Response to Gilbert Achcar statement

(My comments are in italics.)

On 5/8/13 2:42 AM, Gilbert Achcar wrote:

WHY I DECIDED TO MAINTAIN MY PARTICIPATION IN THE SWP’S *MARXISM 2013*

Gilbert Achcar

The campaign against the SWP is taking a regrettable turn. It now includes attempts at intimidating those participating in Marxism 2013, including myself, into withdrawing from the conference. The SWP is being described as a “socialist rapist party” and taking part in the conference as an “apology of rapism”.

You can call the SWP whatever you want but the fact is that a key leader of the party was protected from the consequences of the most brutal act of violence against women.

Whatever one thinks of the crisis in the SWP and the behaviour of its leadership, such terms applied to a whole party ­– the largest on the British radical left – and to the open forum that the party organizes each year are outrageous. They reveal the regrettable persistence of a certain mindset on the left, a mindset the origin of which is known all too well and for which anathemas and excommunication are substitutes for political fight.

Nobody advocates “anathema and excommunication”, as if that term applied. Instead, it is a reaction by some leading figures on the left to refrain from accepting invitations to speak at their Summer Carnival of Marxism because of the failure of the SWP leadership to clean up its act. “Anathema and excommunication” would instead describe what happened to the Trotskyist movement for most of the 30s through the 50s when it was routinely blocked from joining social movements, trade unions, etc. by a hegemonic Communist Party.

I do not recall any such attitude towards innumerable left parties the leaderships of which are guilty of much worse than what the SWP is accused of. To give but one example, I have accepted in the past invitations by the French Communist Party to their annual Fête de l’Humanité, as do regularly countless intellectual and activists who are deeply critical of that party. Had I regarded participating in such open forums as an endorsement of the party’s political, organisational or ethical record, which I deem to be incomparably worse than that of the SWP in all respects, I would have never accepted. Instead, I regarded my participation as an opportunity to engage with the public who attend such events, be they party members or non-members, and defend my own views, which differ from those of the party. No one ever blamed me for that.

This is a bogus analogy. The CP in France was not responsible for repression in the USSR. By the 1960s the CP’s in capitalist countries had evolved into social democratic type formations whose connection to the Moscow Trials, etc. mostly consisted of a refusal to disavow their own history. If the French CP, on the other hand, was as tiny as the SWP and had 9 rape investigations on its record, that might be another story.

I do firmly believe that the crisis in the SWP is a worrying symptom of a deeply-rooted problem pertaining to a vitiated conception and form of organisation. Regrettably, a few of the SWP’s opponents worldwide are taking this same vitiated tradition to extremes in the way they practice SWP-bashing. It is high time for the radical left to get rid entirely of that tradition if it is ever to regenerate.

8 May 2013

Sorry, Gilbert, the “tradition” we need to get rid of is thuggery on the left. When a minority faction in the SWP was formed to clean house, its members were shouted down and threatened with violence. Meanwhile, Alex Callinicos–author of 27 books–speculated that “lynch mobs” might arise if the minority refused to abide by the rules shoved down its throat by an anti-democratic majority. If that is the kind of gathering you want to attend, be my guest.

 

Guest speakers at the 2013 Socialist Rapist Conference

http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/speakers.htm

Paul Le Blanc
Paul Le Blanc is an author and activist flying in from the United States for Marxism 2013. His many books include “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party”, and “Black Liberation and the American Dream”. He will speak on “The history and future of Lenininism” [Is that anything like Troskyismism?]

Gilbert Achcar
His many publications include “The Arabs and the Holocaust”.  His new book “The People Want: a Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising” is out this year.

Plus Alan Freeman and Radhika Desai who seem to live for these things.

Take an indefinite vacation

Brian McFadden in today’s NY Times.

Letter to a Harvard professor on Karl Marx

Dear Professor Peter E. Gordon,

In your New Republic review of Sperber’s new bio of Marx, you write:

“The outbreak of Bolshevik revolution a little more than three decades after his death would have struck him as a startling violation of his own historical principle that bourgeois society and industrialization must reach their fullest expression before the proletariat gains the class-consciousness that it requires to seize political control.”

