Across Canada, ads from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers are appearing on billboards, bus shelters, television sets, cinema screens, and the pages of newspapers and magazines. These ads, to say the least, are bullshit: They characterize a massive campaign of misinformation and an attempt to green-wash the single most environmentally destructive project on the planet. Most of these ads use the same strategy. Reassuring messages are superimposed over images of pristine landscapes, which are often unrelated to the Tar Sands – or which are planned for mining and have not yet been transformed by developers into permanent, toxic moonscapes. Other billboards, similar to the one above, claim “Every Drop of Water Counts” or “Clean Air is Essential.” Without contrary information these ads paint CAPP as responsible and caring – but what if they were actually honest?

Disclaimer: This review is a case study in overanalysis. It is extremely unlikely that any of the political conclusions drawn here existed in the minds of the writers when they created the screenplay for this madcap comedy caper. But one of the virtues of the Marxist method is its ability to provide new insights into things we would otherwise regard as ordinary or commonplace. Spoilers ahead.

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”

-          Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

On its surface, Jerry Zucker’s 2001 film Rat Race is light-hearted comedic fare with little in the way of profound political messaging. The plot involves six teams of people at a Las Vegas hotel and casino who are recruited by the resort’s billionaire owner Donald Sinclair (John Cleese) to participate in a race for the betting pleasure of himself and his wealthy peers. A duffel bag containing $2 million in cash has been stowed away in a train station locker 563 miles away in Silver City, New Mexico. Each team receives a key to the locker, and whichever team reaches the locker first wins the race and keeps the money.

The teams consist of:

1. an attorney (Breckin Meyer) and a helicopter pilot (Amy Smart);
2. a disgraced football referee (Cuba Gooding, Jr.);
3. a pair of twin brother con artists (Seth Green and Vince Vieluf);
4. a family man (Jon Lovitz), his wife, son, and daughter;
5. a short-fused businesswoman (Lanai Chapman) with her estranged but kind mother (Whoopi Goldberg); and
6. an Italian narcoleptic (Rowan Atkinson).

Of these characters, businesswoman Merrill Jennings and lawyer Nick Schaffer would likely have the highest incomes, followed by pilot Tracey Faucet, referee Owen Templeton and minivan-driving family man Randy Pear (who lies to his wife about job prospects). Marked by the lowest incomes are twin con artists Duane and Blaine Cody, as well as the eccentric foreigner, Enrico Pollini, whose suit is cheap and occupation unknown.

In short, the competitors come from a variety of social backgrounds. It is significant that Nick originally has no interest in competing and tosses away the key. As an attorney, his likely substantial income permits him the luxury of throwing away this 1 in 6 chance of becoming instantly wealthy. He only changes his mind when the Cody brothers’ shenanigans ground all planes at the airport, and his conversation with a helicopter pilot gives him a solid chance of winning the race.

A businesswoman who screams into her phone at subordinates, Merrill is likely the most financially well-off of these “ordinary people”. But given her enthusiasm for the race, it is doubtful that she possesses anything approaching the immense riches of someone like Donald Sinclair.

Mass popular entertainment in capitalist society tends to gloss over class differences. Thus a film like Rat Race can portray team members from various economic backgrounds as equally “ordinary”. But for our purposes, the competitors’ clear difference with Sinclair is the fact that each would stand to benefit substantially from possessing $2 million, whereas for Sinclair and his pals, such a hefty sum is mere pocket change. In #occupy terms, this is the story of the 99% battling it out for the amusement of the 1%.

All participants seem initially wary of the race, but when Owen appears to get a head start greed kicks in and the rest quickly run after him. In their desperation, everyone ends up in a tangled heap at the bottom of a staircase. The mad race for individual riches has led to counterproductive in-fighting amongst the individuals chosen to compete for the enjoyment of the bourgeoisie.

As representatives of the 1%, Sinclair & Co. are so absurdly wealthy that they think nothing of gambling away vast quantities of cash on ridiculous bets. In one scene, Sinclair’s butler Mr. Grisham (Dave Thomas) asks a high-priced escort how much a bizarre request will cost. Upon hearing her answer, the wealthy gamblers emerge and pay off the colleague whose guess was closest.

Later on, while flying to Colorado, Sinclair has his pilot swerve the plane violently and the rich men bet on which of them will vomit first. In a deleted scene, they can be seen playing Monopoly with real money. This colossal waste of wealth is not too far removed from the reckless speculation of the parasitical American financial class that led to the economic collapse of 2008.

