View From Left Field

At the end of each year I compile a list of favorites that helps me remember what I enjoyed and learned from the movies, music and books that I had time to engage with. These lists are far from representing the “best” of the previous year, but instead are a small sample of what I found to be exceptional viewing, listening or writing whose experiences lifted me emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Such an exercise also helps me remember what I’ve seen, listened to, and read, with the goal of coming back to these works of art in the future. In compiling these lists, I rely on a few personal criteria for each category.

For movies, I include films that I found exhilarating because they evoked a passionate response from the storytelling, the characters and events chronicled, and the risks taken in bringing these versions of stories to the screen. I made a deliberate effort to include a significant number of films that are outside the Hollywood studio system and that were made without the institutional support or resources of that system. However, a good number of films with big budgets, big stars and strong institutional backing also made my list. While mainstream Hollywood traffics in blockbusters peddled to the lowest common denominator of profits and mass advertising that helps drive mass consumption and mass visibility, there has long been a tension between the corporate domination of film production and the efforts of film artists to creatively develop their projects in a way that breaks down traditional boundaries that are privileged by studio executives.

Artists who have a history of box office success can, if they choose, use that success as “capital” to advance projects that otherwise would not get funded. Therefore the gap between big budget Hollywood and quality filmmaking is not so cavernous as to be insurmountable. That being said, whether mainstream or not, I chose movies that pushed beyond the boundaries of expectations and, in many cases, represent the cutting edge of artistic achievement, in my view–which of course is highly subjective and dependent on my experiences as a viewer when I watched the film. Was I passionately moved by the storytelling, the characters, the social landscape, and the creative insights provided by the movie?

One movie on my list, Don’t Look Up, which I ranked 10th, has been the subject of polarized debates among film critics and mass audiences who had (mostly) radically different reviews of the film. Critics found it to be too full of simple stereotypes, repetition, overly lengthy sequences that were poorly edited, and mostly a collection (at best) of Saturday Night Live-type sketches that worked better in isolation than as part of a cohesive and entertaining film. Obviously, I disagree with this criticism. I thought the film was well-written, well-acted, funny and powerful in its portrayal of how the actions of powerful corporations and politicians are destroying the planet and blocking attempts of people to learn the truth about how our very survival is being sacrificed by ruling elites. That the filmmakers spoke to the politics of climate denial made it even more powerful and timely.

That being said, I do not think that the critiques of the film by most film critics can be reduced to those critics being in denial about climate change, which was a charge often made by the film’s supporters. I felt the film could have been better directed, better edited and more cohesive, and therefore more potentially powerful in execution. The art of film criticism is not without merit, and film critics are not inherently “elitist.” At its best, film criticism can elevate great art by enhancing audience appreciation–the job of the film critic is not inherently “elitist,” nor should we automatically accept the opinion of film audiences over film critics. The social, political and economic context affects how films are made, marketed, perceived and understood, which complicates the task of the critic and the understanding of the audience.

However, I do think too many film critics are guilty of not viewing a film holistically, so that film “quality” is artificially separated from social, political, economic and historical context. Too many reviewers seemed blissfully unconcerned about where the filmmakers’ anger was coming from, namely from the urgency that humanity is facing global extinction, which was mostly not even discussed by critics in grappling with the “quality” of the film. Too often the urgency of the filmmakers was derided as too “angry,” “simplistic,” and “one-sided,” as if the issues posed by the film could have been better packaged with a more nuanced treatment of an extinction event. The vapidity of the critiques exist within a cultural ecosystem that insists on separating “artistic value” from “politics,” when in fact such a separation reflects a narrowness of critical interpretation.

Good film criticism can also be a work of art, adding layers to our understanding of what we have seen. That means the best critics understand that their reviews exist within a larger socioeconomic and political power structure, with consequences for what films typically get made and how they get promoted, consumed and examined. As the politics of climate change have become about existential survival, a film that is politically angry is exactly what we need for the extinction moment that we face. Critics, whatever their feelings about how well the film achieved its mission, were unwilling to discuss the political urgency of the mission, which proved more revealing about the narrowness of contemporary film criticism than the shortcomings of the film itself.

