Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes

Book Reviews: “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America,” by Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, New York, 2008); and “The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems,” by Van Jones with Ariane Conrad (Harper One, New York, 2008).

These two books on global warming were published last year as the Obama campaign moved into high gear. Friedman is a NY Times columnist. Jones is a human rights activist who Obama appointed as Special Advisor for Green Jobs but then was forced to resign recently after being attacked by right-wing Republicans for supposedly being a “Marxist.”

Both Friedman and Jones recognize that today’s severe global warming is due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) in industry, transportation and in the generation of electrical power. They both recognize the urgent need for a solution. But they both (incorrectly) suggest, in different ways, that the capitalist market can solve this problem, if only governments worldwide would adopt “the correct policies.”

In his book, Friedman is an unabashed apologist for U.S. imperialism. Jones, on the other hand, denounces the U.S. history of genocidal theft of Indian lands, slavery and the ongoing racist treatment of black, Latin, Asian and Native American working-class people, as well as the extreme sexist discrimination against women. Racism/sexism and global warming are the “two biggest problems” (his subtitle) facing the world.

Friedman writes as though racism and the current oil wars never happened and calls on the U.S. to regain its mythical moral leadership in the world (after Bush allegedly destroyed it) by taking the lead in decreasing GHG emissions. Jones, on the other hand, calls on the U.S. government to solve global warming by creating green jobs to build clean energy usage that will also help to abolish the inequality of income and opportunity suffered by black and Latino workers. He says neither problem can be solved without solving the other.

The two authors seem to be living in two different universes — Friedman in fantasyland while Jones is almost in the real world.

While Jones doesn’t defend the war-criminal U.S. ruling class like Friedman does, he appears clueless about the nature of capitalism. He doesn’t recognize the antagonistic relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. He doesn’t see the capitalists’ absolute need to promote racism and sexism to enhance their super-profits and to maintain their political power —  control of the state. This enables them to exert their class domination over both the working class and over competing imperialists.

Though Jones advocates the full involvement of “minority” workers to pressure the government to foster use of solar panels, windmills and other forms of clean energy, he proposes that such a coalition be led by “progressive” businessmen. (!) This position is misleading pie in the sky, typical of those like Jones who toy with revolutionary ideas at one point in their lives and then reject them to pursue a career in the Democratic Party.

His central error is not understanding that capitalism, with its driving profit motive, cannot stop using fossil fuels without dismantling virtually the entire body of physical capital in the world, replacing it with new physical plant and modes of transportation employing clean energy sources. The world’s capitalist classes can never agree to do this.

The world’s imperialists are locked in life-and-death competitive rivalries with each other. No “global policy” that interferes with their battle for maximum profits can possibly be written and enforced as long as these imperialists fight with each other over control of the world’s resources and markets.

The main battle we face in the movement against global warming is defeating the misleading strategies of writers like Jones and the fantasies of liberals like Friedman. We must redouble our efforts to demonstrate that only the abolition of capitalism, classes and production for profit instead of for use can lay the foundation for a renewed planet. Only the world’s working class, led by its communist party PLP, once having seized power from the capitalists and consolidated its power through revolution, will be able to clean up the world, revolutionize production processes with safe, clean energy and save the planet.

‘District 9’ Attacks Racist Apartheid But Offers No Solution

Sometimes in order to get a story about the horrors of racism and capitalism through the gauntlet of financiers and studio execs in Hollywood you have to add… ALIENS. In the movie District 9 an alien ship stops above Johannesburg, South Africa with nearly a million alien inhabitants in a state of starvation inside. Feeling pressure from the international community the South African government relocates the aliens to a camp on the edge of the city, District 9. The film takes place twenty years after the ship’s arrival. The film’s location in South Africa is no accident as it is meant to conjure images of the Apartheid system that ruled there for nearly fifty years.

