Whatever Happened to the Proletariat?

David Rosen

The Left Forum was held in New York on the May 29^th-31^st weekend and thousands attended.  It offered numerous panels led by academics, activists and independent thinkers of every strip as well as film screenings and public plenaries.  Everyone ran into someone they knew from a past life or started a new friendship.  While a lot of grey-haired veterans of the ‘60s were present, a strong turn out of millennials confirmed that the left is alive in America.

The one thing missing from the gathering was “the proletariat.”  Remember in The Communist Manifesto when Marx warns: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”  The word proletariat was never formally mentioned during the weekend.

What happened to the proletariat?

The Forum was a joyous gathering hosting diverse discussions involving critical social, political and intellectual issues.  Topics ranged from Black Lives Matter to anti-fracking, the national security state and the $15-hr minimum wage to the Islamic State, Cuba and even Victor Serge.  In one panel on women & the Red Scare, 99-year-old Miriam Moskowitz talked about having been railroaded by the FBI, convicted of espionage and served 2 years in a federal penitentiary; her conviction was overturned, yet she has not received justice, an exoneration.  Individually, each session had value.

The conference confirmed that the left serves two important roles: it articulates a critical perspective on key issues and it champions individual and collective activism.  Unfortunately, the left is playing a mostly defensive role, trying to preserve lost gains as global economic reorganization remakes the country.  As many presenters made clear, the tyranny of finance capital, old-time racism, carbon polluters and the national-security state dominates American politics.

Sadly, the conference offered no revolutionary vision to inspire the vast American populace to change the system.  A host of trying concerns knit together a loose confederation of different interests that share one underlying belief: there’s a need to create a more equitable society, one based on a more humane, non-racist and environmentally-sound redistribution of wealth.  Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the Democratic Party’s quality conscious, articulate this vision.

The media regularly reports on political bribery scandals, secret campaign funds and luxury speaking-engagement junkets.  Today’s ruling class, the 1 percent is not – in Marx’s words – “trembling.”  Like robber barons of old, today’s ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank.

* * *

For a century, the concept of proletariat anchored radical analysis and politics, theory and practice.  Its now all but disappeared.

From European revolutionaries of 1848 to victims of the ‘50s Red Scare, it was a concept understood by radicals of every strip.  The proletariat was the vanguard of struggle, at once the most advanced sector of the capitalist system in terms of generating profit as well as the most exploited.  Given Marx’s dialectic thinking, the proletariat prefiguring a utopian future, suggesting new forms of social organization.  Today, the proletariat has vanished from radical discourse.  But has it disappeared from the historical stage?

Marx was a student of Hegel and believed in the dialectic, that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.  In the Communist Manifesto, he defines the proletariat in the following terms:

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Who was Marx’s proletariat?  He was an industrial workingman (we’re dealing with 19^th century conventions):  “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.  He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”  He also was an individual, a man:  “The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.  Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”  The proletariat knew the system was rigged.

Often forgotten, for Marx the proletariat was not the “dangerous class,”the lumpen-proletariat.  He called the lowest class, “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society ….”  He did acknowledge, that they “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

The same year Marx issued the Communist Manifesto, 1848, Pierre Proudhon, France’s leading revolution and an anarchist, insisted,

“the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government.”  He saw the proletariat remaking society: the “problem before the labouring classes . . . [is] not in capturing, but in subduing both power and monopoly, – that is, in generating from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labour, a greater authority, a more potent fact, which shall envelop capital and the state and subjugate them.”

The proletariat was a shared concept among the 19^th and early-20^thcentury left.  Where Marx called for the end of exploitation, Proudhon called for an end to domination; where one saw class, the other saw hierarchy.  Both saw the proletariat as the revolutionary force that could overthrow the tyranny of the capitalist system, both exploitation and domination.  The proletariat was at once the most exploited sector of capitalist society and, in breaking its chains, ushered in a utopian, “communist,” society.

No one speaks in these terms anymore.  Over the last quarter-century, the political imagination of the American left has withered, become instrumentalized into do-good activism.  Not that this activism is unimportant.  Battles against racist cops, antiabortion ravers, environmental criminals, corrupt banksters or revolving-door government cons are but a few of the fronts in with the broad left is confronting a system in crisis.

In Marx’s day, the proletariat was the industrial working class.  Remember, it’s 1860s London of the early factory system and steamship imperialism.  Marx identified the proletariat as those who generated the most surplus value (i.e., profit) and, thus, experienced the greatest degree of exploitation.  They had the most to loose, thus most challenged the owners of the means of production, the capitalist.

Is there a proletariat today?

* * *

Once upon a time, the left — whether Marxists, socialists, anarchists or social democrats — shared a common understanding of the proletariat.  It meant the most exploited, thus most pivotal, thus the most revolutionary sector, of the working class.  But it also meant something more, a force that prefigured new forms of cooperative social relations, communism.

The Bolshevik Revolution killed the proletariat.  First under Lenin, then under Stalin, the centralized party, claiming leadership as the vanguard of the working class, superseded the proletariat.  In the U.S., from the 1930s to 1950s, the proletariat became just another sector of the fragmented working class, organized by often-corrupt unions and those aligned with the Soviet Union, thus decried as “national security threats.”  The proletariat was jettisoned from political discourse during the tumultuous ‘60s like so much historical dead weight.

Now, a half-century later, is there is a proletariat in the U.S. today?  It’s easy to say, “No!”  The traditional industrial working class has all but disappeared and the social struggle is varied and diverse.  The left seems bound together with little but a shared hope that activist intervention and grassroots politics can contain the next crisis let alone right the wrongs that so oppress contemporary American social life.