With that as a backdrop, here is my list of favorite movies of 2021:

1. Summer of Soul
2. Nomadland
3. The Card Counter
4. West Side Story
5. Bring Your Own Brigade
6. The White Lotus (series)
7. Power of the Dog
8. Identifying Features
9. Licorice Pizza
10. Don’t Look Up
11. Dear Comrades
12. Sun Children
13. Velvet Underground
14. All Light, Everywhere
15. Nightmare Alley

My next lists are more expansive, with 20 favorite albums and books. If anything, it was much easier for me to find great music and great books, fiction and nonfiction, in 2021 than great movies. The music list reflects my own biases toward jazz, soul, blues and alternative rock, and folk, which necessarily narrows my consideration for this top 20 list. That being said, the criteria for selection are similar to the criteria used for movies: did the music passionately engage my senses? How creative was the artistry, from the quality of the musicianship to the collaborative engagement within each song to the quality of the songwriting? I discovered quite a few albums this year that I repeatedly listen to, which is another criteria for making this list:

1. Arturo O’Farrill, Dreaming in Lions
2. Amythyst Kiah, Wary + Strange
3. Adia Victoria, Southern Gothic 4.
4. Cha Wa, My People
5. Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, I Told You So
6. Rising Appalachia, The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know
7. Courtney Barnett, Things Take Time, Take Time
8. Buffalo Nichols, Buffalo Nichols
9. Chris Brashear and Peter McLaughlin, Desert Heart, Mountain Soul
10. Cedric Burnside, I Be Trying
11. Nicole Glover, Strange Lands
12. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, 662
13. Eric Bibb, Dear America
14. Jimbo Mathus, These 13
15. Benito Gonzalez, Sing to the World
16. Mingus at Carnegie Hall, Deluxe Edition Remastered
17. Gov’t Mule, Heavy Load Blues
18. UV-TV, Always Something
19. Nina Simone, The Montreaux Years (Live)
20. Tower of Power, 50 Years of Funk and Soul

The books that made my favorites list include an impressive and expansive analyses of the global rise of fascist political movements, the history of structural and institutional racism, the political economy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the causes and implications of global inequality and climate change, among a range of other important topics and themes. I also included works of fiction that directly addressed some of these same themes:

1. Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism.
2. 1619 Project
3. Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy
4. Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were (novel)
5. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
6. Dave Zirin, The Kaepernick Effect
7. Daniel A. Sjursen, A True History of the United States
8. Andrew Cockburn, Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine
9. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 2nd Edition.
10. Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists.
11. Luke Epplin, Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the Workd Series that Changed Baseball.
12. Donald Sassoon, Morbid Symptoms: Anatomy of a World in Crisis.
13. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, The Global Green New Deal
14. Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.
15. Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100
16. Russell Banks, Foregone (novel)
17. Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.
18. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, 3rd Edition
19. Robert L. Allen and Chude Pamela Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States, new edition.
20. Sarah Pinkser, We Are Satellites (novel)

I define the “left” as those that argue for major structural change in societal institutions from the economy to the political system to further an egalitarian economy and polity. How to go about fighting for structural change is about tactics, strategy and goals, which fractures the left into a wide range of diverse categories, each with its own history and political objectives. These include left social democrats, socialists, communists, and anarchists. Even these differentiations are complicated, with socialists and communists divided by the degree to which their envisioned future societies will have a mix of public and private ownership, or will abolish the capitalist market outright.

Within capitalist societies, those on the left often refer to those who dominate the political and economic system as the “ruling class.” This class, as a collective group of dominant capitalist interests, has power as a result of its ownership of societal resources, which it owns and manages for profit. Diverse groups of capitalists often come together to preserve and expand their profit-making opportunities, and rely on their ownership of wealth and their power within the capitalist state to protect their collective interests.

