Roseanne for President! 2012 Movie by Michael Moore and Comments on Mental Health
We watched this flick last night and was compelled to think about the recent controversy over Roseanne Bar and her show being taken off the ABC. This documentary was filmed / produced by Michael Moore mainly from the period of Roseanne's life where she was running for president in 2012. The first section of this saga depicts mainly her struggle for nomination within the Green Party where she lost to Jill Stein in the Party primary. Interspersed with sections of the nominating conventions of the Greens and media interviews pertaining to the election, are clips of Rosseanes early back round and career becoming a stand up comic after having been homeless and institutionalized for mental illness. Rosseane mentions in one home interview that as a child she was around holocaust survivors in her home and heard their stories, and felt this as a personal motivation to struggle for social justice her entire life. Also mentioned is her taking of the sleep drug Ambien during that period she was running for president. One thing that struck me as I watched the documentary is that Roseane was definitely a mentally disturbed person at this point in her life, yet she was still rationally aware and somehow willing and able to take action to effect change through her electoral campaigns in the Third Party movements.
After Roseanne looses the Green Party nomination she turns to the Peace and Freedom Party which only has ballot status in California. Having my own affiliation with the Peace and Freedom Party, I watched the latter part of this documentary with particular interest. In hindsight, seeing how the populism in America has been depicted in the mainstream media as a creature of Trump, and how Roseane herself has fed into the reactionary extreme end of populism collaborating with Alex Jones / Info Wars, I believe it was a mistake to have supported her. Nevertheless had I been at that convention I probably would have voted for her nomination. Her rejection by the Greens forced Rosseane to change her tune a bit from a solely celebrity status campaign. At that time she was aligned with Cindy Sheehan, a reputable anti-war activist, as well as having been formerly endorsed by Cynthia Mckinee of the (now) Georgia Green Party and the Black Caucus of the Green Party. Roseanne Bar at that time publicly called for single payer health care, and an end to the military industrial/ prison complex before she switched her campaign focus to harping on the issue of legalizing hemp.
What was most interesting of all in this documentary and what I am trying to get at here is that there was a deep contradiction within this woman which the progressive left failed to see, and is somewhat of an indictment on us - myself included - as leftists. What the documentary showed in Roseannes personal ranting and raving at the computer screen is that after her rejection by the Greens she not only lambasted Jill Stein with a potty mouth of Ambien induced slander, but also condemned the PROGRESSIVE LEFT as a bunch of "WHITE GUY SOCIALISTS" who did not appreciate her celebrity status, were hypocritical, stupid and conceited Bay Area types. Roseanne was obviously very bitter about her loss to Jill Stein for Green Party presidential nomination. He words and actions in the following clips conveyed a mix of psychological disturbance and some motivation to move on. In the very next scene Roseanne is shown heading to the California Peace and Freedom Party Convention to seek nomination as a presidential candidate. Just to clarify the Peace and Freedom Party is unlike the Greens an openly and unabashedly SOCIALIST party.. I have been a member myself for some 25 years, been active on Central Committees in Alameda and Solano, and continue to be registered Peace and Freedom.
Like many of us I have made mistakes as it is human to err. That being said, as much as it is futile to wallow in regret it is equally futile to remain obstinate and unable to realize and learn from our mistakes. Mental illness is a serious issue which we need to do better on in our progressive, working class, third party organizations and movements. Perhaps if someone - say Michael Moore himself - had seen and been aware of her psychosis Rosseane could have been dealt with more humanely and brought solidly into the third party movement. The circumstances of her fame and exposure to the networks and entertainment industry possibly made this very difficult as her comments are still blown up all over mainstream and social media. They have become a spectacle unto themselves. Hollywood and entertainment icons have the ability to change mass consciousness if they choose. Roseanne had done this on certain occasions to her credit, yet her mental illness has now come to be some kind of barrier whether by her own fault or media hype. It is a bit of both I think. I do know from experience in my own family that dealing with people with mental illness is walking a fine line between accepting things as they are, and still moving on to improve the situation. Ultimately we need to have more awareness of mental health, the people we work with, their state of mind and the health of the left as a whole. Michael Moore's recent statement on his 25 year friendship with Roseane Bar is very interesting and telling of the human side of the struggle which takes place often "behind the scenes" of the more immediate tactical and strategic issues we are so focused on.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/26/new-film-explores-drone-wars-from-pilots-point-of-view/
I really enjoyed this movie and was particularly surprised and pleased that the two women companions/comrades of Marx and Engels were given the place in history they deserve and that all the characters come across as real human beings struggling to understand the world around them and change it for the better. It is a pleasant experience indeed to watch a movie in which historical characters so vilified by the capitalist media and ignored by "official" history for the masses yet who played such important roles in shaping it are given their due. Were I capable of writing a thoughtful intelligent review of it I would have. Instead, I share this excellent review of the film from Frieda Afary from the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists. Richard Mellor