Despite your Harvard credentials (or perhaps in light of them, given Niall Ferguson’s foot-in-mouth disease), you show a shocking unawareness of Marx’s late writings on Russia. In letters to Danielson and Zasulich, he warned exactly against the interpretation you proffer to New Republic’s readers.

In an 1881 letter to Zasulich, he stated:

“Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian ‘rural commune’ can preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide; it can gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched mankind, WITHOUT PASSING THROUGH THE CAPITALIST REGIME, a regime which, considered solely from the point of view of its possible duration hardly counts in the life of society. But we must descend from pure theory to the Russian reality.”

You can find out more about this in Teodor Shanin’s “Late Marxism”, a book you would find most edifying, I’m sure.

You also state: “In one of his many columns for  The New York Tribune, he reasoned that British imperialism, however regrettable, was a historical necessity: only via modernization could India overcome its heritage of ‘Oriental despotism’.”

Once again you demonstrate a shocking unfamiliarity with Marx’s later thinking. I would refer you to the chapter in Aijaz Ahmad’s “In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures” titled “Marx on India: a Clarification.”

Even in Marx’s earlier writings, he qualified the benefits of capitalist modernization by saying in 1853: “The Indian will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”

And, more to the point, in an 1881 letter to Danielson that reflects his total break with the “stagism” you attribute to him, he noted:

“In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc., — what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, — speaking only of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England — it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.”

A bleeding process with a vengeance.

This, Professor Gordon, notwithstanding your and Sperber’s insistence that Marx belongs to the 19th century, is what makes him very much a 21st century figure since “A bleeding process with a vengeance” is a perfect description of the garment factory disaster in Bangladesh and the suicide epidemic in India of small farmers who have no future. I understand, of course, that a magazine owned by a Facebook billionaire rests on the assumption that there is no alternative to capitalism, but in the interests of serious Marx scholarship I would urge you to do your homework.

Yours truly,

Louis Proyect, moderator of the Marxism mailing list

The ISO, the British SWP, and threatening violence

Paul Heideman, ISO’er

Charles T. Peterson, ISO’er

Paul Blackledge, SWP’er

Sebastian Budgen, Studio 54 bouncer

Over the past few days I have been castigated on Facebook by a couple of members of the International Socialist Organization pictured above for warning Vivek Chibber that he would “regret it” if he ever interrupted me at an academic conference again. Paul Heideman added that I was brimming with ressentiment because of my failure to be admitted to the exclusive club made up of posh journals like Historical Materialism, the organizer of the conference where the incident occurred. This term Heideman obviously picked up from one Sebastian Budgen, an HM and NLR/Verso editor. Budgen got it into his head for some strange reason that my main goal in life was to get past some velvet rope into the Marxist version of Studio 54.

I don’t think that it is a stretch to assume that the ISO played a major role in organizing the conference. Generally you can tell by the composition of the chairpeople and the speakers the relative weight that some group on the left wields in such gatherings.

Of the three workshops I attended on Saturday, all three had the ISO stamp in one way or another. Jonah Birch, who I subsequently learned was Vivek Chibber’s dissertation student, chaired the workshop on Neil Davidson’s new book on the bourgeois revolution. Birch took the tack that probably most ISO’ers take, namely that Chibber was wrong to interrupt me but that I was much more to blame for saying that I would make him “regret it” if it happened again. (This is the talking point that Charles T. Peterson took but not Heideman.) Aaron Amaral, another ISO member, chaired the SYRIZA workshop. I seem to remember Birch and Amaral from Columbia University years ago but I could be wrong. The panel on Lenin featured two top leaders of the ISO, Paul Le Blanc and Joel Geier. I could probably find more ISO footprints but you get the idea.