Capitalist states face contradictions due to the conflicts between the profit-making interests of the capitalist class and the public legitimacy of state institutions under capitalism. During different phases of capitalist history, workers, the middle class, progressive reformers and the poor have challenged the capitalist state to expand its functions and purpose beyond serving the needs of capitalist owners. As a result, societal groups have been able to win reforms under capitalism, but those reforms are always in danger of being reversed when capitalist owners face a crisis of profitability.

During the period from 1980 until the present, capitalist interests, often competing with each other based on where and how they make their profits, have increased their instrumental power over the capitalist state through a dramatic rise in the number, scope and capacity of business political lobbying networks. Transnational corporations have used their global wealth and their market and political power to lobby governments to reduce progressive taxation (a global trend), to reduce corporate taxes (a global trend), to increase the direct subsidies provided by states to corporations (a global trend), to privatize public services for profit (a global trend) and to hollow out the capitalist state to make it less responsive to the interests of the public (a global trend).

In this way the political parties within capitalist democracies have moved steadily to the right over the most recent four decades of capitalist history, often referred to as “neoliberal capitalism.” Social Democratic political parties and other parties historically claiming to represent the interests of workers, have on many occasions advanced right-wing, pro-corporate policies that were opposed by many of their own constituents. This process, a function of capitalist interests being deeply embedded within capitalist states, have served to de-legitimize capitalist state institutions, leading a prominent scholar to argue that democratic rule within contemporary capitalism is facing a severe crisis that could lead to its extinction (Streeck 2020).

The crisis of democratic capitalism is directly connected to the contradictions between capitalist profit and capitalist political institutions. This crisis has created a legitimacy crisis for dominant political parties as they shift to the right of the spectrum as a result of the intensification of capitalist demands for more profit-making opportunities, less taxation and more state assistance to subsidize capitalist profits during times of economic crises. This has paved the way for “outsiders” such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and others to claim to mantle of representing the opposition to the entrenched “political class.”

Contrary to this rhetoric, the far right and the neo-fascist right is very much a part of the capitalist establishment. They represent sectors of capital who see a profit-making opportunity in a further de-legitimation of the capitalist state, which promises more profit-making for sectors of capital that depend on even more de-regulation and sale of public assets for accumulation of profits. Not all capitalists agree with this frontal assault on capitalist institutions, but many capitalist sectors have promoted the very same policies championed by Trump and Bolsonaro.

For example, in the U.S., a wide range of business organizations had been financing efforts to make voting more difficult for workers, minorities and the poor for the past decade as part of a broader effort to support legislation on a state-by-state basis that would cut taxes, reduce social spending, increase subsidies to corporations and produce a much more regressive taxation system whose burdens would fall more heavily on workers and the middle class. When the Republicans continue this effort on overdrive under Trump, they are in fact intensifying an effort that has long had the support of powerful blocs of U.S. business lobbyists and corporate networks.

The fact that the Democratic Party is opposing voter suppression and beginning to challenge some of the neoliberal policies that have been advanced over the past four decades (which have in most cases been supported by both parties) does not mean that the Democratic Party has broken with corporate interests. Quite the contrary. What it does mean is that there is conflict within the capitalist class over government policy. The Biden Administration has advanced legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan, that has spent three times more on unemployment, housing, family assistance, COVID-19 emergency aid, and aid to states, counties and cities, than the Republican Party wanted to spend.

The sheer scope and scale of the Democratic Party’s American Rescue Plan has led some observers to suggests that the Democrats are signaling a break from the past four decades of corporate-friendly government policies, or a broader break from neoliberalism. That pronouncement is premature, and ignores the extent to which both Democrats and Republicans just months before endorsed the CARES Act, an extremely corporate friendly expansion of COVID emergency aid whose wealth overwhelmingly went to the coffers of the biggest U.S. corporations, while very little found its way to working people or the poor. In fact, as has been documented extensively, the rich have gotten far richer during the COVID crisis, either by using their market power and wealth to make more money or by being bailed out by an interventionist state which still privileges capitalist interests above societal interests.