I. Marx’s concept of organization;
II. Marx’s challenge to the French Anarchist thinker, Pierre Proudhon;
III. The role of women.
Reviewed by Frieda Afary
It is not easy to make a movie about a multidimensional and historical figure like Marx without privileging one aspect of that figure’s life over another. Raoul Peck’s Young Karl Marx however, has succeeded in presenting a holistic view of the young Marx and his time that also speaks movingly to the problems of our time.
That success seems to be rooted in two elements:
First, In addition to being very knowledgeable about Marx’s work and time period, Raoul Peck and Pascal Bonitzer, the screenplay writers have largely drawn on the correspondence of the main characters, Marx, Friedrich Engels, his closest colleague and collaborator, and Jenny von Westphalen, his comrade/wife. In doing so, they have allowed us to hear these characters think.
Secondly, Peck’s own life-experience has made him a creative intellectual/filmmaker/political activist, sensitive to the issue of human suffering and emancipation. Born in Haiti, under Duvalier’s dictatorship, he went to the Congo with his family in 1961 where the first democratically elected government of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba had just been overthrown by U.S.-backed forces loyal to the dictator Mobuto Sese Seko. After living under the dictatorship of Mobutu for many years, he continued his education in France and Germany where he received degrees in industrial engineering, economics, and film. He has had jobs as varied as being a taxi driver in New York, a journalist and later, Haiti’s minister of culture in 1996-1997.
During the past 36 years, Peck has made 21 films, most notably, Lumumba, about the Congolese revolutionary and independence leader, and I Am Not Your Negro about the African American writer, James Baldwin. It is this knowledge and life experience that has been brought to bear on his presentation of the young Marx.
The film thus starts with a chilling scene in which poor peasants– women, men and children –collecting deadwood in Prussia’s Mosel forest in the Rhineland, are assaulted, beaten and killed by agents of landowners who arrive on horsebacks. In the background, we hear excerpts from one of Marx’s 1842 essays on the Prussian law on the theft of wood, which he wrote for the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, where he challenged the very hypocrisy and inhumanity of this law and its use to kill peasants.
Film viewers are then taken to the office of the Rheinische Zeitung where the 24-year old editor, Marx (not yet a communist) is challenging his colleagues to be more radical, even as the Prussian police is banging on the door with an order to shut down the newspaper and arrest them.
Peck then, introduces us to Friedrich Engels, the son/employee of a German textile factory owner in Manchester and a socialist intellectual seeking the collaboration of workers to help him write a book about the condition of the working class in England. Marx and Engels meet for the second time at the office of the German philosopher and political writer, Arnold Ruge. They discuss their respective works, ideals and goals, and the rest is history.
Since it is not possible to discuss all the dimensions of Peck’s film, in this short review, I would like to limit myself to three aspects which stand out as unique: I. Marx’s concept of organization; II. Marx’s challenge to the French Anarchist thinker, Pierre Proudhon; III. The role of women.
I. Marx’s Concept of Organization
While a two-hour film cannot possibly allow any writer/director to do justice to the philosophical, economic, political and social issues that Marx was writing about, or Engels and Marx were jointly writing about, what comes through in Peck’s film is the following: Marx saw himself as a philosopher, the originator of a unique critique of political economy and a totally new concept of human liberation. He was not simply exposing income inequality but challenging alienated labor and the alienation of humanity. He was a profound philosopher and economist but also not an ivory-tower intellectual. Thus, he and Engels actively reached out to workers, men and women, to poor people, to other revolutionary intellectuals, and helped transform the League of the Just from an organization that limited itself to “the brotherhood of men” to one whose manifesto became the Communist Manifesto, written and published on the eve of the 1848 Revolutions that shook up Europe.
The fact that Marx’s concept of human emancipation and his views on organization were completely distorted and turned into totalitarian state capitalist societies, as seen in the USSR and Maoist China, does not permit the abandonment of that concept and its relevance for today.
II. Marx’s Challenge to Proudhon
Peck emphasizes how much the development of Marx’s ideas was a response to what he and Engels thought were the inadequacies of Pierre Proudhon’s views. At the same time, we see that Marx and Engels made an effort to reach out to Proudhon in their organizational work, because they respected him as a worker-intellectual and a working-class leader.
