[Marxism] re Michael Moore's decline

[ilyenkova@xxxxxxxxxxx]

In an otherwise bravura review of Fahrenheit 9/11 last June, WSWS
correspondent David Walsh got it exactly right on Michael Moore, I
think. In the
spirit of Trotsky's writings on the artist and his/her relation to society,
Walsh points up the internal tension in both Moore's filmic work and in
his politics. In light of this discussion of Moore's putative decline
it's worth
excerpting:

Walsh:

>In interviews, Michael Moore repeatedly emphasizes that he is an
artist and
a filmmaker first and foremost. This is generally interpreted as a
disingenuous
or evasive remark. Perhaps it is an attempt in part to avoid being
accused of
taking a partisan position on the current election campaign and thus
compromising attempts to reach a wide audience with his film, but the
documentarian, inadvertently or not, has hit upon an important issue.

As a politician and commentator, Moore has been woefully inconsistent. He
vacillates, for example, between strident denunciations of the Democrats
for
their lack of backbone and appeals to its traditional supporters to
ÃâÅretakeÃâï
the party. His support earlier this year for the candidacy of former army
general Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO forces in its brutal assault on
Serbia, for the Democratic presidential nomination was entirely
deplorable . This was Moore at his weakest, his most pragmatic, his most
unthinking.

As an honest artist, however, Moore is compelled to go beyond the
limitations of
his conscious political outlook. Image-making has that quality. This is
not a
film that provides aid and comfort to the leadership of the Democratic
Party. In
searchingly examining the history of the past four years, Moore reveals the
Democrats as largely complicit in a bipartisan strategy, indeed a ruling
elite
consensus, aimed at establishing US global hegemony.

Looking honestly at Flint and such communities, Moore is compelled to
acknowledge or imply that for American working class youth there is no
future
within the present economic and social order. Beyond that, he argues
convincingly that imperialist war takes advantage of poverty to find its
cannon
fodder and, at the same time, serves as a safety valve to suppress the
class
struggle at home. The implications of these insights are revolutionary.

Of course, in creating a work that directly treats political and historical
matters, the artist, even the honest artist, cannot entirely overcome his
limitations. Unresolved questions will inevitably find their way into the
artistic product. And this is the case with Moore's film.

A tension exists in Fahrenheit 9/11 between the sober and thoughtful
tone of the
Flint sequences and some of the more superficial, irritatingly jocular,
almost
sophomoric moments. A tension exists between a deep sympathy for the
working
population in America and an opportunist orientation to the miserably
compromised liberal wing of the Democrats, one of the two big-business
parties in America. __A tension exists between socialist convictions,
hostile to
all forms of national and ethnic chauvinism, and American populist
demagogy,
tinged with nativist prejudice.__ (emphasis mine RM)

One of the difficulties with Fahrenheit 9/11 is that from the
methodological and
aesthetic point of view, it ends where it should have begun. Its not the
exaggerated focus on Saudi Arabia and the Bush family fortunes that is most
telling, but the scenes in America, in Michigan. The horrors in Iraq are
not
principally the product of Bushs personal greed and stupidity, as real as
those are; they express the social contradictions of American society as a
whole.

Lacking in Moores film ultimately is a more seriously considered and
consistent analysis of the type of society out of which something as
monstrous
as the Iraq war could possibly have emerged. The political personnel in
charge
of lying and finding rationales for imperialist invasion at any given
instant is
a secondary matter. Bush, Gore or John Kerry the drive for US world
domination
will continue. The personal demonization of Bush can become a means of
evading
the critical question: the historic and systemic bankruptcy of American
capitalism, at which Moores film is forthright enough to hint.

The filmmakers dilemma is not merely his own. Moore passed through the
bitter
experiences of the working class population in Flint, repeated
throughout the
US, in the 1970s and 1980s: the vast downsizing, the abandonment of
workers to
their fate by the trade unions, the devastating economic, social and moral
consequences. The limitations of that experience and his own limitations
are
bound up with unresolved political problems facing the American working
class,
including the character of the unions, the nature of the Democratic
Party, the
historic role of liberalism.

Where does Moore go from here? In our view, his further evolution as an
artist
will largely depend on his intellectual and political development. In
the first
place, this will mean an open admission of his underlying socialist
convictions.
A frank and thoroughgoing critique of American capitalism is unavoidable
if the
filmmaker is not to repeat himself, or worse, fall backward and find his
work
used for purposes antithetical to his most deeply held convictions.

Moore has obviously done a considerable amount of reading and thinking,
and on
that basis made a crucial advance with this film. He has come very far. One
hopes he can resolve the tensions in his thought and his art.<

I could not have put the contradictory reality of Michael Moore and his
his work better than this. I've always thought Moore has a big Red,
White & Blue streak running down his back. When he embraced General
Wesley Clark it was not only without reluctance, it was as an American
populist who had found his Caesar.

Bob Montgomery














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