But if “Yes,” who is it?  Is it the increasing number of inner-city African-Americans and others fighting police lynchings?  Is it the increasing number of rural and suburban Americans fighting fracking?  Is it the growing number of whistleblowers and journalists defending the right to know?

Often overlooked, is the new proletariat the legions of contingent – i.e., freelancers, contractors, consultants — workers hungry for a paycheck and willing to work for what’s been dubbed “the sharing economy?”  There are the estimated 9,000 companies identified with the new for of high-tech innovation.

This new form of exploitation, of turning oneself into a commodity, is spreading throughout the economy.  Its gaining ground within transportation, with companies like Uber and Lyft; apartment rentals with Airbnb; good and services, like designer clothes from RentTheRunway; and odd jobs with TaskRabbit.  And don’t forget adjunct faculty, the exploited intellectual labor force who keeps the billion-dollar collage education racket functioning.

Once upon a time, in Marx’s day, workers sold their labor power; today, everyone sells their personal surplus value, whether a room in their apartment, their car as a driver or their blood by the liter.  Today, nothing is not for sale.

More troubling, capitalism has evolved from an industrial to a financial system, from a nation-state operation to a global enterprise.  The revolutions of 1848 that inspired Marx and Proudhon took place at the dawn of industrial capitalism, a century-and-a-half ago, and the world has changed since then.  However, the tyranny imposed as the fundamental conditions of modern life – exploitation and domination – persist. The question remains: What happened to the proletariat?

Lost in a Sea of Squabbles

Brian Cloughley

The United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs.

– US President Obama  May 23, 2012

60 percent of the United States Naval forces will be stationed in the Asia Pacific by 2020 —P-8s [spy aircraft], Zumwalt-class destroyers, littoral combat ships, forward-deployed forces, Marines in Darwin — all and many more are headed to the Pacific . . . woe betide the foe who decides to challenge the United States of America or our Navy.

– US Vice President for War, Joseph Biden, May 22, 2015 

We will remain the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come.

– US Secretary for War, Ashton Carter, May 27, 2015 

The US navy operates routinely in the Black Sea, in accordance with international law.

– Pentagon, 31 May 2015

Scores of ships and aircraft from 17 countries are taking part in Baltic Sea naval drills as part of exercise BALTOPS which starts on Friday 5 June 2015 and runs until 20 June.

– NATO media release, 4 June 2015

The United States of America is making it clear that it intends to increase its already massive military presence surrounding China and Russia.  Over the past sixty years the capabilities of strike forces stationed in US military bases in Hawaii, Japan, Australia, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand and all over Europe and the Gulf region have grown enormously, as has the number of US combat navy vessels roaming Asian and other seas, ready, as Mr Biden threatens so pugnaciously, to go to war. Biden says that Washington is ready to meet any challenge — but if these bases and warships weren’t there,  they wouldn’t be challenged.  And the only reason they are there is to menace other nations in regions which have nothing whatever to do with the United States.

Mr Biden’s grasp of international affairs is a little shaky, as made clear by his astonishing claim that in Asia “for the past 60 years, the security we provided has enabled the region’s people to turn their talents and hard work into an economic miracle.”  He had obviously forgotten a decade of disaster in Vietnam during which savage mayhem over 50,000 US military personnel died in the cause of nothing fighting a country that had done no harm to the United States.

North Vietnam did not present the slightest threat to a single American citizen.  But millions of civilians in both North and South Vietnam died as a result of Washington’s paranoia, just as a few years later there was similar slaughter in Iraq following the US invasion, and in Afghanistan during an abortive and mishandled military occupation.  The needless toll of American and other nationalities’ soldiers was obscene.  But Washington is entirely undeterred by failure and slaughter and continues to stick out its truculent chin in seas, skies and bases all over the globe.

The trouble is that this time the US is confronting and trying to intimidate two nations which are not prepared to accept swaggering arrogance indefinitely.  Russia and China are proud countries and will not take much more of the condescending arrogance and coat-trailing aggression that are so much a feature of US international pronouncements and provocative actions.

Recently Biden had a cheap sneer at China that shows his utter lack of comprehension concerning that country and its leaders.  In a speech to naval cadets last month he boasted that “President Xi of China, when I was meeting with him, asked me why do I continue to say America is a Pacific power?  And I said because we are.” (And here the transcript notes that there was “Laughter”  —  indicating yet more brainwashing of young US military leaders to believe that all other nations are inferior.)

But if Mr Biden and the rest of the Indispensable America brigade imagine for a moment that President Xi and his country might find his mocking comment even remotely amusing they are totally wrong.   Biden’s bombastic blabber epitomizes the sort of juvenile bragging that has made Washington loathed and distrusted in so many places, and Biden is following the example of his amateur president about whom so many Americans (and countless foreigners) had such great hopes concerning his approach to foreign relations.  There was a feeling that at last there might be an era of understanding, collaboration and give-and-take.

But now it is obvious that the United States, although stridently proclaiming that it is an “indispensable nation” and one that will be the “principal security power” in Asia, has no intention of extending its influence through international diplomacy or bilateral negotiations with nations it considers are becoming a little uppity.  The US intends to achieve authority over the world by military domination.

But it won’t succeed.

US military antics in the Baltic, Black and South China Seas would be laughable were they not so calculatingly confrontational.  And they are increasingly likely to lead to direct conflict.  While this might satisfy the macho posturing of self-important little politicians and others who have no idea what it’s like to hear bullets flying (and a lot of gung-ho generals as well), there is a rather wider aspect of this bravado, which is that these people are putting the world at extreme risk of nuclear war. Doctor Strangelove lives on in such hideous caricatures as the appropriately named General Breedlove, the deranged commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military machine.

On March 4, 2015 Breedlove told the world that in Eastern Ukraine there were “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery.”  This was (and continues to be) utter nonsense. As Germany’sDer Spiegel recounted “For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.”

