For more information, please consider reading this article by Kelly B. Vlahos.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Iraq War, Occupation of Iraq, US Military

Last week, Chris Harman died. Harman was a Marxist-Leninist of the Trotskyist kind, with sufficient integrity and intellectual fortitude to buck established orthodoxy, and a member of the Socialist Worker's Party known for its active intervention in British politics and social life. He died while in Egypt, providing praiseworthy support to the burgeoning labor movement there in opposition to President Hosni Muburak. In this obituary, Michael Rosen recalls how he was inspired by a new Marxism in the 1960s, a Marxism that repudiated Stalinism.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm very familiar with him and his work, as are, not surprisingly, many of the people over at Lenin's Tomb. The rememberances of Harman and his political influence are quite moving, an influence attained because of the rigor of his analysis and his personal commitment to socialism. I recommend that you click on the link that I have provided, and read them. Some of you may have read his recently reissued book, A People's History of the World, which is readily available in this country, unlike his numerous articles and pamphlets, although some can be found on the Internet, here and here and here.

For those of us in the US, unfamiliar with his work, as am I, there is one article of particular interest, published in 1994: The Prophet and the Proletariat. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion (and, it is well worth reading the article in its entirety for the richness of the political, social and historical analysis that precedes it):

It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and 'fascist' or as automatically 'antiimperialist' and 'progressive'. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a 'utopia' emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As with any 'petty bourgeois utopia', its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without 'oppressors' to using them to impose 'Islamic' forms of behaviour on individuals.

Socialists cannot regard petty bourgeois utopians as our prime enemies. They are not responsible for the system of international capitalism, the subjection of thousands of millions of people to the blind drive to accumulate, the pillaging of whole continents by the banks, or the machinations that have produced a succession of horrific wars since the proclamation of the 'new world order'. They were not responsible for the horrors of the first Gulf War, which began with an attempt by Saddam Hussein to do a favour for the US and the Gulf sheikdoms, and ended with direct US intervention on Iraq's side. They were not to blame for the carnage in Lebanon, where the Falangist onslaught, the Syrian intervention against the left and the Israeli invasion created the conditions which bred militant Shiism. They were not to blame for the second Gulf War, with the 'precision bombing' of Baghdad hospitals and the slaughter of 80,000 people as they fled from Kuwait to Basra. Poverty, misery, persecution, suppression of human rights, would exist in countries like Egypt and Algeria even if the Islamists disappeared tomorrow.

For these reasons socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an 'infidel', 'secularist' conspiracy of the 'oppressors' against the most impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as 'progressive'--mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah--especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on people--in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.

But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes 'Islamic' forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.

The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system--or often to the first followed by the second.

But this does not mean we can simply take an abstentionist, dismissive attitude to the Islamists. They grow on the soil of very large social groups that suffer under existing society, and whose feeling of revolt could be tapped for progressive purposes, providing a lead came from a rising level of workers' struggle. And even short of such a rise in the struggle, many of the individuals attracted to radical versions of Islamism can be influenced by socialists--provided socialists combine complete political independence from all forms of Islamism with a willingness to seize opportunities to draw individual Islamists into genuinely radical forms of struggle alongside them.

Radical Islamism is full of contradictions. The petty bourgeoisie is always pulled in two directions--towards radical rebellion against existing society and towards compromise with it. And so Islamism is always caught between rebelling in order to bring about a complete resurrection of the Islamic community, and compromising in order to impose Islamic 'reforms'. These contradictions inevitably express themselves in the most bitter, often violent, conflicts within and between Islamist groups.

Seven years before 9/11, Harman provided a thoughtful, nuanced examination of the emergence of political Islam, and the manner in which it generated internal and external conflicts, among people, among classes, among nations, even among its own adherents. His article was groundbreaking because of his refusal to evaluate radical Islam as if it emerged independently of pre-existing social conditions, as many have done in the US and Europe, Samuel Huntington foremost among them.

Unlike Huntington, Harman came to the same conclusion that Retort did 11 years later, namely that radical Islam is a contemporary phenomenon, explainable by reference to current social, economic and political conditions. Writing with the benefit of hindsight after 9/11, Retort recognized that the modernity, if not postmodernity, of radical Islam was such that it was partially characterized by the innovative use of modern communications technology by its adherants. Far from an expression of those trapped within an antiquated culture incapable of adapting to neoliberal capitalism, they have displayed a facility for exploiting its emergent features as a means of assymetrical oppositon.

