Dennis Broe excavates the contradictions of class and culture in the architecture, art and culture of Los Angeles

Race is the way class is spoken in America, as Cornel West wisely pointed out, and that is especially true in the sprawling multi-cities that comprise Los Angeles. Money is the other way that class is constituted, regulated, and enforced. Both race and money are used to segregate this city of multiple contradictions and rigid, though often invisible, boundaries and barriers dividing one class from another.

Language, living quarters, and mode of transport are some of the ways class structure is imposed and this is visible in the architecture and layout of a city that was developed with no real centre, but rather an endless sprawl that grew up wherever the next profitable real estate market appeared.

As Mike Davis points out in what is still the best book on LA, City of Quartz, LA was the only major American city that lacked an industrial base – that is, a city mired in illusion and an illusory consumer and entertainment economy. Downtown LA did finally by the 1940s establish an industrial base including becoming a textile centre, but then Ronald Reagan stripped that base and promoted its migration to Asia in the neoliberal era of the 1970s, before becoming president and applying this principle to the country as a whole.

The mural district in Downtown LA

Entire areas are continually remade as Downtown – whose motto is now “Live, eat, play in DTLA” – once the financial heart of the West, became a ghost town by the end of the 1950s and was then in the 1960s and 1970s inhabited by the Hispanic and particularly Mexican populations as Anglos fled to the suburbs. This section is being reclaimed, gentrified, as the sons and daughters of those who fled move back to this left-for-dead area, now become an arts centre, and begin ousting its Hispanic inhabitants as property values rise. This recolonization is marked by the transformation of what were once peasant markets into trendy, shi-shi eateries serving the latest craze “avocado toast” with names that transform ordinary breakfast into a rarefied and eroticised meal such as the currently wildly popular franchise “Egg Slut.”

There are whole sections of the city, particularly in the Mid-City and South Central areas where Spanish is the dominant language. Those areas are among the city’s poorest, with many of their homeowners struggling to survive by supplementing their day jobs by at night ferrying the city’s upper middle-class elite, as Uber drivers. The poor ride buses, once referred to by the Anglo population as “shame trains,” but which today are being talked about as a source of public transportation which may allow the city to cut down on its pollution.

The boundaries between neighborhoods, enforced by real estate prices, are so rigid that a most common question is “Where do you live?” since the answer will determine one’s socio-economic status. If there is an incongruity in the answer, i.e. the person seems to be for example a bohemian living in a rich district, the second question to determine status is “What do you drive?”

This is also a city of class-based contradictions, with its class structure embedded in its cultural life and marked by division in its approach to monuments, museums, sports centres and even its symphony orchestra.

The Mission mural

This is starkly evident in two murals in the Olvera Street section of the city, itself a kind of tourist and cleansed celebration of the Mexican population complete with a clothing and trinket market and “authentic” restaurants. At the top and heart of the street is a mural depicting the “Mission” view of Hispanic culture with the Padre blessing the animals, a feast traditionally celebrated on the street, while the brightly garbed Mexican peasants, in a colour depiction that resembles a Disney animation, kneel in humble adoration of the benevolent Spanish preacher.

America Tropical mural

This view of California as spiritually sustaining its Hispanic population is undercut however by a nearby mural titled America Tropical, painted in 1932 by the famous Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The mural deploys a triptych construction within the same frame to show at the centre – in traditional religious iconography the place for Mary, God the Father or Jesus – a Mexican worker crucified, with the American eagle perched above him, haughty and oblivious to his suffering. To the right are two armed Mexican peasants readying themselves to fire on the conqueror. To the left is a mass of tangled industrial pipes that resemble tree trunks and that represent the transformation of a natural space into a for-profit, capitalized space.

After its well-publicized opening this mural was quickly painted over, that is “whited out” – particularly the section with the armed Mexican peasants – and Siqueiros was deported. It is an accurate depiction of the Mexican struggle in the US, and was somewhat restored by the Getty Foundation, but can now only be seen from the roof of a museum dedicated to its origin with the colours now washed out unlike the perpetually bright colors of the far more visible “Mission” mural, with its docile peasants.

Getty Villa

A striking aspect of museum life in LA is that of the four major museums – the Getty, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), UCLA’s Hammer and The Broad – three are privately owned, with the Getty collection far outweighing the public LACMA offerings. Both feature a kind of Noah’s Ark approach to art history, that is, one of each kind of major painters and movements, but the Getty is a more supercharged turbo-Mercedes ark, featuring three to four of each kind compared to LACMA’s public, more impoverished Toyota, with barely one of each. Plans to construct a museum quarter around LACMA have been criticized because due to the dominance of car culture, there is no safe place to cross the street for access to the multiple museums.

Museum culture also raises the idea, central to the city, of illusion. The Getty Villa this summer is displaying articles from the city of Herculaneum on loan, because the Villa is a reconstruction of the city near Pompeii which was levelled by the Vesuvius volcano in 79 AD. The striking aspect of this recreation is that the oil magnate Getty, once the richest man in the world, had the money to rebuild the Roman city so that his vision of the city is now more “lifelike” than what one sees in visiting the actual ruins outside of Naples.

Equally, Downtown LA is filled with abandoned, once palatial, movie theatres that are now only rented out for occasions such as Oscar parties, while one former restaurant functions only as a rentable site for which Hollywood period restaurant scenes are staged. This all pales into insignificance behind The Grove, in West LA near Beverly Hills, which is an artificial neighbourhood that boasts high-end products, anchored by The Apple Store. Its false recreation of neighbourhood complete with trolley recollects in tranquillity quaint non-virtual ways of being such as pedestrian blocks, a former sign of working-class solidarity, and their artifacts: “newsstands,” “movie theatres” and, that most vanishing breed destroyed by Amazon, “book stores.”