District 9, like the areas most black South Africans’ lived in under apartheid, is a fenced-in slum with densely-packed shacks housing almost two million aliens living in a constant state of poverty and starvation. The aliens are blamed for the conditions of the slum they are forced to live in despite the fact that the conditions were created by denying them food and other resources. The local population, fully indoctrinated with this racism,
vigorously calls for the aliens to be removed to camps outside of the city.

The film is shot in a documentary-style fashion using commentary from people’s reactions to living in the city as the story unfurls. The comments about the aliens in the film are from real life interviews the director conducted with people from Johannesburg about the influx of immigrants mainly from Zimbabwe and Nigeria into the city.

The fighting between the humans and aliens reached the point where the government decides to relocate the aliens outside the city, District 10. They contracted out the removal of the aliens to a private enterprise called Multi-National United (MNU) that uses private and government security forces to control the aliens.

While most of the MNU and security forces are white it is interesting to see black members of the population in the crowd call for the alien deportations. Showing the negative results of life without communist politics, these black residents call for the removal of aliens to concentration camps not unlike those they were subjected to two decades prior under apartheid.

The class and race dimensions of the movie are made clear very early as the aliens’ “stupidity” is explained by academics and journalists who state that they must be the workers of the civilization since they are so loathsome. The workers at MNU regularly refer to the aliens as “prawns” which is the racist term devised for them. The aliens are given slave names like Christopher Johnson, names that with their vocal capabilities they can’t even pronounce; they are branded and rigorously catalogued.

The film’s human protagonist is the weak- minded Wikus who works in the alien and human affairs department of MNU. While engaging in a brutal forced eviction campaign in District 9 he meets an alien Christopher Johnson who questions the legality of the evictions, Wikus raids his house and exposes himself to alien technology that begins slowly turning him into a “prawn.” Representing the capitalist class as the human Wikus, his primary characteristics are cowardice and duplicity. He repeatedly makes his situation, and that of the aliens around him, worse by abandoning them in cowardly attempts to save himself. Only as he begins to fully change into an alien can he summon the courage to help the aliens in their fight against MNU.

MNU, who regularly brutalize the alien inhabitants and raid their homes looking for weapons, know of the Nigerians, gangsters living in the slums,  and their illegal activities, but allow them to exist as another method of terrorizing and controlling the population. Just like in the real world, gangsters only exist because of the racism and violence of capitalism and they flourish with the tacit consent of the capitalist class.

The contrast between the Nigerians and MNU in the film is interesting. The gangsters’ belief in witchcraft and their leader’s desire to consume alien flesh elicit an instant, strong response from the audience. “Who are these monsters?” one wonders. Yet when MNU agents engage in the regular policy of
dispatching alien babies with flame throwers (joking that they pop like popcorn), dissect mass numbers of aliens for medical experiments (in a crazed attempt to locate the source of their “power, á la the Nazis), or regularly gun down aliens in the street for fun it elicits a different response since they do it while wearing business suits or crisp white
uniforms. The film plays on how we have been taught to abhor the violence of petty gangsters while ignoring state-sanctioned genocide caused by the capitalist class.

By the end of the film you are ready to cheer as alien weaponry turns MNU agents and gangsters into clouds of red dust and goo. The film’s strong imagery leaves one feeling both disturbed and unsure about the future. There is no quick, easy victory. The film ends in a state of uncertainty and while the lesson is clear that demonization of the “other” caused by capitalist racism leads to genocidal violence, how do we escape this grim reality? There is one lesson that no Hollywood film is allowed to teach. If we want to end racism and the capitalist violence it excuses, then workers have to smash the whole system through communist revolution.

Imperialist Rivalries Spurred 1969 Moon Landing

July marks the 40th anniversary of the 1969 U.S. moon landing. President Obama celebrated the anniversary with the Apollo 11 crew by asserting that the U.S. would remain committed to space exploration and that his education reform is crucial to the work of NASA. Obama failed to mention that both NASA and the education system have served as vital gears in the bloody U.S. war machine for the past 50 years.

