This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Maoist Movie Reviews

Insurrection fails political test, and is boring

Star Trek: Insurrection
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
1998

Review by MIM

Film number nine from the Star Trek dynasty is about the modern miracle of a highly advanced, supposedly idyllic 24th century society that somehow has not managed to eliminate the patriarchal concept of gender. The Baku have reached great technological advance, but rejected technology for the sake of happiness and isolation on their own planet. The Star Trek crew stages its Insurrection to defend this idyllic society from forced relocation. In doing so, the crew briefly rebels against its own government and army.

The guiding principle of the insurrection is that "every forced relocation in history has been disastrous for its victims," and its premise is that this forced relocation is being made to steal natural resources from its victims. It is true for example that Europeans forcibly relocated millions of Africans to steal their labor; and that settlers throughout the Americas, Pacific islands, parts of Asia, Africa, etc. have forcibly relocated Indigenous people to steal land, labor and other natural resources from them. And MIM generally supports even bourgeois renditions of struggles to defend people from these forms of colonization.

But MIM rejects the universal moralizing of Insurrection. Forced relocations can be to the benefit of the people being moved, as when Stalin internally deported Jews in the Soviet Union to move them away from the advancing German troops. MIM would rather see Jews moved to undesirable locations within the USSR than worked into disease in concentration camps and then gassed or shot. We also generally oppose the fiction that liberation will come from a segment of the conquering army.

While it is true that occupying troops are often won over by the strength and correctness of an Indigenous liberation struggle, the officers of an occupying force tend not to be the leaders of any liberation struggle. In truth, the strength of the people's will can win over segments of the opposition, but this will must originate with the people who liberate themselves.

Even though the Baku society in Insurrection has been living in tranquility for 300 years, it retains such stone age constructs as marriage, ownership of children, and feminization of wimmin. In Star Trek style that hasn't changed since the Cold War episodes of the 1960s, part of the attraction of this ideal society is beautiful wimmin who never age and wear revealing clothing.

The neat thing about science fiction is that it can play with modern social constructs by stripping away all their structural baggage. Ursula Le Guin's book The Left Hand of Darkness for instance gets rid of gender by taking the premise that men and wimmin work the same jobs, have the same level of importance in government and social life, and have all differences in appearance eliminated by living in a very cold climate that requires wearing so much clothing that one's body shape is hidden. She winds up with people who have no biological sex for most of their lives, but occasionally mate with whomever they happen to be around when the time comes.

MIM likes books like Le Guin's because we also think of gender and other superstructural divisions among people in terms of what will come of them once we have completely replaced the capitalist substructure. This is the only correct way to approach thinking about futuristic social relations because it understands that human nature and relations are not fixed or static. In failing this test -- in terms of how it sees relations between oppressors and the oppressed -- Star Trek: Insurrection is a pretty boring movie.

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