| Red Words |
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| Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00 | |
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In a Land of
Plenty Reviewed by Dougal McNeill
Wellington’s Paramount Cinema on Courtenay Place was packed when, just a few days out from the general election, a crowd of mostly older people came to see In a Land of Plenty, a documentary by Alister Barry – known for his work Someone Else’s Country – about unemployment in New Zealand. Barry had the guts to do what no other New Zealand filmmaker has done. He has gone behind the blithering and the bullshit of Treasury and the New Right academics to make a history of how, after the election of the Fourth Labour Government in 1984, unemployment was made a central instrument of economic policy. In order to keep inflation down and rescue profits for businesses, Treasury deliberately let the level of unemployment rise no matter what the social and personal costs. Under National, they stepped up their assault on workers and the unemployed by slashing benefits and services. There is a very revealing part in this film where we learn how Treasury analysts calculated benefit cuts to a level they knew was below that needed to healthily feed a family. I came away from watching this film with a renewed sense of disgust at the way the modern "free market economy" is based on the cruel exploitation of ordinary people. In a Land of Plenty is worth seeing for the file footage Barry has foraged out alone. There’s some brilliant shots of protests against unemployment and attacks on workers, and a truly wonderful moment where Richard Prebble gets an egg straight in the face – a present from a laid-off worker! There are also some very good scenes exposing the smear campaign against beneficiaries WINZ ran in the late 90s, and showing what sort of lies and propaganda a government department is prepared to use to turn public opinion. But, despite these undeniably strong points, I do have some quite serious criticisms of In a Land of Plenty. It didn’t examine the international context of the right wing attack at all – as if New Zealand was a sheltered little paradise until ’84, our past was a rosy one and Thatcher and Reagan didn’t exist. This prevented us as an audience from gaining any understanding of why the terrible assaults on workers and the unemployed happened when and how they did, and not in another time. Barry is also very uncritical of union officials and Labour Party politicians. Ken Douglas – who played a leading role in clamping down on any fightback from within the union movement – Jim Anderton and others are all interviewed and their words are allowed to pass without comment. This makes In a Land of Plenty quite a depressing film because, even though it does show us how terrible the New Right is, it doesn’t present even the image of an alternative. The usual sellouts are allowed to pass the whole thing off as inevitable, and that’s it. Which is a shame. The hard work Barry has put into finding so many excellent moments of resistance should serve as inspiration for us to take up the struggle now, and not reinforce nostalgia and gloom, as some of the older middle class people in the audience seemed to be feeling. But don’t let these criticisms put you off. Because In a Land of Plenty isn’t your usual piece of right wing bullshit, don’t expect to see it on TV anytime soon. But do look out for it at the video stores, or write to Community Media Trust, P O Box 3563, Wellington. Copies cost $30.
The
Navigators Reviewed by Andrew Cooper
A railway workers’ depot, South Yorkshire, 1995. The rail system has been privatised and a bunch of grasping private companies will force workers from different depots to compete against each other for maintenance work. In the film’s hilarious opening piece, the hapless depot manager has to read out a "mission statement" for their new company. "We have to ‘think safety’. Deaths must be kept to an acceptable level." At first the workers treat the privatisation and its absurd new rules as a joke. But then the company devises new ways to divide and rule, sacking or forcing out most staff and eventually closing the depot. They are forced to work as contract labour, with no holidays, sick pay or guarantee of work. They must be on call to work at any time, get their own transport to jobs on the rail tracks, and buy their own safety clothing and equipment. Instead of putting worker and passenger safety first, the rival rail track companies are only interested in putting the blame for any derailments onto other companies. Workers who complain about lack of safety are blacklisted by the employment agencies and not given future work. The film’s conclusion is a fatal accident caused by fatigue and understaffing. The other workers, terrified of losing what work they have left, cover it up to avoid blame. With a couple of exceptions, most importantly 1995’s Spanish Civil War epic Land and Freedom, Ken Loach’s films of the past decade have dealt with the experiences of British workers in a period of defeat and downturn in struggle. As one critic put it, they are about ducking and diving as class struggle, of guerrilla war and individual resistance within the capitalist system. Is Ken Loach being overly pessimistic? Without doubt his style is one of extreme realism. His work has always reflected the real level of working class political consciousness and struggle in Britain, and, unfortunately, in the past decade this has been at a low ebb. In the 1960s he made powerful indictments of the Labour government’s failure to address social issues such as homelessness in his 1966 TV play Cathy Come Home. His more overtly political films in the early 70s were celebrations of working class victory as well as explanations of the role of Labour and union leaders in trying to undermine those struggles. His 1983 documentary Questions of Leadership, exposing the role of union leaders in failing to resist Margaret Thatcher’s war on the working class was effectively censored. It criticised the very people the Conservatives were relying on to smash the coal miners and strengthen the hand of the union bureaucracy at the expense of rank and file workers. The 1990s saw a series of powerful feature films. What characterises these is not just the portrayal of workers in defeat, but also, until 1998’s My Name is Joe, the presence of at least one character who either explicitly argues for or at least shows in some way the possibility of a collective rather than individual response. In Riff Raff, the one politically conscious worker is sacked when he asks for basic safety procedures to be followed. There is no sense of an alternative to this, no strike or attempt by the other workers to resist collectively. The only fightback is a purely individual one – when a worker dies through lack of safety two other labourers burn down the luxury flats they are building. My Name is Joe was the only film in this period not to even have one character pointing the way to an alternative. Its main character is a former alcoholic struggling to get by in a working class area devastated by years of unemployment. The Navigators does have one character, a union delegate of some kind, who tries to stand up for the workers. But he too is laid off like the others. Despite its often marvellous humour then, The Navigators is essentially a rather depressing film where the workers are little more than passive victims. Ken Loach has been widely criticised by the left for this. But we have to see his recent work as reflecting what is doubtless the reality for most workers in the 90s – trying to simply survive rather than fight back. His other recent work, 2000’s Bread and Roses, about a Los Angeles cleaners’ strike, showed that this pessimism is not permanent but a response to the experiences of the vast majority of workers in recent years. The Navigators won’t give you much idea about how to fight back, but it will definitely stoke your feelings of class hatred! More importantly, taken together Ken Loach’s recent work, especially Land and Freedom, will leave audiences inspired and aware that defeat is not inevitable.
