shouldn't be concerned about making money from my own art, which is an imitation of art, which in turn is an imitation of reality. To make things worse, the artists are supposedly lying about everything, as Plato said. I don't believe that; I think the artists are telling the truth. It's the museum curators who lie!

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

~ Pablo Picasso.

The Progress of the Twentieth Century

Vampire mythology is indefatigably interesting to me. The way Anne Rice depicts vampirism is exciting and engaging in her novel The Vampire Lestat, but I have my reservations. I read this book once before and am now re-reading it. She is, like many American writers, a mouthpiece for consumerist lifestyles, and in this way she operates as a kind of unacknowledged propagator of these values. This is much more clear to me now. Five pages into the novel we read that the Vampire Lestat has arisen from his slumber since the 1920s. The year is 1984 now, curiously, and he is loving American capitalism. I find this somewhat humorous, but I wonder if I should. Lestat explains,

"Department stores had become palaces of near Oriental loveliness--merchandise displayed amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night drugstores, bottles of violent and green shampoo gleaned like gems on the sparkling glass shelves. Waitress drove sleek leather-lined automobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at night to swim in their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at the end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes. In fact the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the earth since time immemorial were almost completely washed away."

Lestat's inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations proceeds as follows:

"Ah, the Twentieth Century. Ah, the turn of the great wheel. It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim people of ages past. I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. The brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before."

But I must delve into a bit of Marxist literary criticism here. Lestat is obviously unaware of the perils of living outside the marvelous spectacle of middle-class abundance and progress. He glorifies the leisure and luxury at the disposal of the American middle class, or what appears to be an endless supply of credit and perfectly liquid capital markets. He has not seen any "slum" or witnessed any legitimate hardship in the capitalist spectacle. His eyes are fixed to television screens and the worldly possessions of an apparently classless and non-hierarchical society. It is particularly interesting that he never once mentions the working class nor the upper class, only the middle class, and he is oblivious to the wealth of any other nation, or any other neighborhood besides the bustlingly elitist French Quarter of the old New Orleans.

The sociology of this text is particularly telling; it is so obviously infused with the American mythology: that we are all members of the middle-class now, that there is no upper or working classes, that we have all been washed up by tide of increasing wealth, that there is no wealth disparity, and if there is: it is easily moved through the workings of mobility. But Anne Rice mentions these people very seldom, and when she does, she has reserved her most venomous words for them.

Lestat is particularly distasteful towards whom he calls "drunkards" and "beggars". Of course, 'we' have "achieved a certain androgyny," a certain aesthetic that the Marxists of the past had called "decadence". There is really no reason that there should be drunkards and beggars today, what with all the abundance and luxury described thus far.

This is a particularly interesting way of cementing our beliefs about the sociology of our world, that is, through the guise of the modern mythology of the vampire. The way fantasy and fiction authors in general describe our world by the devices of 'other worlds' is a way of passing on a code, a code that perhaps only Marxist literary critics are keen to, but to which we should all be familiar.

This is certainly only Anne Rice speaking here, not the Vampire Lestat. We are told that Lestat was witness to the French Revolution and who tilled the soil alongside peasants in the 1700s. The technological work and progress of the Twentieth Century had been remarkable and
it certainly has made fools of people like Thomas Malthus and other catastrophists. But the savage garden of Nineteenth Century had not in any way been completely uppified and utterly utopiafied by the Twentieth Century. What a silly joke. The Twentieth Century has been one of the bloodiest, most gruesome centuries known to the human race, and the Twenty First Century is looking no better.

One thing is clear, Lestat is not merely being a naive Eighteenth Century noble who landed in the last century. This is much more genuinely the way in which Anne Rice would assume a French person from the Eighteenth Century would evaluate our century. They would apparently fall head over heels in love the the workings of this mythically 'classless' capitalist empire, with all it's cultural niceties like rock and roll bands and what not.


Further Reading:

Rice, Anne. Interview With a Vampire. Ballantine Publishing Group. New York, NY: 1976.
Rice, Anne. The Vampire Lestat. Ballantine Publishing Group. New York, NY: 1985.
Rice, Anne. The Queen of the Damned. Ballantine Publishing Group. New York, NY: 1988
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Merlin Press Ltd. London, UK: 1971.

Our Marxist Drinking Game

I'm at a friend's house, and we're drinking cream stout from Suffolk while rearranging his sexually-suggestive refrigerator magnets, which I said were overtly sexual. I proceeded to list them: words like breast, gorgeous, sausage, sordid, whisper, sweat, peach, manipulate, juicy, and enormous fill the refrigerator. I thought that obviously these magnets were designed for sexed-up college students' refrigerators. He said they weren't necessarily sexual or phallic, so I suggested we try to interpret them in other ways, such as interpreting them through a Marxian analysis and see whether other interpretations were possible. Taking turns then, we interpreted every magnet on the wall through Marxian analysis. If we could not think of anything Marxian to say about "smell", "king size bed" or "penetrate", (well then!) we just had to drink more cream stout.

