Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) was the founder of one of the first major Black modern dance companies in Amerika. Two of the most interesting aspects of Ailey's life are his cultural achievements viewed in the context of racism and national oppression, and his own thoughts on racism and national oppression; and what has been described as his mental breakdown, also deeply intertwined with the realities of being a Black man in a racist society.
So we review Ailey's life here not as a model of oppressed national revolutionary cultural work, but as an example of how prominent Blacks cannot ignore national oppression. The contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations is the principal contradiction in the world today, so understanding the Black nation's subordinate position in this contradiction is necessary for dealing with it correctly. In a remembrance of Ailey, the journalist who helped him write his autobiography said "he was aware that this world, while accepting him, believes that European music and dance are vastly superior to all other music and dance."(1) In a way, Ailey's greatest strength and contribution was that as much as he fought to be accepted by the Euro-chauvinists of the art world, he fought to be accepted as a Black artist doing Black culture.
As someone who did cultural work with no explicit political affiliation, Ailey is not someone with whom MIM has a lot in common. But while Ailey himself probably would not have had a lot to say to MIM, his work has a lot to say about cultural efforts and leadership in the Black nation. Here we review two books on Ailey's life - Ailey's own autobiography, Revelations, and a new biography of him by New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning, Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance. Dunning's book is a detailed biography; it traces Ailey's life artistically, but does not deal with his motivations, political or otherwise. In Revelations, Ailey talks about what it meant to grow up and develop a public career as a Black man in Amerika. He does a better job of explaining his politics and their role in his work.
The path of Ailey's career
As the founder of an early major Black modern dance company in Amerika, Ailey grew up as an artist and an individual through a series of historic firsts. This position in some ways took a toll on his mental health; while working to be a leader in Black culture, he was being promoted as an example of Amerikan culture. In 1962, Ailey's company was the first Black troupe to tour Southeast Asia on U.$. State Department sponsorship and the first State Department sponsored company to tour extensively through the countries it visited.(2)
Sending a Black cultural mission to Southeast Asia on behalf of the government must have been a calculated move to instill friendliness between Blacks and the peoples who were then becoming U.S. neocolonial subjects. Because images of racism and national oppression had also severely tarnished the U.$. image overseas, this was also an by the State Department to promote integrationism internationally. Showing Blacks on an official tour would have given credence to the idea that the oppressed and oppressor nations within Amerika were relatively equal, and helped propaganda efforts to make colonized peoples more friendly to the colonizers.
Ailey's and his company's self-image
In her foreword to Revelations, Lena Horne said that Ailey and his dancers "inspired me to better prepare myself for the life I had to lead as a black artist in a society that too often refuses to recognize and reward fine talent and its contributions to our culture."(3) From these two narratives of Ailey's life, it is clear that he did not turn away from the pressure that is put on Black artists to be cultural ambassadors from their nation to the world. The expectations that Black people in the public eye be representatives, and transformers of the Black public image and the Black nation's self-image, create monstrous doubts in the minds of Blacks who must live up to them. When white Amerika promotes this expectation it lays all possible pressure on these individuals. MIM does not claim that white Amerika cares overly about individual famous Black psyches, but rather that by publicly placing responsibility for the fate of the Black nation in these individuals' hands, the oppressor nation pushes responsibility for the results of national oppression away from itself and onto the oppressed.
Ailey said he was struck, at one point fairly late in his career, by the realization that "the dances my family did at our home in Texas, those social dances, were beautiful marks of our own culture."(4) The same could be said of Ailey and dance as an editor said about Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino writer, and his writing: "Bulosan thus decided as a writer to identify with the Filipinos. He retold their experiences and gave voice to their aspirations."(5) Ailey retold Black experiences, particularly southern Black experiences, and made his career about that telling. Of his most famous series of dances, Ailey said "my plan was to make Revelations the second part of an all-black evening of dance. First would be the blues in Blues Suite, the spirituals in Revelations, then a section on Kansas City jazz, then a section on contemporary music. The aim was to show the coming and growth and reach of black music."(6) Ailey identified with the dances of his childhood and of the Black nation generally, and built much of his company's repertoire around showing the world the beauty of these dances.
Ailey's ballet Cry, a solo which he would not allow white dancers to do, is "dedicated to Black women everywhere" and takes the performer "from oppressive drudgery to emotional anguish and finally to wrenching joy" in a mourning and celebration of Black wimmin's lives in Amerika.(7) Revelations, his most famous work and likely the most famous single ballet of the twentieth century, is all about the southern Black church - its place in the community, in nurturing young Black people, and so on. Blues Suite is about the Dew Drop Inns and honky-tonks where Black adults spent their Saturday nights before going on to church on Sunday mornings. For Bird with Love was his big jazz piece, premiering very late in Ailey's life and dedicated to Charlie "Bird" Parker.
In To Die for the People, Huey Newton describes Melvin Van Peebles's approach to symbolism in the Black community: " Sweet Sweetback [shows the reaction of the oppressed to their oppression] by using many aspects of the community, but in symbolic terms. That is, Van Peebles is showing one thing on the screen but saying something more to the audience. In other words he is signifying, and he is signifying some very heavy things."(8) Aliey's work - in the combinations of music and dance, the selections of pieces and periods of Black culture - does the same thing. He made constant efforts to universalize his work and to speak to all people with his choreography. But at the same time, Ailey was signifying to Black people first.
In his choreography, Ailey devoted his time to depicting Black life and the spirit of Black people over making dances of political protest. He planned for many years to do a piece on Malcolm X but never got to it. Around the time of Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday in 1986, Ailey choreographed the ballet Survivors, based on the life-stories of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,(9) and he did a benefit for Martin Luther King's civil rights work. While on tour with his company in the Southern U.$. in 1963, Ailey referred to the South as "Courage Country" in reference to Black southerners' political work for civil rights.(10) But his ability to identify with the Civil Rights Movement politically was limited, and his activism was limited to celebrating Black culture with Black audiences and popularizing it among broader audiences.
Ailey's career was representative of a section of national bourgeois culture. Even while this section can be progressive, it shows us the importance of proletarian art in the revolutionary movement. The separation of life from politics in Ailey's work is a political expression of the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The pursuit of culture over politics is an attempt to misguide the proletariat into supporting the national bourgeoisie to the exclusion of making socialist revolution.
AAADT and its associated institutions
As much as he chose not to pursue politics, Ailey did structure his artistic life to fulfill his political goals. In response to the barriers he faced as a Black man trying to have a career in dance and to his analysis of the dance world, Ailey saw it as his responsibility to bring Black culture to the stage. He wanted to bring Black culture to Black people and provide work opportunities for Black artists.
Black dancers had a very hard time finding work. For this reason, Ailey made it his business to create jobs for them: "I feel an obligation to use black dancers because there must be opportunities for them but not because I'm a black choreographer talking to black people."(11) MIM supports this type of thinking; we do encourage the idea that Black dancers (actors, teachers, politicians) should only be hired to represent or talk to Black people. This is a dangerous idea because it means that people who do not do work with explicitly Black content are released from the obligation of hiring Black people. Naturally, we also think that production of culture with specific Black content is also very important because it is the culture of an oppressed nation and an important part of the consciousness of the Black nation.
Ailey did not restrict his choreography or his presentation of other choreographers' work to Black material and with the exception of his ballet Cry; he also did not restrict non-Black dancers from prominent roles in the company. But being Black in Amerika, he saw much of his work as a series of work on the Black experience.
In his weaker political moments, Ailey said things like "I am trying to show the world that color is not important ... that's what it's all about to me."(12) As weak-kneed as this statement is, we have to look at it in context. What Ailey says to a New York Times reporter is not necessarily the measure of his politics. It is only the measure of how he wants to be seen in the dance world where he jockeys for money and for performance and rehearsal space. In his stronger moments, Ailey said that just because the culture is Black doesn't mean that all people can't relate to it, and he went on to say that racism kept white choreographers from recognizing the potential of relating to culturally disparate people through dance. "Here, in short, is the big problem with white ballet companies: Does one really want to see a black swan among thirty-two swans in Swan Lake ... I give no credence to that position whatsoever. ... We're in the theater, not in a history seminar. It's the same as saying that Japanese dancers can't dance the blues- well, they do in my company. ... their presence universalizes the material."(13)
Ailey talked consistently about bringing more Black people out to the theaters to see his company perform. While the company was in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Ailey was upset that the theater would send buses to Manhattan to pick up audiences, rather than go into the Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn to bring back Black audiences to a theater that was as far from them as is was from the white people in Manhattan.(14) Certainly the Ailey company performed for audiences with greater percentages of Blacks than the typical dance concert audiences. Ailey pointed out that "black folks make up roughly twenty percent of our audience, and the percentage should be greater." Ailey wanted the company to always be more for Black people: "dance should be a popular form," he said, "wrenched from the hands of the elite."(15)
But even Ailey's company, with all its efforts to bring dance to the people and to Black people in particular, is for the elite. From Ailey's comments on who in the Black nation supported his work, the individuals with whom he made connections in expanding his company's work into a dance school and summer dance camps, it seems that the overwhelming majority of Blacks in his audiences were at least petty bourgeois. This class composition makes sense given the restrictive ticket prices of concert halls where the company performs. In retrospect, we can see that Ailey used the class composition of his Black audiences the way MIM would have the Black national bourgeoisie organize itself. Although he made no conscious effort to string the two aspects of his work together, he generated a consistent stream of Black culture and popularized it among the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, emphasizing the importance of Black culture to the elite of the Black nation. He then went on and took the support he had gained from the wealthier Blacks and used that to reach out to sections of the Black proletariat through his dance school and summer dance camps.