The New
Rulers of the World Reviewed by Paul D’Amato
This is the best of all the post-September 11 books that expose the murderous hypocrisy of US foreign policy. It covers seemingly widely different topics, from the West’s complicity in Indonesia’s 1965 coup to Washington’s new "great game" in South Asia, to Australia’s shameful mistreatment of its Aboriginal population. But as Pilger points out, "The narrative that links all four chapters is the legacy of the ‘old’ imperialism and its return to respectability as ‘globalisation’ and the ‘war on terrorism’." The first chapter, "The model pupil," chillingly retells the story of how the US and Britain conspired with the Indonesian military to overthrow the nationalist leader Sukarno and embark on a mass slaughter of members of the Communist Party (PKI) that killed over 500,000 people – an event ranked even by the CIA as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." They ought to know. The CIA gave the Indonesian military a list of 5,000 people to be assassinated and provided the army field communication equipment to coordinate the massacre. The post-coup economic machinations are telling. In 1967, the US and Europe’s top corporate giants met with Suharto’s top economic advisers. The latter were eager to sell the stable new Indonesia of cheap labour and vast exploitable resources. "On the second day," writes Pilger, "the Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector." This little known episode captures the connection between the political, the military, and the economic. "Free markets," it seems, are markets pried open with the help of unthinkable violence. That this isn’t just history is made abundantly clear by Pilger’s next chapter, "Paying the price." Here the reader will find out how the US-enforced United Nations sanctions on Iraq have killed over a million people, more than half of them children. But Pilger gives this horrific story a more human, and therefore more tragic, face. Every day dozens of children die from preventable illnesses as a result of the embargo on many medicines. On a visit to Iraq, one doctor described to Pilger how a boy with a "beautiful nature" had died of Hodgkin’s, a disease that is cured in 95 percent of cases with the proper treatment: "I am a doctor," he tells Pilger. "I am not supposed to cry, but I cry every day… These children could live and grow up; and when you see your son and daughter in front of you, dying, what happens to you?" For those with illusions in the UN as some kind of force for peace in the world, Pilger’s book is a strong antidote. He recounts a conversation with the UN chair of the Iraq sanctions committee. "How much power does the United States exercise over your committee?," Pilger asks pointedly. "We operate by consensus," comes the reply. "And what if the Americans object?" "We don’t operate." This pretty much sums up the chain of command at the UN. The pivotal chapter, "The Great Game," goes into lurid detail to show how the US has used September 11 to reshape a new imperialism, for which fighting "terrorism" has become the new cover. The story is peppered with tyrants, funded and trained by the biggest tyrant, the US government, who then "slip the leash" and become "evildoers." The Taleban, before it became an "evildoer," was seen as an ally in Washington’s efforts to secure a pipeline through the region. Moreover, the US is not only the biggest perpetrator of state terror but harbours terrorists within its own borders – from right-wing Cuban hijackers to School of the Americas trained death squad leaders. Two thumbs up. Way up.
The Scar Reviewed by Andrew Cooper
I bet China Miéville doesn’t suffer from writer’s block. His third book, and the second set in the imaginary world of Bas-Lag, is another doorstopper – the hardback copy running to over 600 pages. In his last book, Perdido Street Station, Miéville used the struggles amongst alien races in the teeming, terrifying metropolis of New Crubozon as a metaphor for class conflict on Earth – and also as a way of highlighting the absurdity of racism. Miéville, who is an active revolutionary socialist, devoted a large part of Perdido Street Station to world-building. In fact, what were obviously almost limitless quantities of ideas often threatened to overtake the actual plot. In The Scar, the metaphors are more subtle and, I think, convincing. At the novel’s beginning, Bellis Coldwine, a rather unlikeable woman on the brink of middle age, flees New Crobuzon after unwittingly being implicated in the events described in the previous novel. Her ship is captured and she becomes a prisoner-citizen of the floating pirate city of Armada. Armada is a floating allegory, a microcosm of human politics. Divided into several districts, each with a different form of government, they range from liberal democracy to anarchy to absolute monarchy – though my favourite, I must admit, was the Vampir (sic) Quarter with its Goretax (residents must let the Vampir ruling class drink their blood in exchange for protection and lower taxes!) And what is The Scar? Well, it’s a place, sure. But it’s also about the scars (both physical and mental) that everyone carries around with them. Both types of scarring are combined in Armada’s rulers, The Lovers, and with them Miéville gives one of the scariest portrayals of obsession – with both each other and their political agenda – ever. Their monomaniacal quest for "The Scar" – a source of unimaginable power – unleashes a series of disastrous events leading to political upheaval and mutiny. As the conclusion makes clear, numerous interpretations of the story are possible. It is, most importantly, about the powerlessness of individuals, no matter how heroic, under capitalism. Only through unity – however fleeting – do the Armadans begin to plot their own destiny. The amazing inventiveness of Perdido Street Station is still there in The Scar, but the story and characters seem more rounded, subtle and complex. I just hope China Miéville doesn’t get writer’s block, because I’m already looking forward to the next instalment. Recommended. |
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