Most touching in terms of monuments is a simple obelisk at the corner of Lincoln and Venice, marking the site where Japanese-Americans were herded into transports taking them to concentration camps at the onset of World War II. The purpose of the plaque is to preserve the memory of this painful incident so that it will not happen again, even as a former camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, is now being used as a detention centre – i.e. concentration camp – for immigrant infants separated from their parents. The contemporary television series The Terror, now in its second season, centres around the deportation.

Dodgers Stadium

More prominent than museum culture in LA is sports stadium culture, with the baseball team, the LA Dodgers, having one of their finest seasons. A number of games have virtual expressions, like a YouTube broadcast of a mid-day game against the St. Louis Cardinals, which the Dodgers won thrillingly in the last out. Here too the spectacle, itself a palliative in a city awaiting, as is the rest of the US, a looming recession, is always mixed with commercial gain. When the organist played the traditional baseball theme “Take me out to the Ball Game,” the neon video streamers displayed all of the various Coke products so that Coke supplanted the song’s more ancient “Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks.”

Stadium building with its subsequent displacement of often poorer populations in the surrounding area is accelerating, especially in Inglewood, soon to be the site of the football Rams stadium, housing 70,000, and the basketball Clippers arena. There is a section of Inglewood known as the “Black Beverly Hills,” home in former times to musical luminaries Ray Charles and Tina Turner, which now may be on the stadium chopping block, as LA also gears up for the 2028 Olympics.

The creation of the Dodgers stadium was the initial massive stadium land grab in the heart of the Chavez Ravine Latino community. In the 1950s it was constantly expanding and needed additional housing, which was proposed by the mayor but was red-baited at the time and declared an un-American socialist solution. This failure to develop the land allowed the Dodgers and the city to claim it. Inside the stadium are photos of the bulldozed and levelled land, portrayed as barren and remade as the site of a majestic ball park. In the combination of Dodger stadium and the remaking of downtown LA’s Bunker Hill into a corporate site, now overlooking or “looking down” on the city, over 12,000 residents lost their homes.

YOLA with Gustavo Dudamel

To end though on a note of resilience, this summer also saw the continuation of the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), headed by LA symphony orchestra conductor Gustavo Dudamel, celebrating his 10th year as head of the orchestra. The tradition, in line with U.S. tradition like the Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts, but inflected with Dudamel’s experience with his Bolivarian Young People’s Orchestra in Venezuela, reaches out to poor and minority communities across the country to fashion a high-school orchestra of the highest calibre, which then holds a final concert, partly conducted by Dudamel.

The passionate conductor began the night with his simple, “I am from a country called Venezuela,” a statement which with him surrounded by this diverse young orchestra brimming with talent, zest and confidence was a powerful and understated political statement, his way of contradicting current US propaganda waged in its quest to short-circuit oil competitor Venezuela and steal its assets.

The concert included an Asian and African-American conductor (Soo Han and Roderick Cox) preceding Dudamel, an orchestral number conducted by Dudamel which featured Venezuelan folk musicians backed by the orchestra, and a repertory boasting the contributions of early African-American symphonic pioneers William Grant and Florence Price. The concluding number, Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” illustrated the way the classical canon is partially made up of contributions from minority groups with the melodies in the piece largely drawn from Roma or Gypsy music.

It was here, in this touching melding of so many culturally disparate spirits, that a truer vision of an evolving Los Angeles, took shape and form. It is an alternative vision that counters the city's history of land and cultural appropriation, and suggests a more inclusive society and a breaking down of its still rigid class barriers.

Dennis Broe reviews the recent Rembrandt exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Rembrandt the outsider? At first glance nothing could be further from the truth. Rembrandt is being feted throughout the Netherlands this year, the 350th anniversary of his death in 1669, with over 23 exhibitions celebrating not only his painting but also the ascendancy of Dutch naval and trading power in his century, the 17th, with Amsterdam becoming the world’s largest port and Holland the empire that succeeded the Spanish and Portuguese. Rembrandt became the most prominent, one of the best paid, and most successful portrait painters of the Dutch merchant class that powered this empire, so in what sense could he be thought of as an outsider?

Here is the argument: His drawings in particular show him in active sympathy with the downtrodden and poor in a society that considered poverty a disgrace; his affinity with the Italian painter who was exiled from Rome, Caravaggio: his fall into disgrace and ruin for the last 20 years of his life where as a painter he was ignored which cast him into obscurity, not totally dissimilar to the way the contribution of the fertile lands and exploitation of the Indonesian peasants obscured the source of Dutch wealth; and, finally, his possible exposure of the violence of a Dutch militia which may lay at the heart of his and the Golden Age’s most famous work, The Night Watch. This violence at home echoes the violence in the colonies and reminds us, as Edward Said so elegantly pointed out in Culture and Imperialism, that the two cannot be separated.

The celebration includes the Rijksmuseum’s ‘Alle Rembrandts,’ ‘All the Rembrandts’ which saw the museum for the first time empty its treasure trove of 20 paintings, 60 drawings and 300 prints as well as a major exhibition, ‘Young Rembrandt,’ to open in Leiden, 35 minutes from Amsterdam, in November. Leiden is where Rembrandt was born, was trained – you can also visit the studio of his teacher – and spent off and on the first 26 years of his life. The show features 40 paintings, 120 etchings and 20 drawings. Again at the Rijks, there is both ‘Rembrandt-Velazquez’ in October, featuring the master’s relationship with other painters and over the summer, a ‘live’ restoration of The Night Watch.

The Dutch Golden Age, which lasted for much of the 17th century, was fueled at home by windmills and peat, that is cheap energy, and abroad by its powerful ships which dominated world trade, so that the Dutch controlled a high percentage of all trade in Europe. They were pillars of and pioneered the techniques of much of contemporary corporate and financial capital. Their primary trading business, the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational and first to be financed by the stock market, was also supported by the Bank of Amsterdam, the first central bank. The Dutch operated monopolies in European trade on nutmeg, cloves cinnamon and cornered the market in coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, rubber sugar and opium. Much of the first part of the century was spent gaining their independence from Spain, finally conceded in 1648. Before that, a 12-year truce, where they were at peace in Europe, allowed them to train their weapons on Indonesia, the source of many of these goods, which the Dutch declared officially as their property in 1619.

