Review: "The Trotsky"

Socialism is a form of teenage rebellion for well-to-do kids. The smart ones outgrow it.

Like Lenin, Pol Pot and Mao? Despite everything else, I guess no one ever accused them of being stupid.

LimeJello wrote:

Like Lenin, Pol Pot and Mao? Despite everything else, I guess no one ever accused them of being stupid.

You are aware that George Washington's project resulted in the deaths of many millions of people, all over the world, and continues to do so on a daily basis, even today? Likewise, no one ever accused him of being stupid.

Watching and old US propaganda film from 1941 called "Why We Fight" I was gob-smacked when they described Vladimir Lenin as "the George Washington of their [Russias] revolution."

Oh, and by the way, Lenin had expressed admiration for Washington, although had the opportunity arisen, I'm pretty sure the reverse would not be true.

LimeJello wrote:

Oh, and by the way, Lenin had expressed admiration for Washington, although had the opportunity arisen, I'm pretty sure the reverse would not be true.

Who cares? 

More interesting material: a review by Louis Proyect [url=http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/the-trotsky/]here[/url].

LimeJello wrote:

You mean Washington's hemp growing project? I had no idea. I was always a big supporter of that. I'm sorry to hear about those millions of dead people. Are you sure your figures are right?

We can start with 20 million American Indians and the move up to 4 million during their illegal war in south asia during the 60's. Variously others inbetween. I am also not satisfied that wiping out 100,000 Japanese in 6 hours one night in Tokyo, should be excluded either.

Too wimpy for socialism? What's more wimpy than socialism? Go out there and succeed in the cut-throat world of unfettered capitalism and then tell me how wimpy that is compared to socialism.

LimeJello wrote:

Too wimpy for socialism? What's more wimpy than socialism? Go out there and succeed in the cut-throat world of unfettered capitalism and then tell me how wimpy that is compared to socialism.

What you mean to say, is get out there in the world and exploit the accumlated capital that our society, and we as indivduals, have inherited from massive imperialist rip-offs conducted at the point of a bayonet. Nothing could be wimpier than thumping ones chest about ones hard earned inheritance, especially when it was stolen in the first place, and you didn't have to do any of the stealing.

I am glad you admit indifference.  But pretending that your special place in the world is really about your hard work is a conceit, regardless of how indifferent you are. Obviously restitution comes in many forms, and is not as simple a population transfer. Nor is this a problem of individuals, but one of societal commitments.

Yeah..sure..and that wouldn't be an attempted justification for hypocrisy or selective morality at all....

Don't worry. My feelings aren't hurt at all. I'm amused.

If I'm correct, j.m. that was Winston Churchill.

Sarcasm usually comes across as being glib on chat forums, or perhaps it was just plain glib, anyway. So, as far as that goes, its kinda hard to see the politics to be "followed" in that.

Well then, to get back to my point, blanket quips about Soviet or Chinese Communist atrocities, that look at these things through the cold war lens of the ideological divisions between communism and capitalism, are very tired, and very easy.

The reason that I brought up George Washington and the "great nation" building enterprise that he and his friends embarked upon and the large scale attrocities that went on in its name, was to underscore the point that first and foremost the Russian and Chinese "communist" movements were not actually anything to do with the ideology that they promoted as their cause. That was the conceit of those who needed a centralizing ideological myth to justify their actions. They were, fundamentaly, "great nation" building enterprises that sought to bring within their grasp independent industrial power and put that in the context of a centralized nation state.

The ideology itself, has very little to do with this process. If we were to total up the casualties that occurred, and looked at the scale of population transfers, and total up the number of local societies wiped out by the steamroller of the United States, and were to compress those into a time period of 40 odd years, instead of 400, we would likely be looking at a massive high speed atrocity that matched, or even outscaled that of the Soviet Union or China.

To make this point is not to excuse either, but is to ask for a real analysis of how power is manifested outside of well worn ideologically tained tropes.

Jacob Richter wrote:

j.m. wrote:

"In short, what's not to like? ... "

That socialism is some sort of teenage rebellion for well-to-do kids?

This is the reincarnation of the Che Guevara t-shirt in movie form.

Lots of socialists weren't exactly well-to-do.  Karl Marx is first and foremost on the list.  August Bebel comes to mind.  The most recent example is none other than Hugo Chavez.

I agree. However, Marx lived off papa Engel's money for 14(?) years. He was some sort of industrial capitalist.

Jacob Richter wrote:

Engels inherited a petit-bourgeois enterprise, not a bourgeois enterprise (certainly not one by today's standards).  IIRC, that enterprise didn't have multiple branches spread across the country (something which some small businesses today actually have).