Harman's final comments provided a pathway that prevented much of the left from falling into the abyss of torture and perpetual warfare that many within the US, some liberals and leftists included, did after 9/11:

On some issues we will find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists against imperialism and the state. This was true, for instance, in many countries during the second Gulf War. It should be true in countries like France or Britain when it comes to combatting racism. Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be, 'with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.'

But even then we continue to disagree with the Islamists on basic issues. We are for the right to criticise religion as well as the right to practise it. We are for the right not to wear the veil as well as the right of young women in racist countries like France to wear it if they so wish. We are against discrimination against Arab speakers by big business in countries like Algeria--but we are also against discrimination against the Berber speakers and those sections of workers and the lower middle class who have grown up speaking French. Above all, we are against any action which sets one section of the exploited and oppressed against another section on the grounds of religion or ethnic origin. And that means that as well as defending Islamists against the state we will also be involved in defending women, gays, Berbers or Copts against some Islamists.

When we do find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists, part of our job is to argue strongly with them, to challenge them--and not just on their organisations' attitude to women and minorities, but also on the fundamental question of whether what is needed is charity from the rich or an overthrow of existing class relations.

The left has made two mistakes in relation to the Islamists in the past. The first has been to write them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common. The second has been to see them as 'progressives' who must not be criticised. These mistakes have jointly played a part in helping the Islamists to grow at the expense of the left in much of the Middle East. The need is for a different approach that sees Islamism as the product of a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve, and which fights to win some of the young people who support it to a very different, independent, revolutionary socialist perspective.

No doubt, this is a daunting endeavor. But the fact that it is difficult, and may take many years to achieve, if at all, does not invalidate it. Even an anarchist influenced person such as myself, someone who does not find the residual vanguardism of Harman and the SWP a plausible means for bringing about a radical transformation of society, can agree with his summation of his position: with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never. Indeed, this is fairly good general characterization of how anyone opposed to the hierarchies that inflict so much oppression upon so many should conduct themselves in relation to any people that have profound points of opposition to the state.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Anarchism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Obituaries, Political Violence, Religon

On Thursday, after eight years in Afghanistan, and six years in Iraq, the US military was attacked in this country by one of its own troops. The war on terror jumped halfway round the world, with a new front opened in Fort Hood, Texas. Neoconservatives justified the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq with the slogan, we are fighting them over there, so that we don't have to fight them over here, but, instead, we have discovered that, by fighting them over there, we are now fighting ourselves over here. The toxicity of the enterprise, a combustible mixture of racism, religious intolerance, sexual depravity and violence, cannot be contained.

It is hard to overstate the significance of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's killing of 13 people and wounding of 30 others at Fort Hood. Twelve of the dead were US soldiers. The US military is the best known instrument by which this country imposes its will upon much of the rest of the world. Many Americans have a sense of security, albeit a false one, because of their belief in the invincibility of this force. Like the bumper sticker says: These Colors Don't Run. But, on Thursday, the US military was fractured in the most horrific way possible when Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers.

There will be attempts to diminish what happened by characterizing Hasan as a crazed, lone gunman, an aberration. And, to a large extent, from what we know so far, that's true. Such a characterization, though, will be insufficient to overcome the crisis of confidence that will inevitably result from his attack. First, the US military isn't supposed to have a lone, crazed gunman, or, if it does, officers are supposed to make sure that they only direct their fire towards the enemy. Second, the effectiveness of the US military, and the unwillingness of the public to object to its actions abroad, can be partially explained by its existence as a multicultural institution, especially when contrasted with its enemies, always cast in fundamentalist hues, whether true or not. The presence of people from different racial, religious and culture backgrounds within an institution shaped by a white, often fundamentalist, leadership, has always been an uneasy marriage, and, the strains are going to become even more severe.

On a more practical level, I have encountered accounts where soldiers have explained their decision to re-enlist because of the bond that they formed with their fellow soldiers while in combat. They dismissed any concerns about why they had been sent and whether they were helping the populace. Instead, they expressed a need to display loyalty to the troops they had fought with during their deployment. In effect, their units became a sort of substitute family. But, the family members are now firing upon each other. As we revisit these occupations from the standpoint on the extreme stress that they have generated among people sent over to police them again and again, some proponents will resume their advocacy of a draft. Good thing we have such a steadfast leader in the White House to make sure that doesn't happen.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, Occupation of Iraq, US Military

Yesterday, I was visiting Lenin's Tomb, and participating in the comments section in response to Roobin's article about actually existing capitalism in the US. His article provided an opportunity for people to expound upon numerous issues related to a contemporary Marxist analysis of historic capitalist development.