I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time but I noticed that Paul Blackledge was invited to speak at a panel on “PATHS OUT OF CRISIS: SELF-ORGANIZATION and the STATE”. Blackledge is a professor at Leeds Metropolitan and obviously well-suited to speak at such a confab. But one wonders if the ISO’ers involved in the planning of this conference did not pause to consider the appropriateness of including a leader of the British SWP in such an event. Did they stop and think about what this says to women in the movement? After all, the British SWP’s former national secretary Martin Smith was charged with raping a young female member. When she tried to substantiate the charges against him, the kangaroo court asked her about her drinking habits.

When a faction was formed to take on the sexism and lack of democracy that made such a scandal possible, what was the reaction of party leaders? A group of dissidents, including Richard Seymour, wrote:

Comrades across the party have been heckled, shouted down and intimidated at aggregates and branch meetings. When they have complained about this they have been heckled, shouted down and intimidated. Young comrades have received nasty messages from those much older than them. They have been threatened with violence.

And what was the role of Paul Blackledge in all this? Apparently the Communist Party of Great Britain, a small group with no connection to Stalinism, has a mole in the SWP. This is what they reported:

The discussion kicked off with some comrades expressing their intense anger.

Sheila Macgregor, for example. Paul Blackledge later on.

But they were not angry either that the SWP has dealt with something as important as sexual harassment with appalling ineptness (not to say a cover up) or with the way the CC attempted to shut down the resulting debate. Rather, they were furious at those of us who’ve been “making a fuss” about such matters.

But you see, it really doesn’t matter very much if Paul Blackledge is okay with covering up for rape and for throwing his weight behind Alex Callinicos who warned that “lynch mobs” would be formed if the faction refused to abide by party rulings.

As long as there’s someone you know who can vouch for you, it is a cinch to get past the velvet ropes and into the Marxist version of Studio 54.

Desperate Acts of Magic

“Desperate Acts of Magic” can be described as a film that does for the world of professional magicians what “The Wrestler” did for another spectator pastime based on illusion. Despite its lighter tone, it probes the depths of a subculture that clearly rests on the foundations of insecure egos just as wrestling depends on beefed up bodies.

We meet the main character Jason Kant at a meeting of coworkers at the I.T. company where he works as a database administrator, a position I held for over a decade while I pursued my own kinds of illusions after working hours. Jason’s head and heart is not really in databases. It is in magic. While the meeting is going over technical matters, Jason minds start to drift toward the coin trick he has been perfecting. While manipulating it between two fingers, he accidentally propels it across the conference table and into the blouse of a co-worker and between her breasts.

The next day he is fired and forced to follow his true passion. Watching this scene made me wonder if I had been better off being fired myself long ago. While leaving the office with his belongings, he runs into a beautiful woman working as a shill for a three-card monte dealer who picks his wallet.

That night she calls him up to let him know that she went to magic camp with him long ago and would like to have dinner with him to get a handle on the magic scene in L.A. He only figures out later in the restaurant that she is the person who picked his wallet. When the bill comes for the meal, she picks the wallet of the guy at the next table to pay for it.

While wary of her criminal side, Jason finds her irresistibly beautiful. He explains to her that he is turning pro and needs someone to work as his assistant. She bristles at the suggestion, telling him that there is nothing more sexist than women serving as a male magician’s assistant in a Playboy Bunny outfit. A day later he meets up with her and says that he wants her to be his partner and not just his assistant. Furthermore, the magic act will be a satire on sexism in the business that features a climactic trick that drives the point home. Despite her initial interest in working with him, tensions mar the professional relationship—not to speak of his jealousy over what he perceives as her preference for a more successful magician who is his best friend.

Jason is played and directed by Joe Gold who knows this world inside out from his experience as a professional magician performing at over 500 kids’ birthday parties, and entering numerous magic competitions. He bears a striking resemblance to Steve Carell who is cast (overcast actually) as nerdy losers. I can’t imagine Carell doing a better job of playing Jason Kant, a nerdy loser in just about all aspects of life besides magic.