Leadership in the Black community
Dance companies in the 1950s and 60s, with the exceptions of a few in New York and Lester Horton's company in Los Angeles, where Ailey received his early dance training and performing and choreography experience, did not accept Black dancers. As a young dancer, Jimmy Truitte, who would later dance with both Horton and Ailey, was told by white dance instructors that they would happily give lessons in the Black neighborhoods if Truitte could find enough interested students on his "side of town." They also offered lessons in their own studios at a separate time from their regular dance classes "because I know you people work so hard."(16)
When Ailey had the money and the organizational support, he established dance camps - one in New York and one in Kansas City - as places where he could foster the kind of leadership and encouragement which he and his friends couldn't find as young dancers. The camps drew kids who would have been good candidates for dropping out of school and taught them about dancing and making dances. Allan Gray, a friend of Ailey's who had fostered the company's presence in Kansas City and established the Kansas City camp, described what the AileyCamp dance program did for kids. They "start seeing how their bodies react differently to different situations. They later tie that into control and learning what discipline it takes to think through a program, make strategies, and then be prepared physically to carry them out. And they tie that into how you have to be mentally prepared but also educationally prepared if your strategy is to complete school." Gray continued, "Many of these kids realize for the first time they have control of their lives. They don't have to react to the outside world or their families."(17)
Huey Newton's words on political action and understanding are a good framework for understanding the work of the AileyCamps. Newton wrote, "the essence of the ideology of the Black Panther Party is that we recognize that matter is constantly in transformation in a dialectical manner. But when we understand this and understand the forces in operation, we can control them in a manner which is beneficial for the community. Therefore what we want to do is understand the contradictions within every aspect of the Black community and move on them by trying to increase the positive side of each contradiction until it comes to dominate the negative side. This is how we define power: the ability to define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner."(18)
In establishing the camps, Ailey and his associates recognized the contradiction between Black children trying to grow up and become something worthwhile, and the society they lived in and the schools that educated them telling them that they were worthless. In the introduction to his autobiography he said "that's one of the worst things about racism, what it does to young people. It tears down your insides so that no matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not quite enough."(19)
Ailey's mental breakdown
In 1980, Ailey lost track of reality and was put in a psychiatric hospital. In Revelations, Ailey describes a process that began when his good friend Joyce Trisler died in 1979 at age 48 (she and Ailey were the same age). His mentor Lester Horton had also died young and suddenly, and Ailey decided that he was doomed to die quickly and set out both to make sure that happened and to live life to the fullest before his death. He drank and took a lot of drugs (principally cocaine), spent money on all sorts of luxuries while stealing from his corner grocery store when he felt like it, and several times ran through the halls of his apartment building screaming "Fire! Fire!"(20) After one of the fire episodes, Ailey was arrested and when given two options, chose to check into a mental hospital or go to jail.(21)
MIM has basic disagreements with the designation of mental illness under imperialism. We do recognize that some people have genuine and serious mental or emotional problems, and this will be true under socialism as well. But as socialists, we resist unquestioning acceptance of the bourgeoisie's definitions of mental illness as many people have been labeled mentally ill whose only illness was social - they opposed imperialism in one manifestation or another. Further, imperialist psychiatry uses the mental illness diagnosis to isolate undesirables from the rest of society. Mentally ill individuals are defined as being less than other people and there is little effort to bring them into society as productive people. Under socialism, we would deal with mental illness as the Chinese did under Mao, "in a comradely manner, as [we would deal with] all contradictions among the people, which are by definition non- antagonistic."(22)
For MIM, Ailey's breakdown is a very public example of how difficult it is to separate mental and emotional stability from political position and consciousness under imperialism. While Trisler's death was the event which set him off, Ailey describes how living in such an oppressive society had already set him on the edge. From Ailey's case we can see how the imperialist psychological and psychiatric professions are responsible for teaching people that they must fit in to an oppressive society to have happy lives. So as a Black person angered by racism treatment, Ailey was told to control his temper and learn how to function within the system.
This notion that we live in an unchangeable system and that individuals must change themselves to fit into it is an important element of capitalist superstructure. If the capitalist propagandists were to admit that capitalism is not good for everyone, they would be encouraging rebellion against capitalism. For this reason, capitalist psychological ideology is antithetical to revolutionary theory. Even in Ailey's non-revolutionary case, this bullshit ideology was impossible to reconcile with any degree of nationalism.
Almost from the beginning of Ailey's career, Amerika was aggressively pressuring him to adopt integrationism and leave the Black nation behind. The U.$.-sponsored tours were only the best documented form of this pressure. As far as MIM is concerned, feeling allegiance to the Black nation and struggling to make its collective consciousness and culture the bases for a cohesive body of work celebrating that consciousness and culture, all in the face of a country which rejects the idea that the Black nation might have anything of value to offer, is enough to make anyone go crazy.
The only extraordinary thing about Ailey's case is that when the contradictions between his national will and the pressures put on him from outside came to a head, he was hospitalized and not put in prison. Blacks who have problems with imperialist society are much more likely to be put in prison, while whites are the majority in mental institutions.(23) Ailey's institutionalization was another form of pressure put on him to soften his solidarity with the Black nation and adjust to Amerikan imperialism. When Amerika imprisons so many of the poor Black men who react violently to national oppression, putting a prominent Black cultural figure in a mental institution instead could only have been an effort to placate him into compliance with imperialism.
Ailey himself recognized the reasons for his so-called insanity, even though he did buy the mentally ill label in the end. Ailey quotes a Village Voice article about his hospitalization: "Alvin Ailey may be paying dues for fifty years of agony." Ailey comments on that article saying "my illness, I now understand, was the way that agony manifested itself. I never understood or faced the truth, not for many years. My way has always been to take things at face value, for what they are. The agony of being black, the agony of coming from a small-town Texas and ending up dancing on the Champs Elysees in Paris, was a heavy load to carry. The contrast, the cultural distance between those two points, certainly had something to do with my illness."(24)
Notes:
1. Alvin Ailey with A. Peter Bailey, Revelations. (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), p. 150.
2. Ibid., p. 106.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Jennifer Dunning, Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance. (New York: Addison Wesley, 1996), p. 380.
5. E. San Juan, Jr., ed., If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader. (Minneapolis: West End Press, 1983), p. 7.
6. Ailey, p. 97-8.
7. Dunning, p. 271.
8. Huey Newton, To Die for the People.
9. Dunning, p. 374.
10. Ibid., p. 177.
11. Ibid., p. 243.
12. Ibid., p. 388.
13. Ailey, p. 128.
14. Dunning, p. 243.
15. Ailey, p. 101.
16. Dunning, p. 47.
17. Ibid., p. 396.
18. Newton, p. 138.
19. Ailey, p. 5.
20. Ibid., p. 134-42.
21. Ibid., p. 143.
22. MIM Theory 9, "Psychology and Imperialism," p. 34.
23. Ibid., p. 31.
24. Ailey, p. 146.
Buy
Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance
Buy
Revelations : The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey
Set in post-rebellion Los Angeles, Bebe Moore Campbell's latest novel, Brothers and Sisters, chronicles the struggles of the petit-bourgeois-aspiring-to-be Black national bourgeoisie in the banking industry. Echoing recent media coverage of Black middle class anger, Campbell paints highly paid executive characters who are followed around designer clothing stores like thieves, overlooked for their white companions by waitstaff in fancy restaurants when it's time to pay the check, and insulted by disgruntled bank customers who ask to speak with "the real manager."