During the course of this discussion, someone, who goes under the Internet alias Lovecat, provoked a specific dialogue as to the means by which a society would evolve from being one centered around private property to one in which property is maintained collectively for the use of all. She did so by reference to the following hypothetical example, one that makes whimsical reference to a couple of others who post comments:

Battersea owned some books - or at least he thought he owned them, presumably because he had shopped for them, paid for them and because the law says that if you do that, you own it. However, johng, in removing said books from Battersea's ownership, showed how vulnerable ownership is when the property is possessed. Johng doesn't need to own the books in order to possess them. Any thoughts?

Lovecat provided some additional clarification here:

I would dispute any claim that Battersea attempted to make that he ever owned the books (because property is theft), which means that he is the criminal and you, in liberating said stolen items from his greedy capitalist mitts, were the libertarian socialist. I think that Battersea has learned his lesson.

Humor aside, I discovered that my engagement with these two comments produced some insight as to relationship between capitalism, private property, and, a particular genre of it, personal property, and I thought that I would repost my remarks here in an edited form.

Here they are: As with most forms of personal property, you don't really need to have a book all the time, or even most of the time, that is an essential dimension of this hypothetical. You have to have food and water every day, and a place to rest every day, but not a book. So, if we are talking about the books in question from the standpoint of use, Battersea doesn't need them that often, only when he or she is inclined to read them. Johng could take them from him or her, and maintain them collectively, without any significant diminishment of his or her enjoyment of use, unless, for some odd reason, they were very popular, and unavailable because so many people wanted to read them.

Hence, the hypothetical highlights possession as manifested by the need to collect. Baudrillard addressed the psychology of being a collector in his first book, The System of Objects, and, now, I recognize that it may have an even greater significance than he gave it in 1968. It is now evident that the urge to collect runs wild under capitalism in its current form. And, whereas it may have been limited to the upper classes in the 19th Century, as manifested by the desire of industrialists to purchase artworks and open libraries (the act of collection par excellence), it has now spread across much of the populace, at least in the developed countries.

People maintain their own vast libraries of music CDs, movie DVDs, books and photographs, among other things, with the ability to increase them and find what they consider to be rarities by means of the Internet. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I remember that people traveled all over the country to find uncommon vinyl records, books, and, as they called them back then, collectibles, or relied upon others to do so. But Larry McMurtry's other job as a rare book scout doesn't really exist anymore. The Internet has exponentially increased the ability of obssessive collectors to find objects that would have otherwise been considered unattainable.

Such explorations have given birth to a new need, the need for storage, something that most people would have considered incomprehensible say, before the 1960s, except in relation to one's essentials, like clothes, furniture and bedding (and, even here, on a much smaller scale than what we currently possess). Now, it is a frequent preoccupation, a secondary preoccupation invariably derived from the primary feature of neurosis associated with collection. The shocking thing about how personal property generates a neurosis of collection is that many of the items collected, whether they be books, movies, artworks, whatever, are therefter hidden, never to be experienced again, or experienced rarely, after the first encounter. They are literally secreted away from anyone else who might be interested in them.

The capitalist response to this contradiction is to mass produce the items in question so that nearly everyone can collect! Needless to say, the economic inefficiencies are incalculable. The activity of file sharing, referenced by Lovecat elsehere in the Lenin's Tomb comments thread, is pertinent here. File sharing constitutes a rebellion against contemporary capitalism on the margins, for the reason that she suggested, as it constitutes a collective means of sharing personal property, in effect, collectivizing it, therefore constituting a repudiation of the psychological dependence upon collection.

By overcoming a dependence upon collection, one eliminates an essential aspect of the necessity for private personal property, so much so that it could provoke a radical transformation of capitalism, if not its eventual rejection. Along these lines, files sharing is much more economically efficient, which may explain why culture industries, like music, TV and film, are trying to push people away from actually owning a copy of the work in question, by making it costly and subject to punitive restrictions, and, instead, commercializing filesharing as a substitute, as cable companies aspire to do with video on demand, and Apple has done with the IPod. This is important, because, as Lovecat also observed, file sharing outside the corporate context also abolishes money.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

It happened so quickly that few people caught it. There was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pakistan, exposing the hypocrisy of Eurocentric feminism when a group of Pakistani women tried to impose the same standards on the US that the US imposes upon others:

During an interview broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to “executions without trial” for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

“Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

“No, I do not,” Clinton replied.