Of course he was.  Deliberately — and most successfully. We’re back to the exciting days of Cold War propaganda.  As Der Spiegel reported when the Ukraine “crisis” began, “General Breedlove announced that the Russians had assembled 40,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and warned that an invasion could take place at any moment . . .  But intelligence officials from NATO member states had already excluded the possibility of a Russian invasion. They believed that neither the composition nor the equipment of the troops was consistent with an imminent invasion. The experts contradicted Breedlove’s view in almost every respect. There weren’t 40,000 soldiers on the border . . . Furthermore, most of the military equipment had not been brought to the border for a possible invasion, but had already been there prior to the beginning of the conflict,” and so on.

Strangelove was fantasizing.  And my information is that this was deliberate.  As we are all aware, every defense force plans for as many contingencies as can be imagined.  US military staffs did appreciations of a possible “Russia-Ukraine Conflict” which concluded that if Russia had wanted to invade and conquer Ukraine it could have done so in about twenty days.  There would have been nothing whatever that the US or its subservient NATO “partners” could have done about it.  Of course Russia would have been insane to have invaded Ukraine because as it well knows it would have suffered a massive and lasting insurrection by Ukrainian citizens.  All that Moscow wants is decent treatment by the Kiev government of Russian-cultured, Russian-speaking people.

Obama and his war-drumming acolytes couldn’t care less about decent treatment of people, especially Russians in Ukraine, and in May Obama declared that Russia is taking an “increasingly aggressive posture.”  Yes, it is — because it is surrounded by US-NATO belligerents who are intent on pressuring Russia until — again the magic words, folks! — there is yet another Regime Change.  It is believed in Washington and a few other places that All will be Well for the Free World when Putin is toppled by some sort of revolution, just as Ukraine became a paradise after its elected president was overthrown.  Like Libya and Iraq.

As with many developments in Washington’s global arrogance, there is a sliver of black humor detectable from time to time. In this instance there was Obama’s presumably straight-faced rhetorical question concerning Mr Putin. “Does he,” thundered Obama, “recognise that Russia’s greatness does not depend on violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries?”  —  Just as Washington recognised sovereignty in Iraq and Libya, destroying both countries after violating their territory and thus creating absolute chaos throughout the Middle East.

I repeat that China and Russia are not going to accept Washington’s belligerent pontification for much longer.  Obama and his merry team of swaggering video barbarians are standing into danger.  They would be well to consider the words of Hunter S Thompson when he advised that in time of difficulty it is as well to “Pray to God, but row away from the rocks,” because from the Baltic to the South China Sea, by way of the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf, there are lots of rocks ready to rip holes in wandering warmongers.

The Stuff No One Talks About

Ron Jacobs

Despite the fact that the US military is still engaged in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is virtually no discussion of this reality. Furthermore, so-called Special Forces teams (death squads) are at work around the world taking out enemies of the Pentagon and the interests it protects. Millions of US residents believe their security and lives depend on the ability of these highly trained death squads to find and kill enemies their rulers have made. It is when these death squads fail to do their jobs that the regular military steps in. Sometimes this is done surreptitiously under the guise of advisors and other times it is done en masse with an invasion force. The world has seen both approaches in the past few decades. Iraq has borne the brunt of each approach. In addition, there are economic sanctions and no-fly zones, both of which are supposedly designed to convince the citizens of the country being sanctioned to rise up against their government. To my knowledge, this has never happened. Instead, the usual response of those citizens is to rally around their government against the outside enemy or for the country to fail as a state. One can see the former psychology at work in the imperial nations where the fear of the enemy creates a desire for security that discards cherished freedoms in the name of that supposed security.

One aspect of this craving for security seems to be a lack of critical thinking. Very few commentators or politicians question the need for more military presence or more law enforcement. We have seen this over and over ever since the events known as 9-11. There are more law enforcers in our lives and they tend to be more brutal and less respectful of civil liberties and civil rights. In addition, they are armed to the teeth with lethal weapons well beyond anything necessary for what we once considered to be regular policing. As in times past, those who feel the brutal effects of this over-policing are those who are not well off and usually not white-skinned. Perhaps more alarming than the apparent upsurge in police brutality is the rabid support it receives from a loud and contentious segment of the US populace. While it is true that this element of the polity has always been present, it seems reasonable to state that it is more vocal than it has been since at least the mid-twentieth century. The question is why?

My answer is simple. There is an element of the US ruling class that agrees with the bigotry of these US residents. These individuals are more than willing to fund groups and campaigns whose primary intention is to divide people by racial identity, national origin and religion. They have a media organization whose primary raison d’etre is to do exactly this. This media outlet is of course, FOX News. Naming this corporation does not in any way exonerate the other national and international media groups that spew their own version of the swill FOX News calls commentary. However, it is FOX News that leads the way in the campaign to divide the working people against themselves. From NPR and the New York Times to USA Today and CNN, the tendency to project the ideology underlying FOX News’ presentation is not accidental.

This past week, it was announced that the US Air National Guard and numerous corporate sponsors intend to bring their air show back to Burlington, VT. This air show had been cancelled in a previous year because of a lack of government funding. Its reappearance has touched off some sore nerves in light of a heated controversy over the basing of the latest death plane—the F-35—at Burlington’s airport. In short, despite loud and popular protests against the basing of the F-35 at the airport, the Air Force is going ahead with its plans to do so. Almost every politician in Vermont, from Bernie Sanders to Senator Pat Leahy and the ambitious Democratic mayor of Burlington Miro Weinberger, supported this basing. Once again, this was in spite of very popular citizen protests. Anyhow, back to the air show.