But Brothers and Sisters offers a deeper and more insightful look into this anger, directed downward to Black proletarian nationals as well as upward to the white banking establishment. Their anger at the aforementioned and anecdotal racism is compounded by the very structural fetters to their becoming independent capitalists. And their contempt for "lazy" Black proletarians is tempered by their stronger opposition to the bank's discriminatory policies which sap money out of the ghetto and funnel it into the white suburbs in the form of loans and investments.
In the era of imperialism, in which the principal contradiction is between imperialism and oppressed nations, the national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations plays a dual role in the revolutionary struggle. Campbell, by telling the story from the perspective of this social group, conveys both the reactionary and the potentially revolutionary character of the Black national bourgeoisie. Reactionary is their position as capitalists - they may prefer a Black-owned bank, but they want to own it, run it, and profit from it - at the expense of the proletariat here and in the Third World. Potentially revolutionary are their sometime tactical alliances with proletarians and feminists against the ultimate power-holders - the imperialist bourgeoisie.
As the bank comes under fire from critics charging discrimination in lending, and the city experiences the tension of the second impending Rodney King pig trial, the bank president launches a "Diversity Program." Central to the program's success is the installation of a Black man as regional manager. While he is promised the presidency of the bank down the road, he is well aware that his position rests tenuously on the goodwill of his white benefactor.
One of the principal relationships in Brothers and Sisters is the difficult friendship between a naive white woman named Mallory, who slept her way up the bank's corporate ladder with a B.A., and a lesser paid Black woman named Esther who gets by on the strength of her M.B.A. credentials. Each questions how the other can be so angry (Esther) or so stupid (Mallory). In one scene:
"Mallory's voice rose. '... I never knew you were so bitter. I thought we were friends.'
"'Any black person in America who isn't bitter is either dead or psychotic. You're my friend if I smile at waitresses who ignore me and act like I don't see salesclerks following me around. Get this through your airhead: I'm not having as good a time as you are in this goddamned country.'"
When Mallory's corporate sugar daddy takes her for granted one too many times, she uses her new Black boss (Humphrey) as a weapon to make him jealous, taking him to a public party, and inviting him back to her house afterward. Gender and national loyalties are called sharply into question when Humphrey persists with Mallory after she dumps him and the scam is over. Mallory pays the price for wanting to retain her executive position and not offend Humphrey, by inevitably sending mixed messages to him when she turns down his repeated offers for dates.
Campbell expertly conveys the ugliness of romance power games, the ambiguity of a woman's "no" in the patriarchal matrix of eroticized dominance and subordination, and the deadly history behind a white woman's accusation that a Black man is harassing her sexually. Mallory learns a hard lesson in principal contradictions when Esther won't take her side against Humphrey. As she too has experienced the oppression of rape, and of sexual harassment in the workplace, it is not without some angst that Esther explains,
"'So few of us make it to the top. I can't knock him down.'
"'Do you know how it feels to be grabbed, to have your clothes torn? To have someone treat you like a piece of meat? We're both women, Esther.'
"'I'm a black woman,' Esther said slowly. 'There is a difference.'"
That lesson of principal contradictions is repaid 100 fold when Esther suspects her Black teller of stealing money, when in fact it is her white male colleague that's responsible for the embezzlement. In contrast to Esther's $65,000 a year career, the teller's position is the young woman's first precarious attempt to sever her reliance on the state and welfare. When the theft comes to light, the white man in charge looks at them both and sees simply, "Black women." And he fires them both.
The white supremacist corporate coup is completed when Humphrey too goes down in flames, the outcome of Mallory's appeal to a bigger patriarch (the bank's vice-president) to stop his behavior. As can easily happen when women attempt to stop individually perpetrated patriarchy by appealing to the state or other higher forms of male authority, the vice-president turns Mallory's charge of sexual harassment into an accusation of attempted rape. Mallory is shocked and furious for having been used as a pawn in bank politics, but anyone with a historical perspective on the gender privilege of white women in Amerika merely shrugs and asks, "What did you expect?"
Brothers and Sisters is an advance over the typical "political correctness" which portrays white men as the only power-holders, and everyone else as equally subordinate to them. Campbell shows, in spite of herself, that nation is the principal contradiction, understands First World women's gender privilege, and clearly promotes the interests of the oppressed nation bourgeois against imperialism.
The film "A Civil Action", which is a dramatization of the events documented by this book, opened on 8 January 1999. This review originally appeared in MIM Theory 12, "Environment, Society, & Revolution." Hey, we read the book already, if you've seen the movie and think it adds or detracts something important, send us your review!
A Civil Action is an entertaining read for anyone with an interest in corporate destruction of the environment and the law. Jonathan Harr followed the case starting in 1986, through an extravagant discovery process, 5 months of trial, lavish settlement meetings and the beginning of an appeal process to write this non-fiction account. The book is fascinating largely because what would seem to be cinematic exaggeration -- lawyers spending $20,000 to set up two-day meetings for 3 people, paying $150,000 for one day's worth of investigatory lab tests, and then expecting several millions of dollars in payment at the end of the casework -- is all documented and true.
A Civil Action explores in detail some of the contradictions of capitalism exposed by Amerikan law. The objective of the law is ostensibly to right social wrongs, to provide balance among individuals' and organizations' conflicting interests. But lawyers who spend their time petitioning for legal judgments require money in exchange for their time -- so the proceedings then have to serve two purposes: right whatever is wrong and remunerate the lawyers for their time. This means that lawyers frequently decide which social wrongs to attempt to set right according to which ones they think will yield the biggest reward.
The legal process also acts out some contradictions inherent to capitalism. In this case, the pressure to dispose of waste cheaply, to quicken the production process and decrease overhead was the direct cause of environmental destruction. Under socialist planned production, we will not see many cases like this one in which producers have taken short cuts to increase profits and are attempting to avoid correcting their errors. Under socialism, production planning will take environmental factors into account and profit will not be the sole judge of successful production. Instead, production for a healthy society will be valued.
The facts here are astonishing for being a product of First World circumstance. The plaintiffs Woburn were poisoned and then developed cancer and died mostly within 10 years of when they had first gotten sick. In Amerika we are used to seeing people poison themselves intentionally with cigarettes and with fat- and preservative-filled foods among other causes. But we do not frequently notice people poisoned by their drinking water because pollutants are so regularly exported to the Third World to get around environmental restrictions designed to protect the imperialist country citizens.
In reading accounts like this one, MIM focuses not on the horrors of the individual medical accounts, but on the industrial context in which they occur. Under imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, the unequal distribution of wealth occurs evermore along national lines, as does the unequal distribution of labor and of damage to the environment. So while socialist planning would demand an accounting of total resources and direct stresses to the places that could most easily bear them, capitalism simply uses and destroys the areas which are farthest from its center of operations. The capitalists use up the resources which are not in their own backyards and save their own immediate surroundings -- partly in response to labor aristocracy demands. This is conscious planning on the part of imperialist administrators and not mere accident. The fact that people in the First World clearly have the capacity to buy and therefore use more polluting resources than people in the Third World should make this clear: someone is making sure that pollution is separated from consumption.
Socialism -- not personal injury law
Personal injury law, while it can shed light on some nasty goings on in the corporate world, is an oddly decadent outgrowth of the Amerikan legal system. It has some romantic notions attached -- personal injury lawyers usually work on a contingency basis, collecting fees based on their expenses and a percentage of the award in the case only when they win. This arrangement gives personal injury lawyers the appearance of doing legal work for "free" for people who can't afford lawyers, and going up against big nasty corporations in favor of less privileged people.
But in the end, the law is set up to focus on big rewards, not on long-term assistance to poor people.
MIM does not look to the Amerikan legal system to correct capitalism's mistakes or to mitigate the harm it does to the masses. We devote our time and resources to building independent institutions of the oppressed and to supporting the just anti-imperialist struggles of oppressed people the world over. We know that only a dictatorship of the proletariat -- of the majority over the minority -- will alleviate the pain caused by capitalism and guard against it for the future. MIM calls on all people concerned with environmental destruction and irresponsibility to work with us to build organizations that can seize proletarian power and restore and protect the environment for the world's people.
Reviewed by MC88
Forever Peace is the most recent novel by Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran turned science fiction author. Haldeman wrote his first novel, The Forever War, in 1975, and this book, while not a sequel, is a continuation of it in spirit, dealing with similar issues in new ways. Haldeman has written a basically anti-imperialist, anti-militarist book. Forever Peace also has the distinction of being the only novel MIM has read which attempted to seriously deal with the implications of nanotechnology. Unfortunately, we were disappointed by the pacifist, idealist direction the plot took in the second half of the book.