The Dutch had guns, the Indonesians spears, and so Indonesia, and most particularly Java, or as the Dutch called it, the East Indies, fell, and a landowning people whose earth was rich in fertile volcanic soil began to lose their land and were forced either to cultivate crops that profited Dutch trading or were forced to leave the soil to work on Dutch plantations. This subjugation, which is the underside of the Dutch Golden Age, is partially recounted in the great Dutch novel of the 19th century Max Havelaar, sometimes referred to as ‘the book that killed colonialism.’ Its author, who called himself Multatuli, Latin for “I Have Suffered Much,” was a disgruntled colonial administrator who had what D.H. Lawrence termed ‘a passionate, honorable hate’ for the colonial system and a penchant for social satire that Lawrence equated to Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.

A new edition of the book has just been published and in Amsterdam there is a Multatuli house which tells his story. A pastor in this multi-voiced novel, whose apt name is Blatherer, speaking to the Dutch merchant class from the pulpit, explains and rationalizes the colonial system in the following homily: ‘The longer the Dutch have to do with the Javanese the more wealth there will be here and the more poverty there will be there. It is God’s will that it should be so!’

Multatati, like Rembrandt, ended impoverished but in his final years pleading the cause of the Dutch working class, which was just starting to organize. Rembrandt in his time, especially in the drawings and etchings of his early years on display at the Rijks, demonstrated a great sympathy and reverence for the poor in Dutch society, often displaced peasants, as well as a Bosch-like attention to the raucousness and physicality of this class and a sharp at times almost Hogarth-like ability to display the actual vulgarity of those in power. There is the gorgeous cross-hatchings which illuminate a drawing of a bearded old man with a high forehead, all his dignity intact. There are as well leprosy sufferers, a beggar woman with a gourd, a ratcatcher doused in rats plying his trade to a shirking homeowner, and side-by-side etchings of a peasant man and woman ‘making water,’ seen simply as a natural act.

A painting from 1639 is a Chardin-like genre scene of a boy watching two pheasants, one hanging from a hook, the other sprawled on a ledge. The viewer’s sympathy though is not with the plump boy, but with the slaughtered pheasants. A rape scene of a monk with his female prey in a cornfield from 1646, a little after The Night Watch, and reveals the exploitation of the clergy. Finally, at the point where Rembrandt is being forced out of his home by his creditors, there is a pen and brown ink drawing of the biblical Susanna being accosted by two elegantly attired elders who, having surprised her at bathing, point to her nakedness and in a majestic economy of line implore her to surrender herself to them.

Rembrandt also has historical and aesthetic affinities with another outsider artist, Caravaggio, whose dark palette and mastery of light and shadow – with the emphasis on shadow in his violent and bloody biblical scenes – influenced the Dutch artist. Rembrandt, who purportedly never left Holland, was likely exposed to the style, which would become crucial for his own mastery of light and shadow, by a group of Dutch artists, called Caravaggisti, who brought the dark style back to Holland. Caravaggio was exiled from his home in Rome as Rembrandt was forced to leave his. The Italian artist also had an affinity for street people, having been exiled for public brawling, and also died with little recognition, not to be rediscovered until the 20th century by Roberto Longhi, Pasolini’s teacher, as Rembrandt was himself only reclaimed as a major artist in the 19th century because of the attention of the Impressionists.

In his late 40s, Rembrandt was forced to sell his house and the many art objects and antiques he had acquired, supposedly due to poor financial investments and lack of commissions. It was the turning point of a descent into poverty. He died in 1669, was buried in an unmarked grave, and as was the custom for paupers his ashes were dug up and discarded 20 years later.

One reason his sales no longer flourished was that in the 1650s and 1660s, in the high era of the Dutch empire, a new style, ‘courtly, elegant, and smooth,’ that is more imperial, was coming into fashion and erasing the taste for his animated brushwork and anything-but-restrained use of colour.

There was perhaps another reason and that is examined in Peter Greenaway’s film Rembrandt J’Accuse which, through what it terms a forensic examination of The Night Watch, makes the argument that the painting is anything but celebratory and solemn in its presentation of an Amsterdam town guard or militia as a brawling band. It was an expose of its central figure, the militia captain Banning Cocq, as being a violent ruffian who may have murdered his way to the top and may have taken part in an unsuccessful attempt at overthrowing the city government. A gun goes off behind the captain, indicating the violent and thuggish quality of his charges; a rooster in the lower portion of the painting mocks his name; and Rembrandt himself appears near the centre, cupping his hand and seemingly whispering in someone’s ear potentially about the official and his dirty secret. In Alexander Korda’s 1936 fiction film about The Night Watch, a disgusted Cocq who supposedly hated the frenzied violence of the painting, asks Rembrandt, ‘Do those look like gentlemen of rank and position?’ Greenaway claims that Rembrandt’s ostracism was in part due to his exposé in the work.

Greenaway argues his case from a spectral and minute analysis of the work itself, with little supporting evidence, but the view that Rembrandt was ostracized for exposing the plot and the officer – a view the BBC took seriously enough to recently refute and which may be gathering steam – is simply one more indication that far from being the primary representative of the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt was one more victim of it.

One of his most tender drawings in 1658, at the time he was forced to vacate his house, has a woman, exhausted from the day’s activity, sitting by the kitchen stove fire, her shirt at her waist, and unable to move so that her half-nakedness is not voyeuristic, but an expression of her exhaustion at a world that has made life hard and almost unbearable for her. Her resignation seems an almost autobiographical representation of the artist’s own struggles under an empire that had rejected him and his sympathy for its exploited and oppressed outcasts.