To those who opposed the F-35, the upcoming air show is like being spit at. To many of those who support the F-35, it is a verification of the necessity of weaponry like the F-35. Their arguments claim that it is the military that keeps them safe; indeed it is the military that keeps all of us safe, even those of us who oppose the plane. Plus, they continue, the planes are only being used to protect US airspace from bad guys. Then, of course the events of 9-11 are brought up once again. These statements do not come just from people who always support the military. This in itself raises a question of what would make these people think that the US military protects them.

That is when the true shortcomings of liberal and progressive thinking come into play. By accepting the government’s propaganda that it is the military that keeps us safe, people do not have to ask the question why are we in danger? They can ignore the history of their nation’s military, its role in exploiting the resources and peoples around the planet and the consequences of that role. To put it as succinctly as possible, the primary reason the “homeland” needs protection is because its military has killed and maimed countless humans around the globe while destroying their homes, livelihoods and futures. In doing so, it has created innumerable enemies, many of whom are intent in doing harm to those of us who live within the United States’ confines. This statement is not made to excuse the actions of these individuals and groups, nor is it made to justify the actions of nations that support them.

It is made, however, because it demands the question why? Why does the United States invade nations and occupy them? Why does the United States bomb countrysides back “to the stone age,” poisoning their land and people? Why does the United States arm and support repressive regimes around the world that imprison and torture their own citizens? And, to bring it home, why does the United States arm its domestic police forces with military-grade weaponry and excuse their murderous repression of the poorer classes inside the US?

This is the stuff no one talks about. This is the missing piece of every politician’s program. Whether it is a progressive like Bernie Sanders calling for tuition-free colleges and single payer medical care or a right-winger like Lindsey Graham calling for more wars, the essential link is the profiteering off the people and resources of other nations. Sanders and similar-minded progressives want to make the lives of US working people the best in the world by instituting social democratic programs while the right wing merely want to make their wealthy friends and supporters even wealthier. Ultimately, it appears that neither political position cares too much about the effects their imperial policies have on those in other lands. This is true in spite of attempts by the right wing in the US to paint politicians like Sanders and even Barack Obama as un-American. As long as they all believe in American exceptionalism their similarities will be more distinctive than their differences. The late social critic Mike Marqusee once wrote, ‘“America” remains a dangerous construct and one that serves the elite better than the majority.” (Chimes of Freedom, p. 277) Does Marqusee’s statement then mean that no matter what politicians like Sanders say or do, by accepting the tenets of American exceptionalism, they can ultimately only serve the elite? Furthermore, by voting for them, are we similarly complicit?

Manufacturing Hope

Elliot Murphy

The political writer John Hilley recently wrote a response to Owen Jones’s Guardian article in late May about why the British left should adopt the language of Podemos. He points out that although Jones’s criticisms apply extremely well to substantial parts of the left, his single solution of reforming the Labour party ought to be questioned: ‘Lamentably, within this lofty endorsement of Podemos, Jones still fails to concede that Labour can never be a credible vehicle for change, that it’s long-done, unreformable, too tainted by establishment ideology, neoliberal doctrine and historic sellout.’

Hilley notes that when Jones is challenged on Twitter to justify his left-Labourism, he quite typically responds with terse jibes like ‘Ever get bored of your sectarianism?’ and, in response to Hilley’s assessment of his Guardian piece, he often resorts to (cleverly) shielding himself from criticism by branding others as ‘dogmatic’, ‘self-indulgent’ and ‘sectarian’. But as Hilley notes, Jones’s unusual sensitivity to challenge and his dismissive responses effectively imply that ‘having a fundamental disagreement on such vital issues constitutes some petty wish for division, or that a challenging view is somehow invalid’. Holding someone’s arguments up to scrutiny should not be seen as divisive, although the fact that Jones very clearly gets a tantrum on whenever prodded tells us more about him than it does about the British left (his persistent use of the phrase ‘people like you’ when addressing such troublesome horrors as Hilley reveals a deeply conservative and even undemocratic instinct within Jones, no matter how superficially socialist and tolerant he and his writings may appear). In addition, Jones fails to make the crucial distinction between individual and organisational sectarianism, with the latter, and not typically the former, being a central obstacle for the left: If an individual chooses to distance themselves from the views of others in a particular domain of discussion, this does not imply that the organisation they belong to, as a whole, will be unable to collaborate and support other forms of organisation and political action.

One of the handful of times I’ve spoken to Jones was last October when he was hosted by a UCL Left Forum meeting. I decided to ask him about Media Lens, the group involved in keeping tabs on the ‘liberal media’ and exposing biases, close friends of Hilley’s. Jones’s face instantly scrunched up. ‘Them lot’, he said. We walked out of the university building, his eyes glued to his feet. He accused them of being self-important and self-aggrandising, resenting the number of occasions they’ve challenged his views on topics ranging from Libya to media ownership. I pushed him on why he’d ever object to these kind of discussions, surely to be welcomed in a healthy democracy. He repeated the line about self-importance but threw in ‘self-indulgent’ for good measure.

Most of what Hilley says, on the other hand, is easy to agree with, although going so far as he does in outright rejecting any substantial differences between the leadership candidates is neither accurate nor helpful. Still, encouraging comparisons between the position of Jones and the Media Lens-style ‘we need a revolution’ rhetoric (as they claimed on Facebook around the time of the election) is plainly to be welcomed, despite the latter’s lack of comprehensive strategy besides building non-profit media outlets and ‘rejecting the state’ and other such notions.

