I teach a class at Rutgers University in the History of Socialism and Communism. At the beginning of each class I read from the capitalist media, often from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, examples of how the capitalist system works, its irrationality and cruelty, along with how media distorts reality. I like to call these introductions 'Capitalism Gone Mad,' as they sometimes are.

Tomorrow I will mention Frank Rich’s New York Times column concerning the right-wing crusade against, of all people, Clint Eastwood, and his new movie, Million Dollar Baby. Rich titles his review of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved et al, campaign against the famous actor and former GOP mayor of Carmel, California, 'How Dirty Harry Turned Commie.'

Now the use of the put down 'Commie' always gets me mad, although I never minded being called a Red until contemporary advertiser-propagandists started to associate 'Red states' with Republicans. Commie is essentially a hate word used to denigrate Communists and those connected with Communist positions. In South Africa, where the term was used to vilify that aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the population, namely the supporters of the ANC whom the government called dupes of the South African Communist party, enemies of Apartheid would use the term 'impy' for imperialist as a counter-put down, something that we in the United States might pick up to characterize those who fatuously see militarism and robber baron capitalism as indistinguishable from democracy. Imagine calling William Kristol an impy and Donald Rumsfeld an ultra-impy. But back to the case at hand. Eastwood is confused by these attacks, portraying his film, which features the story of a female boxer in, according to Rich, an unsentimental, un-RockyI-IV way, as an expression of American individualism.

Assorted right-wingers, champions of the rights of the fetus and the brain dead, but not those in between, have condemned it as propaganda for physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, since a subplot concerns a man who suffers a devastating spinal cord injury and wishes to end his suffering. Looneytoons who have also borrowed the term 'culture war' from the German Empire. They probably don’t know that the term comes from Birsmarck’s 'KulterKampf' against the Catholic Church or that their present well funded campaign most closely resembles the Nazis crusade against 'Kulterbolshevismus'(a catchall term that portrayed all non-conservative culture as a Bolshevik inspired plot to undermine German morality). Maybe they do know, but this doesn’t stop them from comparing the right of people who are terminally ill or faced with pain and suffering from which there is no respite from voluntarily ending their lives with the Nazis murder of the physically and mentally disabled, whom they saw as drains on the German 'master race,' and lives that were not worthy of life. After all, those who own the media let them say pretty much what they want

Although I haven’t seen the film yet, I will tell my class that these attacks remind me of the HUAC attacks on Hollywood movies in the high cold war period. For example, Ginger Rogers right-wing Republican mother, a true Hollywood shrew, told HUAC that a line in a Dalton Trumbo scripted movie(an excellent one) on the home front during World War II, Tender Comrade 'share and share alike, that democracy' was Communist propaganda. HUAC and its cultural Gestapo also found Communist propaganda in the movie Robin Hood (after all, isn’t Communism stealing from the rich and giving to the poor) not to mention some Shirley Temple films (this was about 30 years before Shirley ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for Congress and she did, after all, have Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, the great Africa-American dancer, in a number of her films).

My personal 'favorite' though concerns a totally innocuous Hollywood musical set in Latin America where HUAC discovered that a bellboy, entering an elevator, whistles 'The Internationale' as the elevator is going up (oh, the symbolism, the evil meaning; perhaps the guy dancing the Rumba was really Uncle Joe Stalin).

Of course, films like Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and a few others extolling Soviet heroism during World War II were special HUAC and right-wing press postwar targets. Song of Russia even had its title changed when it was sold off to television along with a totally bizarre short newsreel added postscript denouncing the Soviets for becoming like the Nazis and creating the Iron Curtain after the war – something totally at variance with Lillian Hellman’s powerful screenplay and which made absolutely so sense, given the film.

As for real CPUSA activists in Hollywood, as William Z. Foster said in a discussion with party members in the movie industry shortly after World War II, the censorship of the studio system made it impossible to make socialist or directly class conscious films. What was done though, as Lester Cole, one of the Hollywood Ten who never changed or apologized for his politics noted in his memoir, Hollywood Red, was for Communists and other leftists to work cooperatively with New Deal liberals to develop projects that portrayed working-class people more favorably and cast some light on exploitation and injustice within the system. What HUAC was in reality doing in its hysterical and often hilarious attacks on Hollywood was not only to force the blacklisting of those who wouldn’t kowtow to it, but to stop such films from being made, which with the help of blacklisting and the Korean war they did for the decade of the 1950s.

