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Saturday, June 16, 2007

Lenin's Tomb has seen Michael Moore's Sicko, though he doesn't say whether he caught a legitimate screening somewhere in England or France or if he downloaded it from one of the many bootlegs already circulating on the Internet. Here's the money quote:

However, if there is one thing that stands out in this film, it is how ruthless and brutal the American ruling class really is. It is unmistakeable: they are the master race, and they're out for every last cent. I was going to say what a shock it was that so many ordinary Americans would say on film that they expected the companies to live up to their advertising slogans, but then I compared it to the fact that I myself - for all that I should know better - am still shocked by the extremity and barbarism of the people who run the United States. The conclusion is that one must be as ruthless as they are to get even the slightest penny back from them. Most of those in the film who did get ruthless did so in a highly individualistic fashion, through their lawyers, and left the system intact. What is obviously needed is for the kind of single-minded determination and class solidarity that American CEOs display to be shown on the streets and in workplaces. You could describe it as revolutionary realpolitik: the practises of power, learned and practised by the poor, and the marginalised, and those who like to imagine they're 'middle class'. When Moore showed French protesters filling the streets, he might have added that many of them were on strike: it is (still) in their centrality to the production of profit that American workers are best placed to hit the system most effectively, regardless of what Uncle Sam or his many pollsters or television dramas have to say about it.