Obama’s call for education reform comes at a time when the dominant role the U.S. has played in the world since World War II is being threatened by the growth of imperialist rivals in China, Russia and Europe. Following the lead of educational reforms outlined by Bill Gates, Exxon and Lockheed Martin, a heavy emphasis on math and science in high school is seen as a way to keep the U.S. from falling further behind the curve of its technologically-advanced rivals.

In 1962 when John F. Kennedy declared that “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” the U.S. ruling class was much more certain of its place in the world than it is today. Anti-communism, and post-WWII prosperity for some, allowed U.S. rulers to bolster support for themselves against supposed communist threats abroad. Like Obama, JFK summoned the tools of the state — through the expansion of military programs and the reworking of the education system — in order to strengthen U.S. imperialist ambitions.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. ruling class in response created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By promoting “space race” hype, the NASA program encouraged workers in the U.S. to root for “team America.” In 1969 U.S. astronauts planted a U.S. flag on the moon that was meant to be a symbol of their global power, but by this time the U.S. was hated around the world.

The Tet Offensive had turned the tide of the Vietnam War and rebellions of U.S. GIs were increasingly common. Unable to rely on its own soldiers, the U.S. became heavily dependent on carpet bombings, bringing the Vietnam War into its bloodiest phase. The bosses cover up this history to keep workers in the dark about capitalism’s bloody past and to spread patriotism so workers will support the bosses’ war plans.

The same year NASA was created, U.S. rulers created the Advanced Research Project Agency (now DARPA) to meet the research and development needs of the U.S. military. Over the next 50 years DARPA developed weapons ranging from the M-16 rifle which aided in the murder of countless Vietnamese during the Vietnam war to the Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones currently being used to kill and maim workers along the Pakistan border. DARPA initiatives paved the way for increasing technology-driven warfare and the eventual militarization of space.

The same year NASA and DARPA came into existence, Congress created the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Aimed at creating a generation of tech-savvy workers able to compete with Soviet rivals, the NDEA included support for loans to college students, and the improvement of science and mathematics in schools. Hoping to win students to U.S. nationalism, students had to pledge anti-communism in order to receive college loans. Students involved in anti-war activities were punished and denied loan money.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam signaled the beginning of the end for U.S. global dominance. In 1979, the loss of Iran as a Mid-East watchdog coupled with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan intensified the worries of U.S. rulers about their ability to control vital resources in the region. The rise of competing imperialist powers in Europe and Asia has only escalated tensions in the Mid-East. Obama has picked up the torch of imperialism where Kennedy, Carter and Clinton left off, deepening imperialist war in Afghanistan and carrying it over into Pakistan.

The appearance of Obama’s foreign policy may differ from his predecessors, but the essence remains the same: war and destruction of rivals are the only sure ways an imperialist power can stay on top. Obama & Co. understand the vital role the education system plays in their ability to wage war. It is no accident that Obama chose as his education czar Arne Duncan, who as CEO of Chicago public schools handed over control of four public high schools to the U.S. military.

While education reform is expected to produce a new crop of workers able to make the next generation of technologically-advanced weapons, the Obama administration realizes that this type of weaponry alone cannot win wars. U.S. rulers have adopted a boots-on-the-ground approach, recently deploying tens of thousands to Afghanistan and calling for thousands more. They are paving the way for future recruits though the creation of various national service programs and through standardized testing regimes that push students out of high school and into the military.

As workers’ cynicism and lack of patriotism persist along with the economic crisis, the bosses have amplified their call for sacrifice. The bosses aim to disarm workers by teaching patriotism and lies about the history of the working class. We must bring the message of revolution to the classrooms and workplaces and organize students and workers to fight against imperialist war under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party.