HUAC hasn’t existed for a long time and 'McCarthyism' is a term that only the most extreme rightwingers, Anne Coulter particular, whom I have always considered an Eva Braun looking for the right man to follow, treat positively. But the Rush Limbaughs and the Michael Medveds do on 'talk radio' what the Westbrook Peglers of the Hearst press and the right-wing columnists everywhere used to do in the daily papers, fill the air with HUAC-Joe McCarthy charges, many big and little lies, or 'multiple untruths,' as a liberal writer in the 1950s noted wisely about McCarthy’s style. They create a sort of ideological air pollution that people passively live in, not even recognizing it, the way the people in my neighborhood breathed in coal dust all the time in the 1950s and didn’t think much about it.

Still, I guess I can thank Limbaugh, Medved, et al, who provide precooked prejudices for an audience of shut-ins, Walter Mitty reactionaries with little to do than raise their blood pressure in search of scapegoats, call in to the talk shows, and get off their backsides every few years to vote Republican. I confess that I have liked Clint Eastwood’s recent movies (he is a fine director) and also share his love of jazz.

After all, the mentality of our 'KultureKampfers,' Limbaugh, et al, isn’t too different than what Tom Lehrer captured in his old 1960s song about the John Birch Society – 'there’s no one here be we and thee and we are not too sure of thee.' Philip Jessup, a liberal Republican and a target of Joe McCarthy and Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings, helped bring down McCarthy. (I have nothing against liberal Republicans even though I haven’t seen any for a long time.) I’ll ask the students tomorrow if they think that Eastwood can be recast as an ally of the left in his later years. He was always a much better actor than Ronald Reagan, not to mention Conan the Governor.

Actually, students in my Socialism and Communism class usually tell me they learn a lot from my Capitalism Gone Mad introductions. For example, a few years ago I read from a New York Times Magazine story highlighting a teenager who had used his computer skills to carry forward a complex computer stock market scam that made fools of a weakened Securities and Exchange Commission and cost millions. At one point he even arranged a meeting with some high powered people, even though he had to arrive in the New York Port Authority Bus station with his mother.

Recently, I noted the adventures of a New York Law School Dropout and pharmacist’s son who had just bought the most expensive house ever sold in New York State. He made his money by speculating on prescription drugs – hoarding them in warehouses and selling them off when the prices rise, as they invariably do. In the process he occasionally created shortages and always added to the final price – but that’s capitalism and even though some of his activities have been restricted he rolls on.

Sometimes the stories are truly nightmarish. A Latino women in the late 1990s in Brooklyn was thrown off public assistance and forced into the 'workfare' program. She postponed seeing doctors because she feared that she would lose her job and her family’s medical benefits. As it turned out, she died of cancer that may have been treated had she not been afraid to seek medical attention earlier. Earlier, a secretary in her sixties. She was a low-wage pink collar worker forced out of a New York apartment by condo conversions and then murdered in the slum neighborhood that she moved to because she had to keep her job and could afford nothing better.

You can read about such people, along with the millions who perish as collateral damage of global capitalist machinations in Africa and Asia, the millions who regularly flood the emergency rooms of public hospitals from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. One doctor compared what he saw in LA to what he had seen in third world countries, except the people waiting in LA for any help that could get were far less hopeful than third world peoples.

These stories appear every day in the capitalist media, but they are never put together analytically. The fact that they are out there, as Herbert Marcuse noted long ago, in developing his thesis of 'repressive tolerance,' helps to create the illusion that we have a 'free press' and a 'free society.' Those who do connect the dots analytically, as C. Wright Mills a little earlier than Marcuse was writing, are called 'biased,' 'one sided,' etc, ideologues, etc., meaning that we have gone beyond 'ideology,' except for capitalist ideology, which isn’t ideology but universal truth.

A century before Marcuse and Mills, Karl Marx noted simply that the ideas of any class divided society are both the ideas of its ruling class and are proclaimed by its ruling class to be universal truths, whether they are ideas of feudal lords ruling by divine right or capitalists ruling by their definitions of 'freedom,' and 'competition.'

As I tell my students, Marxism remains the best framework ever developed for connecting the dots even though the dots themselves and their configurations change and Marxism itself must respond to and grow with the changes, but it is the only framework that enables us to understand social development that can do that.

In the future, I hope to present further 'Capitalism Gone Mad' examples to the readers of PA’s online edition.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached via e-mail at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.