Still stuck on the stairs, one of the competitors suddenly hatches a brilliant idea: why don’t all the teams just go to Silver City together and split the money up evenly? Couldn’t they avoid in-fighting if they simply banded together and distributed the wealth among themselves equally? At that point, Pollini, who had been trailing, steps over the heap of people and continues onwards, gleefully proclaiming, “I am in a race! I am in a race!”

Instantly the participants renew their struggle to grab all the loot for themselves. The brief flirtation with a socialist approach has given way once more to the Hobbesian war of all against all that is typical of capitalism – an individualist ethos that may be summarized as, “I’ve got mine, so fuck everybody else.”

Near the end, the political subtext of the film sharpens once more. As the teams arrive at the Silver City train station, they all reach the locker at the same time and struggle to be the first to use their keys. When one finally opens the locker, they find the duffel bag of money missing.

It seems that the butler Grisham has run off with the call girl under the mistaken belief that she liked him for him, and not the $2 million he was leading her to. Despite their similar class interests, the bourgeoisie remains a den of thieves who will happily stab each other in the back to increase their own personal profits; Bernie Madoff is only the most famous recent example of this phenomenon.

Chasing after the duffel bag of money while it hangs from a cow that is dangling from a hot air balloon (don’t ask), the frantic racers suddenly crash through a wall and find themselves onstage at a charity concert hosted by Smash Mouth that instantly dates the film. They finally gain their prize and start helping themselves to wads of cash.

In a misunderstanding, the charity believes the competitors have come to donate the money to feed hungry children. The competitors initially react with horror and attempt to correct this impression. However, the heartfelt expressions of gratitude by the charity’s organizer, as well as a representative hungry child, soon compel all competitors to relinquish their winnings in the name of charity. This sacrifice on behalf of the needy becomes cathartic, with the former competitors smiling and/or pumping their fists in the air.

But Nick isn’t finished. Seizing on the presence of Sinclair and his cronies, he announces that the affluent gamblers have volunteered to donate double the total amount of money raised by the charity. The numbers on a display board increase at a dizzying speed; millions of dollars which were previously hoarded or pissed away on useless speculation are forcibly redistributed to serve real and desperate social needs.

It is this expropriation of wealth that makes Rat Race more than just a frivolous comedy. The presence of starving children puts the main characters’ individual pursuit of riches into perspective. Capitalism, by its very nature, leads to poverty and vast inequality. As Che Guevara noted, the central myth of “free enterprise” – that anyone can become wealthy if they work hard enough – is usually defended with the example of figures like John D. Rockefeller, while conveniently ignoring the amount of misery that must be created in order for a Rockefeller to exist.

By their own initiative, Sinclair and his friends would never have used that money to serve positive social ends. It was only when Nick put them in an impossible position at the charity concert that they were forced to smile and wave as a portion of their wealth was taken from them. This is the point at which right-wing ideologues would start ranting and raving about the injustice of somebody stealing their hard-earned money (Who earned it for them? The Sinclair gang don’t look like 9 to 5 types).

Wealth redistribution is precisely what happens at the end of Rat Race. And what are the results? A huge number of children who would have gone to bed hungry, or worse, will now be fed. Lives have been saved – and the only casualty is the relative freedom of shiftless billionaires to gamble away huge amounts of money other people earned for them. Regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions, the socialist subtext of Rat Race takes what would have otherwise been an unremarkable if entertaining comedy and gives it a didactic meaning to serve as a rallying cry for the proletariat.

Matt Gardner is a working journalist and supporter of the Marxist newspaper Fightback. He currently lives in Saskatchewan.

In the most recent issue of Maisonneuve, Occupy Toronto insider Paul Gettlich offers an adept history of the temporary micro-society which famously fomented in St. James Park during OT’s month-long occupation. The feature, entitled “Anatomy of an Occupation,” recaptures the unique atmosphere of chaos and political exuberance that characterized life in the OT encampment, focusing in particular on the challenge of self-regulation faced by OT activists. As the encampment increasingly became home to society’s most marginal elements, including the homeless and the mentally ill, it became plagued by substance abuse and occasional fits of violence.

An excerpt:

“Occupy Wall Street had taken root in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park a month earlier, but it quickly spread across the globe, with some one thousand tent cities flowering from Halifax to Hong Kong. Each protest site is plagued by a slew of external and internal pests. Riot cops. Infiltrators. Mass arrests. Rubber bullets. Groupthink. Infighting. Truthers. Tasers. The movement—which claims to represent 99 percent of society—has one particularly great challenge. It occupies spaces that are often already occupied: city parks where the homeless, the mentally ill and the addicted congregate. Over two hundred tents quickly pockmark St. James Park, and both groups—protesters and drifters alike—must learn to coexist. In a city where Mayor Rob Ford was elected, a year earlier, on a platform of privatizing social services, a petri dish of dystopia evolves at the Occupy encampment. But so does the group’s ability to internally adapt, to govern and police the wide array of problems it faces.