The gist of Marx’s critique of Proudhon is expressed in a few scenes in which Marx challenges Proudhon’s view of “property as theft” for being inadequate in its understanding of capitalism and capitalist relations of production, namely alienated mechanical labor and its consequences. Peck also depicts how Marx took it upon himself to do a serious study of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty (1846), and was compelled to write Poverty of Philosophy(1847), as a response.
In his Philosophy of Poverty, Proudhon had argued that if money were abolished and if workers were paid vouchers based on their labor time, the vouchers would allow autonomous cooperatives and communities to have transparent exchange and social relations without the need for a central plan.
Marx, in his Poverty of Philosophy, and later in the Grundrisse, critiqued Proudhon’s thesis and argued that under capitalism too, workers’ wages are based on their labor time. However, the labor time used as the measure of remuneration under capitalism is not the worker’s actual labor time but the minimum labor time for the production of an exchange value. Later in Capital he called this measure, an average or “socially necessary labor time.” He thought that any conception that fell short of comprehending the capitalist mode of production and its fragmentation of the human being, would not be able to offer an alternative that could truly transcend capitalism.
While the detailed content of these books could not be discussed in The Young Marx, the film does show that Poverty of Philosophy was meant as a book for workers as much as for intellectuals. In one scene, Mary Burns, a worker, is shown holding it up at a labor meeting and calling on the participants to read Marx’s response to Proudhon.
III. The Role of Women
Peck makes a special effort to highlight the role and characters of Marx’s wife, Jenny von Westphalen and Engels’s companion, Mary Burns. Jenny von Westphalen was the daughter of an aristocratic family in Trier and had been Marx’s friend from a young age. She was not simply Marx’s wife. As a highly educated woman who had also become a revolutionary, she was a thinker and a comrade who could carry on debates with Marx and assisted him in the development of his ideas. She was independent-minded and articulate. She endured poverty and endless hardships because of having married a revolutionary who kept getting expelled from one country after another for his ideas and activities. However, she did not return to Prussia to live with her aristocratic family, because she truly believed in the cause for which she and Marx were both fighting. All of these dimensions of Jenny Marx come through in the film and make viewers truly admire her.
Mary Burns was also not simply Engels’s companion. She was a militant and vocal Irish worker who challenged the horrible conditions of factory labor and helped introduce Engels to the League of the Just, an organization of revolutionary artisans and workers led by German emigrant artisans, Karl Schapper and Wilhelm Weitling. She was also very interested in the ideas that Marx and Engels were developing, and participated in activities with them to introduce these ideas to other workers.
The last scene in the film in which Marx, Engels, Jenny von Westphalen and Mary Burns are sitting around a table and editing the handwritten copy of the Communist Manifesto, is truly memorable.
IV. Marx’s Relevance for Today
It is the Communist Manifesto, the culmination of the film, that Peck argues, speaks volumes to today’s crisis-ridden capitalism. In an interview about the film, he states: “Both projects [I Am Not Your Negro and The Young Karl Marx] were a sort of response to the world I see around me, and not only here in this country [U.S.] but in Europe and in the Third World. It’s what I call the rise of ignorance, of confusion . . . I just wanted to give a response and come back to what I call the fundamentals.” (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/25/588673944/the-young-karl-marx-looks-inside-the-mind-of-a-revolutionary) In another interview, he states: “Marx was not dogmatic. Marx always said you need to reanalyze your current situation and your historic situation.” (http://www.newsweek.com/young-karl-marx-movie-raoul-peck-director-review-communist-manifesto-communism-818987)
It is not only Marx’s critique of capitalism but also his ability to comprehend reality in a holistic way, to analyze, to be a critical and independent thinker, that Peck thinks we can learn from in order to challenge the growing populism, dogmatism and authoritarianism that is engulfing the world. Peck wants a new generation to know that they can change the world for the better and revolutionize it, provided they begin with the thinkers who give us the foundation to do so.
Hopefully, Peck will go on to make parts II and III of this film to cover the other periods of Marx’s life.
Frieda Afary
March 23, 2018
Cast: August Diehl as Karl Marx, Stefan Konarske as Friedrich Engels, Vicky Krieps as Jenny von Westphalen, Hannah Steele as Mary Burns, Olivier Gourmet as Pierre Proudhon, Rolf Kanies as Moses Hess, Niels-Bruno Schmidt as Karl Grun, Alexander Scheer as Wilhelm Weitling.
Director: Raoul Peck
Writers: Pascal Bonitzer and Raoul Peck
Cinematographer: Kolja Brandt
Editor: Frederique Broos
Composer: Alexei Aigui
Languages: German, French, English with English subtitles
Length: 118 minutes
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