Anti-Imperialism Modeled on Vietnam Experience
Forever Peace takes place in the year 2043. By 2043, there have been two significant developments shaping the unfolding of history. First, the imperialist countries have developed nanotechnology; in particular they have invented "nanoforges", which are programmable molecular factories. Haldeman doesn't completely describe the science involved, but he doesn't have to. MIM will review a book by one of the inventors of the concept of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler. Our readers can read that to find out about nanoforges. For now it's just important to know that they are means of production that could drastically reduce the amount of humyn labor necessary in the production stage of the production process. A society whose means of production was nanotechnology would do most of its labor in the design stage. The second, not unrelated development, is the polarization of the world into the Alliance and the Ngumi Alliance and the continual state of war between the two. All of the imperialist countries (that have nanoforges) make up the Alliance. The Alliance also controls lots of puppet dictatorships in Third World countries. But a wonderful thing has happened. The entire Third World has come together to fight the imperialists, as peoples' governments, and rebel groups in countries with puppet governments, have come together and formed the Ngumi Alliance to coordinate their wars of liberation against the Alliance.
Reading about the Ngumi Wars in Forever Peace, it is obvious that Haldeman had Vietnam in mind. The main character in the story is an anti-war draftee named Julian, forced to fight against the Central American Ngumi. They do most of their fighting in Costa Rica, which has a puppet government that invited them to come in and slaughter its citizens. The strategy is one of genocide: hunter/killer platoons kill anything alive in free-fire zones; nuclear weapons have destroyed Sao Paolo (the largest city in South America) and Mandellaville (a fictional Ngumi city). Julian is part of a Harassment/Interdiction platoon, the job of which is to make the Ngumi's lives hell but stop short of killing them. Haldeman apparently assumes that cool heads have prevailed among the military-industrial complex, because the only use of nanotechnology in the war seems to be in producing armaments; there are none of the designer biochemical weapons it should be possible to build using the new technology.
One aspect of the story that is an extrapolation from Vietnam and current military trends is the distance that the technology has put between the soldiers and their victims. In Vietnam, most murders were committed by B-52 pilots from several miles away, but the combat troops on the ground who murdered their victims face to face still took a bullet every once in a while. In 2043, neither the bomber pilots nor the ground troops ever leave the comfortable safety of their base in Panama. The soldiers are all fitted with jacks via which they plug their brains into a computer via which they control "soldierboys," which are heavily-armed robots. There is a similar situation to that in the movie "The Matrix" in that people whose robots are killed while they're jacked sometimes die for real, and at least undergo severe trauma requiring hospitalization. And to make it even easier for the Ngumi to do some damage, the members of a platoon all have their brains networked together via the computer they all jack into, so if one of their robots gets destroyed or damaged, they all undergo such trauma.
One thing that is unusual in light of the similarities between Vietnam and Forever Peace is the glaring omission of an anti-war movement. There is no anti-war movement in Forever Peace. There are a lot of anti-war intellectuals and soldiers but all they seem to do about the war is talk privately amongst themselves. The soldiers Haldeman describes are specifically drawn from the intellectual elite, supposedly because a certain amount of intelligence is required to operate the advanced weaponry; Julian has a Ph.D in physics from Harvard. During Vietnam, when they faced being drafted, elite students were in open rebellion, but for some reason they aren't making a peep in the analogous situation of Forever Peace.
Haldeman doesn't seem to be too impressed with the strategy of Maoist People's War. He is constantly making his protagonist call the Ngumi leaders insane for being willing to sustain high casualties rather than capitulating, and calling the Ngumi people irrational for following their leaders. Julian hates his own country's leadership, but he doesn't see the Ngumi leaders as any better. Because of this inability to distinguish the righteous violence of the oppressed from the reactionary violence of their oppressors, Haldeman takes up pacifism and ends up resolving all the interesting questions raised in the first half of his book with a cop-out that takes up the entire second half.
Naive Economics
MIM wishes Haldeman had been clearer about the economic situation in the wake of the nanotechnology revolution. It seems that the Ngumi war is partly about the Ngumi demanding use of nanoforges, and partly about the Alliance still requiring access to Third World natural resources even though Third World labor is unnecessary. The latter must be principal, since otherwise the Alliance doesn't seem to have any material incentive to maintain control of the Ngumi countries. We could imagine a non-economic incentive, such as a perceived need to control Third World populations in the name of preserving the natural beauty of the countries they inhabit. Haldeman doesn't paint a clear picture of what the incentive is. Why don't the imperialists just go home and let the Ngumi develop their economies in peace, even if it is on an industrial basis and without nanotechnology?
MIM thinks Haldeman is being too simple-minded in assuming nanotechnology will be the end of labor. Designing products and programming the nanoforge's computers to produce them would be extremely complicated compared with any design or programming problems that are dealt with today. They could require a lot of labor power. Haldeman hints at the existence of artificial intelligence to handle some of these tasks, but even if the only labor involved is checking over what the AI did or telling it what to do, there's still work to be done. There are also service industries where humyns couldn't be immediately replaced. MIM can imagine the white nation sitting around getting fat while Third World sweatshops produce all the computer programs that enrich them, and Third World chefs, prostitutes and masseuses slave away for their pleasure.
Haldeman is also simple-minded in portraying nanotechnology as the end of capitalism. In Forever Peace the nanoforges are all owned and strictly controlled by the government. That is actually probably realistic, because in anyone else's hands they would be a serious national security risk, and in fact in anyone's hands they would be a threat to the survival of the humyn race. But the government just produces all the necessities of life and gives them to people for free, and then rents out the nanoforges to individuals to build trinkets for themselves. MIM wants to know where all the monopolies went whose collusion with the state resulted in the nanoforges being invented in the first place (today Xerox, the Department of Defense, various universities, etc. all collaborate on nanotech. research). Corporations that develop patents related to nanotechnology won't just die the day after filing those patents. The capitalist system of private property, which includes the ownership of ideas such as the designs and programs that would make the nanoforges work, won't just die because some new production techniques are developed. New production techniques might help dig the grave of capitalism, but so will the class polarization that accompanies them. This is happening today, has been happening for a hundred years, and is happening in Forever Peace too: production becomes more and more socialized and automated, coming more into contradiction with the system of private property both because private appropriation is inconsistent with the form taken by the production process, and also because the system's ability to create more wealth is accompanied by an ever greater impoverishment of the majority of the people living under that system. Haldeman recognizes the first contradiction; he sees that the abundance of wealth nanotechnology makes possible makes putting a price on that wealth an anachronism. But it is the second contradiction that will sound the death knell of capitalism, since that contradiction is the source of the only force in society with an unambiguous interest in getting rid of it: the proletariat, which has nothing to lose but its chains and a world to win.
Pacifist Mind Control Conspiracy
MIM has read reviews of Forever Peace which state that "Haldeman has discovered the solution to the problem of war." This is patently ridiculous. Haldeman's solution could be called Pacifist Mind Control Conspiracy. What ends up happening in Forever Peace is that a cabal of First World intellectual elites conspires to use their positions of power in the government and military to carry out a massive mind control operation that renders all people on earth incapable of committing "violent acts" other than in "self-defense."
MIM puts self-defense in quotes because what Haldeman means by self-defense does not include the organized self-defense of the oppressed to end imperialist violence directed against them in the form of denial of access to food, medical care or their own countries' natural resources. The Ngumi's wars of liberation are not considered self-defense by Haldeman. Self-defense as Haldeman conceives of it is only possible in reaction to an immediate threat of physical harm. We put "violent acts" in quotes because Haldeman only considers an act violent if it is premeditated and involves direct personal contact with the victim. Haldeman would not consider the murder of 10,000 people in Bhopal, India by Union Carbide an act of violence by Union Carbide's CEO or others responsible for the release of toxic gas, for example. Haldeman's narrow view lets most violence in the world off the hook.
A big problem with Haldeman's scheme is that if it worked it would not make the world a better place. In the unrealistic economic arrangement Haldeman portrays, the imperialist countries have socialist economies; they do not engage in production for profit. So ostensibly, after the Ngumi become nonviolent the imperialists will be happy to give them nanoforges. Haldeman subscribes to the unscientific "productivity first" theory which sees a mere increase in productivity automatically generating a revolution in productive relations without any social revolution. The reality is that capitalism doesn't just disappear whenever new technology is discovered. Now, try implementing Haldeman's scheme in a capitalist world and all you'll get is the oppressed disarmed and unable to fight their oppressors. MIM wishes things could be cleaner and easier, but unfortunately the only proven path to eliminating starvation ends with peace and communism but starts with the violence of revolutionary armed struggle and people's war. It's a bloody path, but nowhere near as bloody as the status quo.