‘The Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism

The new movie The Ugly Truth starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (of the horrifically racist, fascist movie 300) is a rehashing of an old romantic comedy stand-by, the uptight career woman looking for love who falls for her smooth-talking, womanizing male co-star. Written by three women (proving sexism knows no boundaries under capitalism) the tired, rehashed plot reaches new levels of crass sexism. The movie is hyperbole at its worst, insulting the audience by force-feeding them wholly unbelievable and insulting caricatures of what “real” men and women are supposed to be.

Heigl plays a morning news producer who drives men away because of her demanding nature, while Butler’s character is a cable-access TV personality whose show is based on telling women “the ugly truth” about men, that they’re all shallow, sex fiends incapable of love and uninterested in any sort of relationship with a woman other than physical.

The movie is rated R for the unnecessary and copious amount of vulgarity that replaces any attempt at witty dialogue or character development. The Ugly Truth boils down to the lesson that women should be subservient to men in all ways: by making less money, wearing skimpy clothing, laughing at unfunny jokes and, most importantly, leaving their brains and hearts at home (and that men should look for and only find satisfaction in such women).

Like Sex and the City, The Women or Bride Wars, this movie wants us to believe that happiness really lies in vacuous consumerism and oversexualization. In the end the main characters end up together, but this union doesn’t come about because of some profound lesson learned about the importance of respect for each other, but rather Heigl’s willingness to be the objectified woman Butler’s character wants.

I went to see this movie only a few days after it opened and so watched it in a packed theater. The mix of people was fairly evenly distributed between men and women and their reactions were quite interesting.

There were few laughs from anyone (this may have been due in part to the movie’s hackneyed script) but there was a general air of disgust. More than one couple walked out of the film and of those who stayed many seemed uncomfortable or insulted. The man sitting next to me kept groaning and shaking his head. It seemed that no one was satisfied with this movie’s portrayal of men and women or the nature of their relationships, and why should they be?

The ruling class is constantly shoving sexist crap down our throats, utilizing all media at their disposal, but in recent years the level of filth the working class has been asked to ingest has worsened. Recent action movies like 300 and Watchmen fetishize sex and violence, but romantic comedies like The Ugly Truth are doing their part as we “laugh” along to women being treated like mindless sex objects and men being portrayed as soulless perverts.

Sexism is critical for keeping the bosses’ profits up and the working class divided. As the bosses’ economic crisis deepens they will have to rely even more heavily on sexism to keep their system running. Movies like The Ugly Truth show the degenerate nature of the U.S. capitalist class and its culture here in the waning days of the empire. The battle lines are clear: for the bosses there is sexism, racism and fascism; for the workers there can only be communist revolution!

VALKYRIE: FASCIST MOVIE ABOUT NAZIS VERSUS NAZIS

In July 1944, German military officers attempted a plot, called Valkyrie, to kill Adolf Hitler. The film “Valkyrie” paints these plotters as anti-Nazi heroes. But in reality the assassination and coup attempt was just a fight among fascists. The political leadership of the plot opposed the Nazi (National Socialist) Party and it’s military wing, the SS. But, for all intents and purposes, the Valkyrie plotters were Nazis who built the fascist regime much more than they ever harmed it.

The movie only hints at what the conspirators stood for when we see the political leadership of the conspiracy insisting they surrender to the West, end the war, and close the concentration camps. They aim to arrest all members of the Nazi party and the SS and stage a coup placing Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, identified only as an elected politician, as Chancellor of a post-Hitler Germany.

This leads viewers to believe that the plotters are anti-racist and were motivated to save millions being killed in war. However, the plotters’ urgency to kill Hitler and take control of Germany was spurred by Germany’s military losses in the war, anti-communism, and a different but no less racist vision of fascism.

The film focuses on Lieutenant Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg — a German military officer dissatisfied with Hitler and Nazi leadership and wounded by British airfire in Tunisia — who enters into an anti-Hitler conspiracy of the German high command.