Clinton no doubt scheduled this particular appearance in furtherance of her long standing efforts to elevate the concerns of women around the world, as she has done on many other occasions, but one wonders why she bothers at all.

After all, it is evident that Clinton has no interest in what they have to say if it deviates from her belief that the objectives of feminism and US imperialism harmoniously reinforce one another. I have to concede that she deserves praise for scheduling the event, because she has control over her schedule, and she was undoubtedly well aware of what the Pakistani women was likely to say. We were treated to a rare episode wherein a white woman in a position of political power in the US provided a forum for women of color in a country subject to US military violence. She eschewed the public relations of photo opportunity.

Even so, Clinton's unwillingness to engage the sincere, legitimate concerns of her female Pakistani audience demonstrated the farcical nature of the enterprise. She just could not acknowledge that the deaths of Pakaitanis inflicted by US military operations, many of them women and children, were the equal of those killed by al-Qaeda or the Taliban, without demonstrating the impossibility of integrating the universalist principles of feminism with the pragmatic, often militaristic requirements of empire. Indeed, she could not even acknowledge what everyone knows, that these attacks do, in fact, kill many Pakistani women and children in addition to the men, who are, it seems, considered probable militant Islamic fundamentalists, anway. Nor could she open a dialogue with her inquisitors about whether the US strategy in Pakistan is intensifying the violence, as many Pakistanis believe, instead of quelling it.

Of course, the New York Times attempted to come to Clinton's rescue, but only made things worse by suggesting that the women who participated in the interview had been induced to question Clinton in a harsh, inhospitable manner because they had first seen Pakistani journalists do it:

Mrs. Clinton sat down first with the TV journalists because they set the agenda. So great is their influence that the questions posed to Mrs. Clinton by young people the next day sounded like those the broadcasters had asked — blunt and combative, though just short of rude.

An example came Friday at an interview for the program “Our Voice” when a young woman asked Mrs. Clinton whether she viewed the Predator drone attacks used by the United States in Pakistan’s frontier areas as terrorism.

Oh, that silly woman! We all know how inadequate the Pakistani educational system is. If she hadn't seen Hillary questioned in such a blunt, straight forward manner (undoubtedly much more directly than anyone in the US ever does), she would have continued to wonder about whether she should purchase a new kind of eyeliner. Again, the notion that Pakistani women have the own independent agency, an ability to relate to the world around them, separate from what they are told, either by Hillary or the Pakistani media, apparently never occurred to Marc Landler, the reporter who wrote the story. In fact, it goes beyond feminism into the realm of racism, as Landler suggests that the young people of Pakistan are so stupified that they cannot relate to anything other than what is fed to them by the media.

So, Hillary was left to lecturing the people of Pakistan about their inadequacies, which, at the end of the day, boiled down to a refusal to uncritically celebrate that Pakistan is a vassal of the US. We are therefore induced to conclude that her willingness to be critically questioned by Pakistani women served as a fig leaf, however inadequate, to distract attention from what were just more directives from the Raj. A larger question remains, though. Does the 21st Century Raj, the US, tired of Pakistan, intend to shatter it so that it can reconstructed in a more agreeable form? And, is the US attempting to facilitate such an outcome by intensifying the violence that makes the country even less and less governable? It is impossible to ignore these questions, because, if Hillary travelled to Pakistan to push the country towards fragmentation, she would have conducted herself precisely as she did.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Neoliberalism, Pakistan

Prior to 1979, China pursued economic and social policies consistent with the creation of an industrialized proletariat, often associated with the production of armaments, within a planned economy. Peasants subsidized it through the supply of agricultural commodities at state controlled prices while subject to restrictions upon their movement that made it extremely difficult for them to leave their villages. With the increasing emphasis upon market liberalization by Deng Xiaoping and his successors, state owned industry entered a period of inexorable decline, resulting in plant closures and commercial redevelopment.