With that in mind, how should a person on the left respond to capitalist conflict within the dominant capitalist political parties? First, the left should understand the urgency of protecting public access to governing institutions. The Republican Party has coalesced forces that have historically supported an evisceration of social services that benefit the working people and the poor. And Republicans represent the segments of the capitalist class that are most in favor of using all means necessary to wage war against voting rights, scapegoat minorities and immigrants, and maintain neoliberal capitalism by restricting public money to working people. While the Democratic Party is no friend of working people, there are real consequences for the U.S. working class in losing voting rights, having less access to (even meager) public services, and demonizing minorities within the brazen rhetoric of white supremacy that lately has eroded the autonomy of K-12 teachers in several states to teach history in a way that is truthful to an understanding of institutional and systemic racism.

This means that the left needs to fight against voter suppression, defend the most oppressed sections of the working class, mobilize on behalf of minority rights and access, and champion more economic relief for workers and the poor. That does not mean becoming part of the Democratic Party. The left needs its own institutional networks, its own movement identity, and its own connection and embeddedness to the U.S. working class, whose interests have been drowned over the last four decades under the weight of corporate power.

The left should not shy away from defending liberal institutions whose very existence is predicated on a history of working class struggle. This includes being committed to opposing voter suppression, and advocating for an expansion of voting rights, which had been achieved historically as a product of working class struggle. Now these rights on under assault by a neo-fascist Republican Party which is also intent on passing state laws that prevent cities and counties from reducing the money going to local police forces (see Governor DeSantis in Florida) and prevents teachers in K-12 from teaching the truth about institutional and structural racism.

There has been momentum among what I would call a “class-reductionist left” in the U.S. to minimize the importance of these political and social struggles. This “class-reductionist” left does not see a threat from the “neo-fascist” right It sees the Republican Party as barely distinguishable from the corporate liberalism of the Democratic Party. Even more worrisome, some sectors of the left mistakenly think that capitalist power has gravitated more to liberal institutions and networks of corporate identity politics epitomized by MSNBC, and is less represented by right-wing networks like Fox News. Representative of this tendency are reporters such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, whose animosity toward liberalism in all its manifestations have led them to participate in very questionable far right networks with the aim of lending ideological credence to “liberal bashing”, regardless of the source.

I think “liberal bashing” can be healthy and necessary, but context is everything. The left now faces a serious threat from neo-fascist political tendencies and movements who have found a home in the Republican Party. If these movements succeed in further weakening voting rights, demonizing and restricting the ability to speak about and to organize in favor of minority rights and representation, and stops any further expansion of U.S. government spending directed toward the working class and poor, then societal movements capable of challenging the capitalist state will be further weakened and divided.

The left needs to join broader coalitions opposing the neo-fascism of the right. At the same time, we should have no illusions about the Democratic Party and we should build independent networks that connect the interests of workers with racial justice movements so that we can help place greater demands on capitalist political parties, so as to avoid being captured by them.

Two new books provide guidance for the left. The first is White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, Verso 2021. The second is Border Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia, Haymarket Books, 2021. Both do an outstanding job tracing the origins of the contemporary far right, including fascist currents in European and U.S. politics. In Malm’s account, the fossil fuel industry is linked to the emergence of the fascist right in global politics. Oil and natural gas corporations have a lengthy history spreading the propaganda of climate denial, which has become a fundamentally important issue for the far right and fascist movements, which have used climate denial, and financing from corporate interests, as a weapon to advance a white supremacist ideology. These movements, as both Malm and Walia show in meticulous detail, base their existence on “white replacement theory,” identifying immigrants as the leading threat to the livelihood and existence of the white race. The far right sees climate change as a “false ideology” propagated by elites that want to “replace whites” with foreigners. In addition, Walia provides exhaustive historical links between far right immigrant bashing and the institutionalization of policies furthering white supremacy as a way to oppress and subordinate the working class.