Stauffenberg, an aristocrat born in his family’s castle, was impressed by Germany’s initial military successes. Participating in Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, Stauffenberg wrote home that Jews and “mixed races” are “a people only comfortable under the lash” and would “serve our agriculture well.” Before the invasion Stauffenberg refused to participate in a ruling-class anti-Hitler movement unrelated to the Valkyrie plot.
After Germany’s massive military and political defeat in Stalingrad in February 1943 Stauffenberg changed his mind. He concluded that not assassinating Hitler would be a greater evil than having the communist Soviet Union occupy Germany.

In late 1943, Stauffenberg dictated demands to the Allies as conditions for post-Hitler peace. They included: retaining Germany’s pre-World War I eastern border (stripped by WW I ’s victors), keeping Austria and the Sudetenland (invaded by Germany early in WW II), and continuing to occupy territories east of Germany.

Goerdeler also generally supported the Nazi regime early on. He was mayor of Leipzig and served as Hitler’s Price Commissioner in the early and mid-1930s. In October 1935, almost four years before the invasion of Poland, Goerdeler sent Hitler a memo recommending decreased arms production, devaluing the currency, and opening up industry to foreign investment — essentially that Germany’s ruling class would benefit from allying with Western imperialists, instead of competing for supremacy.

Hitler’s economists disagreed and the Nazi leadership pressured Goerdeler to resign as mayor and blocked his employment in Krupp AG, Germany’s biggest company. While Goerdeler opposed some of Hitler’s militarist economic policies, he admitted his own policies would result in 2-2.5 million unemployed workers. Clearly, Goerdeler had no problem devising his own fascist plans.

After Goerdeler’s resignation in March 1937 he became Director of overseas sales at Robert Bosch GmbH, a major auto supplier that heavily profited off slave labor made possible by the Nazi regime. Goerdeler used his position to organize an anti-Hitler coup amongst the German ruling class.

As Germany’s armies faced certain defeat from the Soviets, Goerdeler contacted the British government several times to negotiate a post-Hitler peace. Like Stauffenberg, he insisted that Germany could not surrender to the communists and made similar demands of the Allies.

The most heroic spies and saboteurs among the German high command were communists and Soviet sympathizers who leaked intelligence to the Red Army and committed sabotage, helping communists kill 8 out of 10 Nazi troops in the war. Working-class Jews led rebellions in the Warsaw ghetto and at the Sobibor concentration camp. Many German workers housed Jews during the Holocaust. In every occupied territory the Nazis faced armed resistance, often led by communists. Our class has plenty of real heroes. The fascist plotters of Valkyrie are not among them.

We should not be fooled by the film to support any group of fascists and imperialists over another. Translate “Valkyrie” into the modern-day U.S. and you get more support for the liberal rulers who back Obama and the Democrats vs. Bush/McCain. However, both groups of U.S. rulers belong to the racist ruling class, just like the Valkyrie plotters and Hitler did. Instead, we should take inspiration from the Red Army that succeeded in smashing the Nazi war machine.

Che Gripping Film But Lacks for Real Revolution

“Che,” now in theaters in the U.S. and worldwides, makes strong points. But, being a commercial movie, it misses the main political reason why Ché’s guerrilla tactics failed:without building a mass-based Marxist-Leninist party, communist revolution will fail.

“Che” is directed by Steven Soderburgh, and is based on the writing of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentinean doctor who fought in the guerrilla rebel army against the Batista dictatorship. Shot in documentary style in two parts, this four-and-a-half hour film realistically depicts the military operations of 1956 to 1959 that defeated the Batista army and the 1967 failed guerrilla attempt in Bolivia that led to Che’s murder under orders from the CIA.

The film treats revolution as a serious business, showing armed struggle necessary to end capitalist exploitation. It shows the tough, day-to-day struggle of guerrilla warfare, the rigorous training, the hardships when food is scarce and lives are lost. We see the constant effort needed not to degenerate politically in life-threatening circumstances and experience the exhilaration that comes when, in village after village Cubans join the guerrilla army, providing the support to make the uprising successful.

