Audio Essay

desert island movie

00:00

The Battle of Algiers

It’s a punk rock kinda question.

1:45

The Battle of Algiers: Bombs and Boomerangs

By Peter Mathews

(Jonathan Reading)

19:00

My first exposure to The Battle of Algiers was courtesy of a comrade who took me to the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon to check it out (circa 1995).

The movie was part of a longer list of essential anti-fascist films that included Land and Freedom (Ken Loach) and Come and See (Elem Klimov).

I had never seen anything like it then and have never seen anything like it since.

21.30

The film has a narrow geographic scope (the Casbah or Arab Quarters in the city of Algiers) and focuses on the years 1954-1957 during which the national liberation struggle took the primary form of urban guerrilla warfare.

But, oddly enough, The Battle Of Algiers opens with the failure of the armed struggle and ends with the successful popular uprising that culminated in the ousting of the French colonialists. What does it say about armed struggle? It is deliciously nuanced about this and many other questions.

I read it as arguing this: the failure of the armed struggle was, while a failure, still a prerequisite for the success of the popular uprising.

25:15

The purity crusade references the particular cultural context of the Algerian national liberation struggle but also the lumpen proletariat and its role in revolution. Mathews understates the sequences where the lumpen tough enters a brothel and puts a pimp on notice; he later kills the pimp. The lumpen is also recruited in prison, where he is a criminal. But within an apartheid system a larger section of the oppressed population are not part of the formal economy.

30:00

Documentary feel. Non professional actors. Extending socialist realism.

The Battle of Algiers is counter cinema that implicitly undermines celebrity worship and through the crowd as protagonist and indigenous non-professionals as actors, even subverts it.

Actors are cattle.

32:30

Ennio Morricone’s score and the entire soundscape of the film are also extraordinary.

END

• If, following the concept of the Bit Revolution, it is now possible to track, measure and control in real time all important aspects of the processes by which things are transformed into the means of human survival, is it not possible that the ambiguous operation of converting all labor and capital into commodities through financial exchange value and the trust upon which it depends, and the arbitrary, injurious and invidious nature of this operation, has finally become, on the whole, a hinderance to human liberation rather than a step towards that liberation? Rather than a necessary step in development, say from feudalism to capitalism, it amounts to a stop on human freedom. Saying as much in 1918 would probably have amounted to so much infantile leftism; saying as much in 2018 amounts to survival.

• The central contradiction of contemporary capitalist rule is contained within the statement made by the science fiction author William Gibson, which I take the liberty to rework: the future is here; it awaits redistribution. Behind all the shock and awe of every new disruption and innovation lies the creeping suspicion, becoming more evident every day, confirmed by every new app, every new genetic breakthrough, every new medical procedure, that ready solutions to deprivation are being systematically withheld, diverted and accumulated such that our lives are getting manifestly worse. But, what is new about this contradiction is that a solution no longer requires a period of ‘catching up’ (the Bolshevik’s NEP) or a long transition from one ‘stage’ to the next, usually characterized by an intensification of regimes of work so as to stave off a return to ‘year zero’ and the deferment, in perpetuity, of that next stage. The dynamism and disruption of 21st century capitalism need not be counterposed by a state socialist model–this binary is (potentially) entirely superseded by the networking and computing power of the Bit Revolution. What is now possible, as in no other era of human history, is the harnessing of forces that make such a transition rapid, far reaching, deep and permanent, but on behalf of the commons, controlled by the commons. This scientific and technological power existed prior to 2010, but it had yet to reach scale. Today it has, or soon will. Harnessing the awesome powers of the Bit Revolution is essential, though not sufficient, for any revolutionary endeavor. Also as in no other time in human history is the possibility of the end of organized human life that this power, if left in the hands of corporations and the state, will almost certainly bring about. You don’t think so? Who could have imagined the sheer audacity of hubris exhibited by our masters of the universe in that epic shitting of the bed that was the electoral victory of Donald Trump? Who could have imagined that from a pant suit would emerge a giant penis upon which neoliberalism would trip? Truly anything is possible. Which means our revolution is possible, too.
• If the above argument is true, it would be possible using the power of the Bit Revolution as applied to economics to imagine, to theorize, and therefore plan, a thorough going reorganization of the means of production and reproduction beginning with the elimination of that which is harmful and useless as the basis for the expansion of that which is healthy and useful. I know, who is to say what is healthy and useful? Well, we are. Just set money and markets aside, for the sake of argument. One could, and should, map what that economy would look like, in all its particulars, over time and across space, so as to bring it about. A central conceit of capitalism is that it must grow, and that growth is inextricably linked to progress; nothing could be further from the truth. It just needs to be reorganized and redistributed, again and again. Eternal growth and a general speeding up just as easily intensify inequality, even as they raise all boats. And if my boat is a dingy, yours a yacht, however much the sea level rises will never change that fact.

