Noted Haitian filmmaker, Raoul Peck, is scheduled to direct a $20 million biopic about the young Karl Marx, taking the viewer up to the point where his most well-known work, The Communist Manifesto, was published. If the film is a hit on movie screens and cable outlets like Showtime and HBO it might generate a lot of "surplus value" to be taken from the workers on the project.
Were Marx and his revolutionary wealthy friend, Frederick Engels, such advanced thinkers they they anticipated that it was inevitable that one day the bourgeois cinema would bring his story to brain-addled proletarians and they could succeed at finally bringing about a worldwide workers revolt? (At least those workers who lived near a DVD store or could afford subscription pay cable.)
True, Marxism is on the wane in most places, but people like an underdog and Karl certainly had a rough time personally as a young man because he had been born a Jew in anti-Semitic Prussia and he was alienated from the establishment because his father had been forced to convert to Protestant Christianity to keep his job as a lawyer. Also, to put a couple extra logs on his own bonfire, Marx wrote that the same German and later French establishment that was discriminating against him and making laws to stifle a fair deal for the urban working stiffs were, in the long run, going to be replaced by a workers' state, and even that would gradually disappear and thus free people from the toils of industrial labor. Nothing personal, guys, Marx would say, it was just the process of historical inevitability. According to Marx, greedy and exploitative bourgeois types were going to get theirs in the end, and possibly soon, and it would not be pretty.
From looking at his past film credits, I imagine Mr Peck is an intelligent and well-meaning man who will make a sensitive film on this guy's life. The guy's family had to flee Haiti when he was a kid, and that island nation is not a good place to be introduced to the idea of a stable capitalist economy. He probably sees value in Marx's early writings. I do,too, from what I recall and have reread from in articles on the early Marx.
I just don't buy his solutions.
In case you just tuned in and are wondering what's going on, I'm not nor have I ever been a Marxist myself. If Karl were around to dial me up on his Nokia cell phone---perhaps from the Malibu bungalow he was renting for his screenplay duties, putting some extra "gloss" on his auto bio script for Mirimax Pictures--he would say he read that last admission on his Apple computer and say loudly that I have bad case of "false consciousness" created by the values of the society and the material production I was raised in. If Karl was a acquaintance and I was at home when he called, I would dispute such a remark as being just too damn pat."Karl," I'd say. "You're wrong there, pal. Look- turn down the NPR Classical Music station on your Bose Wave Radio there and listen to me for a minute...of course I give money to my local public radio station, Karl. Not all the time. How often? How much? Look, don't change the subject.
"First off, Karl, I acknowledge growing up in the USA in a middle-class white family is not conducive to radical thinking. But I'm not a kid anymore, Karl. And I did read enough of your earlier writings in college to get a good idea where your coming from. And, don't take it personal, brother, but you have to admit that you're a better critic of economic systems than you are a blueprint guy.
"I mean, yeah, your heart might have been in the right place, but look at what came of your brand of revolutionary dictatorial socialism in the decades after you stopped writing and went into suspended animation? A hundred million people died in Russia and China and other places under your disciples' handiwork and now nobody but the Cubans and the North Koreans even practice what you said was going to drive away all the bad karma in the world economy.
"Sure, I work and sometimes, sure, I feel under appreciated and all that. So do my other friends. But even you have to admit its better to be a worker or a manager in a company that owns you for eight to ten hours five or six days a week (if you want to eat, drink and sleep and have a family the rest of the time) than to have a state bureaucrat yammer at you that, basically, the State owns you for all twenty-four and seven? Did you read that copy of 1984I sent you last Christmas? To be honest, pal, when it comes to 19th Century political philosophy, John Stuart Mill and the Fabian Socialists like Beatrice and Sydney Webb over in Britain go down a lot easier to me than anything that smacks of 'historical inevitability' and 'dictatorship.' Nothing personal there, big guy."
We'd argue a while longer, then Karl would sigh loudly and then tell me the limo driver was here to take him over to a party for the shareholders at "Ma Maison" in Beverly Hills. He'd then say, "'I'm embarrassed to go, of course. It might make my hostile critics think I'm contradicting myself to make money for such people, but it's for the greater glory of the world revolution and the liberation of proletariat... Besides, Frederick and his lawyers (I've only got four!) and that skinny-hipped clothes horse of a wife are going to be there and I'll be damned if I'll let that pack of backsliders try and screw me out of my profit points!"
I wouldn't give him a hard time about it--the contradictions. Don't get Karl started on contradictions. He'll segue right into Hegelian dialectics and then he'll lose you every time unless you're some kind of brainiac.
Before he'd hang up, I'd say, "have a good time at Ma Maison, Karl. And good luck with the movie and go easy on the goose pate. Karl, do you even know your cholesterol numbers?"
For more on the subject(s), follow these links:
http://www.hbo.com/films/sometimesinapril/cast/raoul_peck.html
No comments:
Post a Comment