Guevara is portrayed as a committed revolutionary who gave his life in the service of the working class that inspired him, not as the glamorous “Icon of Revolution and Liberation,” of the face on a million T-shirts. But still Guevara comes across as a central figure in the struggle to overthrow Batista.

Barely acknowledged is the critical role of the Cuban workers, peasants and students who for decades had been organizing against the regime and U.S. imperialism. Its concentration on the military aspect of the struggle against the U.S.-supported Batista regime, with only passing reference to the politics, raises many unanswered and important questions.

The first part, “The Argentinean,” hints at ideological struggle between different factions within the Cuban guerrillas but doesn’t present the ideas fueling their disagreements. Battle scenes are cut with flash-forwards to 1964, with Guevara — now Cuba’s ambassador to the UN — addressing the General Assembly. He attacks U.S. imperialism and its lackeys in Latin America and correctly places the blame for poverty and misery on capitalism. But we don’t learn what kind of society was being built in Cuba or where, for instance, Guevara stands on the great political debate of the day, between the revisionist betrayal of the Soviet Union and the more leftist forces led then by China.

In Part II, “Guerrilla,” Guevara leads a small group of Cubans and Bolivians in an attempt to seize power in Bolivia. The armed struggle fails, largely because the indigenous peasants don’t join the guerrillas and because of the betrayal by the pro-Soviet Bolivian “Communist” Party. “Che” doesn’t discuss how Guevara’s main political idea, the “foco” theory of revolution, contributed to the failure. Abandoning the Marxist idea of building a mass base in the working class, Guevara believed that a small band of insurgents, a “focus group,” could jump-start a revolution by example. Tragically in Bolivia, practice disproved this theory.

“Che” is a gripping and thought-provoking film but lacks the complexity the revolutionary process deserves. In the struggle to change society, the ideological battle to win the masses to communist politics is as important as the military, if not more so. “Che” adds to the knowledge of our past and, with discussion and further reading to fill in the blanks, can strengthen and inspire our fight today. (See the above article and the 1/14/09 issue, for PLP’s analysis

‘Religulous’: Methadone for the Masses

Amid an escalating crisis, the difficulties of life under capitalism enter conversations quickly. “I lost my home, but si dios quiere (god willing) we’ll get another one soon…as long as I don’t get laid off,” said a friend, a worker and single mother of two. She is not alone, as the California East Bay Area where she used to live has the fourth highest number of foreclosures in the nation. Today more than ever, workers’ lives are directly under attack, so why such faith?

“Religulous,” a documentary featuring comedian Bill Maher, outlines various reasons why people shouldn’t adhere to religion. He interviews creationists, a Christian congregation, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, ex-Mormons, and others. The film debunks religious claims to morality and history, concluding that believing in religion is like believing in fairy tales. “Religulous” links war, politics, and foreign policy to religion — interviewing a senator and using clips of Bush spouting blurbs of god, country, and freedom in relation to the Iraq War.

The combination of facts and comedic ridicule proves entertaining, but Maher’s elitist cynicism (he’s a libertarian apatheist [apathy + atheist] who is pro-Obama and pro-Israel) solves nothing. “Religulous” illustrates the antiscientific nature of religion, but falls short of an adequate analysis of its function under capitalism. Maher tells us why many religions are absurd, and how believers are manipulated, but he does not tell us why they have a grip on a large section of the workers of the world.

Marx and Engels analyzed the material (real-world) conditions that gave rise to primitive religion. These include fear of death, fear of life, material uncertainty and so on. Under capitalism, as workers’ lives fall under more vicious attacks during crises, these insecurities intensify. In tough times, workers often turn to religion, and as Marx said, “this society produces religion, [which is] an inverted world-consciousness.”

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” My California friend’s religious faith then stems directly from the attacks of capitalism and the uncertainty of our lives. Instead of fighting back, workers withstand abuse. Religion deprives workers of class-conscious fight-back.