As the sociologist Seán Duffy at Glasgow University pointed out soon after the publication of Jones’s piece, ‘Spain isn’t starting to elect seemingly radical left politicians because Podemos have been “communicating better”, rather because 100,000s of people have been involved in sustained and effective mobilisation against the corruption and incompetence of their government. This simply is not happening in the UK’. It seems to me that Jones is in fact part of the problem here, what with his overly simplistic and cautiously ambiguous calls for ‘hope’. As Chris Hedges notes, ‘this kind of mania for hope is really a kind of sickness, because it prevents us from seeing how dire and catastrophic the situation is if we don’t radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the ecosystem’ [http://goo.gl/IvFD3H]. And Jones – by ending his piece by pointing to the (clear and acknowledged) limitations of demonstrations and opting for intensely vague and amorphous forms of action involving what Jones calls ‘communities’ – is not adding anything to the urgent strategic debates being had across the country in organisations from the excellent rs21 to the rapidly expanding Counterfire to the somewhat more spectacle-oriented though inspiring People’s Assembly.

It has been well established through numerous reviews and endorsements that Owen Jones’s book The Establishment: And how they get away with it lays out some important criticisms of international trade, the UK police force, tax laws and the financial system. Yet while the establishment includes for him ‘media barons who set the terms of debate’, Jones fails to mention one of the most influential critical media models, Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model in Manufacturing Consent, which argues that media reporting is influenced by the private interests which fund and maintain news outlets. The media themselves are, after all, corporations, and so are concerned primarily with profit maximisation, but the term ‘corporate media’ is only used once by Jones. He writes that ‘the Establishment could hardly ask for a more effective lobbying operation than the British media’. Yet his chapter ‘Mediaocracy’ completely ignores the Guardian, his trusty employer, with Jones attacking the easy targets (Daily Star,Daily Mail), despite the Guardian’s role in supporting numerous aspects of the neoliberal project (including an aggressive foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya) and backing New Labour. With the focus of attack being on wealthy individuals, what conveniently escape attention are firms and trusts (like the Scott Trust – which is a firm, not a trust – owner of the Guardian). Jones is quick to condemn media barons like Rupert Murdoch for their reprehensible actions, but ignores the influence of corporate owners and advertisers (as in the recent case of the Daily Telegraph’s reports of the HSBC scandal, tempered due to commercial interests).

Jones also claims that Harold Wilson was attacked by the British left for ‘giving diplomatic support’ to the US during its bombing of Vietnam. He adds that Wilson ‘did not commit British forces to the conflict’. But Wilson gave much more than diplomatic support, with secret British air flights sending arms to the US, while MI6 dispatched teams to South Vietnam. Jones’s claim that ‘Britain joined the US-led coalition that invaded Afghanistan to depose the Taliban regime’ is also incorrect. The Taliban objective came weeks after the initial invasion, orchestrated after the Taliban refused to extradite Bin Laden and associates when the US demanded, the Whitehouse claiming (without evidence) that they were involved in 9/11.

Jones’s conception of the establishment is also too Tory-heavy, ignoring the strong corporate ties of Miliband’s Labour opposition and the Liberal Democrats. In addition, while Labour exhibits extreme institutional hostility to the left, Jones insisted on supporting Miliband to the hilt during the recent general election campaign for his ‘passion and grit’. And whereas Russell Brand’s Revolution quotes controversial anarchists like Chomsky and Graeber, Jones safely quotes The Communist Manifesto, discussing few contemporary writers and activists. Indeed one of Jones’s earliest articles appeared in 2007 on an online Marxist journal, and his special kind of soft left-Labourism may be appealing to some in a time of relentless austerity, but the Labour party shows no signs of breaking with neoliberalism. The core philosophy of the Labour leadership is accommodation, not being wildly pro-austerity to the level of Osborne, but pro-austerity enough to please important City figures, as the current leadership candidates reflect (which the honourable exception of Jeremy Corbyn). Yet the only parts of Labour which The Establishment seems to object to is Blairism and John Smith’s opposition in the early 1990s.

Jones believes in ‘extending democracy to every sphere of life’, including ‘the wider economy and the workplace’ – archetypal anarchist and socialist views, but views which The Establishment rarely translates into concrete policy proposals. Edward Snowden is mentioned once, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks never, while Libya receives a single mention. Like Revolution, The Establishment’s repeated adoption of abstract gesturing and the illusion of tactical instruction often reaches impressive heights; Jones is very good at writing sentences like ‘But the rise of the Internet and, in particular, social media provide fresh opportunities for new movements to link together’.

While Chavs documented the prejudice against the working classes, The Establishment exhibits numerous instances of class hatred, mocking establishment figures for their fake tans, etc. And, as with Revolution, Jones’s book contains some glaring contradictions. He writes that establishment membership is based on shared ‘mentality’ on one page (echoed in subsequent interviews), and on another he claims membership is based not on personal characteristics but institutional position.

Jones concludes simply by invoking the ‘politics of hope’ before reproducing his favourite Tony Benn quote about the flame of anger at injustice. This is great, but an obsession with hope is where Jones differs from Naomi Klein (and Chomsky, Chris Hedges and George Orwell). We do not read these figures to be uplifted and feel optimistic about the state of the world, and yet they provide a much more comprehensive series of alternative political visions. What is needed is an anti-austerity grassroots strategy, something which the currently dominant Blairite wing of Labour plainly cannot deliver. No matter how many times he quotes Benn and stands behind podiums declaring ‘solidarity’ for every movement from DPAC to UK Uncut, by hanging onto the Labour party and only rarely discussing progressive alternatives Jones may well starve the British left of some much needed innovation.

The War in Colombia and Why It Continues

W.T. Whitney Jr.

In Havana, representatives of the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been negotiating peace for 30 months. The war they are trying to end has killed or disappeared 250,000 Colombians over 25 years. The future of the talks is uncertain.

