Marxism Goes to the Movies

Mike Wayne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317194798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Introducing the key concepts and thinkers within the Marxist tradition, Marxism Goes to the Movies demonstrates their relevance to film theory and practice past and present.

Author Mike Wayne argues that Marxist filmmaking has engaged with and transformed this popular medium, developing its potential for stimulating revolutionary consciousness. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, this history and these resources are vital for a better future. Marxism is one of the few approaches that can bring together political, economic, formal and cultural analysis into a unified approach of studying film, and how films in turn can help us understand and even critically interrogate these forces. The book examines how filmmakers, who have been influenced by Marxism, have made some of the most significant contributions to film culture globally, and provides historical perspective on the development of Marxism and film. Each chapter covers a broad theme that is broken down into sections that are cross-referenced throughout, providing helpful navigation of the material.

Clear and concise in its arguments, this is an ideal introduction for students of Marxism and film, inviting readers to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the subject.

1

Marxism

1.1 Marxism and Marx

Marxism is the name for the body of work associated with the German revolutionary thinker and political activist, Karl Marx. Born in Germany in 1818, he died in London in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in the north of the capital. He had lived most of his adult life in London as a political exile from the German authorities. Britain was the first country to undergo an industrial (especially textile-based) revolution. Before that, it had been developing capitalist agriculture for around two centuries and it had an expanding empire to boot. So, the British authorities probably calculated that Herr Marx was unlikely to be much of a threat to them. Possibly they even thought that the free market system so well entrenched already in Britain would deal with Marx more effectively than the police spies, either by driving him to gainful employment that would keep him otherwise occupied or by driving him to starvation. Marx called this the ‘dull compulsion of economics’.¹ Marx came close to starvation and it was only because of his lifelong friend and sometime co-author, Friedrich Engels (whose family owned a cotton mill in Manchester) that he was able to both survive and write, and leave the world with an explosive body of work. The world historical importance of that work is that, without Marx and Marxism, we would not have a coherent theoretical framework with which to understand the most powerful, paradoxical and dangerous type of social arrangements ever to exist: capitalism. This ‘framework’ though is not a finished body of work. It comes down to us with many different strands, arguments, disputes and controversies within it. It is a living, exciting, dynamic and historically developing body of work that has been made in response to the continuities and changes in the capitalist system it critiques. Marxism’s impact on modern culture – although often denied – is hard to overestimate. Its considerable influence in and through film and its major contribution to understanding film and the significant cultural impact film has had and continues to have, despite our new multi-media environment, are the subject of this book.

1.2 Commodity fetishism

Marx wrote some of the most explosive works ever. His 1848 The Communist Manifesto has only been outsold by the Bible. His mature magnum opus Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867, sets out his analysis of the systematic tendencies of capitalism. It opens with these words: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.’²

The subtitle of Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. Political economy was the science of capitalist economics, as elaborated by Marx’s predecessors, such as Adam Smith who famously wrote The Wealth of Nations. Marx’s Capital begins with the statement that how ‘wealth’ presents itself under capitalism is very particular. It presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’ and Marx here quotes from one of his own earlier works, suggesting that this line of thought has remained important to him, nagging away in his mind. Actually, the original German word, erscheint is closer in meaning to ‘appears’ than presents. The term appearance has a double sense in the German philosophical tradition that Marx inherited from his immediate philosophical predecessor, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). What appears is both a real phenomenon (commodities really do exist, of course) but also this appearance or manifestation is not quite the full story. The ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ appears spontaneously to us as a ‘level’ of reality that rests on deeper structures and relations that do not register immediately in the appearance. What perhaps had been nagging away at Marx was the idea that these deeper structures worked according to principles that were very different from the appearance.

Immensity itself is a category of quantity, and one theme in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is that it is a system where the quantitative is out of control. A logic of quantification, of ‘immensity’ is a brute, crude measure of the social and within a logic of quantification, more fine-grained judgements (such as needs) are obliterated. For example, an immense accumulation of commodities will conceal (as did the science of political economy before Marx) the social and economic power relations on which a society of commodities relies. Since Marx’s day, advertising has expanded into a gargantuan industry commanding a global budget of several hundred billion dollars devoted to promoting commodities. And cultural industries have in turn also expanded to produce an immense accumulation of images associated with commodities (films, comics, film-related merchandise, etc.), whose appearance is in contradiction to the real power relations that produce those images and commodities. As Guy Debord famously put it, we live in a society of bewitching spectacles.³

In a very famous section of Capital called ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’, Marx returned to the intuition he had that the way the capitalist system appears to us, the way it strikes us in everyday life and activity, the way we interact with the capitalist system, all raise profound obstacles to our understanding and knowledge of that system. The commodity was, Marx insisted ‘a mysterious thing’ in which the social relations which produce it disappear and leave the commodity to appear as if it had a life of its own, independent of the social relationships that produce it.⁴ Marx gives a satirical metaphor in the form of a wooden table, which, once it becomes a commodity, ‘evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas’ of its own power and autonomy and starts dancing.⁵ The commodity that ‘comes to life’ is indeed a trope of contemporary advertising. Contemporary dominant political discourse is full of discussions of ‘the market’, as if it were a force of nature with a life of its own and not a social institution produced by social relationships. Within the world of commodity fetishism, the independence of ‘the market’ from our control as a whole is counter-balanced by the inflated hopes we have of agency within the market at an individual level. As we dip our hands into our pockets to access a portion of all that wealth dancing before us as an immense accumulation of commodities, we take another commodity (money) out of our pocket and exchange it for the commodity we can actually do something with and use. We feel, says Marx elsewhere, empowered by this exchange:

Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual … is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side, positing the self … as dominant and primary.⁶

In pre-capitalist societies, the fetish was a thing invested with magical super-human powers. Capitalism has reinvented the fetish in the form of the market, money and the commodity world, a world of things independent of democratic collective human control but not human and social origins. Necessarily, then, this is a world of things that resists social explanation as a result of resisting social control. This is a commodity world that conceals the processes that produce it. It conceals the struggle that goes on inside the system. The blood, sweat and tears. In the subterranean currents of our psychology and culture we feel not empowered but subordinated to this world of things, this system of things. And this is compensated for by unrealistic fantasy projections of individual agency. Marx’s ‘big idea’ about what is concealed, his main contention concerning those power relations atomised by the immense accumulation of things, has to do with classes and class struggle.

1.3 Classes

‘The History of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’⁷ This was the ringing opening line to The Communist Manifesto. Society is fissured by different class interests. This emphasis on class struggle can be a painful and difficult reality for non-Marxist outlooks to admit and is often in various ways repressed (completely denied) or disavowed. This latter term (borrowed from Freud) refers to a more ambiguous social-psychological response along the lines of ‘yes, I see what you are saying … however, I believe …’ with the ‘belief’ in some way downplaying, softening or in some other way explaining away the centrality of unpleasant things like class conflict. The history of class struggle tends to elude full and frank representation (in capitalist political economy and cultural images) because its implications for cultural myths, visions of national or community identity and self-identities are so profoundly destabilising and unsettling.

Marx defined classes as social groups that share a relationship to the economic means of production, and this differentiates them from other groups of people who have different relationships to the means of production. One of the key relationships in question here concerns ownership and non-ownership of the means to produce the ‘immense accumulation of commodities’. In a class-divided society, different groups have different positions and roles in that activity of production. The means or forces of production refer to all the things that are required to produce, such as land, tools/machinery, techniques, raw materials, but also labour power and buying capacity. Capitalists are defined by their ownership of the means of production. Labour, the workers or the working class works the means of production (and is a means of production) on behalf of the capitalists. This ownership/non-ownership relation to the means of production is prioritised by Marxism because they are the means of social life itself. Economically, socially and philosophically, production is a crucial concept within Marxism.

Marx defined the working class as ‘propertyless’ (the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’) in the sense that they do not own any means of production themselves. They could and have gone on to own means of consumption (televisions, cars, phones, all the ‘goodies’ of mass consumer society) but that is something quite different. Not owning the means of production ensures that the working class must sell their ability to labour (their labour power) to the capitalists in order to survive. This means that while labour is formally free to sell their labour to any capitalist, there is a huge economic compulsion on them to do so (in order to survive) and to accept the terms and conditions which the capitalist tries to impose on the worker and which in turn shape their access to consumer goods and all the necessities of life. Marx’s basic point about this relationship is that it is inherently exploitative, with the capitalist always getting more value (what Marx called ‘surplus value’) from the worker (in terms of the value of the outputs they contribute to producing) than the worker receives in the wage they get for working. Marx argues that the exploitation relationship was the core relationship of the modern capitalist era.

If we probe the category of ‘capitalists’ a bit more, we see that there are different types, distributed according to a social division of labour, which is an important second feature of the Marxist definition of classes, as the Russian revolutionary, V.I. Lenin noted.⁸ For example, there are the landowners who cream off revenue from capitalists simply by renting out their land or owning the land on which property is built and/or agriculture is cultivated. There are bankers and shareholders who cream off revenue from other capitalists by loaning interest-bearing capital to them so they can expand. Then there are the small capitalists (sometimes called the petit-bourgeoisie) who employ a small number of people, but who typically work alongside their employees. Then there are the industrial capitalists whom Marx thought were the core class of capitalism, because it was their relationship to the working class that really lay at the heart of the dynamics of the modern social system and its system of exploitative wealth creation. Film, we should remember, is a form of industrial manufacture. It also has elements associated with the petit-bourgeois control over the creative inputs by some of those occupying the highest echelons in the technical division of labour (directors, stars, scriptwriters, set designers, even though they are paid a wage). It is also, in its dominant commercial form, closely interlocked with the banking and shareholder systems of capitalism.

The social division of labour refers to all the different branches of activity which a social order needs to produce and meet its needs. So, we can break a social division of labour down much more minutely than just in relation to land, industry and finance. Cultural and media production would constitute an increasingly significant branch of activity within the social division of labour, meeting communication, entertainment, information and leisure needs. One consequence of a complex social division of labour is that workers may not have the opportunity to develop and co-ordinate their common interests practically across the many branches.

Film workers may form bonds of shared interests with other film workers and express this through trade union organisations. But for film workers to perceive a shared set of interests with transport workers, for example, requires a politics that can bridge the gaps between their immediate situation. But film workers, like all workers are also internally divided by the technical division of labour, which refers to the complex ensemble of tasks that have to be combined within the labour process of a given occupation. The plan of the Lasky Studio in Hollywood from 1918 (see Figure 1.1) shows how this technical division of labour is built into the layout and design of the building complex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1. Marxism
• 2. History
• 3. Methodologies
• 4. Production
• 5. Form
• 6. Ideology
• 7. Realism
• 8. Culture
• Further reading
• Index
• Film index