Several years ago, Wang Bing profiled this phenomenon in his epic, West of the Tracks, a nine hour documentary set in the massive Tie Xie industrial district in Shenyang, Manchuria. With an astonishing visual and narrative sensibility, one marked by neorealistic characterization and striking industrial compositions, Bing patiently presented the last months before the closure of the few remaining factories in the district, the attachment that the workers had for them and the breaking of the iron rice bowl, as housing for the workers was being torn down to make way for commercial development. A communal, collective way of life was destroyed as part of the price for admission into a neoliberal, globalized economy. Bing gently presented the workers to us with an intimacy absent sentimentality or voyeurism.

In the US and Europe, indeed, perhaps, most of the rest of the world, the Cultural Revolution is accepted as the most turbulent period of recent Chinese history, but Bing suggests that market liberalization has been equally traumatic. Jia Zhangke appears to have come to a similar conclusion in his most recent film, 24 City, or, perhaps, more accurately, he has determined that the entire period of Chinese Communist Party rule has been one characterized by the harsh ebbs and flows of modernization. He imputes great significance to his protagonists, the workers within Factory 420: The story of these characters represent the last fifty years of Chinese history.

As you might expect, Jia is being hyperbolic. The peasant experience is pretty much absent in 24 City. Even so, the experiences of the workers of Factory 420 opens a window towards understanding the social transformation resulting from the embrace of market liberalization, as he interviewed over 130 people who worked there. The film itself is an innovative blend of documentary and fiction, with Jia presenting the stories of four people connected to the factory through five of the interviewees themselves and four subsequent ones through actors and actresses. He made the decision to adopt this technique because of his belief that history is a mixture of fact and imagination. As a consequence of the incorporation of fiction within a documentary narrative structure, the film is more straightforward than Jia's previous ones which are noteworthy for their elliptical storytelling methods, although engagement with the content of what the interviewees, both real and fictional, say presents the challenges common to his other films. His mastery of color, along with his feel for architecture and interior design, are everywhere in evidence as expressed through his compelling compositions, with the most startling departure being his interweaving of more realistic scenes, such as an interview of an elderly former 420 employee traveling across Chengdu on a bus, seemingly recorded with a hand held digital camera in one long take.

By way of background, Factory 420 was opened in Chengdu in southwestern China in 1958 for the purpose of manufacturing parts for military aircraft. Prior to that time, facilities for the manufacture of military weapons were located in Manchuria, but, after such facilities were subjected to American bombing during the Korean War, the Chinese Communist Party adopted Mao's strategy of moving such production outside the reach of both American and Soviet airstrikes. One suspects that he was influenced by the Soviet experience in World War II, wherein much of the country's industrial platform was successfully transported away from the Ukraine to Siberia. During the 1980s, the workers shifted from producing military aircraft parts to appliances for the consumer market. Within the last few years, as has happened many times across China, investors brought forth a proposal for destroying the aging factory, relocating it somewhere else on the periphery of the city with modern manufacturing technology, and undoubtedly fewer workers, so as to free the land for residential and commercial development. The site was quite appealing, because of its centrality within the city, and the developers christened the project, 24 City, a name purportedly taken from a classical Chinese poem about Chengdu.

During an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Jia said that he first thought about making 24 City after he finished Platform in 2000:

This makes sense as the narratives of Platform and 24 City traverse similar terrain within their own unique social contexts. While Platform deals with the coming of age of a young music and theatrical troup forced to adapt to the rapid transformation from Maoism to the market in the 1980s, the industrial protagonists of 24 City live through a similar experience over a longer time frame. Both groups experience the turbulence of migration, market liberalization and the abandonment of collective ideals for individual ones. At the conclusion of each, a sympathetic young character, in Platform, a male one, in 24 City a female one, finds themselves esconsced in a new world of consumption and commodification, where, ironically, their new found individuality, and the individuality of those around them, have been fused into a mass of conformity. Baudrillard recognized such an outcome forty years ago when he observed that the young woman who selects a hair style popularized by a famous model or actress sees herself as engaging in act of personal expression even as thousands, if not tens of thousands, select the same one.

Prior to the production of the film, Jia also said that his purpose was to tell a story about three women in the 50s, the 70s, and the present day, as society makes the transition from collectivism to individualism. By doing so within a larger narrative that also interweaves male experience as well, he grounds gender within a complex mosaic of social transformation. First, there is the paradox that within the collectivism of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, people retained a surprisingly high degree of individuality within their personal lives. Or, rather, people carved out more and more individual space for themselves over the course of this collectivist period, so much so that, upon the introduction of market liberalization by Deng, it disintegrated. By the beginning of the 21st Century, with the collectivism of the past a fading memory, the workers of Factory 420 discovered that they were now at the mercy of a new social system that considered them and their experiences as superfluous.

