...you can not only play; you can do whatever you darn please!

I would argue here that regardless of what one thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place.

I would further argue that, because of the demise of the Soviet Union and communist China, we have entered a historical era in which capitalist states see a unique opportunity to tear up social contracts earlier agreed to, contracts that were only drafted in the first place largely to defend themselves against the existential threat that the USSR and China represented.

--excerpted from my writing in the previous blog.

That ideological dispute settled the argument over whether capitalism was the best economic system.

--from a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times referring to the Cold War.

Perhaps this is what Putin had in mind when he stated that the destruction of the Soviet Union was “a geopolitical tragedy.” Just as the scale of World War II allowed Western historians to evade dealing with the deeper implications of the only slightly less horrific first world war, a war that could not be blamed on Stalin, those same historians now have a hard time explaining why capitalism—newly unfettered by the threat of a communist monolith—now seems on the brink of collapsing.

This is not to say that we lacked our own, homegrown revolutionaries. Even before the Great Depression, working conditions were such that the U.S. produced its own Socialists, Communists, Wobblies and other left wing factions. May 1, or May Day, celebrated by workers around the world, in fact commemorates the Haymarket Square Riot that took place at a workers’ demonstration in Chicago on what was actually the fourth of May, 1886. By 1919, however, the success of the Russian Revolution elicited the Palmer Raids as a response here in the U.S., a government-sponsored reign of terror cited in history books as the period of the first Red Scare. When the U.S fell into the depths of the Great Depression, however, even scare tactics could not entirely suppress a renaissance of left wing organizing. It would only be due to the gearing up of the enormous war machine required to fight WWII that the labor of U.S. workers was once again in demand. Even so, the standard of living for most Americans would not rise until well after the war had ended, with the inception of the golden Eisenhower age, the template decade (1953-1963) for American prosperity (and, in retrospect, a singular event).

Guided by the patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt, (who was widely condemned by his fellow patricians as a traitor to his class), American capitalism was saved. On some very rare occasions, Socialists and Communists gained elective office, but for the most part, a real revolutionary movement never gained any momentum. In order to save the system, however, concessions had to be made. It was during this period that the U.S. labor movement grew in influence, often spurred on by Communist organizers in the big industrial cities of the North. Banking and Wall Street interests were compelled to give way to a spate of regulation designed to protect the ordinary citizen. In 1935, frightened by the prospect of an army of unemployed whose living conditions were often desperate, legislators created the Social Security act, (actually titled Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI)).

To this day, conservatives like to portray the Roosevelt era as responsible for creating Big Government with all of its evils. In fact, conditions had become ripe for reform much earlier, during what is called the Progressive Era, the era of the first President Roosevelt. When Ronald Reagan uttered the famous “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was repudiating not just the reforms instituted by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also those initiated by the Republican hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Both Roosevelts understood that if capitalism was to be saved, reforms needed to be put in place.
Just as the Progressive movement anticipated the more far-reaching reforms that would take place in a world made far more dangerous for capitalism by the success of the Russian Revolution, the move by Reagan conservatives to deconstruct those same reforms anticipated the demise of the Soviet threat and only began to come to flourish after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. So-called neo-conservatives essentially began a putsch against all government entities whose role it was to check the excesses of private enterprise. The other prong of the neo-conservative attack on government was an intense campaign to privatization across the board, even extending, most egregiously, to the privatization of the armed forces. The campaign continued unabated during the at least nominally Democratic administration of Bill Clinton.

Armed with the pseudo-intellectual credentials of such as pop-Nietzchean novelist Ayn Rand and the laissez-faire crowd nurtured in the nineteenth-century hothouse atmosphere of the University of Chicago, the so-called Chicago school, Republican legislators turned an intense beacon on every manifestation of perceived government interference in the free flow of cash. A strong impression arose that, for this political camp—from Milton Friedman to Newt Gingrich on down—the motto was carpe diem. The fall of the Soviet Union and the earlier “gains” made by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the crisis of the seventies and eighties mobilized the forces on the right. The sense was that the right had to take advantage of this unique historical opportunity not only to bury contemporary socialist tendencies, but to dig a series of holes so deep that—even were there to be a rebirth of such thinking—it would take a future generation forever to claw its way out, or, even better, make it impossible.

