For the average working-class person, classical music and the works of Shakespeare possess no relevance- as they make no sense. The workers are not conditioned to understand or appreciate these middle-class entities. Shakespeare and middle-class music have evolved out of the socio-economic privilege that is the cultural accumulation of the Bourgeoisie. In reality, this Bourgeois culture should not possess any meaning or relevance for the Proletariat. This is a body of pointless words and sounds imbued with a 'speciality' that only its creators can understand. The irony is that part of the profit generated by the labour of the Proletariat - and stolen by the Bourgeoisie - has provided the detached foundation of these exclusive cultural expression. Who cares 'What light through yonder window breaks?' Where is the food, clothing, medical care and housing in Mozart of Beethoven? The Bourgeoisie, of course, already possess these things and do not need to campaign to achieve these things again. The Bourgeoisie has accumulated the cream of Proletariat profit - kept the toilers completely impoverished - and built its opulent lifestyles upon the bones of the workers. Nice words and melodious notes do not free the mind of the workers from the oppression of the predatory capitalist system. The Bourgeoisie is free in the sense that it is dominant in the exploitative System it invented. The workers are subordinate. Being subordinate - the workers are forced to exist in a manner that sees the mind and body continuously oppressed. This encourages both inner and outer conflict and ensure emotional, psychological and physical violence rules the roost - not nice words or pleasant sounding musical notes. There are two ways forward. One is to reject the working-class and fully align with Bourgeois culture (and give-up any notion of Revolution). The second direction is to overthrow the Bourgeois System - and for the workers to sieze control of the means of production.
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This film reminded me of Logan’s Run, the Matrix and Gattaca (with undertones of Minority Report), Filming occurred between October and December, 2000, and was completed well before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center during September, 2001. However, the finished film was not released until 2002 and in the post-911 war-mongering climate in the US – was a monumental cinema and financial failure. Perhaps the central theme of ordinary people rising-up against an oppressive regime did not go down too well with the Bush Administration as it was priming the American population to mindlessly follow its orders to (illegally) invade Afghanistan (and Iraq) in retaliation for 911 – without either country having anything to do with the terrorist attack itself. It is stated that Berlin was chosen for its fascistic architecture – and areas of run-down East Germany – with the produces careful not to mention that the former ‘Socialist’ East German State was ‘devastated’ with the re-introduction of predatory capitalism and that in just ten years, large areas became economically run-down and inundated with neo-Nazi movements whilst being abandoned by the unified ‘German’ State - bereft of financial aid and vital resources, etc. In other words, it was the predatory capitalism of the US that destroyed the infrastructure of East Germany – and not (Marxist-Leninist) ‘Socialism’ that had over-thrown Nazism and carefully re-built the country in the wake of Hitler’s death in 1945! Of course, the ‘Ministry of State Security’ or ‘Stasi’ (1950-19990) was responsible law and order and (from 1952) intelligence and counter-intelligence – for the State of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Its main tasks were to guard the German people from infiltration by US predatory capitalism – and arrest, try and imprison any East German nationals still holding ‘Nazi’ viewpoints. The US packaged this move as a human rights violation and started various media campaigns to have these people released. With the collapse of East Germany in 1999, all these former Nazis were released to great fanfare – and they immediately set about exercising their newly found ‘capitalist’ freedom by re-establishing a vast network of neo-Nazi organisations that still exist and function today! This is the background to the ‘decrepit’ areas the producers of this film claim they used in the former East Germany.
Furthermore, the producers feature images of Joseph Stalin – the ‘elected’ General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and Saddam Hussein. The former fought Hitler’s fascism to protect the West with the Soviet Union losing around 41 million men, women and children, whilst Saddam Hussein was to be blamed by the Bush Administration (falsely) for being behind 911! An odd choice for so-called ‘deficient’ leaders as both were victims of the capitalist system! The producers also churn-out footage of the 1989 ‘Tiananmen Square’ Incident in China which was revealed in 2011 as a media hoax by Wikileaks - perpetuated by the US and UK media during a time before the internet and when very few people possessed the ability to verify at source what they were being told to ‘think’ by their respective governments! Although many suggest this film is a re-hash of Orwell’s 1984, the situation is a little more complex. George Orwell, as a Trotskyite, was tasked by the UK government to agitate against the Soviet Union through the medium of literature. Orwell’s books are not very well written, but they exist in virtually every school throughout the Western (capitalist) world! His books entitled ‘1984’, and Animal Farm’ are designed to psychologically ‘inoculate’ the minds of young children born within the capitalist system against forming any thoughts in support of ‘Socialism.’ As Orwell recognises the urge toward ‘creativity’ the only distraction his fiction allows is a dalliance with Trotskyism which serves the purpose of directing the individuals straight back into the arms of predatory capitalism! In this regard, Orwell’s misleading and poorly written works serve a similar purpose to the drug ‘Prozium’ found in this film. Whereas Orwell’s work ‘suppresses’ any thoughts in support of ‘Socialism’ - ‘Prozium II’ is a drug administered to all citizens of Libria which is used to ‘suppress’ all ‘emotion.’ The point of this is that the Council which runs Libria has decided that ‘feeling emotion’ is the reason humanity ‘goes to war’, and therefore if ‘emotion’ is stopped – all ‘war’ will cease (as does ‘resistance’ to authority). Orwell suppresses ‘Socialism’ (thus allowing the capitalist system to function normally – which includes raging war), whilst ‘Prozium’ allows for a society to function ‘free’ of warfare although under a totalitarian government (capitalism in decline). As religion is linked to ‘faith’, and given that ‘faith’ is premised upon ‘emotion’ - in an emotionless society, there is no need or inclination for religion to exist. Instead, secular ‘Clerics’ are trained to defend the State against anyone who ‘feels’ emotion. To do this they become expert in advanced martial arts – both armed and unarmed – and are empowered to be judge, jury and executioner. Their job is to destroy anyone who ‘feels’ and eradicate any material signs of culture produce by ‘feeling’ individuals. Every citizen is obligated to take their dose of ‘Prozium’ every day so as to prevent any feelings developing. Not to do this constitutes a ‘sense crime’ which is punishable by immediate death. Prozium creates an ‘unfeeling’ society that lives in the ‘eternal moment,’ That is to say, all citizens of Libria physically exist in the existential moment. This sounds very similar to the Japanese Zen ideology developed in Japan post 1868 (following the Meiji Restoration), which developed to its peak during the 1930s. This was a fascistic distortion of Chinese Ch’an that sort to ‘eradicate’ all human feeling and create a population that only lives in the present moment and possessed no moral qualms in ‘killing’ anyone who opposes the will of the State. To do this, the Japanese State had to ‘abandon’ all Buddhist morality and ethical behaviour and the Buddhist Establishment had to conform. This created an appreciation of the present moment that forgets the past and has no thought of the future whilst being completely ‘amoral’ due to its lack of contextualising emotion. This type of Japanese Zen conditioned millions of Japanese people to mindlessly obey a hierarchical government and kill anyone who opposed its objectives. Not only this, but after WWII, many so-called Japanese Zen masters then transmitted this type of ‘amoral’ Zen to the West where it has become known as ‘International Zen’, even though this type of thinking has been abandoned by most ethnic Japanese people who have reverted back to a more civilised and humane type of Buddhist practice. Clerics in Librium act very much like the Samurai of ancient Japan and the Kempeitai, of fascist Imperial Japan – as they are empowered to kill anyone who deviates from the accepted norms of society. To achieve this the Clerics have developed a deadly ‘Gun Kata’ - which is a set of movements using fire-arms which has been mathematically calculated to kill as many people in the shortest space of time, in such an efficient manner that exposes the Cleric to the least damage. Just as the bourgeoise retain control of the means of product, as the dominant class, the bourgeoise tends to also dominant all the prevalent forms of art. Bourgeois art is indicative of the ‘mystification’ of what it is to be ‘bourgeois’ - and nothing else. The intellectual location of the intended destination of bourgeois art lies just over the boundary of the material edge of bourgeois-defined reality – it is bourgeois material reality 1.5! In and of itself, there is nothing particularly difficult to understand about this as a a) process and b) manifestation. Even for many bourgeoisie – who are too busy amassing their ill-gotten wealth - ‘art’ of this type remains as periphery to their perception as it stands in relation to the relevance of material reality. Bourgeois-art is a manifestation of the limitation of bourgeois thought. This being the case, the working-class should not stand enawed by this process. The proletariat must retain an independent creativity that runs a) parallel to and b) stand in competition to its bourgeois alternative. Although separate and distinct, proletariat art can (and must) occasionally over-lap with, dominate-over and on occasion - ‘replace’ - the bourgeois alternative it seeks to replace. This is because the auspices of proletariat art lie just beneath the surface of a society it does not yet dominant due to continuing bourgeois control of the means of production and every social, cultural and political advantage this dominance bestows upon its bourgeois user. This should not, in and of itself, interfere with the natural business of ideological displacement, for as time progresses, the dialectical power of proletariat art will become ever greater and prominent for the minds and bodies of the majority of human-beings living within society. Proletariat art is the ever-present spectre living just below the surface of the conscious-mind and just beyond the moving aspects of the material world! As the next and most important stage of human mind-body evolution, proletariat art is the summation of everything that is great and good about the working-class and the Socialist Revolution that it will initiate over the bourgeoise! The bourgeois class will eventually cease to exist – just as their art will stop possessing any relevance as an expression of material reality (as the exploitative material reality it currently manifests will no longer exist to be reflected through the machinations of bourgeoise at). However, even at this stage, it is important for the proletariat artist to remain ‘free’ of all contrived structure and mechanisms of self-limiting control. This process also includes not falling into the trap of hyper-individualism premised upon ‘isolation’ and enhanced by a certain ‘cultural’ irrelevance. These are the challenges for the genuine working-class artist.
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AuthorAdrian Chan-Wyles PhD - Political Commissar and BMA (UK) Historian & Researcher. Archives
April 2024
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