From Cannes, Dennis Broe reviews Ken Loach’s latest film, about the slow breakdown of a family exposed to the 'freedom' of the gig economy

The first scene of Ken Loach’s new film Sorry We Missed You, which premiered at Cannes this week, is a masterful laying out of the job requirements by a burly foreman. That terminology has changed, however, and now he is simply an ever more impersonal “manager” (which makes him even more a bully) of a down-on-his-luck worker who has, like Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, toiled at many jobs.

The worker recites a litany of part-time work – hauler, builder, even gravedigger – that he has done in trying to stay afloat and the burly company front man assures him that his troubles are over. Now his hours are his, because he is a franchise owner of a delivery van, and the sky and his own ambition are the limit on the amount of money he can make.

The rest of the film is an exposure of this lie – of the desperate condition of a husband and wife and their son and daughter, caught in the agony of this new version of “freedom” which is in some ways much closer to a form of slavery. Ricky is forced to sell his wife Abby’s car to buy the delivery van and the required to work 14 hours a day 6 days a week to meet the company’s demands.

Just as with workers in the Amazon warehouses, Ricky is given a bottle to urinate in by a fellow driver and told that this is his most precious work tool, since he does not have time to stop for a bathroom break. Abby meanwhile, a care worker for the elderly, on a “zero-hour” contract which means she is only paid for the actual time, usually not enough to do the job, that she is allotted to the “client,” itself a term which attempts to distance her from the desperate aged people she is committed to helping.

All expenses and any damages for both workers are of course theirs to repay, and Ricky is told that his most valuable possession is the black box which orders him around and tracks his every movement. He becomes the servant of these algorithms which treat him not as a human being, but as a replaceable cog who does their bidding. As Shoshana Zuboff describes this condition in Surveillance Capitalism, he is caught in a digital profit system that “has no appetite for our grief, pain, or terror, although it eagerly leeches from our anguish”; a system that is “indifferent to our meanings and motives.”

This is a film by Loach and perennial screenwriter Paul Laverty on an extremely topical subject. A British court last year laughed Uber out of the courtroom when it tried to claim that it was not a company employing workers but rather simply a clearing house. The judge called out the digital charade, and told them they behaved exactly like owners but without having to pay any benefits. In the US on the other hand, a judge recently reaffirmed the position of a gig economy company as simply a clearing house, so the matter is extremely contentious at the moment.

Like Loach’s last film, the Cannes prizewinner Daniel Blake, the film is set in Newcastle, once the heart of the British industrial revolution, and the capital of coal, as signified in the British idiom about it being pointless to “carry coals to Newcastle.” But the Newcastle of the last two films by Loach and Laverty is a devastated place, left for dead in the Thatcher revolution which drained the area of its factories. But as one of Abby’s “clients” reveals, it was also one of the sites of a magnificent last-ditch effort in 1984 by the miners to keep their jobs.

A recounting of Loach’s and Laverty’s films over the last more than 15 years at the height of neoliberalism displays this downward trend for the British, and indeed the Western, working class. 2002’s Bread and Roses detailed the ultimately winning efforts of Los Angeles, heavily-female, Latino janitors to organize and unionize. But the highly underrated and more relevant everyday It’s A Free World in 2007 instead presented the opposite scenario, as two working-class female “entrepreneurs” attempted to turn their back on any class solidarity, and instead become exploiters of itinerant African labour, only to fall victim themselves to exploitation from above.

In the world of Sorry We Missed You, the title itself is not just the note the driver leaves if he cannot make a delivery, but also, in the wider sense, a sign of workers passing in the night, trying to maintain a semblance of fellow feeling but driven to distraction as they attempt to merely survive. Abby is consoled by a woman at a bus station who offers her comfort that she barely has time to accept, and Ricky engages in good-natured banter with his working-class customers, but the exchange is always short-lived, cut-off by the pressure to get onto the next delivery.

Like the Latina women of Bread and Roses who clean downtown LA business offices at night, Ricky and his ilk, the other drivers, are supposed to be invisible automatons who simply carry out the imperatives of the new digital economy, while actually being crucial to it. Shooting the film from their perspective therefore becomes a scintillating act that calls the nature of this economy into question.

The film is also clear about the other problem, besides precarity, pressure at work and low wages that plagues these workers, and that is the increasing price of housing. Ricky and Abby nearly had enough money to buy a house in 2008, but then had their loan squashed in the market crash. The hope of buying a home is what drives Ricky to the delivery job. It is this pressure and the inability to own a home that makes workers susceptible to the growing exploitation of the gig economy. Loach often uses a fade to black to end his scenes and in the latest film the black or bleak lasts longer before the next scene begins – a sign of the deepening loss of agency and even hope in his protagonists.

The casting adds an autobiographical and real element to the film’s texture. Kris Hitchen, the poor man’s Damian Lewis (who is squandering his talent on 1% drivel like the TV series Billions, sometimes referred to as ‘wealth porn”) described himself at the press conference after the film as a part-time electrician, part-time actor and thus himself susceptible to precarity in two professions. He comes from Manchester, not Newcastle, and the rivalry between the two cities in soccer figures in a lively debate between Ricky and a customer. Debbie Honeywood, Abby, worked in education for 20 years, itself a caregiving profession that is also being stretched to the limits.

Loach and Laverty were lively and engaged at the press conference for the film, which took place in what for Loach is the very friendly confines of Cannes, where he is the director with the most appearances in the competition. A Reuters reporter, echoing the neoliberal mainstream media soundbite, asked what are we to do in this time where the centre has broken down and there is only the radical right and the radical left. Loach responded by asking who in the room was part of the “radical left.” No one raised their hand and the question was a clever way of calling attention to the fact that anyone outside the new business ethos is labelled “radical.”

The term is also a way of tarring those who want progressive social change by grouping them with the immigrant-hating, actually pro-business nationalists of Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen. Laverty pointed out that with the growing disparity in income between the wealthiest 1 percent (or fraction of a percent) and everyone else has come an overall decline in life expectancy in many of the Western countries ,and in the US for the first time in almost a century.