When the cat is not just away, but gone forever...

For all the folks who give little weight to historical “what ifs,” the thought experiment of envisioning how twentieth century history might have gone differently is a pointless one. Recent events, however, have me reprising a scenario in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 failed or never took place and being rewarded with some provocative conclusions about how world (“globalized”) capitalism has evolved now that the U.S.S.R. has in fact collapsed. Before I present this view, however, let me dispense with, out of hand, what I would imagine to be a conservative view of how things might have gone. For this, we need not go very far; the example of Communist China, with its far shorter life span, will do nicely.

What the Chinese call the “liberation” that took place under Mao Zedong in 1950 lasted a little more than two decades before a communist regime(n) was replaced by the almost maniacal capitalism the nation is now in the throes of, far shorter than the Soviet Union’s run of more than seven decades, the biggest part of the twentieth century. Conservatives, I would imagine, will argue that had the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek continued to rule, the disruptions of the fifties, sixties would never have taken place, and China would have quickly evolved into the capitalist powerhouse it now is. For why this view is sheer nonsense, the term “liberation” is worth analyzing a bit. Up until 1950, China was a conglomerate of what the Western powers like to euphemistically call “spheres of influence.” Had there not been a revolution, that reality would no doubt have continued. Whatever one may think of China’s various manifestations since 1950, one incontrovertible reality is that it is the Chinese and the Chinese alone who came to control their nation’s fate. One need only recall the lengthy debate here in the U.S., following the expulsion of Chiang to Taiwan about “who lost China?” as if it was ours to lose. The perceived loss of China played no small role in throwing our country into the madness of McCarthyism for a good part of the 1950s.

Nevertheless, conservatives likely fantasize that a thriving Nationalist China would soon have emerged from the ruins of World War II and centuries of domination by the U.S., England and others of the European powers. I should say here that this is a point upon which one can only speculate. I have never seen such a conservative argument made directly in print, nor can we know if such an argument, if and when made, could be delivered with a straight face.
I would argue here that regardless of what thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place. After the European and American military expeditions to Russia failed to thwart its revolution, and the Red Army under Trotsky finally dispatched the White Army in the early 1920s, capitalist ruling classes in all of the advanced nations could never go to bed without fearing that they would be awakened by the sound of their own working classes rising. That fear is now gone. There may be some lingering mice roaring in the Caribbean, South America or Asia, but, for the foreseeable future at least, it seems the great Marxist Utopian vision has been relegated to the “ash heap of history.” (Ronald Reagan’s [or one of his better educated speechwriter’s] play on Leon Trotsky’s having earlier damned capitalists to the “dustbin of history.”)

Before extending my argument any further, let me anticipate here another myth of conservative historiography that would have things just rosy on our planet had the Russian revolution never occurred. There is the small matter of World War II and the estimated 60-70 million lives that it cost. Conservative history is like a set of Russian nesting matrushka dolls with lots of embedded mythology. This construct renders it a lot more difficult to take on any one event or historical manifestation without dealing with the almost interminable nested “axioms” of the faith. “How,” one of their axiomatic arguments goes, (if their response is to be consistent with others of their arguments), “can you even entertain the notion that the world is a better place as a result of the Russian revolution, when it gave us the two most evil men in history, Hitler and Stalin, who, in turn, gave us WWII?”

Although given the dimensions of the human tragedies that the twentieth century witnessed, one must guard against glibness, I will nevertheless confess to wondering how the mere 37 million casualties of World War I, (“the Great War, the “war to end all wars”) could be explained away had not a second world war rendered it a prelude to even greater disaster. How explain the blood bath fought between good White Christian capitalist nations without any Evil Empire to blame? Had we been spared the greater horrors that were to come just twenty-five years later into the 20th century, would the earlier war so easily been written off as an aberration or suppressed in collective memory?

