[Peace-discuss] Farenheit 9/11, and more.

[Morton K.Brussel]

One of the most astute commentators discusses the movie on his Blog. 
Perhaps relevant to the comments of Carl and Robert recently posted. 
MKB.

Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore, and Orwell
  Posted by Paul Street at June 29, 2004 07:36 PM

The commentary on Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” will be abundant on 
the left, and I won’t try to write a thorough review here or anywhere 
else. It's brilliant, of course.

  I’ve had a tendency to view Moore a bit like Orwell viewed Charles 
Dickens. In the 1940s, the lifelong democratic socialist Orwell wrote a 
brilliant essay rescuing Charles Dickens from Marxist-Lenninist body 
snatchers who claimed the great 19th century British novelist as one of 
their own. Beneath affection for Dickens and distaste for formulaic and 
mechanistic “Marxists,” Orwell launched an essentially hard-left 
critique that Karl Marx would certainly have approved. “The truth,” 
wrote Orwell:


  "is Dickens’ criticism of society is almost exclusively moral…There is 
no clear sign that he wants the existing order [capitalism, P.S.] to be 
overthrown, or that he believes it would make much difference if it 
were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 
“human nature.” It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to 
a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. 
Nowhere, for example, does he make any attack on private enterprise or 
private property. [Even in the one Dickens novel that includes a 
portrait of an industrial worker (Hard Times), Dickens’] tendency is if 
anything pro-capitalist, because its whole morale is that capitalists 
ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious… [Dickens’] 
whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous 
platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent. 
Naturally, this calls for a few characters who are in positions of 
authority and who do behave decently. Hence the recurrent Dickens 
figure, the Good Rich Man."

  That’s sort of how I took Moore’s first great – and I mean great – 
movie, “Roger and Me,” which tells the story of how General Motors 
devastated Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan through 
de-industrialization (plant closings). The movie was obviously 
brilliant – spectacularly so – and Moore clearly thought and thinks 
that “the workers ought to be rebellious.” But the key sub-text that 
has Moore following GM’s CEO Roger Smith all over trying to arrange a 
meeting to discuss the terrible social and human consequences of the 
company’s “business” decisions always struck me as naively 
moralist-Dickensian. Smith, after all, was nothing more than the 
functional representative and agent of “modern” multinational capital 
and modern multinational capital and capitalism in general (as all good 
leftists know) are simply not about social conscience or sustaining 
decent human communities. Theyare about enriching the privileged few, 
whatever the broader social and moral costs.

  It was interesting in that regard to see “Fahrenheit 9/11” end with 
Moore quoting from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four about the drive of the 
ruling class of modern hierarchical society to impose essentially 
permanent warfare. I didn’t write down the exact words he quoted he 
used but they must come from the ninth chapter, where Orwell placed the 
totalitarian regime ruling “Oceania” within the context of capitalism’s 
quest to overcome the Marxian contradiction between modern 
industrialism’s capacity to create massive social wealth leisure and 
the private “elite’s” desire to maintain stark class distinctions and 
steep sociopolitical hierarchy. The analysis comes wrapped in the 
forbidden book written by Emmanuel Goldtstein (Orwell’s parody of Leon 
Trotsky), who notes that:

  "an all-around increase in wealth threaten[s] the destruction – 
indeed, in some sense was the destruction – of a hierarchical society. 
In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, 
lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a 
motorcar or even an airplane…wealth would confer no distinction. It was 
possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense 
of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, 
while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in 
practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure 
and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings 
who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would 
learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they 
would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no 
function, and they would sweep it away. In long run, a hierarchical 
society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

  The ultimate solution to keep the “privileged minority” wealthy and in 
power, according to Goldestein/Trotsky/Orwell, is permanent warfare, 
which creates a way for “the wheels of industry” to be “kept turning 
without increasing the real wealth of the world,” sustaining inequality 
and creating a powerful ideological mechanism whereby the “privations” 
imposed by hierarchy seemed “necessary.” An added benefit came from the 
fact that “the consequences of being at war, and therefore in danger, 
makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, 
unavoidable condition of survival. War,” Goldstein/Orwell concluded, 
“not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it 
in a psychologically acceptable way,” capping off an analysis that is 
pregnant with meaning for understanding the not-so post-Cold War 
foreign and domestic policy of the United States today.

  Is Moore moving towards a more genuinely radical structural 
perspective? There’s a few things in “Fahrenheit 9/11” that seem a bit 
more structural than I recall him being in the past…the chilling class 
connection on military recruiting around Flint (very well done), the 
candid discussion of the role that world capitalist oil money has 
splayed in keeping the Bush dynasty more attuned to the needs of Saudi 
petro-sheiks than ordinary Americans, and more.

  Overall, however, the movie seems still largely in the Dickensian 
moral-critique mode, as it is clearly about getting the good or at 
least nicer rich men (the Democrats) IN and the really bad (and 
messianic-Fundamentalist – a connection that Moore’s stays away from) 
rich man (Bush II) and men (the Republicans) OUT. Maybe this is at it 
should be, under the limted/limiting circumstances of American 
winner-take-all "politics." Orwell thought there was much to recommend 
the bourgeois-moralist approach and Marx was certainly able to 
appreciate the value of that approach in the hands of people like 
Dickens and Balzac.

  But if it’s all about getting Bush II out – the clear intention of 
Moore’s very carefully crafted movie – then I find it odd that there’s 
next to nothing in Fahrenheit 9/11 about the domestic socioeconomic 
consequences of the harshly regressive and racist “homeland” agenda 
that Bush II has pushed through under the cover of 9/11. In reality, 
the foreign policy differences between the Democratic candidate (Kerry) 
and Bush II are relatively small compared to the domestic policy 
differences – something I wrote about in my last post. Of course, its 
foreign policy that's doing the most to sink Bush right now...because 
of Iraq he hasn't been able to cash in on 2 months of (admittedly very 
flawed) job growth.

  Still, I couldn’t be persuaded to recommend voting for Kerry (instead 
of Nader or Cobb) in a swing/"unsafe" (see previous post) state purely 
on the basis of foreign policy or even civil liberties. It’s tax 
policy, civil rights, racial justice, gender equity, and labor rights 
(hard to imagine Bush II refusing to cross a union picket line, as 
Kerry did yesterday) on the home front that finally swing me over to 
that recommendation. From that perspective one thing I would have liked 
to see a bit more of in Moore’s movie is how Bush II has used the 
jetliner attacks to deepen empire and inequality at home.

  But you can’t always get everything you want and right now “Fahrenheit 
9/11” seems like a good measure of what we need. For that, and for 
Michael Moore, I am very thankful indeed.
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