The specific form of mind control that the plot hinges around involves jacking. At first it seems like Haldeman just introduces jacking so he can write about people jacking their brains together and then having sex. At times he seems obsessed with the idea, but ultimately the whole story comes down to jacking. One of Julian's elite friends does research on jacking for the military, and reveals the results of a classified research project. It turns out that if you jack a bunch of people together for more than two weeks they lose the ability to commit acts of "violence" other than in "self-defense." Julian and his friends call people who have been through this process "humanized." The story has already clearly lost any value it might have had as a prescription for ending violence.
Haldeman's idea is just a new version of Timothy Leary's plan to "turn the whole world on" with LSD. Leary's experience with LSD lead him to believe it could make people nonviolent. He hoped to get world leaders to try it so they would stop fighting.(1) Later when some of the CIA's documents on its MK-ULTRA mind control program came out, it was revealed that the CIA had been giving LSD to its agents for a period of over 20 years. CIA mind-control researcher Sidney Gottlieb took LSD regularly in the 50s and later designed special poisons to be used to kill Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba.(2) Noone ever accused the CIA of being nonviolent.
Haldeman assumes jacking would induce empathy; Leary believed his research had proven LSD would. Haldeman believes that people who were jacked together would get to know one another so well that they would feel there was no difference among them; so that killing someone I was jacked with would be no different from killing myself. Haldeman seems to be unaware that people kill people that they know very well all the time. Often people know people who they do not like, or get extremely angry at people they do like. Also, many people kill themselves. Ultimately, there's just no reason to think something like what Haldeman proposes could work. There's no reason I couldn't swim around in your brain for two weeks and come out of the experience wanting nothing more than to brutally kill you.
Nevertheless, this is the direction Haldeman chooses to go in. So Julian and his coconspirators embark on a plan to install jacks in all the people on earth, and then jack them all together with each other. Helping them are the already humanized people from the original research project, who happen to have their own nanoforge in the basement of their house, and a high-ranking military officer who seems to be able to get them any military hardware or paperwork they want. That makes their job way too easy, and the book would have been at least 100 pages shorter if it weren't for the Hammer of God.
The Hammer of God
There is a parallel plot in Forever Peace basically unrelated to the Ngumi war. The Alliance has built the largest supercollider in history. It's called the Jupiter Project: they dismantled one of the moons of Jupiter and used the material to build a supercollider that encircles the planet in the moon's orbit. Using such a collider, it will be possible to perform experiments at energies approximating that in the Big Bang. Such an experiment is scheduled to take place in a couple months. Julian and his girlfriend Amelia, physicists, have discovered that this experiment will result in the entire universe being completely destroyed. Another Big Bang would be triggered.
This is an interesting idea. Humyns today have the ability to destroy all life on earth at the touch of a button; maybe in a hundred years we'll be able to destroy all life in the universe as easily. The Jupiter Project is also interesting to think about as an example of the kind of mega-engineering project that might be possible in the future using nanotechnology. Certainly under communism humyns will be capable of performing far more impressive feats than the mere dismantling of a moon to build a giant tube around the largest planet in the solar system.
Now, you would think Julian and Amelia could just go show the relevant officials their evidence and get the experiment called off. But instead military intelligence kidnaps their collaborator and sends a bunch of agents out to kidnap and either erase their memories or, if necessary, kill them.
Haldeman is good at portraying imperialist decadence. The U.$. of Forever Peace is similar to the U.$. today in that white people engage in no productive labor and are faced with the constant challenge of amusing themselves. Apparently the challenge proves to be too much for some people; one popular thing to do is jack into a recording device and then commit suicide in some elaborate manner. Then other people pay to jack in and play back the recording. Suicide is popular among groups of people with no obvious choice of anything meaningful to do with their lives. MIM tries to organize as many white youth as we can to fight imperialism, but unfortunately many kill themselves before we reach them.
But things in the United $tates have yet to get so bad that there is a mass movement of people advocating that the entire humyn race and in fact, all life in the universe, commit suicide. This is what the Hammer of God is in Forever Peace. Or, to be more precise, the Enders are a mass movement of people awaiting the apocalypse, and at the head of that mass movement stands the Hammer of God. The Hammer has a cell structure with disciplined membership and firm leadership dedicated not just to awaiting but to bringing about the apocalypse, and it has members in very high places.
At points in the story it appears Haldeman is going to implicate the state in covering up the truth about the Jupiter Project so it can try to turn it into a weapon against the Ngumi. Instead of making a point about imperialist militarism and how little it cares about the long-term well being of the humyn species, he diverts attention from the state to a bizarre religious cult. There's really no lesson to be drawn from this aspect of the story, though it is very entertaining.
Notes:
1. Timothy Leary, Flashbacks (New York, NY: Putnam, 1997)
2. John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind
Control (New York, NY: New York Times Books, 1979)
Anti-Militarism
The Forever War is a story about a war. The war ends up lasting 1143 years. It is an interstellar war against aliens called Taurans. Haldeman admittedly modeled the war on Vietnam. Haldeman even has Vietnam veterans leading the training and battle in the early phases of the war. It is a war fought for a very long time against a little-understood enemy very far away. At the end of the book we actually find out that the Taurans are communists who have been at peace for thousands of years, which is a nice twist. But humyns are at war with them for over a thousand years before they find this out. And it is a war started without provocation by the UN for economic reasons.
The Forever War takes a very clear anti-militarist line. Especially in the final chapter when the soldiers are learning the truth about how the war started, it is explicit in pointing to the capitalist economic system and capitalist domination of the state as the cause of war. Unfortunately imperialism doesn't really enter much into the picture, which hurts the Vietnam analogy; the war is not about access to labor or natural resources.
The Forever War begins in 1996 when UN ships start attacking Tauran ships without provocation. Some ships loaded with humyn colonists had disappeared and when the UN saw that there were aliens around, they decided to start a war, saying that the Taurans had started it by attacking the humyn ships. This is clearly meant to remind us of the Tonkin Gulf Incident, when the U$ said Vietnam had attacked its warships and used it as a pretext for the war. The UN was looking out for the interests of the war industries, which were facing the spectre of disarmament and peacetime production (and overproduction).
A war over such long distances is possible because of the discovery of wormholes. There are even battles fought in the Magellanic Clouds, which aren't in our galaxy.
The war is fought in a conventional way, over territory. Specifically, humyns and Taurans fight battles over control of various wormholes. This is reminiscent of the "island-hopping" strategy of the U$ in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, except that in World War II the Amerikans knew where Japan was, whereas humyns in the Forever War have no idea where the Tauran's home planet is, or for that matter where any permament Tauran habitation is.
The main character, William Mandella, is a ground soldier, whose job is to fight for control of the planets orbiting the ends of wormholes. Because these ends are black holes and thus exude very little heat, these planets are usually icy and very cold, as in at most 10 degrees above absolute zero. This causes Haldeman to write extremely surreal and creative training and battle scenes. The reader gets a feeling of how precarious it would be just trying to survive in such an environment, much less wage war in it, even with all the high tech gear Haldeman gives his characters.
Time dilation adds to the surrealism. Mandella fights in only two battles in the course of over a thousand years (subjectively, he only experiences about 10 years of time while 1200 years pass on earth). By the time the war is over he has only one acquaintance still alive from the beginning of the war.
Between battles Mandella comes back to earth, and Haldeman uses this to portray social changes over a period of a thousand years. As communists, MIM is happy to find that Haldeman portrays a communist earth by the year 3138. It's not necessarily what we envision; for one thing, the entire population of earth consists of clones of two people. But, we're not so dogmatic that we'd dismiss that notion out of hand. We're not in the same camp as people who complain about everyone dressing the same in socialist China; being different is overrated in petty bourgeois dominated countries like the United $tates. Also, all people on earth in 3138 share the same mind. British communist scientist J.D. Bernal predicted 70 years ago that future humyns would all share the same mind.(1) He saw this situation being consciously developed by electronic means. Haldeman's clones, when asked about their "one mind" say that "you'd have to be a clone to understand." MIM doesn't think humyns will throw science out the window under communism, which is what Haldeman seems to be implying. But it might be that these clones have evolved telepathic abilities and just don't feel like explaining themselves, since they're understandably not entirely forthcoming in responding to other questions posed by representatives of humynkind's past militarism.