Faced with a communist threat, one of the ways world capitalism found it easier to sleep at night was to allow and encourage Fascism to flourish. With thugs like Franco, Mussolini and Hitler “cleansing” their societies in Europe and supposedly modernized post-Meiji Shinto Japan in Asia using a Son god to the same end, a real “axis” of evil protected the gates against other Russian-style uprisings in the still-born nation states of the world that had never quite gotten the trick of evolving into liberal democracies. For, in spite of Marx and Engels’ belief that revolutions would first be successful in advanced England or Germany, events would prove that theirs was an ideology most effectively shaped into a weapon in largely peasant societies with still living memories of virtual enslavement. None of this precluded Western sages from asserting, by a not quite elegant twist of logic, (and it is a permanent fixture in Western historical writing), that it is Communism’s fault that Fascism came into existence. Rather than take on that disingenuous argument here, it may be more productive to focus some historical hindsight on events here in the U.S. during the period between the two world wars.

Here, in the new world, a young democracy that no foreign army had placed foot in since the War of 1812, protected from foreign enemies by two vast oceans, where its own imperial expansion had involved the facile genocide of stone age aboriginals and a new navy’s adventurism in the far offshore Pacific and sleepy Caribbean, fascism did not find so fertile a soil as in class-bound, blood-drenched and war-weary Europe. Thus, while Germany, Italy and Japan kept their working classes under control by forcing them into uniform and fully employing them in the creation of death machines on a scale the world had never seen, the U.S. had the luxury, at least for a while, of keeping a small army and pacifying its workers with a New Deal. Unlike Europe, U.S. rulers, though confronted by millions of unemployed, an increasingly angry working class, did not need to fret about a vast empire on our borders threatening from without and potentially causing havoc within. In short, the U.S. could attempt reform.

(To be continued.)

Voiture de luxe: China as a Repainted Audi

When Voiture de luxe opens we find a middle-aged teacher, Li Qiming, disembarking from a ferry, having left his countryside home in search of his son in the city of Wuhan. Both Qiming's son and daughter have left home to start new lives in the city, joining the wave of young people following a similar course in the new China. What drives Qiming to search for his son is the fact that he has not heard from him in a long time, and his wife, dying of cancer, wishes to see her son again before she dies. Qiming is met by his daughter, Yanhong, who takes him to her apartment in the city. Yanhong shares her flat with another young woman, A Li. Upon entering the flat, we can see in Qiming's face an immediate recognition of the circumstances that both of the young women live in. Qiming is stoic, yet the worn, slender, once handsome intellectual clearly takes in all the significance of what he sees in the flat. On the other hand, as a loving father, denial seems also to be at work, and he does not immediately come to any conclusion about how his daughter is earning her living.

Yanhong is a beautiful young woman, and we soon see how she earns her living when she goes off to her job. Her workplace, ostensibly a karaoke club, is in fact a well-appointed brothel. Any visitor to China over the last decade will be familiar with the club's decor. As clients leave their luxury automobiles to enter the club, they are greeted by rows of attractive young women who bow, smile and utter a demure ni hao. Inside, marble floors are polished to a dizzingly high shine, curved staircases and state-of-the art lighting abound. Trade the dominant red of the karaoke club for more subtle hues and the setting is one which has become ubiquitous in China's burgeoning multi-star hotels. The contrast between Yanhong's workplace, her living quarters and the meaner streets of much of the city behind its Potemkin village facade of luxury is jarring.

The preferred companion of a brutish customer who is clearly a gang leader, Yanhong is nevertheless called from his side by the club's reckless owner, Da Ge, with whom she is in a relationship of sorts. This is clearly a mistake on Da Ge's part, a mistake which drives the plot of the film. Da Ge's relationship to Yanhong is somewhat nebulous. An older man who is not Yanhong's physical match, he is part lover, part boss, part pimp, and, as we later discover, soon to be the father of her child. While this subplot simmers in the background, we watch Qiming begin the search for his son. In the course of doing so, he encounters a police officer, a man of his own generation with whom he has an immediate affinity. Like Qiming, the police officer is about to retire, but out of sympathy, exerts a special effort to find the boy. After the detective obtains a lead to the boy's wherabouts, Qiming decides to celebrate by inviting him, as well as his daughter and her boyfriend, to dinner at a restaurant.