Marx concluded that religion can only be uprooted through a complete reorganization of society and the material conditions which give rise to religion. A world free from religion entails a world free from poverty, layoffs, unaffordable healthcare and so on. Workers must have faith in the working class’s ability to understand this reality, not a misplaced faith in religion.

Communism may not bring heaven on earth right away, but it will certainly destroy this capitalist hell where workers are made homeless overnight. Lenin too saw religion as taking hold of workers “chronically menaced by the unforeseeable calamities of capitalism.” He stated “the modern class-conscious worker…contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.”

To save the world, “Religulous “calls to battle all anti-religious people with ‘better judgment’ to rationally argue away the problem of religion. But it cannot simply be argued or rationalized away. Communist revolution is necessary to get at the core of the real problem. The solutions proposed by “Religulous” are in essence anti-materialist, mistaken, and superficial. Workers, through class struggle culminating in communist revolution, will triumph against an unjust world and religion.

Offering a clear path for revolution, Lenin states, “No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.” Religion is one among many of these dark forces, and the struggle continues. Maher is not as clever as he seems…

Constantine’s Racist Sword Aided Imperialism

“Constantine’s Sword,” based on a book by former Catholic priest James Carroll, is a documentary film that depicts the vile history of Catholic anti-semitism.  During the 1960’s, influenced by the anti-war movement, Carroll became painfully aware that if the U.S. had been dropping contraceptive pills on the people of Vietnam, the Church would have been the first to condemn the war, but because it was dropping napalm, it supported it. He soon left the priesthood and became a writer.

Carroll decided to investigate the origins of Catholic anti-semitism. He went back to Emperor Constantine, who adopted Christianity as a way of uniting the Roman Empire around a strong ideology that placed him as God’s representative on earth. Other belief systems, including paganism and Judaism, were competitors that were violently suppressed. Jews were blamed for the death of Christ, a false charge that was repeated over the centuries in the Passion Plays that depicted the crucifixion and death of Jesus. In Europe the Passion Plays were often followed by pogroms, violent attacks on Jewish communities.

Later, the Crusades, which began in the late 11th century, lasted almost two centuries, and were aimed at seizing Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims. Blessed by the Pope, fueled by Christian fanaticism, and led by the cross, the crusading armies marched toward the Holy Land, stopping along the way to murder thousands of Jews in German towns. Later, during the state-sponsored Spanish Inquisition, tens of thousands of Spain’s Jews were forced to convert, to become “conversos.” However, that wasn’t sufficient, because converted Jews were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism and were called “marranos,” or swine. 2,000 of them were burned at the stake. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain. Later, the Arabs (called Moors) were also expelled.

Carroll correctly points out that the 20th century persecution and mass murder of Eastern European Jews could not have occurred were it not for the centuries of Christian anti-semitism that prepared Germans, Poles and others to see Jews as Christ-killers and a threat to Christians. The film shows how the Vatican refused to speak out against fascist attacks and killings of Jews, either in Italy itself or in the rest of Europe. It signed a Concordat (treaty) with the Nazis in order to preserve the property and functioning of the Catholic Church, and shared much of the conservative vision of fascism, especially its anti-communism.

Though Carroll remains a Catholic, he warns about the growing theocratic danger of religion and government merging to become one. He shows how the Air Force Academy in Colorado has allowed cadets to proselytize evangelical Christianity on campus, and where non-Christians have been harassed. Yet Carroll fails to examine the dilemma for the ruling class when it comes to religion. On the one hand, evangelical fervor can motivate believers to join the military and risk their lives in the supposedly holy cause of fighting radical Islam. On the other hand, this resurrection of the “Crusades” creates considerable anger and resentment among Arabs and Muslims throughout the world.