Sorry, I forgot that Engels didn't own a lexus or a car either and many small business owners do now therefore he wasn't privileged my mistake. And because he maintained Marx and he retired with a business in the 19th Century he must've been humble like those on CPP my mistake.

LimeJello wrote:

Like Lenin, Pol Pot and Mao? Despite everything else, I guess no one ever accused them of being stupid.

Lenin pulled Russia out of WW I. What's not to like there?

Uncle Sam and Brits supported the biggest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler in Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

It was either Mao or Chiang Kai-shek and his gangsters who murdered ten million Chinese before Maoists chased them away to Taiwan.

radiorahim and I saw this movie over the weekend.  It was really funny!  We laughed our heads off at it.

I don't know that I agree with j.m.'s takeaway that the movie is simply ridiculing socialism as an amusement of rich kids.  In this case, we have a rich kid who is pretty clueless about the working class, who tries to build solidarity and socialism among his peers, whether at work in his father's garment factory, or in the public school he's sent to as punishment.

It's a coming of age story for a rich kid, to be sure, but he doesn't give up his principles, his poor little rich kid thing is given the mocking it deserves, and it's really funny.

And in the end, his ideals win out because under all the ridiculous posturing the kid does, his heart is in the right place, and the ideals he thinks about are true.

I also found the romance part pretty unbelievable, but I figured that was part of the humour of the film.

And the film WAS really funny.  The background music was used to humourous effect (often some Russian men's chorus singing some old socialist hymn or other), and we howled over the sign in the background in one scene with a TV reporter -- did anyone else catch it? -- the "J. Parizeau School of English" or "English School" or something like that.  It was blink and you miss it, but we caught it.  Little gags like that made it fun.

Engels was no petit bourgeois. He expanded the family capitalist enterprise into Manchester, but he did that with his father's capitalist wealth. [But strictly speaking, yes, it was Frederick Engels directly supporting the Marx family in their genteel middle class poverty... not "papa Engels".]

I'm looking forward to seeing the movie.

And by the way.... when socialism was more than the quaint oddity it is now, in the Sixties there was just as much irony and unreality in youth looking to their convoluted understandings of the socialist experiments. It wasn't just rich kids. I "discovered" socialism as a small town working class kid, and it was as touching and goofy as the kid in the movie sounds.

The problem was [is] that business of 'discovery'.... versus being an organic product of a living process.

KenS wrote:

Engels was no petit bourgeois. He expanded the family capitalist enterprise into Manchester, but he did that with his father's capitalist wealth. [But strictly speaking, yes, it was Frederick Engels directly supporting the Marx family in their genteel middle class poverty... not "papa Engels".]

I stand corrected then.

KenS wrote:

People obsess too much on the rich kid aspect- let alone the bigger problem of attempting to deconstruct comedies.

Like I said, my teen search for socialism was pretty funny. And thats real life- no probelm embellishing it. Sans rich kids, same basic narrative.

Yes, it's not worth deconstructing. Some people's search for socialism left them with a bullet in their head. Let's make a comedy!

Or closer to home: with in an ice pick planted in their head by the comrades. [Trotsky's end.]

Though that wasn't when Trotsky was searching for socialism.

Bullets to the head as a consequence of searching for socialism don't happen if you have grown up in North America. When you were contrasting what would be more real, you mentioned a protaganist with a single mom. But I've been there, and ANY teen search for socialism here is inherently unreal.

The rich kid protaganist is just more absurd. The rest of us doing it is still the same story.

Number of posts, but I have no idea what the ascending order is for the titles.

Fidel didn't tinker with it - that's one of the categories.  Our tech guys were having fun when we did the redesign, I guess. :)

LimeJello wrote:

Oh, and by the way, Lenin had expressed admiration for Washington, although had the opportunity arisen, I'm pretty sure the reverse would not be true.

Librarians of the world unite!

Quote:

The former president borrowed The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel on 5 October 1789, according to the records of the New York Society Library.

Staff discovered it was missing when they conducted an inventory of books in the library's 1789-1792 ledger earlier this year. Washington had never returned the book – an essay on international affairs – to the library, which shared a building with the federal government at the time and was used by members of Congress and the cabinet as well as the president. The former president's overdue fines, it has been calculated, would theoretically amount to $300,000 (£209,000).

Yeah, he never told a lie and he didn't return his library books.

CMOT Dibbler wrote:

Why does he have to mention his Jewishness?

He also misses something really important.  Most teen comedies don't feature people who look sixteen.  Such movies are about fantasy as much as anything else.

I suppose because Trotsky was Jewish and because Proyect is Jewish. (I would probably mention it if it were my culture involved.) But you really did focus on the least important aspects of the review