Some volunteers, referred to as marshals, are originally trained to guide marches and supervise protests. But as more problems arise, their role changes into something resembling a non-violent security detail. Many of them disappear when the temperature drops and more malcontents arrive. In the third week of October, the hardcore marshals—who camp in the park or live in the area—organize into two groups. The Street Team deals with the homeless and drug users. The Greeting Committee identifies potential troublemakers when they first arrive and explains how things work in the park: no violence. Easier said than done; after all, no one in the 99 percent is excluded. That week, as if on cue, more and more self-proclaimed prophets, meth heads, crack peddlers and alcoholics embed themselves in the camp. Fights start erupting. A late October cold snap is about to break.”

Whereas Paul Gettlich’s approach is narrative and historical, retelling the event of encampment from start to finish, Noah Gataveckas, over at Civilized Discontent, returns to St. James Park six months after the eviction and details, in ideological terms, the city’s official effort to deny the park its history, to re-sod the grass, and to eradicate all traces of the occupation, leaving behind the message that nothing interesting ever happened there.

An excerpt:

“The homeless who filled this park … embodied capitalism’s stain: they gave presence to its contradictions, its inherent failings in a verifiable, concrete way. All someone had to do was take a walk through the park and they would see the 21st century new norm of neo-feudalism: the castles of finance capital had suddenly been surrounded by the lumpen rabble, such that no one could pretend any longer that the good old days of late 20th century capitalism were still in effect. We had entered the Age of Austerity, a retro throwback to the Great Depression. On the outside, people walked around, repressing well and acting like Clinton was still in office or some shit. Meanwhile, inside the perimeter of the zone, souls were getting a sneak peak at what’s to come, which is what has already arrived for millions around the world in the form of new social relations that are bound through the ties of destitution, unemployment, and poverty.”

Both articles are well worth a read. Check out Paul Gettlich’s “Anatomy of an Occupation” over at Maisonneuve, and “Recalling the St. James Occupy at 6 Months” by Noah Gataveckas at Civilized Discontent.

A day after students from Quebec took plastic bullets to their heads and faces in their continuing struggle against a 75% tuition hike, the youth of Toronto broke free of their perennial apathy and took to the streets with dissident clamour!

Actually, that isn’t quite what happened.

Saturday May the 5^th marked Toronto’s largest annual demonstration with the 14^th iteration of the Global Marijuana March. Less a protest than a smoky act of civil disobedience, or a mobile party, participants left their houses armed with bongs, blunts and brownies (as well as the occasional protest placard), openly defying the draconian pot laws of Canada’s newly implemented omnibus crime bill. Taking to the streets, the group shouted slogans including “Free Marc Emery,” “We’re here, we’re high, get used to it,” “No prisons for pot,” “Legalize it,” “Women on a mission to end prohibition,” “Fuck Harper” and “I smoke cannabis!”

The march drew between fifteen and twenty thousand participants as well as a nominal police presence, dwarfing the turnout of recent Toronto rallies against robo-calls and elections fraud, tuition hikes, finance capital, tar sands development, municipal and provincial austerity budgets, police brutality, and genocide in the Congo.

The youth of Toronto are expected to protest again next year.

This amazing piece of film was made by N. Khodataev in 1924.  It’s Soviet propaganda, but also an amazing relic of early animation.  Watch it for yourself and try to figure out what’s going on, besides exciting modernism.

ARCHITECTURE. – Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society’s ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses itself in actual architectural constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that church and state speak to and impose silence upon the crowds. Indeed, monuments obviously inspire good social behaviour and often even genuine fear. The fall of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things. This mass movement is difficult to explain otherwise than by popular hostility toward monuments, which are their veritable masters.

Above: Popular hostility towards monuments.

For that matter, whenever we find architectural construction elsewhere than in monuments, whether it be in physiognomy, dress, music, or painting, we can infer a prevailing taste for human or divine authority. The large-scale compositions of certain painters express the will to constrain the spirit within an official ideal. The disappearance of academic pictorial composition, on the other hand, opens the path to the expression (and thereby the exaltation) of psychological processes distinctly at odds with social stability. This, in large part, explains the strong reaction elicited, for over half a century, by the progressive transformation of painting, hitherto characterized by a sort of concealed architectural skeleton.