While not as ambitious as “The Prestige”, “Desperate Acts of Magic” is much more realistic about the lives of professional magicians. I can’t say that I am an expert on this world but I probably know a bit more about it since my wife’s nephew, who is now studying film in the U.S., was one of Turkey’s most successful teen magicians. Mostly out of my connections to him, I have tried to see any film that comes my way about magicians, just to send him the screener when I am done. If you have ever dabbled in magic yourself or if you simply want to see a well-written and well-directed character-driven romantic comedy, check out “Desperate Acts of Magic” that opens today at the Quad Cinema in N.Y. and at the Laemmle in Los Angeles on May 10^th.

Voices of the Mizrahim

In doing background research for an article on the Jews of the Maghreb (North Africa), I learned of the existence of a 2002 documentary on Iraqi Jews titled “Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection”. Among Jews, the term Mizrahim (Hebrew for Oriental) is applied to those from North Africa and the Middle East, in contrast to the European Ashkenazis who constitute the ruling elite of Israel.

In some ways the term that makes the most sense is Arab Jews, one that is embraced by Ella Shohat, an Iraqi Jew who is featured in “Forget Baghdad”. Her story, and the story of four elderly Jewish ex-members of the Iraqi Communist Party, is a reminder of the destructive character of Israel’s creation. Not only did it represent a nakba (disaster) for the Palestinian people, it also forced a people deeply rooted in their respective Arab countries to become assimilated into a culture that regarded them as inferiors.

While by no means an attack on the Zionist entity, the 1964 Israeli film “Sallah Shabati” does a fairly decent job of dramatizing the plight of new Mizrahim immigrants. You can rent the DVD “Forget Baghdad” from Netflix while “Sallah Shabati” is a bit harder to get your hands on (I took a copy out from Columbia University’s film library, but Amazon.com has new copies for sale at $15.64). After seeing them side-by-side, you can only conclude that the Mizrahim would have been better off where they came from, a claim that obviously applies to the Ashkenazim as well.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/voices-of-the-mizrahim/

Marxmail’s Fifteenth Anniversary

When I started working at Columbia University in 1991, the school was still mainframe-oriented just like the firms I used to work at on Wall Street. They had an email system called PROFS that ran under IBM’s VM operating system. That name might ring a bell with you since it was the same email system that Oliver North used.

About once a week I got an email with listserv in the subject heading that announced new listservs, usually something like “Raising Angora rabbits” or “The Bahai guide to a successful marriage”. About six months into getting such announcements, I strolled into the cubicle of the programmer who administered VM email and asked him what the hell a listserv was. He smiled and said, “So you haven’t heard about the Internet”.

After he explained what a listserv was (the term originally applied to IBM’s proprietary list handling software), I realized that there might be a listserv out there that would be useful to me. So I sent off a command to “list all” and got back something like 1500 listservs, one of which was PEN-L, the Progressive Economists List moderated by Michael Perelman, the prolific and inscrutable Marxist economist. I have been subbed to PEN-L for the better part of 22 years except for brief periods when Michael disciplined me for flaming people over something like the Brenner thesis or threatening to punch somebody in the nose (Doug Henwood on one occasion.)

In 1994 I got an announcement for a new mailing list called Marxism that was a project of the Spoons Collective. Jonathan Beasley-Murray, a grad student under Michael Hardt at Duke and a Spoons Collective member, kicked things off:

So essentially (and following Negri etc.) I am interested in an analysis of the State, and also in looking at economics or the “base”: hence, for me, the project to read _Capital_.  Also, I hope, this entails a “return” to Althusser (who, in my opinion, was never so interested in culture and ideology as he was in the State and economics, and who was the last thing around before everyone, by which I mean the Birmingham school, jumped on the Gramscian bandwagon).