In the end, my friend says what we came up with is more of a game than an explanation of the magnets' meaning. You should try it some time.

Fool's Milk

This plattenbau

With all its prefabricated concrete

Must be hiding something

Comrade Zhao, Who came too late

I'm reading a bit of Chinese history on the Tienanmen Square Massacre. When the students went on a hunger strike that lasted 7 days, the Communist Party Leader, Zhao Ziyang, came and told the students that,

Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask you to forgive us. All I want to say is that students are getting very weak, it is the seventh day since you went on hunger strike, you can't continue like this. As the time goes on, it will damage your body in an unrepairable way, it could be very dangerous to your life. Now the most important thing is to end this strike. I know, your hunger strike is to hope that the Party and the government will give you a satisfying answer. I feel that our communication is open. Some of the problem can only be solved by certain procedures. For example, you have mentioned about the nature of the incident, the question of responsibility, I feel that those problems can be solved eventually, we can reach a mutual agreement in the end. However, you should also know that the situation is very complicated, it needs a procedure. You can't continue the hunger strike for the seventh day, and still insist for a satisfying answer before ending the hunger strike.

You are still young, there are still many days yet to come, you must live healthy, and see the day when China accomplishes the four modernizations. You are not like us, we are already old, it doesn't matter any more. It is not easy that this nation and your parents support you to study in colleges. Now you are all about early 20s, and want to sacrifice lives so easily, students, can't you think logically? Now the situation is very serious, you all know, the Party and the nation is very antsy, the whole society is very worried. Besides, Beijing is the capital, the situation is getting worse and worse from everywhere, this can not be continued. Students all have good will, and are for the good of our nation, but if this situation continues, loses control, it will cause serious consequences at many places.

In conclusion, I have only one wish. If you stop hunger strike, the government won't close the door for dialogue, never! The questions that you have raised, we can continue to discuss. Although it is a little slow, we are reaching some agreement on some problems. Today I just want to see the students, and express our feelings. Hopefully students will think about this question calmly. This thing can not be sorted out clearly under illogical situations. You all have that strength, you are young after all. We were also young before, we protested, laid our bodies on the rail tracks, we never thought about what will happen in the future at that time. Finally, I beg the students once again, think about the future calmly. There are many things that can be solved. I hope that you will all end the hunger strike soon, thank you.

"We are already old, it doesn't matter to us any more" became a famous quote after that. Zhao's visit to the Square was his last public appearance. Ziyang was seen as being even too sympathetic towards the students and was placed on house arrest, never to be seen again in public. He died in 2004.

Had he not been deposed and made a “non-person”, Mr Zhao might have transformed China into a country very different from the one it is today, politically if not economically. The party prefers to believe that the course China took then was right: brutal repression followed by an explosion of capitalist energy that has propelled it into the front ranks of the world’s economic powers. Mr Zhao, by contrast, believed that capitalism was possible without terrifying the party’s critics into silence.

That said, his behavior during Tienanmen was never that of a hero. Students in the square did not especially admire him, and his appearance there may have been designed to further his own political ambitions. He showed no sign either before or after Tienanmen of opposing one-party rule. But in a political environment that brooked no dissent, he was undoubtedly a reformer.

After his downfall, Mr Zhao never resigned from the party. He did not court the media. Yet, to many, his nuanced non-conformism with the post-Tiananmen order was an inspiration. He could have salvaged something of his political career by publicly acknowledging his “errors”, but refused to. In his guarded compound in a quiet alley close to Beijing’s main commercial district, he lived out his last years without openly challenging the party. Foreign leaders politely avoided mentioning him when visiting Beijing. Yet the party remained in fear of Mr Zhao until his dying breath.

The "Service Sector" According to Marx

In Marx’s day there was no such thing really as a capitalist service sector. Service workers were invariably people who offered their services directly on the market, not as the employees of capitalists who profited from provision of their service. Consequently, Marx writes about the “service sector” in this sense:

"The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state"

...

"In bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue — including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. — belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services — often coerced — all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist’s revenue.

...

"But it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production."

Grundrisse, part 9. Original accumulation of capital]

Things like the service sector are important to Baudrillard, who wants to talk about how the new service, the new simulation has taken over and completely replaced production. The service sector is the new economy and there is no more production. The purchasing of these services doesn't make one a capitalist, Marx says. But this just means he's spending his money, the fruits of his capital, on services.

However, Marx doesn't seem to consider the possibility that one such capitalist will make the services offered into a business, and invest in the capital and labor necessary to commodify, socialize, professionalize, those services.

Marx only considers the service industry with respect to the exchange of goods for labor. But there is a whole industry to develop from this idea, whereby labor is exchanged for labor, and enormous profits to be gained.