Gender
Haldeman's line on gender is mixed. One good thing about Haldeman's treatment of gender is that he is clear about gender being a social construct. The communist world of 3138 is asexual. There are biological males and females, but they don't have sex with each other. Reproduction is entirely of the test tube variety. Midway through the war, Haldeman portrays an earth where homosexuality is encouraged by all institutions and heterosexuality is viewed as a disease. People in this world are repelled at the idea of intercourse with someone of the opposite sex. This situation is said to have been developed by government population control measures encouraging homosexuality. Slowly homosexuality displaced heterosexuality as the norm until the latter practically ceased to exist.
Unfortunately, and this is not too surprising for a novel written in 1975, a small amount of heterosexism is still to be found in The Forever War. Haldeman has his communist clones specifically prescribing heterosexuality as a sexual practice superior to homosexuality and offering to convert the homosexuals. The communists do give a reason for why they like having heterosexuals around (there are a few planets of unrepentant ones, who don't use cloning, but none on earth; they seem to be communists too). They say it is because heterosexuality would keep the gene pool broad in case long-term cloning turns out to cause genetic defects. Now, this makes no sense given the reproductive technology that should be available in 3138. Homosexuals should be able to combine their genes to make children just as easily as heterosexuals. One lifestyle choice is not superior to the other. Why couldn't the homosexuals have been given their own planets like the heterosexuals instead of having to be converted?
Haldeman was ahead of his time in portraying wimmin in combat. He rejects the myth that wimmin are not capable of waging war. In both Forever Peace and The Forever War, the armies doing battle are half wimmin. In The Forever War, Haldeman portrays a military that is completely sexually integrated. Strangely, he also portrays a military in which men and wimmin are obligated by military law to have sex with one another. A "free love" situation is imposed. The wimmin in the story are all very compliant, which leads us to conclude that this is just male fantasy on Haldeman's part; this doesn't play any big role in the plot, and isn't all that realistic given how gender relations work today (remember that the year is 1996 in the story).
Unfortunately, and this is not too surprising for a novel written in 1975, a small amount of heterosexism is still to be found in The Forever War. Haldeman has his communist clones specifically prescribing heterosexuality as a sexual practice superior to homosexuality and offering to convert the homosexuals. The communists do give a reason for why they like having heterosexuals around (there are a few planets of unrepentant ones, who don't use cloning, but none on earth; they seem to be communists too). They say it is because heterosexuality would keep the gene pool broad in case long-term cloning turns out to cause genetic defects. Now, this makes no sense given the reproductive technology that should be available in 3138. Homosexuals should be able to combine their genes to make children just as easily as heterosexuals. One lifestyle choice is not superior to the other. Why couldn't the homosexuals have been given their own planets like the heterosexuals instead of having to be converted?
Haldeman was ahead of his time in portraying wimmin in combat. He rejects the myth that wimmin are not capable of waging war. In both Forever Peace and The Forever War, the armies doing battle are half wimmin. In The Forever War, Haldeman portrays a military that is completely sexually integrated. Strangely, he also portrays a military in which men and wimmin are obligated by military law to have sex with one another. A "free love" situation is imposed. The wimmin in the story are all very compliant, which leads us to conclude that this is just male fantasy on Haldeman's part; this doesn't play any big role in the plot, and isn't all that realistic given how gender relations work today (remember that the year is 1996 in the story).
There is a romantic subtext to the plot, in that Mandella falls in love with a womyn soldier named Marygay, much of the story follows them around, and they end up living happily ever after on a heterosexual communist planet. To some extent Haldeman seems to want to tell a story of "true love," but there's also the implication that Mandella and Marygay only pine away for each other for 800 years because virtually everyone else in the universe is homosexual.
Economics
As in Forever Peace, The Forever War suffers from the glaring omission of an anti-war movement. In both novels the soldiers are drawn almost exclusively from the intellectual elite. Historically, when intellectual elites have been drafted to fight in wars, elite youth and students have rebelled. Not so in The Forever War. Mandella hears of a massive and nearly successful campaign of guerilla warfare led by disaffected veterans of The Forever War, but other than that we aren't told of any anti-war rebellion. Apparently the militarists have been very successful at portraying the Taurans as a major threat to the humyn race, despite the fact that the Taurans had no idea where earth was, the war went on for years before anyone ever actually saw a Tauran and returned to earth to tell about it, and there was no hard evidence that the Taurans had ever attacked humyn spacecraft. There also could be some application of the stick alongside the carrot in suppressing anti-war sentiments, as the entire world seems to be under martial law and a fascist regime.
There is a clear economic motive for humyn support of the war, which is that the earth's economy becomes dependent on war-related industry. Mandella learns that average Amerikans (in 2024 at least) don't support the war all that passionately, but aren't willing to oppose it because they see their livelihood as dependent on it. Maybe the same thing could be said of imperialism today; the labor aristocracy seems to be alive and well in 2024.
Imperialism is also alive and well, but Haldeman is very sketchy about this. Half the world population is unemployed. This unemployment seems to be concentrated among oppressed people in the Third World and in the First World cities. Many Euro-Amerikans have been able to move to communes in the countryside to subsistence farm; occasionally they come under attack from lumpens hoping to take some of their food. The rest of them get jobs assigned by the UN. In 2007 there was a massive worldwide famine to a great extent caused by UN rationing, which systematically discriminated against oppressed people, unleashing a world war called the Ration War. The Ration War started in Ecuador when the Imparciales started assassinating every rich person they could find. From there it spread around the world until the UN managed to suppress it. Overall, two billion people died in the war and famine.
The picture Haldeman paints of near-future earth is pretty gloomy. In 2024, the cities are populated exclusively by lumpens; crime is rampant and life is cheap. The labor aristocrats seem to all be in rural areas or possibly suburbs, though Mandella never visits any suburbs so it's hard to tell. The entire world is under a single UN government. There is no fac=8Fadeof democracy; the whole world is under martial law. We don't know whether this is supposed to be because of rebellion or crime. The UN welfare state supposedly provides jobs to everybody that pay enough for the bare necessities of life, but there is rampant legal discrimination of various forms; this is fascism, not socialism. Half the jobs on earth are connected to war-making industries. Massive military waste production seems to have alleviated the problem of crises of overproduction, making for a relatively stable economic situation.
The two areas in which Forever Peace excels are in its attempt to deal with nanotechnology and its portrayal of and opposition to imperialism. The Forever War was written before the concept of nanotechnology even existed, so dealing with it would have been impossible. In fact, most of the technology in The Forever War is pure fantasy. However, The Forever War has much more to say than Forever Peace about gender and humyn social relations, and takes a more explicitly anti-militarist stance. Unlike Forever Peace, which drifts into pacifist idealism that takes up the whole second half of the book, The Forever War has a strong finish, saving the best parts for last. From a purely artistic standpoint, the dialogue and overall plot development in The Forever War seems more convincing and less contrived than that in Forever Peace, and the depiction in The Forever War of humyn activity in extremely strange environments is a striking creative achievement.
Notes:
1. The World, The Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the
Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, by J.D. Bernal (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1969) Originally published in 1929.
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This Book
Jazz, Toni Morrison's latest book, will not disappoint her fans. In her fast-paced narrative style, Morrison continues to write captivating novels wound around the everyday life and history of Blacks in America.
There is much historical significance in this novel that a reader unfamiliar with its setting will miss. This review will proceed directly to the politics of the plot that people (such as this reviewer) from this uninformed perspective can glean.
Set in New York City in 1926, the novel centers on the lives of a married couple, Joe and Violet. Joe is one of the few faithful men in his neighborhood - - until he has an affair with the 18-year-old Dorcas. Fearing he will lose her, Joe kills Dorcas, making his already suffering marriage intolerable.
But Morrison's story is not one of sensational infidelity and sex. Instead she explores the effect that individuals' upbringing and history have on their everyday lives and relationships. "Jazz" is a novel about people who take control of their lives, overcoming the passivity that could keep them slaves to their environment and history. Morrison celebrates the ability of two people who turn their relationship and their lives around.
Morrison notes Blacks' well-founded fear of white people, the hypocritical but popular rigid religious morality, and the eroticization of male power taught by society -- all integral parts of Black urban life in the 1920s and very relevant today.
Dorcas has left Joe for a man closer to her age who tells her what to do, making her change everything from the way she laughs to the way she dresses. Joe just wanted Dorcas to do whatever made her happy, and Dorcas decides that the young man must like her more because he cares enough to tell her what to do. Best of all, other women want to have him too.