“Today the mountains and forests of Colombia are the heart of Latin America.” At an international forum on Colombia on June 8, former Uruguayan President Jose Mujica was saying that developments in Colombia, including the peace process, are “the most important in Latin America.”

Interviewed on May 30, head FARC negotiator Iván Márquez, asserted that “confidence at the negotiating table is badly impaired and that only a bilateral ceasefire can help the process advance.” He said deaths of “human rights defenders [including] over 100 members of the Patriotic March coalition” and “persecution of leaders of the social movements” were poisoning the atmosphere.

Since March in Cúcuta, thugs have killed four labor leaders, including on June 2 Alex Fabián Espinosa, a member of the MOVICE human rights group. In May assassins killed community leader Juan David Quintana and professor and social activist Luis Fernando Wolff, both in Medellin.Analyst Azalea Robles says that “a total of 19 human rights defenders were murdered in Columbia during the first four months of 2015.”

On April 15, FARC guerrillas killed 11 Colombian soldiers in Buenos Aires (Cauca). According to Márquez, “They were defending themselves following the disembarkation of troops [from aircraft] who were advancing on them.” In apparent retaliation, the Colombian military, bombing from the air, killed 27 guerrillas on May 21 in Guapi (Cauca).   The FARC immediately ended the unilateral, indefinite ceasefire it declared in December, 2014. Within days, government forces killed 10 guerrillas in Antioquia and five more in Choco Department. The dead included two FARC peace negotiators who were in Colombia updating guerrillas on the talks.

Negotiators have reached preliminary agreements on three agenda categories: land, narco-trafficking, and political participation. But now they’ve have spent a year on the “victims” agenda item; reparations and assignment of blame were prime topics. On completion recently of their 37th round of talks, they did agree to form a truth commission as “part of the integral system of truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition.” Work on that project may divert government negotiators from their steady focus on “transitional justice” which entails punishment and jail time for FARC leaders.

A pilot project on removing landmines and discussions by military leaders on both sides about ceasefire mechanisms are other markers of progress. Márquez insists on “reconciliation on the basis of actual history, far-reaching justice, comprehensive reparation, and no repetition [and] all of this is tied to structural transformations.” This last promises to be a sticking point.

Azalea Robles explains why: Emphasizing Colombian government dependency on powerful economic interests, she implies that the hands of government negotiators are tied. “The Colombian reality,” she says,” is shaped by dispossession and territorial re-accommodation destined for all areas … that are of economic interest. It’s a capitalist logic that allows no scruples and constitutes ecocide turned into genocide. In Colombia strategies of terror are promoted and they relate to capitalist plunder.”

For example, “80 percent of human rights violations and 87 percent of population displacements take place in regions where multinationals pursue mining exploitation, [and] 78 percent of attacks against unionists were against those working in the mining and energy areas.” Some “40 percent of Colombian land is under concession by multinational corporations.” She counts 25 environmentalists killed in 2014.

Capitalism in Colombia, Robles insists, rests on “state terrorism.” She cites “physical elimination” of the Patriotic Union party, “6.3 million dispossessed and displaced from their lands for the benefit of big capital,” and “60 percent of assassinations of unionists worldwide” having taken place in Colombia.

The fate of Wayuu Indians in La Guajira Department epitomizes the terror of extreme poverty and powerlessness. Some 600,000 of them occupy northern borderlands in Colombia and Venezuela. In 2012, 14 000 Wayuu children died of starvation and 36,000 survivors were malnourished; 38.8 percent of Wayuu children under age five died. La Guajira’s El Cerrejón, owned by the BHP Billiton and Anglo America corporations, is the world’s largest open-pit coal mine. Mine operators have destroyed Wayuu villages and poisoned soil and water. They pump 35,000 liters of water out of the Rancheria River each day thus depriving the Wayuu of water they need for survival

While ongoing violence and terror serve as backdrop for the peace process, that reality, ironically enough, originally prompted President Juan Manuel Santos to initiate the talks. He and his political and business allies worried that for civil war to continue might frighten off multinational corporations and international investors. To protect Colombia’s capitalist economy and its integration within the U. S. – led globalized system, they wanted it to end.

But, one asks, where is the common ground shared by a capitalist regime habituated to criminal brutality and Marxist insurgents still in the field after 50 years?

Maybe compromise is not to be, and civil war will continue. Writing for rebelion.org, Colombian political exile José Antonio Gutiérrez D.accuses the Santos government of using negotiations exclusively to create space for strengthening its military power, while beating up on its political opposition and the FARC. Peace, he implies, is not the government‘s objective.

In fact, the government anticipates a “neo-liberal peace.” Were that to occur, the FARC would be giving up on its basic objective of securing justice through political action. FARC negotiators have long called for a peace with mechanisms in place allowing for social justice and structural transformations to flourish. A constituent assembly is a prime example.

Commentator Fernando Dorado gives voice to the government’s line. Fearing that the FARC itself might use a bilateral truce to restore military capabilities, he specifies that, “The only solution is to de-escalate confrontation voluntarily and speed up the talks.” He regards ex-President Uribe’s recent switch to supporting peace on neo-liberal terms as facilitating this approach. Until now Uribe has masterminded obstruction to the peace process. Dorado claims the U.S. government is insisting that “the bloc of hegemonic power [in Colombia]’ unify itself in order to achieve its objective: ‘neo-liberal peace’ with tiny ‘democratic’ concessions.”

The spilt among conservative forces stems from the Santos-led group’s face-off against right wingers – ones Uribe speaks for – who are loyal to traditional forms of oligarchical power, among them: large landholdings, ranching, military force, paramilitaries, and more recently narco-trafficking.