Loach pointed to the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn as a potential hope, citing the fact that the ever-growing membership made it the second largest party in Europe but also cautioning the audience that if they opposed the contemporary corporate “consensus” they will be attacked in ways that often have nothing to do with the argument, since the argument for equality is irrefutable.

To return to the film, one of the most impressive aspects of Loach and Laverty’s films is the way they avoid the standard melodramatic turn. Thus, Ricky announces in the opening interview that he has a 100 percent safe driving record and so we wait for the inevitable car crash to come. Except it doesn’t. There is instead a moment where he is so exhausted from driving that he nods off but the truck glides to the side of the road.

Instead, what we witness at the end is the increasing tension in his face and sheer exhaustion from he and Abby trying to support a family which is constantly threatening to come apart, because of their inability to be around to raise their kids. It is not the melodramatic turn of the horrible and disfiguring accident that marks Ricky’s slide into oblivion. It is the slow and increasing tension and weight of the everyday struggle within this supposedly free economy that is the ultimate and most often silent tragedy that these left-behind workers face. Death, and the death of the soul, comes not suddenly and dramatically in Loach’s film but just as inevitably by a thousand cuts every day.

Dennis Broe traces the history of the representation of labour on screen, and finds inspiration for celebrating May Day and continuing Marx’s struggle against capitalism.

This is Bro on the World Film Beat Breaking Glass on the subject of Marx and the cinema, as we approach May Day, a worldwide day of honouring labour, and falling this year just four days before the 200^th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth.

To talk about Marx is to talk about labour, since one of his main contributions to econmics is his labour theory of value, which reversed the typical view of economists, who saw value created by the owners. Marx called these economists ventriloquists (mouthpieces) for capital and instead proposed that value was created by workers, and that capitalist value amounted to what might be called social theft, stealing the time of the workers who were forced to work well beyond the hours needed for their subsistence. These excess hours, Marx said, were where profit was created. Capital though did serve a function in that it brought these workers together, conglomerated them in a way that actually meant that all labour, rather than privatized and individual, was now social. It was just that capital appropriated this labour and redistributed the profit from it into the hands of a wealthy few. And of course, in our day, that few is forever and rapidly shrinking.

Marx’s goal was “to render the world more conscious of itself,” that is, to make this process, which capitalist scribes had obscured, clear. If we start to speak of labour in the cinema and imagine how Marx would have conceived it, we might first look at a history of representation of labour on the screen, then a history of off-screen labour, that is, of organizing in the cinema which also affected what appeared on the screen. Finally, we might look at how the cinema itself is an intense process of all kinds and levels of labour, which its owners continue to efface, claiming that they are its ultimate creators.

Labour on screen

The very first image to appear in the first public showing of any film is workers exiting a factory, in this case in the 1895 screening in Paris by the Lumiere Brothers of male and female workers streaming out of their father’s photographic factory in Lyon. The camera is set up in front of the exit and records the various moods (elated, morose, bored) and modes of travel (bicycle, foot, horse) of the exiting employees. So labour takes front and centre as the cinema begins and in many ways there has been a gradual process of erasing that image, shunting it to the side and obscuring it.

Steven J. Ross in Working Class Hollywood details how workers and unions organized their production houses in the early silent period following the Lumieres, and how much a subject class struggle was in these films. D.W. Griffith’s greatest film is perhaps the 1909 Corner in Wheat which intercuts the poor struggling wheat farmer barely making it from season to season because of the low price paid for his labour, the besieged consumers of wheat who once the market is cornered must pay an increased price for bread, and the speculator in wheat, the wheat king, who in the commodities market crushes his foes by buying all the wheat and then raises the price.

A follow-up, longer film titled Contrast, directed by Griffith actor Guy Hedlund cross-cut the poverty of coal miners with the extravagant and lush lives of the owners of the mines. This is not even to mention the more overt depiction of worker’s struggles in Russia after the Revolution in Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin.

Workers and their lives were a continual subject until their stories were purposely struck from the screen with the coming of the Motion Picture Producers' Code, the Hayes Code, which along with interracial relations and more frank displays of sexuality essentially forbid working-class modes of relating and ushered in an era of a more whitewashed middle-class cinema in the middle to late 1930s. This embargo was broken somewhat as the crime film, the film noir, began again to deal now in a more disguised way with workers’ lives and attitudes, often around the law, which was constantly encroaching on them. This period of re-emergence begins around 1940 with Warner’s film about truckers They Drive By Night and continued into the 1950s with Fritz Lang’s murder in the fishing or cannery industry in Clash by Night.

This was the story in Hollywood but across the globe workers and their lives were emerging onto the screen in the period in France in the 1930s in what is called Poetic Realism, with Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange about a publishing collective where the owner returns to re-appropriate the profits of the collective and is killed by the writer whose work has led to its success, and Marcel Carne’s Le Jour Se Leve, which has factory worker Jean Gabin, who is dying slowly from the factory fumes, instead gunned down in a sudden burst of violence by the police for his destruction of a jealous bourgeois type who attempts to ruin his life.

The film was remade in the U.S. under the title Daybreak with Henry Fonda, a worker prototype from his role in Grapes of Wrath. There were also outbursts of working-class or middle-class fugitives in trouble with the law in Britain (They Made Me a Fugitive). In Italy, the neo-realist movement dealt more directly with the lives of the poor in such films as Vittorio de Sica’s trilogy of the three ages of humans: Shoeshine, about destitute boys in the street; Bicycle Thief, about an unemployed worker in the prime of his life with a last chance at salvation which fails; and Umberto D. about an old-aged pensioner trying to pay his rent. In Japan Akira Kurosawa in Drunken Angel and Stray Dog highlighted Japanese poverty and Kenji Mizoguchi in The Victory of Women and Street of Shame focused on the role of female workers in a patriarchal society.