Carroll’s critique of Catholic anti-semitism is limited, never seriously examining the overlap between the conservatism of Catholic and fascist ideology. The film neglects to mention the role of Vatican officials in helping high-ranking Nazis to escape to Latin America after the war. It says nothing about the role Catholicism has played in indoctrinating the oppressed to accept their unfortunate lot in life and wait for the kingdom of heaven, or the alliances that the Catholic hierarchy has made with wealthy elites and fascist regimes throughout the world.

Christianity became the official religion of Rome because it guaranteed the rule of the Emperor. It became one of the central institutions of feudalism, based on the exploitation of peasants. Today, the Vatican — worth billions of dollars –– hypocritically criticizes capitalism for its fixation on material wealth (profits), but even more avidly condemns Marxism for wanting to bring an end to capitalist exploitation and religious superstition. Based on medieval prejudices, Catholicism, like ALL religions, fights to keep working people subordinate to the rulers.

There will be bloodied capitalists….

The Academy-award nominated film, “There Will Be Blood,” with a spectacular performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, who won Best Actor, is said to be based on Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel, “Oil!” Unfortunately, it is not. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, borrowed only three aspects of the novel – the setting (southern California), the industry (oil) and the time period (first quarter of the 20th century). He omitted the heart of Sinclair’s wonderful book: an exciting and insightful description of the struggle between labor and capital, and the way in which the owners control government, Hollywood and the press for their own ends. It’s an unintended and welcome consequence of the film’s success that many people are reading ‘Oil!”

A terrific novel, it follows two main characters – J. Arnold Ross, a self-made, hard-driving owner of several oil fields, a millionaire who only has two interests. One is getting oil out of the ground and making money, and the second is the well-being of his son, affectionately called “Bunny.” Father and son care deeply for each other. But as “Bunny” grows up and becomes more socially aware, he becomes close friends with Paul Watkins, a young carpenter who works for Ross Sr. Paul helps lead a strike in the oil fields and is radicalized by left-wing organizers. Bunny is sympathetic to the strikers and begins to listen carefully to Paul’s socialist ideas.

During WWI, the newspapers were filled with crude anti-Bolshevik propaganda, believed by most people. But not by Paul, who sees things clearly from the point of view of the workers:

“Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil-strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you have never been to Paradise [an oil field], and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil-wells.”

Paul, drafted into the U.S. army, is sent to Vladivostok in the Russian far east, part of an intervention by a dozen imperialist armies aimed at helping the Russian aristocracy, the White Army, overthrow the new workers government. His friend comes back in poor health and when Bunny asks what had been the purpose of his expedition, Paul replies:

“I’ve told you – to break the strike. The biggest strike in all history – the Russian workers against the landlords and the bankers; and we were to put the workers down, and the landlords and bankers up! . . . .[T]hey would get together and call themselves a government, and it was our job to rush them supplies, and they would print money, and hire some adventurers, and grab a bunch of peasants and ‘conscript’ them, and that would be an army, and we’d move them on the railroad, and they’d overthrow another Soviet government, and slaughter a few more hundreds or thousands of workingmen. That’s been my job for the past year and half; do you wonder I’m sick.”

Bunny begins to question the capitalist system that was the source of his father’s and his own wealth. He comes to realize that there is a war going on every day in the factories and the fields. Describing one oil field and the accidents that occurred there as the men raced to produce more oil and more profits, Sinclair writes:

… of all the thousands of men who had worked here, seventy-three out of every hundred had been killed or seriously injured during the few years of the field’s life! It was literally true that capitalist industry was a world war going on all the time, unheeded by the newspapers.

His friend Paul becomes an organizer for the Communist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism needs to be overthrown with revolution. One of Bunny’s college friends, Rachel, is a member of the Socialist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism can be peacefully voted out through elections. Although Sinclair gives Paul all the best arguments, Bunny’s temperament – which is to avoid conflict – leads him to side with the Socialists, as did Sinclair himself. Yet Sinclair is respectful of the politics and accomplishments of the international communist movement.

This review only touches the surface of this powerful and thoughtful novel, which ends with both personal tragedy and a hope for the future.