And I throw Bourdieu into the mix for good luck too.  I find his analysis of culture extremely useful, and a useful “antidote” to the celebratory nature of much of what passes for cultural studies nowadays.  However, I am interested in supplementing Bourdieu’s social analysis, in part through a fuller investigation of the nature and sources of power (which is a given in his framework, it seems) and partly through re-interrogating both his notions of class and the moments at which he suggests the system may break down (which I compare to a DeleuzoGuattarian deterritorialization).  These moments, however, are few and far between.

(This is from the archived pre-Marxmail Marxism lists at http://www.driftline.org/.)

You can imagine my consternation when I saw something like DeleuzoGuattarian deterritorialization. What kind of jive was that? After spending 11 years in the Trotskyist movement, I had no inkling that Marxism had become so fashionable in the academy—or at least a peculiar subgenre of it.

Within a year or so, the center of gravity in the Marxism list had shifted away from cultural studies and toward “Marxism-Leninism”. It was what Lenin might have called “One Step Forward and Twelve Steps Backward” since the left was still in the midst of sectarian vanguardist illusions that it is only first beginning to address and overcome.

By 1996 the Marxism list had degenerated into perpetual trench warfare between ortho-Trotskyists like Hugh Rodwell and Bob Malecki on one side (a Morenoite and Spartacist League fellow-traveler respectively) and supporters of The Shining Path in Peru on the other. If this was not bad enough, the Maoists were at each others’ throats over who was the legitimate representative—one Adolfo Olaechea in London or Luis Quispe in New Jersey. They spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to expose each other as police spies or issuing death threats. Adolfo was quite a master of invective, making me look like St. Francis of Assissi by comparison. Here he is lacing into Bob Malecki:

Malecki – you are so stupid and lazy.  Always trying to mix-up different kettles of fish.  In Peru it is not the GPU who is saying that the best strategy for the DEFENCE OF THE RULING CLASS STATE is to use “leftists” infiltrated in the social fabric, unions, “popular organisations”, etc. IT IS THE MILITARY HIGH COMMAND behind the walls of their FORTIFIED VILLAS. It is the bloody rich speaking in the “tongues of the bogus leftists and windbags like you” who CONFESS that these organisms, whatever flag of convenience they may fly, are THEIR BEST BET in their ANTI-PEOPLES WAR.  Thankfully we NEVER ACCEPTED you into ANY United Front FOR THE REVOLUTION, you silly reactionary twit!  Malecki and the Peruvian Military High Command have the very same bloody counter-revolutionary STRATEGY against the LIVING REVOLUTION.

All this went on for the longest time mostly because the Spoons Collective had a principle about “free speech”. After hearing one too many protests from people like me who were tired of the flame wars, they set up a moderated list called Marxism-International that had a moderation board consisting of Jon Flanders, Zeynep Tufekci (who has gone on to a career as a technology and society guru), Louis Godena—a guy thrown out of the CP for Maoist deviations, and Adolfo Olaechea. Jon and Zeynep eventually stepped down because the job of moderating such a zoo became too much of a hassle. Once Godena and Olaechea took charge, they began unsubbing people left and right, with me the first to go.

After seeing where things were going, I took the initiative of launching Marxmail on May 1 1998, the same day that Doug Henwood launched LBO-Talk. About 100 people left Marxism-International in short order and joined Marxmail. It has attracted about 100 new subscribers per year and the current count is 1479—so we are 21 short of a minyan.

Before a year was up, Marxism-International went kaput. Adolfo continued to speak out for the Shining Path until facts on the ground (being crushed by the cops and the army) forced him to switch gears. In 2003 Adolfo was arrested by the Spanish cops and deported to Peru where he faced charges that could have led to a lengthy prison term or worse. I tried to raise awareness of his case on Marxmail and have stayed in touch with a mellower Adolfo over the years, most recently on Facebook. You can see that he can still rise to the occasion:

VIVA EL PRIMERO DE MAYO, VIVA EL MARXISMO; VIVA EL LENINISMO Y VIVA EL MAOÍSMO, ABAJO EL REVISIONISMO, LOS ENEMIGOS DEL MARXISMO Y LOS FALSOS AMIGOS DEL PUEBLO QUE CONSPIRAN CONTRA ESTE BELLO DÍA DE COMBATE Y REVISTA DE LA REVOLUCIÓN PROLETARIA MUNDIAL.