While most of her characters are unwilling to learn new ways to live and take control of their lives, Morrison's main characters change their lives against strong social pressure. This personal revolution falls a bit short of the social revolution that MIM might conclude its novels with, but it has the correct materialist understanding that people create history and need not be pawns to passing circumstances.
reviewed by MC45
John Okada's first and only novel is the story of Ichiro Yamada, a "No-No Boy," who after being interned for being of Japanese descent in Amerika during World War II served two years in a Federal prison for refusing to be drafted into the u.$. army. MIM recommends this book to those who read fiction as a piece of the explanation for why MIM does not refer to people of Japanese descent in Amerika as a nation.
In MIM Theory no. 8 we discussed some of the distinctions between the oppressed nations living within u.$. borders, and those immigrant and immigrant-descended groups that have yet to form a nation distinct from their mother-country. Immigrant groups are much more likely than white Amerikans to be open to revolutionary politics as they are confronted with their own unequal conditions within u.$. borders. Okada's novel tells a piece of this story that revolves largely around the immigrant-descended youths' persynal struggles to make themselves part of Amerika.
The book begins with Ichiro's return to his home in Seattle after the war's end. He is greeted by a range of people from Japanese-descended veterans who went to war to prove their loyalty and earn a place in Amerika, to Japanese immigrants of his parents' generation who believe that Japan won the war and that young men like Ichiro have demonstrated their true loyalty to Japan, and to other No-No Boys who have found like himself that having rejected Amerikan citizenship by refusing military service, they have no place in the country where they live. The first forty pages are the strongest, and they weave a tight history of how Amerika attempted to decimate the community of Japanese and Japanese-descended people living within its borders. We appreciate this opening section as a careful exposition on one of Amerika's internal war crimes during World War II.
The rest of the book goes in some directions that MIM doesn't like as much, because it does less to clarify the distinctions between oppressors and oppressed. In much writing about the Japanese experience in Amerikan concentration camps, the Japanese are presented as having a choice: between loyalty to Amerika (in the form of an oath, renunciation of fealty to the Emperor, or military service for those who were men and young), and loyalty to Japan (which some immigrants chose, in the form of repatriation). These were lousy options from a proletarian perspective -- between the world's emerging imperialist leader, and the feudal society that sought to occupy all the oppressed nations of East Asia for its own benefit.
MIM advocates a third option for all those who are torn between two imperialist powers: choose neither and throw your weight to the side of the world's oppressed. Okada's book is compelling partly because it does little to explore the genuine internationalist option. We must face facts and see that Amerika has made integrationism look like enough of an option that many will pursue it. Even as No-No Boy has moments of recognition that Blacks occupy a semi-colonial status below that of Japanese immigrants, it holds out a vision of "race"- and border-blind society as the ideal.
MIM also advocates a future in which there are no nation, class or gender groups and therefore no group oppression. But we understand from materialist science that such a communist society will only come about through a long period of struggle, and this struggle must begin with the overthrow of imperialism. As we wrote in MIM Theory no. 8, we "seek to hasten such concerns with democracy to lead Asians toward the struggle for self-determination." Imperialism will only aid our efforts as it heightens the contradictions between Asians and Amerika.
David Guterson's first novel is a richly researched and narrated story of the hypocrisies of u.s. imperialism, and the mechanisms that bind Amerikans and the rest of the population within u.s. borders to this international system of oppression. Snow Falling on Cedars is the life story of the 20th Century for a small island in Puget Sound, off the coast of Washington. It runs through the immigration of Japanese to the Pacific united states; World War Two, in which the Amerikan military (including Japanese-descended volunteers and draftees) fought against Japan and the U.$. government imprisoned its Japanese-descended population; and the 20 years following the War, in which young white people who had Japanese friends grew into middle-aged white people who hated the Japanese and their descendents.
Guterson tells this story through a murder trial. A Japanese-descended man is accused of killing a white man with whom he had been friendly before he was interned in Manzanar, which was a real life concentration camp in California. The dead white man's father was lucky enough to be the only white liberal enough to make a business deal with a Japanese prior to World War Two. By virtue of his liberalism, the dead white man's father had made an arrangement to help the Japanese-desended man's father acquire land for a strawberry farm. (Japanese were barred from owning land and so were dependent on deals with friendly whites if they wanted a piece of the amerikan dream.) The Japanese-descended man was then stripped of his rightful assumption of the land when he was interned just before his eighteenth birthday. Jealousy and anger over this injustice are then proffered as the motives for murder.
Snow Falling on Cedars is the rare honest assessment of the ways individual whites benefit from their government's tactics of imperialism and national oppression. This honesty makes the novel a compelling read. Guterson does not apologize for his characters' chauvinism. He writes plainly about how white people will turn the end of a friendship with a non-white person into an excuse to hate all other people who are not white. He details the rationalizations white soldiers use to turn their battlefield experiences against a nation of people into lifelong bitterness and enmity toward all others of that nation. This is the sort of fiction that demonstrates how art can serve politics and still be quite entertaining and creative.
Here is a novel that gains its power from the assumed authenticity of its portrayal, its attention to details of daily life, and its supposed basis in historical events. Despite writing that is at times powerful and provocative, the book is ultimately a fraud, as much for its phony depiction of Black helplessness and white helpfulness - as for its mistelling of history.
The novel is based on the killing of Emmett Till by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955. The killing is at the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the story makes up the lives of those involved from 1955 to the present.
The real lynching
The Supreme Court had just released the Brown v. Board of Education decision that supposedly ended school segregation, and the white yahoos of Mississippi were pissed. They lynched Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. On a dare from friends, he had called a white woman in rural Mississippi "babe" after bragging about a white girlfriend up North. A few days later, he was abducted from his family's home, driven around and threatened for hours, beaten and finally shot. His body was found several days later in a nearby river, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his testicles cut off, his head crushed, and one eye gouged out.(1)
A white man's jury - who in real life (though not in the novel) drank beer in the jury box - returned a verdict of not guilty against the known perpetrators after an hour's deliberation.
Campbell moderates the lynching markedly. Her Till ("Armstrong Todd") is beaten and then shot right in the yard of his relatives. His body is not sexually mutilated or dumped in the river; he is not taunted and terrorized for hours.
Campbell is intent on humanizing all the players in the story, on making them real and likeable. She even paints the murderer himself as an emasculated poor white man who really only gets dragged into the crime by his goading older brother - a brother who has always held his father's attention more, who always seemed to do everything right.
While Campbell's murderer is dirt poor and only gets poorer after the crime, the real criminal was paid $4,000 by a white journalist to tell the true story after the trial, an event that doesn't fit into Campbell's scheme of things.
The killer's helpless wife, a crucial martyr in the story, is also a kindly and likeable woman, who really wants to be friends with Black people. Everything she says and does toward them is friendly except that she says "nigger" a lot. She is abused by her husband (not unlikely) and eventually moves in with her daughter, who by the 1980s is an integrationist labor activist.
In this depiction, the only benefit gained by white women from lynching and white supremacy is a fleeting sense of importance that is quickly dwarfed by guilt and humiliation. In words right out of a women's studies textbook, the white women in this story wake up and realize that white men don't lynch for them, but for themselves. This is to make clear that white women are really in the same boat as Blacks, and just need to get over some cultural barriers before getting down to some serious integration.
In real life, however, white women gain a whole system of privilege by virtue of their position on the elevated end of white-supremacist chivalry - even as they remain subordinate to the white men who wield the whips.
Perhaps worse, however, is Campbell's transformation of Blacks into emotion- dominated victims incapable of rational collective action. Local Blacks and national organizations, and even family members, militantly fought the Till lynching and others like it. Till's cousin's grandmother put her body between the lynch mob and the young man, before she was knocked out by a shotgun butt - an incident that also doesn't make it into the book. Because rather than take advantage of that militant history to turn the novel into an inspiring tribute to their heroic efforts, Campbell writes it out of the story to create needy and self-absorbed Blacks.
Till's mother, Mamie Till, fought to have an open-casket funeral for her son, so his mutilated body would be a signal to the world. In the novel, she sneaks his body out of town under cover of night.
Mamie Till spent several years touring and speaking on her son's death. In the book she becomes a recluse who devotes herself more than anything else to replacing her son. The most public thing she does is show up at memorials for her son and cry.
Black effort betrayed
In 1955, Medgar Evers of the NAACP and other anti-lynching activists dressed as sharecroppers to talk to local Blacks and collect evidence to be used at a trial, at great personal risk. They also worked to drum up support from the Black press to get the case publicized.
But in the novel a single white journalist, who happens to be the son of a rich plantation owner, takes it on himself to call the New York press and convince them to send reporters, which sparks nationwide press attention.
The kind-hearted liberal goes on to spend thousands of dollars helping local Blacks over the rest of his life, and even runs a small school out of his office. The white journalist who in real life paid the murderers $4,000 for their story somehow doesn't make it into the novel.