The government now is riding high in the negotiations on account of its power, which is military in nature but rests also on its command of the economy and its U.S. alliance. To both achieve peace and rescue its goals, the FARC must, by any logic, also project power; good ideas are not enough. Indeed, ever such since negotiations began in 2012, FARC strategists have been clear on how to do that. They’ve called for popular mobilization in Colombia for peace with justice – for a people’s uprising.

In a recent interview FARC commander Carlos Antonio Lozada, a delegate to the Havana peace talks, explains: “What with vacillations by Santos and growing pressures from militarism against the peace process, the only guarantee of its continuing and its definitive consolidation is that the majority sectors who believe in a political solution to the conflict mobilize in its defense. Peace with social justice for our people will not come as a present from the oligarchy.” He regrets that, “Still there is no success in structuring a broad front that brings together and decisively mobilizes all the social and political forces that crave a peace with democratic changes.”

In the end, the outcome of negotiations probably will depend on what happens in Colombia. Jaime Caycedo, secretary – general of the Communist Party, announced on June 4 that “social and political organizations will be preparing a national mobilization in favour of peace and the demand for a bilateral cease fire.” It takes place in late July.

Dangerous Military Buildup in Asia and Pacific

Ann Wright 

The international community is extraordinarily concerned about the Chinese construction on small islands and atolls in disputed waters off China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan.  Over the past 18 months, the Chinese government has created islands out of atolls and larger islands out of small ones.

With the Obama administration’s “pivot” of the United States military and economic strategy to Asia and the Pacific, the Chinese have seen military construction in their front yard.

I’ve just returned from my third trip to Jeju Island, South Korea. Jeju is called the Island of Peace.  However, it’s where the South Korean military has almost finished construction of a new naval base, the first military base on this strategically located island south of the mainland of Korea that is littered with U.S. and South Korean military bases, leftover from the Korean war and that are a part of the U.S. “defense” of South Korea from  “aggression” from North Korea.

The Jeju Island naval base will be the homeport for ships that carry the U.S. Aegis missiles.  Many on the island call it a U.S. naval base since it will be a key part of the U.S. “pivot” to Asia and the worldwide U.S. missile defense system. They believe that the naval base will be used as frequently by U.S. warships as by South Korean ships and submarines.  With a naval base on Jeju Island, they believe that Jeju Island  becomes a target should military hostilities breakout in Asia and the Pacific.

The naval base was built in the pristine waters off Gangjeong Village midst seven years of intense civic outrage.    The destruction of the marine environment off the village where the famous women divers for decades have harvested by hand the “fruits of the sea” is one of the cultural and economic losses the construction of the naval base has caused.

The destruction by huge dynamite explosions of a unique geologic rock formation called  “Gureombi” is a cultural and spiritual loss to the islanders.  Its tide pools, crystal clear springs and lava rock formations made “Guremobi” a favorite area for villagers and visitors to the island.

Photo by Ann Wright.  Only section of Gurombi rocks left.

The construction of the naval base in spite of strong local opposition is a part of the history of oppression of the people of Jeju Island from the mainland government. After the Korean War, South Korean and United States military forces which conducted the infamous April 3 massacres of over 30,000 islanders who were believed to be opposed to the right wing Singman Rhee government, dissidents and sympathizers for reunification of Korea.  The April 3 “incident” left a deep scar on the people of Jeju Island and made them very sensitive to mainland government policies, particularly those which “target” them again.

The South Korean government has built the naval base in one of the most inhospitable areas of Jeju Island.  The naval base faces the open ocean and has already been battered by two typhoons which have displaced huge concrete cassions which form the foundation of the quarter mile breakwater created to protect the base from the sea.  The government attempted to put the base at two more favorable geographic locations on Jeju Island but were deterred by citizens who successfully refused to allow the base to be constructed in their part of the island.

Despite large and continuing protests in Gangjeong village against the construction of the naval base, the South Korean national government reportedly with intense pressure from the United States decided that they had to begin construction somewhere on the island and chose to ignore the strong local opposition.

However, the decision has come at a great cost to the national government.  Daily demonstrations and frequent large demonstrations with planeloads of mainlanders flying into help islanders, have resulted in the government having to deploy hundreds of police from the mainland to counter the demonstrations.  Local police on Jeju Island are felt to have too much sympathy for the demonstrations and therefore police from the mainland are needed.  Islanders see this as an historic throwback to the April 3, 1948 oppression of opposition to mainland government policies.

Each day at Gangjeong village begins with a 7am demonstration of 100 “bows” at the front gate of the naval base.  Protesters block one lane of the base forcing a slowdown of traffic of concrete trucks and other vehicles entering the base.  For almost an hour, the demonstrators silently offer thoughts on the militarization of their island as they bow or kneel.  At 11am Catholic priests and laywomen conduct a daily mass across from the front gate as other priests and activists sit in chairs blocking both lanes into and out of the base.  Every 20 minutes, a platoon of young police men and women march into the seated protesters and carry the chair and the person sitting in it to the side of the road, opening the road for traffic for five minutes.  Then the police march back into the base and the protesters immediately move their chairs back to block the lanes into the base. After an hour of blocking the entrance, the protest ends with an energetic dance—and traffic resumes.  Long time activists recognize that the hour protest is a small delay in the construction of the base, but consider the two daily protests as extremely important actions to remind the national government of their continuing opposition to the military base.

Photo with Ann Wright’s camera.  Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire, Ann Wright, Catholic sisters and other Gangjeong activists after having been lifted up and carried in chairs out of the road to allow steady stream of concrete trucks to enter the naval base.

My first visit to Jeju Island was in 2011.  At that time, activists still had their camp on the  Guremobi rocks on the edge of the ocean.  The camp consisted of a long educational tent, a sleeping tent and a cook and eating tent.  Every day activists would conduct workshops and ceremonies on the rocks.