By the time the dinner takes place, we have learned through a flashback that Qiming's son had been in a gang with Da Ge, and it was their ill-conceived plan to hijack a luxury car that brings all of these characters together. By drawing the odd, losing playing card, it is Qiming's son who must stand in the middle of a dark road and get the driver of a luxury car to stop. The plan is only half successful since Da Ge gets his car, but, in the process, Qiming's son is killed. It is only when Yanhong is hospitalized after an assault engineered by the mobster who resented her being taken off to Da Ge in the club, that Da Ge, remorseful and guilt-ridden over the assault on his pregnant girlfriend, confesses that it is he who is responsible for the death of her brother.

The dinner party at which the protagonists meet might well be a scene directed by Hitchcock. It is clear early on that the detective recognizes Da Ge, and for the persistent police officer, who accepts a ride home from Da Ge and then asks to see the automobile's registration, the ride is his last. Shortly after, with the detective's dead body at his side, Da Ge is intercepted by his mobster nemesis and is himself assassinated. The film ends with Yanhong leaving the city to return to her rural village. She there tells her father of her brother's real fate, and in the closing sequence, we see Yanhong delivering hers and Da Ge's child as Qiming sits outside of the delivery room resignedly listening to his daughter's labor pains.

Ordinarily, the cinematic cliche of trading the death of one character for the birth of another is used to represent hope. And although the expression on Qiming's face as he awaits the birth of his grandchild may be somewhat ambiguous, there is nothing ambiguous about what that birth represents in the overall context of this tale. Director Wang Chou's view of where China's present course is taking the nation is deeply pessimistic. In the newborn child, the blood of victim and victimizer is inextricably mingled. Yanhong may be back in her village, but she brings with her the seed of corruption she may have hoped to leave behind. When first she returns home, she goes to see her father in the school where he teaches. The landscape is a clear departure from that of booming Wuhan. What we see is a wide shot of the school, a wide sand-colored brick building bearing a red flag, an expanse of sand-colored playground in the foreground. Though true to what schools look like all over Asia, it is here an image of innocence that poignantly hearkens to traditional hopes for the future. Yanhong goes to a child's swing that she recalls from her childhood, and it is while seated on the swing that she tells her father what happened to her brother.

Yanhong's double migration, her return to the countryside, of course suggests that one can't go home again. In an early conversation between Qiming and the detective, we learn that the drama of the urban-rural divide had already played out in the life of her father. When a lead on the boy's whereabouts leads the two men to a kitchen on the campus of Wuhan Universty, Qiming announces that he had been a student there forty years before, during the Cultural Revolution, and that, because he had "said something wrong," he was "sent down," that is, sent to the countryside to do penance for his crime. With the Cultural Revolution long over, Qiming might well have returned to the city, but he makes a choice to stay and teach in the rural village. "I miss my students," he confesses shortly after arriving in Wuhan. He, too, cannot go home again. This writer has had more than one experience in China with Chinese old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution to know that, for many who lived through the period--Western characterizations aside--it was a period of hope and even expanded horizons. For many who were sent down, life long attachments were made, and those who participated came to look back at their lives among rural peoples not merely with nostalgia, their heads filled with propaganda songs, but with great emotion.

What is incontestable in this film is what has happened to Qiming's children as a result of jumping in Wuhan's turbulent waters--one has died, the other become a prostitute. Even Da Ge, who at times actually seems sympathetic, is a victim, perhaps of his greed or even his lapses into humanity, but also as a consequence of his ineptitude for a life of crime. He is simply not ruthless enough to compete. There is a scene (which at first may seem gratuitous) in which we see the stolen Audi, the luxury car that has cost the life of Qiming's son, being repainted. Great care is taken to cover glass and chrome with newspaper and masking tape and we watch the car, originally a silver gray, morph to a glossy black vehicle and watch it imperiously cruise out of the garage where the work was done. The car is a symbol of the new China, a mere reworking of capitalist fantasies of lives drenched in luxury. When Yanhong's dad and his detective/friend travel about, they travel on bicycles, not in luxury cars. Da Ge's stolen Audi had its parallel in the collapsed Soviet Union, where in the early nineties, rows of black Mercedes limousines driven by what were presumed to be members of the Georgian mafia could be seen parked outside of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's new luxury hotels.

For its view of the environmental and social costs of China's new path, Luxury Car is an invaluable work of art.