It is clear, in any case, that mathematical order imposed upon stone is really the culmination of the evolution of earthly forms, whose direction is indicated within the biological order by the passage from the simian to the human form, the latter already displaying all elements of architecture. Man would seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between monkey and building. Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly dominant. From the very outset, in any case, the human and architectural orders make common cause, the latter being only the development of the former. Therefore an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man. Currently, an entire earthly activity, and undoubtedly the most intellectually outstanding, tends, through the denunciation of human dominance, in this direction. Hence, however strange this may seem when a creature as elegant as the human being is involved, a path – traced by the painters – opens up toward bestial monstrosity, as if there were no other way of escaping the architectural straitjacket.

Above: An attack on architecture.

Georges Bataille, May 1929

Reprinted in the Critical Dictionary, translated by Dominic Faccini.

Above: The controversial video from Invisible Children’s Kony2012 campaign.

Like many people across the world, I am in the large minority that takes internet access for granted. On March 7^th, millions of wealthy people who count themselves among that group watched a half-hour long video made by a group called Invisible Children.

The video went viral and ended up gaining unprecedented support via a mixture of pledges of support and video sharing, both quite innocent, and donations. The request for these donations after an emotionally manipulative video, however, is quite sinister – brazenly so. It was a tour de force in coercion, emotional manipulation and sophistry, and millions are falling for it.

I can’t tell you what to do with your money, that’s entirely up to you. But if you had not heard of Joseph Kony before yesterday and are now thinking of reaching into your wallet for some change or your credit card, stop. Stop right now, please. I can’t tell you what to do with your money, but I can ask you what to not do with it, and what you should not do is donate to this group. Let’s say you do decide to donate though, as is your right; where would the proportion of your donation that is not spent on salaries and administration go?

Above: Invisible Children campaign leaders pose with South Sudanese soldiers from the SPLA. Photo: Glenna Gordon

Invisible Children does not hide the fact that it would lend its financial resources to help the Ugandan Army in its aims (19:23 and 21:47 in the video). Uganda has been led by Yoweri Museveni, an autocrat who has also used child soldiers and “ghost soldiers” , since 1986. Among many of its human rights violations, the regime tortures prisoners, oppresses other political parties and the press, and also wishes to introduce a bill that would have ‘convicted homosexuals’ put to death.

In the mid 1990s, the Museveni government forcibly removed over one million people of the Acholi tribe from the northern part of the country to concentration camps further south. These internally displaced persons (IDPs) currently have some of the highest mortality rates in the world at around 1,000 per week. Both Kony’s LRA and Museveni’s UPDF have committed terrible atrocities against these IDPs.

The video says we need to pressure American politicians (why just American?) to go after Kony and try him in the ICC, but the US isn’t even a member of the ICC (21:00). It asks that people put pressure on representatives to try a criminal in a court they themselves have voted against recognising. It juxtaposes a Republican lawmaker and an ICC prosecutor. It uses incoherent logic.

It also states that it is the Ugandan Army that must be supported in achieving the aim of capturing Kony, but as the video also points out, Kony is most likely no longer in Uganda (15:00). This advocates that the Ugandan Army invades another sovereign state or states when those states offer no credible threat against the invading state, going against international law. The Ugandan Army has already entered other states and exploited resources: oil, mineral reserves and rich farmland. In addition, the Museveni regime, along with ally Rwanda, initiated or helped initiate the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that killed an estimated 6 million people – more than any conflict since WW2.

Look at the brief montage of footage (17:26-17:38) where people are out in matching shirts with a banner declaring where they are; not one of them is in a lesser developed country or even in Africa. No Cairo, no Abidjan, no Cape Town, Accra, Lagos, Nairobi . . . All of these cities have zones with internet access. They also have walls and they also have paper, so you would think that a “global” effort to capture Joseph Kony, an African, for war crimes by putting up posters would at least entail some element of Africa in the solution, no? This video was directed solely at rich nations because they are the ones with citizens who have the means to donate by buying the action kits and posters, which retail at $30 and $5 respectively.

The video also depicts the Ugandan regime as honourable, wishing to deploy soldiers to hunt a war criminal but limited by technological and financial restrictions that US advisors can help overcome. This is simply not the case in reality. They are promoting keyboard activism.  If people use this viral exposure to do something useful, such as target the political root causes of the problems – something that we, as those with access to the internet, could do – then we ought to be impressed.