The McCarthy anti-communist witchhunt in Hollywood which spread across the globe again tried to curtain these outbursts and erase them from the screen. But concerns with labour reemerged in the wake of the 1960s cultural and social upheaval in the U.S. in such films as The Molly Maguires about a secret society of Irish workers in the Pennsylvania coal fields and later in Norma Rae about the unionizing activities of a female textile worker. This film though, in 1979, was on the cusp of the neoliberal period in which the cinematic focus was and has remained much more on the owners and the elite, with workers or the majority of the population now seen as a special interest group.

This has been countered by filmmakers whose subject has remained the working class, with the most prolific and most committed of these being Ken Loach. His cinema is also critical of the way the working class has contributed to its own demise in films like Family Life, about the stifling of a young girl to make her ready for factory labour, and the vastly underrated It’s a Free World about how the entrepreneurial logic destroys working-class modes of collectivization.

Labour off screen

The cinema also has a long history of its own workers, like those in the Lumiere photography plant, organizing for their rights. This ranges from the Hollywood screenwriters’ contract in the 1930s, and the beginning of the creation of the creative workers’ collectives, to a crucial strike by the Disney cartoonists in the early 1940s, and the organization of painters and other trade workers called the CSU, which around the ending of World War II closed Warners and other studios, before being blacklisted in the HUAC and McCarthy periods. In Japan likewise, after the war, film workers struck at the major studio Toho and closed it for a number of months, celebrating their own independence inside the studio gates before being threatened to be bombed by General MacArthur and the U.S. authorities.

Finally, the cinema processes themselves are the creation of a collective of workers, often concealed within the corporate framework of the studio. One of the great technical creations of Hollywood was The Wizard of Oz which is often talked about as the crowning achievement of the studio system, and of it epitome, MGM. A crucial scene, which begins in black and white has Dorothy then opening the door of a drab Kansas house to reveal the panorama of colors and flora that is Oz, shown in a crane shot that highlights the work of a whole range of cinema technicians and is more a tribute to the labour of these studio workers than to the studio itself.

Part of the work that is effaced in the contemporary era is the work of the spectator who in the Netflix scheme is constantly providing information on themselves that is then fed back to them in viewing suggestions, with the data also used to rope in ever more viewers.

Marx’s solution to all this was to note that the new challenge, after capitalism had centralized work but kept the profits in the hands of a few was, in the final stage, the expropriation of the “ill-gotten gains of this little number of usurpers by the mass of people.” As May Day dawns, and as the internet draws us all closer and continues to centralize our work, by looking to the history of labour in the cinema we may find the hope and perhaps the means of continuing the economic, political and cultural struggles struggles against an ever more rapacious and ever more bellicose few that in their desperation are becoming more and more dangerous to the rest of the world.

This is Bro on the World Film Beat signing off and wishing everyone a Happy May Day.

Dennis Broe compares the current attempts to overrule the principle of net neutrality with 18C French economists' rejection of bread price controls.

The U.S. regulatory body the Federal Communications Commission is set to overrule the principle of net neutrality where all speed on the internet is roughly equal and instead allow internet carriers and providers to themselves regulate speeds and charge more for what is now an internet right. This provision is happening at the same time as the Justice Department debates allowing a merger between one of the main content providers, Time Warner, and one of the major broadband companies providing access to the American home, AT&T. Trump's Justice Department is so far blocking the merger but this may amount to only a minor roadblock with Time Warner being forced to divest CNN as a penalty for that company’s attacks on Trump, since to attack him is a ratings booster.

Overthrowing net neutrality and a new wave of media mergers are related. If the FCC ruling passes, content producers will seek alliances with internet providers so that their own services are not overpriced by this new unregulated “freedom” to slow speeds and then charge for what is now the internet standard. This is a massive merger since AT&T already owns DirecTV which reaches over one-third of American homes. The ruling will most likely further other mergers of this kind with, in the Serial TV arena, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu then needing to find internet providers to team with. These providers then may also exert direct or indirect pressure on their content and the mergers will also most likely result in increased monthly charges as well as a narrowing and stabilizing of the field to its current heavy-hitter participants. Television watching on the internet would then move closer to the high prices of cable which drove viewers to these content providers in the first place and content may become more stabilized so that the new services start to look more like the old television networks.   

What will the internet itself look like if this ruling goes through? The New York Times claims it will look more like a mall and less like a community forum, though perhaps the more accurate assessment is that the internet already looks like a mall and with this ruling the last traces of the old idea of the internet as a community forum will be erased. It is possible to effectively block content by simply slowing down access to it since a Microsoft study shows that the average internet user’s attention span is 8 seconds between clicks. Longer than that and the content will often be abandoned, not to mention that the practice of training this short attention span means users are being conditioned to pay more not to have their attention interrupted. 

The overthrow of an internet open to all is being rationalized in the usual neoliberal way by claiming regulation is bad and evil, though the government is not really regulating, it is simply keeping an open internet and it may be much more involved in regulation under the new rules which pit everyone against everyone else. Net neutrality, the design of the internet since its inception, is now being branded “government micromanaging of your personal freedom.” The Republican head of the FCC promoting the end of net neutrality, Ajit Pai, says that competition, which is claimed as the only real way to lower prices, is being stifled by the government’s heavy hand. Of course this “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach is somewhat tempered by the fact that Pai himself worked at Verizon, one of not the thousand, but the three or four flowers, along with Comcast, Charter and AT&T, which will assuredly bloom in this new climate.

What I like to point out is that these arguments were rehearsed three centuries ago in the 18^th Century France of Louis the 15^th and are detailed in a book by Stephen L. Kaplan called Raisonner Sur Les Bles - that is, “Let’s think about wheat.” The title comes from Voltaire who said that while it is nice to discuss and discourse about poetry, tragedy, comedy, operas, novels, morality and theological disputes, it is in the end necessary to think about wheat, the lifegiving staple of the majority of the people in Louis’s time who lived on French bread.