In the end, Campbell's Blacks emerge as weak and disorganized, incapable of escaping personal angst and their own rage in the face of overwhelming oppression.
Campbell is too concerned about bringing the Blacks and whites in the story back together to pay attention to the historical imperatives of the period and the events she treats. Historical fiction can be a great tool for changing reality. But in this case readers who want to learn from history would be better advised to read factual accounts and devote their imaginations - and their efforts - to making a better future more reality than fiction.
Notes:
1. This account of the killing is from Henry Hampton and Steve
Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement
from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam 1990. pp. 1-15. And from
Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities
Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press 1984. p. 29.
MIM begins this review by making self-criticism for passivity with regard to work in film. While MIM has known of Godard's work since before MIM's existence, it never got around to engaging Godard even on a theoretical or public opinion plane. This has set back the proletarian art movement even more than necessary.
Jean-Luc Godard was a French Maoist in the 1960s and 1970s and he was also the most influential imperialist country director-producer outside of Hollywood.
Godard's political line
Middle-aged Godard did much for the Maoist movement. Reading these interviews is like reading the autobiography of David Hilliard, because the trajectory is the same. Godard was wildly successful as a Maoist and then later in life could not quite hang on to his Maoism, much the way the Black Panthers did not. While Godard made his greatest contributions in his thirties and not his twenties, the old adage about selling out with older age seems to ring true and by the 1990s, reviewers were calling his work post-modern.
Godard as a persyn in the 1960s and 1970s backed Mao while criticizing Stalin, including "Stalinist" art, which we gather Godard believed was just state- sponsored art and hence evil. This caused Godard to say good things about Yugoslavia where there were some independent film producers. Obviously in China's Cultural Revolution, there was also an emphasis on amateur art, of the workers and peasants producing their own art. Nonetheless, while we note the distinctions Godard makes we continue to defend professional state-sponsored art under the dictatorship of the proletariat and we anticipate its necessity until at least the lower stages of communism.
Our only other possible complaint about Godard would be his gender line. Since sex is so important in the imperialist country movies, Godard did develop a razor-sharp gender line. Some of it is feminist and some of it evokes the split between Marxist males and apolitical or reactionary females that Clare Duchen talks about in her book about why French pseudo- feminism arose in reaction to Maoism. On the other hand, parts of Godard's gender line may be considered to be walking that fine line between revolution and macho misogyny. We must point out though that MIM has no right to criticize Godard, because we have not led any filmmaking efforts, so we haven't proved that we would have handled the gender question any better. We salute his efforts to make movies that do not rely on romance to sell.
In truth, it would be a disservice to review all Godard's films here, so we will not even try. Perhaps other reviewers could step forward after seeing all his films made between 1962 and 1976.
As a persyn, Godard punched his producer at a film showing once and called on the audience to pay to see his version of the film with the money to go to a fund for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.(p. 52) Moreover, Godard spoke for "Third World cinema" as the correct phrase for what he was doing instead of "underground." (p. 11)
Godard also hooked up the Rolling Stones to his Maoist film. The active support by the Rolling Stones of Maoism in France is an example of the kind of times the late 1960s and early 1970s were.
Although Godard championed industrial workers in France on occasion, as far as his art went, he had the correct line on the labor aristocracy. In the first place, he criticized the labor bureaucrats for interfering with his low-budget work, requiring him to use four people instead of three behind the camera as an example.(p. 18) He said the unions were more reactionary than other people and were economically strangling his independent filmmaking.
Much more importantly, Godard had the intuitively correct line on the approach of artists to the labor aristocracy, one that is even more correct for our times than for the 1960s. His advice to the revolutionary artist in the imperialist countries was to hold the line: "'Worrying about distribution patterns affects the kind of pictures people make. Only by concentrating on production without any thought of distribution can we create the kind of film that will change distribution.'"(p. 57)
Godard on art: lessons for PIRAO
Perhaps what Godard is known best for is being a "high-brow" "artsy" film director. He did not like the "art" label as a contrast with other films, but he also spoke of the idea as a reference point to make himself understood on the relationship of artists to finance capital.
Godard's most enduring insight is to defeat the "masses-are-asses" line in art while combining that view with a strong orientation toward building independent institutions of the oppressed. In 1962 he hadn't made any Maoist films yet, but he was already a Brechtian. That means he sought to change the world by engaging the audience in his art. In fact, in 1968, he correctly said "we have to fight the audience." (p. vii, 15) That to MIM is an accurate statement about the imperialist country audiences, which are bound to be a majority petty- bourgeoisie and encrusted with reactionary ideas.
We believe Godard is correct that there is no essential difference between film and theater, so Bertolt Brecht's theories of engaging audience participation and not encouraging passivity are correct for film as well as the theater Brecht worked in. In 1962, Godard said of making films, "One must be sincere, believe that one is working for the public, and aim at them. In my early days I never asked myself whether the audience would understand what I was doing, but now I do. If Hitchcock, for example, thinks that people will not understand something, he will not do it. At the same time I feel that one must sometimes just go ahead-light may always dawn in a few years time. But of course one must be sure of what one is about, because if one just goes ahead and does something, saying 'They won't understand but it won't matter,' one may be disastrously wrong and that it does matter."(p. 5) To MIM's knowledge, while he gave up Maoism, Godard continues to hold this view. In fact, he argued that filmmaking should be film criticism at the same time, so there continues to be a self-critical view in Godard's work and he continued to believe such criticism is a matter of science, at least as late as 1981.(p. 120)
Because Godard was willing to put together art that the masses would not always understand, he received the label "abstract," but he also opposed that label. He considered himself explicitly Marxist-Leninist. Much of the masses' rejection of Godard stems from his unwillingness to utilize sex and violence the way mainstream imperialist producers do. MIM believes it is unreasonable in an ultraleft or right opportunist way to expect proletarian filmmakers to have success any greater than that of proletarian newspaper distributors relatively speaking.
Godard had a firm grip on the influence of finance capital on filmmaking. For this reason, he likened himself to a whore. It was not the whore he opposed but the pimp--the finance capitalist in the guise of the producer as usually distinguished from the artist who is the director.
Unwilling to work for Hollywood no matter how much they offered him, (p. 21) Godard correctly avoided pie-in-the-sky idealism. He realized he would be making "low-budget" films. On a related note, filmmaking was also brief with only short periods of time requiring professional actors.
For the MIM-led army called PIRAO that has responsibility for financial and infrastructure work this all makes sense on how to build an infrastructure for independent filmmaking. Right opportunists in film art capitulate to the demands of Hollywood finance capitalists and sell out. Ultraleft opportunists cling to a non-existent independence of art as if talking about it and waiting for manna from heaven were as good as making art and distributing it. Even in 1980 and 1996 Godard correctly warned artists that "Art and economy are always related."(p. 101) Along these lines, Godard warned that television is absolutely the worst medium, because it is state and monopoly controlled, whereas filmmaking even in Hollywood had slightly more autonomy. We believe this insight continues to this day, where the main television channels in the imperialist countries are the worst purveyors of reactionary drivel. Even attempting to work from within television backfires miserably as the example of the Archie Bunker character in "All in the Family" proves so well. Since television offers no audience interaction with the directors, there is the definite risk that the audience will identify with and glorify the reactionary characters of television scripts, no matter how bluntly depicted. There is no quick and dirty way to subversion of our video culture, so we must not expect or attempt overnight success.
In conclusion, Godard has a very realistic notion of what is possible with imperialist country art. We must steer between capitulating to Hollywood (which is pervasive to Godard the way pornography is to Catharine MacKinnon) on the one hand and blaming all evil on Hollywood on the other hand in order to justify our own economic and artistic passivity. Leadership at this time means challenging thoughts and not gaining popularity.
A call to action
A minority of Hollywood films and independent documentaries is progressive. To reach the next level of building public opinion and independent institutions of the oppressed, we need more than to cull the best of Hollywood. We need our own proletarian filmmakers, theaters, bands and other artists.
"And so for a young movie maker, if he really wants to make a film, it is very easy to do. The problem is getting it shown after you've made it."(p. 19)
MIM calls on all young, old, aspiring and existing film artists to be the early Jean-Luc Godard and work with us. Already we have the independent party press. We can assist in publicizing the works of Godards, so all you Godards out there, please step forward!
We recommend the following:
Since MIM has not worked closely with filmmakers, our first efforts will likely be severely flawed. As materialists we believe any effort is better than nothing and after some years we may hope to surpass Godard. At this time, we believe we must recognize that we would do very well right now just to copy what Godard said in the first 84 pages of this book.