• I am fond of arguing that any fundamental move towards freedom and equality will involve the forced expropriation of private property and its redeployment in the commons. This will never come about through legislation or elections alone. An all-too common response is “but where would you stop?” Bhaskar Sunkara addressed this issue through an essay that distinguishes personal from private property, i.e. your Kenny Loggins records from factories. My response is twofold: let’s start at the top and work our way down. Besides, what a delightful problem to have–not if we should expropriate wealth, but how far down the pyramid we should go in expropriating that wealth? Oh, and if by Kenny Loggins records you really mean a yacht for which that awful music was made (yacht rock), we will take that, too.

Political Geography

Social base

Ideology

Motor

Periodization

….

How the first four elements interact over time is my fifth element–periodization. To visualize this we can use a picture frame to view our subject matter; the mortise and tenon joint is comprised of the first four elements, the whole frame is the era.

These eras are:

Classical Fascism 1921-1945

Cold War Fascism 1945-1990

21st Century Fascism 2010–

In another sense I am just focusing attention on what was happening within and to fascism during this long span of history. Elsewhere I will situate that effort within Régis Debray’s broader medialogical history of ideas (a frame around a frame, if you will) although with a caveat–that the current era we are in is not the videosphere, but the Bitosphere, a part of the Bit Revolution.

We can see why such a periodization is important in understanding the threat of fascism today by noting what can happen when some other frame, often unacknowledged, is used.

Christopher R. Browning’s “The Suffocation of Democracy” in the New York Review of Books (October 25, 2018) is exhibit one. To be fair, Browning is an historian of classical fascism, in particular the holocaust, who wrote the article cited above at the prompting of friends and colleagues who wanted, as we all do, satisfactory answers to two questions: What are the parallels between fascism then and now? What are the differences? Not unreasonable questions. But the very framing of the questions conditions the answers.

Browning extrapolates from a definition of fascism rooted in the classical period forward to the present. In doing so he does what virtually everyone else does, he skips what happened in between. He reasons from a definition of fascism 70-100 years ago to the present, with a frame of liberal democracy vs the twin totalitarian threats. In this he mischaracterizes the nature of fascism, perhaps not so badly in its classical phase, but wildly so today.

Projected out across a sea of time and space this approach to the problem of fascism is ahistorical. In this his broad sweep of history doesn’t hold up.

But he is not alone. It is a rarity for anyone to discuss fascism during the Cold War era because the common wisdom has it that fascism died with Hitler in the bunker, leaving the ‘free world’ to fight communism. Fascism didn’t do anything over that time period because it was dead. Its reemergence in the 21st Century, if one even concedes that it has re-emerged at all, is ex-nihilo. And herein lies the problem: this operation, repeated add nauseam throughout the liberal and socialist press serves narrow political goals (fighting republicans, supporting a narrow anti-capitalism, encouraging a split from Die Linke over ‘open borders’, etc.,) but at the expense of history and thereby a viable revolutionary socialist project.

From a reasonable question (fascism then vs now) comes an analytical movement of staggering stupidity and often breathtaking dishonesty. But, as I noted above, this is not confined to liberals.

Exhibit two. Here’s the same nonsense from Bhaskar Sunkara’s “A Thousand Platitudes: Liberal Hysteria And The Tea Party” (New Politics, June 2, 2011).