There is no “hidden working class” that the left can wean from these fascist movements. Their primary purpose is to divide, weaken and eviscerate the capacity of working people to collectively unite to fight for their interests. That’s why it’s a mistake for the left to develop a strategy that attempts to combine “left populism” with “right populism.” A left wing strategy has to start from the premise that protecting and elevating the most oppressed and vulnerable sections of the working class is fundamental to building the political capacity of workers to fight against their exploitation.

Most importantly, the rise of fascist currents in global politics that combine climate denial with immigrant bashing and white replacement theory is a threat to human survival that goes beyond working class interests per se. That’s why those of us that consider ourselves on the political “left,” have to take anti-fascist struggles seriously. That means resisting the bait that has been put forward by the far right as traps for “left collaboration.” There is an entire media ecosystem that uses “right-wing populism” as a tactic to encourage left-wing activists and organizers of working with the far right in public forums and in publications to advance a “working class nationalism” that equates working class interests with nativist immigrant bashing in opposition to capitalist “globalism.”

One such far right publication, American Affairs journal, is the brainchild of a far right Republican Julius Krein, who has embraced the fascist nationalism of Donald Trump as a way to move the Republican Party closer to a section of “white working class” voters. Of course, the editors and contributors to American Affairs could care less about working class people. They embrace far right nationalism and exclusion, epitomized by the writings of Michael Lind, who is a member of the advisory board of the journal.

Lind, in his recent book, The New Class War, prioritizes immigrant bashing and building institutions of far right nationalism to incorporate a narrow definition of the “American (read ‘white’) working class” who in his view would be better off under a protectionist national security state that zealously guarded its borders and prioritized foreign threats as a way to justify a robust program of welfare for a “deserving” section of the U.S. working class. Lind identifies his project as building a coalition capable of challenging the “managerial elite,” whom he equates with the bureaucratization of the large-scale corporation, a process that has eroded the capacity and entrepreneurial energies of a more “legitimate” entrepreneurial class that is capable of producing real innovation and national greatness. For Lind, the managerial elite operates as an unaccountable extension of monolithic global corporations whose bureaucratization and stifling of competition is the real threat to America. The solution, for Lind, is a nationalistic, America-first response that would protect U.S. businesses and workers from foreign competition and re-institute a national welfare state justified by “security threats” and committed to providing resources to re-establish an industrial base that can compete with our enemies and provide protection for deserving workers.

Lind’s retrograde far-right nationalism can appear attractive to some on the left if they just focus on Lind’s attacks on the “managerial elite,” which is actually slippery and disingenuous, as this elite is ultimately defined more by their cosmopolitanism and advanced educational credentials, than their actual wealth or class status. Lind spends most of his book attacking immigrants, whom he clearly believes are not legitimate members of his more exclusive white working class that he wants to elevate to membership in his nationalist project. Lind’s railing against identitarian projects associated with Black Lives Matter, women’s movements, and immigrant rights movements is indicative of a privileging of white male citizens whose Americanness is thereby codified artificially from centuries of racial oppression, gender discrimination and ethnocentrism, the latter of which is foundational to Lind’s project.

For sections of the “left” that see even parts of Lind’s project as something that the left can somehow take advantage of to build broader coalitions of working class power, they are deluding themselves. Lind and the entire project of the American Affairs journal rejects everything that the left must aggressively defend: a robust commitment to immigrant rights, internationalism through solidarity of workers across borders, and an unqualified support for anti-racist social justice movements. Without all of these ingredients, the left will have sold its soul and diminished the prospects for working class unity, which the far right and the fascists are counting on.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is drawing from the authoritarian playbook of the neo-fascist Republican Party in his broad-scale attacks on academic freedom. He recently signed a bill passed by the Florida legislature that mandates a survey of the political beliefs of public college and university professors to “assess the status of intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.” Contrary to the propaganda of the bill’s sponsors, and of DeSantis himself, this bill has nothing to do with academic freedom. Instead, it’s a political maneuver designed to intimidate faculty by monitoring faculty viewpoints, even encouraging students to record faculty lectures for the purpose of highlighting statements that the corporate-funded reactionaries in Tallahassee can use to their political advantage.