Consistent with this, Jia has also observed that it is important to record memories that are disappearing all over contemporary China. So, much so that he has abandoned previous notions of films as entertainment. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not limited to China. One of Fassbinder's greatest, most idiosyncratic films, In a Year of 13 Moons, confronts precisely this subject, the extent to which the lived experiences of marginalized people are erased with the passage of time, with the assistance of finance capital. In this film, even the wealthy Jewish commercial real estate developer, the man who had participated in the postwar destruction of many of Frankfurt's old residential neighborhoods and the expulsion of the people who lived in them, finds himself facing obsolescence and irrelevance. In the world according to Fassbinder, everyone faces the prospect of becoming marginalized as a result of the acceleration of social change generated by finance capital, an acceleration too seductive to reject. There are echoes of this in the conclusion of 24 City, as Jia's last, fictionalized interviewee, a young woman raised by 420 workers, looks out from the roof of a highrise office tower across an urbanized, commercialized Chengdu that spreads in all directions as far as the eye can see. No one, not even the investors and developers of 24 City itself, can resist the reductionist power of capitalism in its current form.

Second, upon hearing the interviewees, one is tempted to ascribe a male cast to the collectivism of the past and a female one to the individualism of the present. To a certain extent, this is true, as the female characters reveal the attainment of more and more independence with the passage of time. Accordingly, it is hard to resist associating such independence with the adoption of the market liberalization measures associated with neoliberalism. And, there is some truth to this, although the use of the word independence to describe it may not be entirely accurate. Instead, it is evident that women have obtained greater autonomy within their families and their societies during this neoliberal era, even as they, in most instances, become more and more financially insecure, and the interviewees give concrete expression to this over the course of the film: an elderly woman relates how difficult it was for her to find a job in the early 1990s are being laid off at Factory 420; a middle aged one describes how she left Shanghai to work in Factory 420 and refused all suitors for marriage, living, she says, as many of her divorced female friends who got married and divorced do; a young, twenty or thirtysomething one expresses her shock at seeing her mother, also laid off at Factory 420, working elsewhere under brutal conditions at a telephone pole manufacturing plant even as she now travels to Hong Kong as a fashion buyer for wealthy Chengdu women.

Conversely, men, who, during the collectivist period, were exhalted as the embodiment of a privileged, industrial proletariat, exhalted, in effect, for their physical labor, are now defined by other achievements. The first interviewee, one of the people who actually worked in Factory 420, relates the pride that he and his coworkers took in their work ethic, their skill and their commitment to one another. He recalls a beloved supervisor who told them that must not casually dispose of an old tool because they should remember all the hands through which the tool had passed. Upon being prodded by the off camera interviewer, he theerafter notes the Cultural Revolution, but says little about it, so it remains the story that remains untold, at least in a Chinese social context outside the literature generated by its educated victims, the source of memories that even Jia cannot record. The interviewee does, however, imply that his supervisor was removed from his position during the Cultural Revolution, and that it initiated an irreversible process whereby working class support for collectivization and the planned economy unraveled.

Fast forward to the last, fictional, male interviewee, and one hears something very different. Like the last, fictional female interviewee, he is a child of Factory 420 parents. He recalls being sent to Manchuria when he was 16 years old to apprentice in a factory there. He briefly enjoyed performing his assigned task, a repetitive one that involved smoothing a metal component of some kind. But, after about an hour, he decided that he wanted to go back to Chengdu, and, against the wishes of his father, he did so. Here, Jia takes aim at the fact that, unlike the generation of the first interviewee, subsequent generations of people connected to Factory 420 found work industrial manufacturing work increasingly tedious, and seized almost any opportunity to do something else. After returning home, the last interviewee succeeded in becoming an anchor of a popular Chengdu television program. Just as with the young woman who goes to Shanghai to select and buy clothes for wealthy Chengdu women, he is considered emblematic of a generation that now defines success by one's ability to escape the factory and obtain a well paying position within some form of the culture industry. In their shadow are millions upon millions of Chinese who continue to work in a contemporary manufacturing sector under conditions that Isabel Hinton has described as evocative of those of 1840s Manchester.

Labels: China, Film Notes, Neoliberalism, YouTube