“Though many of its shock-troops have come from lumpenproletarian elements, fascism has historically been a petit-bourgeois movement that can only be understood within the context of a militant left. German and Italian fascists disrupted strikes and physically attacked left-wing meetings. This historically specific brand of reaction implies that there was a vibrant workers’ movement challenging capitalist class rule, forcing elements of those on top to attempt to gamble on empowering the fascists in order to ultimately preserve the existing class structure. The American left is a marginalized and besieged political force, not exactly ready to storm the barricades.”

“Historically”, “within a context”, “historically specific brand.” As in waaay back when, not now.

Restated, Sunkara argues: Fascism can only exist if workers pose a credible threat to capitalist rule. Workers pose no threat to capitalist rule. Therefore fascism cannot exist.

If Sunkara insists that the far right represents an episodic readjustment of capitalist command and control, Browning relies on a fairy tale of the post war era so as to isolate the phenomenon of 21st century fascism from it.

“Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.”

Setting aside his characterization of the Bolshevik Revolution as a disaster, note that other disasters of this splendid post war era –Hiroshima, Nagasaki (with which it was inaugurated) the obliteration of North Korea, the Vietnam Invasion, Apartheid, and Jim Crow, Rwanda, etc., are apparently separate from the peace and prosperity he cherishes.

So the liberal in part protects what is by defining fascism as entirely separate from it; the patrician socialist attacks what is but cannot make the leap to something else because of blindness to what also, through different means, blocks its path.

The question restated: what the fuck was fascism doing from 1945 until 1990? What has happened within fascism from 1990 to the present?

That obliteration of an important slice of history serves a purpose: to obscure the true nature of fascism as a desperate exit strategy from the contradictions of capitalism in favor of a future oriented nostalgia that reinforces the worst aspects of that system.

Let’s cue Chomsky–not on fascism, which I think he misunderstands also, but on this notion of framing. Every time someone does this on the subject of fascism–extrapolates across 70 years–they perform an analytical operation similar to that of characterizing the slaughter that was carried out from 1961–1975, on the part of the United States, in Indochina as ‘the Vietnam War’ the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ or ‘Vietnam Quagmire’ but never, ever, ‘The Invasion of Vietnam’. A mistake. A missed opportunity. A failure. Never the predictable results of deliberate policies carried out with bipartisan consensus.

Conservatives draw a somewhat different lesson. My favorite runs like this: fascism was incubated within relatively liberal and democratic polities, (Italy, Germany) yet fascism itself was illiberal (anti democratic) and took aim at that same civic society. Those civic institutions responded in the only way they could–by strengthening those selfsame institutions. This, paradoxically, fertilized the soil for fascism to grow. Ugh. Vicious circle, right? Wrong. Why?

From here it is but a short hop to this conclusion: fascism is a creature of the mob, of the dangerous classes, of the hoi polloi, of an excess of democracy. Fascism comes about through polarization and the collapse of a moderate center, rather than racism, nationalism and war. The stifling of civic society and the intensification of inequality, become necessary evils.

The upshot is this: We all need a little irritating authoritarianism with our morning breakfast so as to avoid the painful bowel movement of totalitarianism in the afternoon. But that’s a steady diet of nothing in the service of the status quo, not an analysis a socialist should respect, much less use.

Browning says, however, that there is a divergence between then and now:

“The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.”

So the threat is these ‘authoritarians’, growing everywhere who “aspire” to “totalitarianism”.

Browning then dissolves everything into the plaintive cry of the sappy liberal:

“The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. ”

That’s as eloquent and empty a summary of the politics of liberal bullshit as any has ever written. Note how ‘fascism’ has totally supplanted ‘populism’ in this treatment–but the use of the term as an epithet denuded of explanatory power remains.

Browning ends with the obligatory environmental apocalypse coda, and just in case you aren’t sure if you are reading this in the NYRB, he reminds you: “No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events.”

I agree–that fucking wall won’t be high enough to protect the masters from the hordes. But we won’t wait for rising sea levels to tear it down, we will do it sooner, along with all that “post war peace and prosperity” you have inflicted on us.

END