As a Professor for 30 years at Florida International University, I am open about my views and encourage my students to be open about their opinions. We engage in healthy discussion and exchange of ideas that goes beyond what the corporate media and the political establishment typically sanction as part of “acceptable” debate. For authoritarians like DeSantis, and for Republicans in the Florida legislature who voted for this bill, academia at its most progressive represents a threat to their unfettered power and influence. That’s why conservatives and corporations have waged a thirty-year war to dramatically lower the public funding of universities, which now depend on private funding and student tuition to replace what used to be public sources of funding. When I was first hired at FIU in 1991, the university got just under 70% of funding from the state of Florida. Now it’s closer to 20%. Over the past decade, states have cut back their spending on higher education by over $9 billion. Ten years ago, students paid for one-third of their education costs. Now they pay for one-half. The result has been a corporatization of the university that has resulted in fewer professors being hired, a dramatic increase in adjunct professors who are super-exploited, and a much greater reliance on corporate sponsorships and grants. That has worked to make academia more conservative (not more progressive, let alone “radical” as DeSantis and other reactionaries would have people believe).

Yet even after decades of assault on public institutions and the public sphere in general, that apparently is not enough for the power-brokers in Tallahassee and the entire infrastructure of the Republican Party, who want to intimidate professors in higher education, and silence critical voices in K-12 classrooms. In addition to the mandated survey to track the ideological views of professors, DeSantis has given Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran the authority to police against the teaching of “critical race theory,” which DeSantis and other Republican authoritarians are using as a bogeyman to stifle the ability of social studies and civic education teachers to speak honestly about racism in U.S. history. DeSantis has proclaimed a ban on “critical race theory” being taught in Florida’s public schools. Contrary to this propaganda from DeSantis and his fellow Republicans, led by Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump, that “critical race theory” is about teaching “students to hate their country,” there is no such thing as a coherent program of “critical race theory.” The use of the term has been weaponized by Republicans to create a nefarious enemy whose invented characteristics can then be used to discredit political movements such as Black Lives Matter. More broadly, the Republican attack on “critical race theory” is really a weapon to stifle attempts by various academics, activists and social justice movements to raise awareness and to try to correct the status quo biases in U.S. history books. These include racist stereotypes, the exclusion of the history and experiences of racial minorities, and misinformation or outright falsehood regarding racism in U.S. history. U.S. history texts are much more likely to whitewash, ignore or misrepresent the histories of minorities, working class people and the poor. Efforts to correct the one-sided status quo bias have been occurring, but only sporadically and unevenly, and in the midst of attacks on public schools and universities designed to squelch these movements. What Republicans want to do is to prevent any corrections to the traditional narrative.

What should the left do about this? We need to take this threat from the right seriously, and to fight back politically. That means educating our own students about the political history of the corporatization of higher education. Most people think that public spending on university education has gone up, which is directly opposite of the actual trend. We also need to educate students and the public about attacks on public education at the K-12 level, and how this represents a long-standing assault on the public sphere, which is being eviscerated by the use of public tax dollars to fund private, for-profit institutions. We need to speak truth to power in the classroom where possible, while acknowledging that not all teachers have the same ability to speak out, due to limitations on job security, lack of tenure, etc. Those of us that do should use our voices to provide students with the broadest possible resources to think for themselves as “critical citizens.” This means equipping them with the tools to understand who has power, who doesn’t and exposing the agendas of the political and corporate class who dominate politics in the real world, as opposed to the caricatured fantasyland conjured up by DeSantis and his corporate backers.