There are a number of people on Marxmail now who were veterans of those battles. My apologies if I leave anybody out but these names come to mind: Jon Flanders, Gary McLennan, Jim Farmelant, David Walters, Juan Fajardo, and—most importantly—Hans Ehrbar, an original member of the Spoons Collective.

When the Marxism lists were about to get booted from a commercial server, Hans stepped into the breach and transferred them to his computer on the U. of Utah network, where he has been teaching economics forever. Unlike his fellow Spoonsperson Jon Beasley-Murray, Hans is the last person out of whose mouth you are likely to hear DeleuzoGuattarian deterritorialization. Despite being a tenured academic, Hans—like many of us—took part in a grueling “colonization” effort that led him to the point of production in some factory or another as part of a Maoist party’s master plan. He, like Moby Dick’s Ishmael, lived to tell about it. Nowadays Hans is very involved in teaching young people both in the U. of Utah and elsewhere how to understand Marx’s Capital. His highly acclaimed annotations to Capital are here: http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.htm

Within a year after the launching of Marxmail, Les Schaffer stepped forward to take charge of technical coordination. With a PhD from Cornell in astrophysics, he certainly is equal to any task even though the integration of the Marxism list into the machine room at U. of Utah has lightened his workload. That being said, Les is trying to figure out a way to conduct a survey of what countries Marxmail subscribers come from and will be getting back to us once he has decided what is the best approach. Leaving aside technical chores, Les’s main contribution to the list is keeping me moored to the planet Earth, a job that sometimes is tantamount to controlling the toad in “Wind in the Willow”.

Finally, I want to say something about where Marxmail is today in terms of the overall political climate on the left. When I launched it in 1998, it was advertised thusly:

The Marxism list is a worldwide moderated forum for activists and scholars in the Marxist tradition who favor a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic approach. It puts a premium on independent thought and rigorous but civil debate.

In 1998 it was swimming against the stream to call for a “a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic approach.” Thanks to the inexorable tide turning against the “vanguardist” model, the list has become a lot more civil and a lot less like a parliament of fools. I hope that the list will continue to be an important asset for those trying to construct a genuine revolutionary movement. Insofar as it serves that need, to even the slightest degree, it will have vindicated itself.

Subscription information for Marxmail is here

 

Separated at birth?

Bob Dylan

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

New York Indian Film Festival 2013

This is an all points bulletin for New Yorkers who care deeply about film and about politics. Based on the press screenings of three films that are scheduled for the 2013 New York Indian Film Festival that opens today, you have the chance to see some amazing work. The two narrative films being discussed here are meant primarily for the Indian market. Unlike the typical Indian film that ends up at an art house in Greenwich Village, the directors behind these films came up through the ranks of the indigenous television and film industry rather than the UCLA Film School. This means that the sensibility is distinctly Indian as opposed to the sort of “globalized” film that exhibits more of West Hollywood than West Bengal. What you “lose” in terms of dramatic complexity and psychological depth is more than made up for by authenticity. The other film under discussion is a documentary that will probably not end up in a New York theater, all the more reason to take it in. After all, it is not every day that you get a chance to find out about war-torn Manipur’s main passion: baseball.

Directed by Devashish Makhija, “Oonga” is the first film I have seen out of India that takes up the cause of the Adivasi, the so-called forest-dwelling tribals who provide the base of support for the Naxalite guerrillas whose case novelist Arundhati Roy argued. Oonga is the name of a young boy who has become obsessed with the story of Rama, the seventh avatar of the Vishnu deity in Hinduism, so much so that he makes a pilgrimage to a distant city where the village teacher has brought classes in the past to see a reenactment of Rama’s combat with the evil monarch Ravana staged at an amusement park.