The book details how many of the Enlightenment thinkers, the physiocrats, who in the 1740s and 1750s turned toward economics, claimed that liberty was the prime value in the society, and for them liberty was tied to property. They said the hidden hand of the free market which encouraged unbridled competition and which was opposed to the heavy hand of the government would triumph in all areas. The liberty of property owners to engage in free market competition was a natural law that was above the law of the state and consequently the king and the state should get out of the business of acting as a safety net to keep people from starving and should instead become a king entrepreneur, or player, in promoting the free market which would lead to lower prices through competition and increased wealth and abundance for all. France, instead of keeping wheat at home, would export it, establishing its global market dominance which at that point belonged to Spain and the Netherlands, and which would add to the prosperity of the entire country.

Growth then supplants security as there is then so much abundance for all that there is no need of the state providing a safety net, just as encouraging competition on the internet will supposedly lower prices for everyone. The abbés, the managers of church landowning property, defended this policy which benefited the largest landowners and growers of wheat, and claimed that needs were not rights, that the liberty granted by the right to own property superseded the people’s need to eat. And that feeding people in times of bad harvests or regulating the price of their staple product so they could afford daily bread meant property owners' rights were subordinate to people’s needs.

In the end, they maintained, as does the current Republican tax bill, what was good for the leading classes was what was good for France. One physiocrat, Lemarcier, whose wealth came from being a slave owner on French plantations, argued that no particular class should be favoured, meaning that the small landowning class should have equal rights and consideration with the vast majority of the poor. The minister Turgot claimed the poor peasant was indifferent to life and more interested in the price of a cow then in their own wife and son, neglecting to point out that the cow might well be the only thing that stood in the way of starvation for the peasant, his wife and his son.

The policies were an utter disaster, as no doubt net reform will be, prompting riots both in the cities and the countryside and reducing the poorest peasants to begging, unemployment, and criminality, culminating in a slaughter of rioters in 1770 at the supposedly joyful celebration of the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who later was in favour of letting her countrymen eat cake but here opposed them eating bread. The response of the physiocrats was that these “reforms,” - as the overthrowing of net neutrality is also being described - failed not because they resulted in hoarding to raise prices, in monopoly price fixing, and in the export of wheat which deprived locals of the crop they helped grow, but because they did not go far enough and were ill administered, that the state was to blame not the free market doctrine. And of course that will be the response when prices start skyrocketing with the net neutrality “reform.”

The last word though in both debates belongs to two actually enlightened members of the Enlightenment. Denis Diderot, the publisher of the encyclopedia, was the first in this circle to recognize the people’s right to existence, the real breakthrough in the Enlightenment. Diderot repudiated the physiocrats’ idea that their economic laws substituted abstract principles for any consideration of what the results of the imposition of these principles looked like. It was the Swiss Banker Jacques Necker though who finally took the people’s own thought seriously, countering Turgot by arguing that the people see wheat as a sacred right delivered from nature, akin to the air they breathe. In the symbolic economy, free access to the internet is equally that kind of sacred right.

Finally, Necker said, these claims to the divine right of free competition organized around who controls the market and the grain supply, as the new internet pricing will be organized by those who control access to the American home, were nothing more than the momentary conquest of one class of society of the future of another. That is, under the principle of property, justice and liberty, there is nothing left for the most numerous class of citizens. Necker knew a thing or two, not only about French bread, but also about where the overthrowing of net neutrality will lead.

 Dennis Broe takes Western cultural institutions and critics to task for their failure to properly convey the revolutionary energy of Soviet art and politics after 1917.

This month marks the 100^th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October 25^th on the Russian Calendar at that time which was November 7^th in the West. The Centennial is being celebrated and/or denigrated with various events, exhibitions, and interpretations here in Europe. What is now emerging as the dominant interpretation is a picture of the event in which the February 1917 overthrow of the Czar in Saint Petersburg is now celebrated as the beginning of a democracy that was brutally extinguished with the October Revolution, in which Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks conspiratorially seized power and which led inevitably to the foundation of an undemocratic regime in the guise of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Likewise, the art of the period immediately before and after the Bolshevik Revolution, a flourishing of all the arts including photography, graphics, painting, theater, cinema and music, is now for the first time being branded as the murderous expression of a totalitarian regime, and this in the heroic period of 1917 to 1932.

All kinds of former truths are being challenged, with the French magazine Telerama now referring to the “myth” of Franco-English imperialism ready to aggress Russia as an excuse for the Bolshevik takeover and with the supposedly left-wing daily Liberation choosing on the week of the centennial to run instead of a consideration of that event an extensive book review of the political camps, with the caveat that before marking the revolution it is first necessary to read the book The Goulag.

The most prominent anti-revolutionary book though is Berkeley professor Yuri Slezine’s The House of Government which essentially presents the Soviet leadership as a cult that lived in the same state-owned building. The book sees the revolution itself as a secular form of fanaticism and the Soviets as fanatics who took the religious version of the final days and the apocalypse and reinterpreted it as the inevitable coming of a global revolution that would redeem humanity.

To this liberal onslaught must be added the attack by the British newspaper The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones on a monumental exhibition on the “Art of the Revolution” at the Royal Academy claiming that the celebration of one of the most fertile periods in the history of art instead “sentimentalises” a “murderous chapter in human history” and comparing the Bolsheviks in this early period of the Revolution to the Nazis.

Alexander Deineka, the Defence of Petrograd, from the RA exhibition

The review appeared before the exhibition opened and functioned as British liberals replaying Churchill’s dictum about the Soviets that he would strangle the baby in its cradle, here strangling the exhibition before it could be seen. It is worth noting that the attack is largely being waged by the liberal press, coinciding with a new McCarthyism being led in the U.S. by the Democrats, in which everything Russian is and now must be demonized.

No doubt the failures of the October Revolution were numerous, including famine and starvation in the Ukraine and a rapid installation of camps for political prisoners, but so were the triumphs. Lenin seized power with the support of the army and the workers on one burning question, an end to the war which was decimating the working classes of Europe. He was nearly the only person to urge what he called “Revolutionary Defeatism,” claiming that a defeat for the capitalist nationalists in the war meant a victory and a halt to the slaughtering of working people by each other in the trenches and by new technologies of increasingly deadly and remote killing machines.