But for the moment, the lack of context and the black-and-white moralist tone of the video clouds a series of highly delicate political and social situations in central Africa.  Doing some good is great, but most of the video was filmed over five years ago. A lot of the ring leaders, such as Vincent Otti, are no longer alive. Going on a revenge spree is a solution for nothing. If you chase the symptom away, fix the problem, don’t wield pitchforks and hunt. This is not Rwanda 1995 when we actually ought to have done something to stop a genocide that killed 800,000 people in under 100 days. (That’s the same as three 9/11s per day for 100 days straight in an area smaller than the state of Massachusetts.) We didn’t care then because there was no economic or strategic interest in the region at a geo-political level as there is now.

At its worst, the video manipulates a child through a highly staged mock interview (09.20 and 13.00), is neo-colonial and says that only wealthy white people can cure poor non-white people of their problems. It is Kipling’s White Man’s Burden in all its jingoistic glory. It is a real life version of Team America. If you actually want to do something in the long-term about the LRA, Kony, Uganda and Africa, then take a consistent interest in Africa rather than hopping on board because everyone is wearing the same colour t-shirt. You could start by demanding of the education system in your country that if a history course is given on Africa (usually titled the “scramble for Africa”), then perhaps it should not just be given solely from a British and French perspective and should not focus exclusively on how it affected European affairs. If you want to do something positive in the short- to medium-term after watching the video and wish to make a donation to a group doing great work in the area, you can donate to Amnesty International, MSF or War Child, among others.

People are saying “Is it better to stand by and do nothing?” – implying that doing nothing is the only alternative. This creates a false dilemma, is a logical fallacy and is intellectually lazy.

Reading this was probably a lot less fun for you than watching the video, but then again I didn’t write this to entertain you or make you feel better or worse about yourself. Did you ever watch the Simpsons episode ‘Trash of the Titans’? It’s the one where Homer becomes sanitation commissioner. During a debate, his level-headed opponent says:

“All right, fine. If you want an experienced public servant, vote for me. But if you want to believe a bunch of crazy promises about garbage men cleaning your gutters and waxing your car, then by all means vote for this sleazy lunatic.”

Homer won in a landslide after an appeal to people that they could feel better about themselves by being lazy – intellectually lazy. It takes no intellectual effort to put on a t-shirt, put up a poster or make a donation. Let’s not do the same thing the population of Springfield did. For once, let’s actually care about Africa and Africans.

Hugo O’Doherty is an Irish journalist living in New York. He has worked in Ghana for the Ghanaian Times and National Trust newspapers, as well as the African Voice newspaper in Ireland. He has also lived and worked in Montreal. He has written a follow-up article on Kony 2012 that is viewable here.

Above: David Holzman’s Diary demonstrates how TV works.

The above clip from David Holzman’s Diary demonstrates the functioning of a television set and why it is so effective. We can consciously (or cynically) disavow what we see, float in and out of attentiveness, or change the channel – but as in the above clip, the raw effect of television is to impress thousands of carefully curated images upon the brain. By showing television in its reduced form, this clip demonstrates the futility of conscious engagement with the medium.

Beyond offering this insight into television, David Holzman’s Diary is a classic of media criticism. It marks the inauguration of the mock-documentary genre, appearing as a novelty in1967. The film draws into question the assumption of objectivity that accompanied the cinema verité documentary movement. It concerns a New York filmmaker who, ironically sensing a disconnection from reality, decides to film everything in his life. As such, the film consists of diary passages in which David Holzman opens up to his camera, or alternatively ventures out into the public sphere. It mixes staged narrative passages with pure observational cinema, in the spirit of New York street photography.

In the film’s introductory diary passage, David lovingly quotes Jean-Luc Godard – “Film is truth 24 times a second.” For the duration of the film, it relentlessly interrogates the legitimacy of Godard’s statement. Of course, in its superstructure – as a fake documentary – the film is closer to showing a lie than to showing the truth. However, the events which unfold are all imbued with a strong documentary realism – they are either totally dry and quotidian (like Holzman sitting in front of the camera and not knowing what to say), or provoked by the ridiculous spectacle of Holzman’s bulky 16mm camera and tape recorder in the public sphere. As the film progresses, the presence of the camera impinges more and more upon the action – to the extent that the major narrative event of David’s girlfriend leaving him is a direct consequence of his overzealous filmmaking. The goal of depicting unmediated, documentary reality is debunked as a utopian project.

David Holzman’s Diary is both a fictional film about eight days in the life of David Holzman, and a documentary about documentaries.