Because the teacher has brought Adivasi children to the city, she has come under suspicion from the local military detachment that is trying to wipe out the Naxalites. They are convinced that she has brought the children there to be indoctrinated. They take her into custody and begin torturing her into making a false confession of being a Naxalite spy.

Meanwhile the Naxalites have brought the teacher to their camp in the forest to get her to persuade the villagers to join the struggle. Made up mostly of women, the guerrillas have taken up arms because there is no alternative. Their husbands have already been killed or imprisoned and their land confiscated to be used for mining bauxite. While the teacher and the villagers she leads are depicted as a kind of football being contested by two opposing sides, the brunt of the film is to show the military as utterly depraved and at the service of the mining companies.

Oonga manages to make his way to the city despite knowing very few words in Hindi and relying totally on the mercy of strangers willing to give an Adivasi youth a ride in their truck or on a motorcycle. Once he is in the amusement park, he sneaks into the tent where the Rama legend is being reenacted as a kind of set piece reminiscent of the ballet in “An American in Paris”. It is one of the more astonishingly beautiful “song and dance” scenes I have ever seen in an Indian movie, more Balanchine than Bollywood.

Directed by Ratnakar Matkari, “Investment” is a scathing portrayal of the grubby, materialistic, and Western-oriented upwardly mobile classes in India. When we first meet husband Ashish and wife Prachi in their high-rise, they seem normal enough. They are enjoying the benefits of a rising standard of living and sharing the abundance they enjoy with their 12-year-old son Sohel who at first blush appears like a typical spoiled brat.

When his dad asks him to turn down the volume on the television set so he can talk to someone in a position of helping him land a job at Barclay’s, the son tells him to go to another room since he is watching one of his favorite shows on MTV, one that features American rappers celebrating their wealth and fame. When he is not watching TV, Sohel is zoned out on video games based on killing “enemies”. (Are there any other kind?)

But as the plot develops, we learn that Sohel is not just spoiled. He is a psychopathic killer in the vein of Patty McCormack in the 1954 film “The Bad Seed”, a lying and murderous 12-year-old girl who became the inspiration for a host of other less inspired horror movies of the 1970s through today.

But the real horror is India’s class society. Sohel has a sick sexual interest in a schoolmate with a mother and father beneath his own parents socially, like characters in a Dreiser novel. When she resists his advances, he strangles her in a wooded area nearby his school where Adivasi peoples have been protesting the takeover of their land by a real estate company. The film makes no attempt to provide a “balanced” view. It is an old-fashioned diatribe against a monstrous family who are obviously symbols of an India that 74-year-old director Ratnakar Matkari has no use for.

This, his first movie, is a clear expression of his values previously reflected through a Marathi translation of Arundhati Roy‘s English essay titled Greater Common Good. After earning a degree in economics from Mumbai University in 1958, he worked at the Bank of India for the next twenty years. Despite his ability to enjoy the life of his evil characters, he is much more interested in challenging the values that are currently encouraging their development.

Directed by Mirra Bank, “The Only Real Game” is a documentary about the baseball craze in Manipur, a state bordering on Burma that has had 30 guerrilla groups operating at its height (or depth, as you look at it.) Ethnically, the people look more Burmese than Indian. This and just about every other aspect of Manipur culture and politics make me realize how dense and challenging the study of India can be. Even if the film was about nothing except Manipur cuisine, it would be worth watching simply for an insight into a nationality that we know so little about.

Apparently the Manipur people are the most athletic in India and took to baseball like a duck takes to water when they first discovered it during WWII. American airman created a base in their state that was a link the supply chain to the soldiers fighting against the Japanese. Not long after creating their field of dreams, they began teaching the natives how to hold a bat and throw a ball—American hegemony’s more beneficent side.

The film shows standout talents from Manipur as well as an American delegation of professionals who raised money for supplies and to support a clinic on the finer points of baseball. Among those on the delegation is former minor league standout Jeff Brueggemann who was never quite good enough or healthy enough to make it in the majors. He is an immensely appealing character and shows what America is capable of once it puts away its guns and its capital.