It is very easy to make the claim that it was the Soviet takeover and the actual threat of international revolution that ended World War I since the Western powers recognized they no longer had the luxury of slaughtering each other since there was now a real threat to their existence and they, the U.S., France and Britain most prominently, at the time of signing the armistice, sent expeditionary forces to destroy the Soviet state.

Soviet Poster, 1920.The inscriptions on the buildings read "library", "kindergarten", "school for grown-ups", etc.

To this may be added that it was yet again the Soviet “cult” and the Russian people that two decades later halted the next form of Western capitalist barbarity in the guise of the Nazi conquest of Europe. At the height of the Civil War, 1918-22, while battling for their survival, Lenin’s Bolsheviks pursued a policy of combatting illiteracy, teaching reading and writing in the various republics in 40 different languages and dialects and refusing to impose Russian Cyrillic. In 1919, at the worst moment of being attacked and under siege, the Soviets boasted 1200 reading clubs and 6200 political, scientific and agricultural circles and by the end of the war 5 million children were in schools, reversing the Czar’s policy of education only for the elite under which only one child in five was educated.

Along with this new literacy, during the war and after, until the end of the first five year plan in 1932, went a flourishing and democratising of especially the visual and more crucially the graphic arts, particularly posters with elaborate and splashy typography and image and photo collages which appeared in trams, on factory walls and throughout the cities in places where crowds passed.

This was a kind of embracing of popular media which in the West would simply be absorbed into the advertising industry. Theatere began to incorporate popular elements of the circus as Meyerhold countered Stanislavski’s psychological realism with a biomechanical method stressing collective and machine-like movement. Constructivism, likewise an incorporation of the power of the machine into painting and cinema, took the pre-war dynamism of Italian Futurism at a moment when that form was embracing a fascist militarism and instead reinterpreted the machine as a source for good in the service of the people and not as simply a killing machine.

Soviet avant-garde art, the currents of which began before the war and was let loose by the earlier Revolution of 1905, greatly influenced the West in the theatrical experimentation and de-psychologizing of Brecht, in the bringing of abstract notions of design to mass production in the Weimar Bauhaus School, and in the ways Eisenstein’s montage in the films Strike and Battleship Potemkin were incorporated into the cinema of Hitchcock.

The period also featured a rethinking of the purpose of the museum, opposing the collector instinct of museums in the West as being dead archives or conversely as simply presenting art as utterly separated from life and only related to its own history. To counter this, the Soviets proposed open air museums integrated into the community, and a broader definition of what constituted art to include folk art and street design. These innovations are now official policy - uncredited to the Revolution of course - of many museums such as the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art whose director boasts their incorporation.

The Revolution though in the year of its centenary has in many ways been sidelined. The Royal Academy exhibit was Europe’s most extensive. Paris’s Pompidou on the other hand chose instead to highlight Russian dissident art in its exhibit Kollektsia, which traced extensively the decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, an uninspired period which broke down into Sots Art which was the Russian equivalent of Pop Art and various returns to the Constructivism.

Elsewhere, there is a current exhibit at the library of the Museum of the Army titled “And 1917 Becomes Revolution” with examples of this flourishing of the arts alongside Western figurative paintings of the pope blessing and sanctioning the slaughter of the troops. There is also a recounting of how two French members, out of a delegation of four, sent to convince the Soviets to stay in the war instead “went native” and converted to their side in favor of the revolution.

It’s a nice exhibit but very difficult even to find in the museum and overshadowed by the current Army blockbuster about the everyday life of a soldier, an exhibit more in favor of war. And indeed World War I over the last three years is everyday honored in its centennial while the event that halted the war is slighted.

By far the most interesting European exhibit was in Venice at the Palazzo Zatere which has been taken over by the V-A-C Foundation, a joint Moscow-Venice group that staged “Space, Force, Construction” which attempted to update the radical thrust of the arts in this period with contemporary art with a political bent over the last three decades. Here was: Lissitzky’s “Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge,” a geometrical description of the Soviets outnumbered and surrounded but surviving by ingenuity......

......and a recreation of Tatlin’s Monumental “Tower of the Future” which was an attempt to address the mistakes of the Tower of Babel.....

........and Rodchenko’s design for a worker’s lunchroom/study center, where eating and acquiring of knowledge go on simultaneously.

Lev Kuleshov's By the Law

Probably the continent’s most thrilling exhibit of Soviet art though is the currently ongoing French Cinematheque series “The USSR of Cineastes” which covers the period of the 1920s through the end of World War II. Beyond Eisenstein’s Strike and Potemkin, the series contains screenings of the anti-petit bourgeois House on Trubnaya Street, a comedy by Boris Barnet about the maltreatment of a peasant woman by the building’s small business elite; Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law, a montage experiment and adaptation of a Jack London short story about how the greed of an international mining expedition in Alaska turns deadly; and The Yellow Ticket, Feodor Ostep’s portrait of a wet nurse, abused by her baronial employer and then cast out into prostitution.

Feodor Osteps, The Yellow Ticket

Why the downgrading of the Revolution? Is it not because in these times which due to increasing income disparity in the West, the brutalisation of the world by industrial climate change, and the ever disappearing support of the state for any form of worker aid or comfort, Revolution is certainly on the table and discomforting to an increasingly shrinking cadre of elites?

Yet the dissatisfaction in whole deindustrialized areas left for dead in France, the US, and Britain is being channeled into pro-nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment that is the opposite of Lenin’s call for an international joining of the workers across the West and the world to rise up.

Instead the Russian Revolution, which twice halted capitalist barbarity on a global scale, is characterized as merely barbarous itself. At the moment when the world is most in need of it, Western elites have been very careful in this year of the centenary to ignore or deny the energy that inspired one of the great hopes of humanity in the twentieth century.