When I returned in 2013, despite the intense efforts of the activists, the Guremobi rock formation had been blown up with dynamic and construction had begun with two huge facilities built on the remains of the rocks to create the massive concrete caissons that would be lowered into the ocean to form the quarter mile long breakwater to protect the base from the open ocean.

Returning two years later in 2015 with eight women from the Women Cross the DMZ walk www.womencrossdmz, including Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire and CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, I was devastated to see the vastness of the naval base which is nearing completion.  Although statistics on the amount of concrete that has been poured into the ocean and into the buildings on the base are unavailable, the sheer scale of the base leads one to guess that a road around the world could have been built with that volume of concrete.

Photo by Ann Wright      Jeju Island Naval Base Huge Breakwater

And its not just on the base itself that construction has proceeded.  As villagers suspected from the beginning, the base would expand into other parts of the community.  More land near the base is now being condemned by the government so it can be used to build housing for military personnel and their families.

After seven years of large protests against the construction of the military base, the base has been built—and the Chinese know it as they have watched the construction—up close—as, remarkably, the South Korean government allows Chinese tourists to visit Jeju Island without a visa.  The Chinese tourist trade is large—as is the purchase of land by Chinese on Jeju Island.  A big area on Jeju Island is now a Chinese “health” vacation area with condos and other facilities for Chinese—even the road signs in the area are in Chinese!

The Chinese are watching another construction project in the Pacific.  This time a United States military base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa.  Despite massive Okinawan opposition, including a visit in May 2015 of the governor of Okinawa to Washington, DC, the U.S. is planning to begin expansion of Camp Schwab, a U.S. Marine Corps base and construction of an airfield runway on Okinawa.  The runway will project out into the South China Sea into pristine waters with endangered coral formations and into the habitat of the dugong, a manatee-like marine mammal.  Okinawa makes up 1% of Japan’s land mass but is the location of 74% of all U.S. military bases in Japan.

Okinawans have been protesting for years the expansion of Camp Schwab, a U.S. Marine Base.  Only last month, over 35,000 Okinawans gathered to voice their opposition to their national government’s approval of the base despite the opposition of all levels of the Okinawan provincial government and island civil society.

In 2007, I visited the activists on Okinawa at their seaside camp where they have a daily presence to remind the U.S. military that they do not want the naval base.  The senior citizens of the village of Henoko moved their Senior Citizens center to the beach so they could participate each day in attempting to preserve their village from another military base.  (RT footage)

The Chinese have been watching the process for the building of another U.S. base in the Pacific, as they have watched the expansion of U.S. military forces on the U.S. territory of Guam.  The projected increase in U.S. military personnel and their families is expected to increase the population of the small Micronesian island by 30 percent.

In another interesting economic considerations versus foreign policy posturing between sparing countries, Russian tourists to Guam do not need a visa to the United States to visit the island.

The bottom line is that the Chinese see the expansion of the United States military forces and capabilities in their front yard and are constructing their own projections of power on the tiny disputed islands and atolls off their coast.  Neither the United States nor China need any of these bases as both have more than enough air capability in the form of aircraft or missiles to initiate or counter any military move by the other.

All of this construction is another example of the never ending, massively expensive war mindset of political leaders and their financial backers who profit from a hostile world.

Israel in Action

Binoy Kampmark 

More should have been made about it last month, but the security patrons and aficionados heaved a sigh of relief more than despair when it concluded. Effectively, efforts to obtain a consensus document at the end of the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference held between April 27 and May 22 were railroaded. The UK delegation suggested that there was only one key sticking point: that of the establishment of a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.

As a review in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted, “It came down to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada supporting Israel’s position on a conference to pursue a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.” The 2010 final document had demanded that a conference be convened on the subject of the zone prior to the end of 2012, to be hosted in Finland with the facilitator Jaakko Laajava. So much for that.

Such reviews, which come every five years, tend to be ceremonial gestures of box ticking and smug denial. They focus, ostensibly, on assessing the progress made towards halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons; provide states complying with the provisions of the treaty access to non-weaponised nuclear technology; and, rather dreamily, the efforts of nuclear weapons disarmament on the part of the Permanent Five (P5) states.

Those fascinated by the dynamics of the nuclear club see the NPT as a successful document, one that has 191 signatories and has stalled the creation of more nuclear states. Once the atomic genie was unleased in August 1945 with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the spectre of total nuclearisation became all too real. But getting countries on board the regime of non-proliferation has entailed a rather empty promise as outlined by Article VI of the Treaty. Not developing nuclear weapons on the part of 186 states was bought by the assurance that the nuclear club would dismantle their arsenals.

The non-nuclear states have over the years found the exchange unsatisfactory. The P5 continue going about wistfully refusing to engage in serious dismantling. The old logic of refusal prevails, and with just under 16,000 nuclear weapons available at the push of a trigger, this balance of terror is something that established nuclear states would not do without. If one has them, the rest have to.

All that seemed to transpire at this conference was a desperate attempt to keep an ill patient afoot. It reached an absurd point where a skeletal, poor document of 184 paragraphs was backed by a majority of delegates for no other reason than there was no other alternative. Austria’s representative, speaking for over 20 signatories of the Austrian Pledge on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, noted continuing legal deficiencies in the quest for disarmament. But even that creation, with severely diluted language about disarmament, was rejected by the US, Britain and Canada.

Israel’s role as a spoiler was vital. Being itself outside the NPT framework, it has manipulated it with a degree of determined ruthlessness. Its official stance, which neither affirms or denies its nuclear stockpile, suggests how singular approaches will be tolerated.

The P5 states have given assurances over the years that a Middle East WMD Free Zone was on the cards. At the very least, a conference has been mooted to discuss its creation. The proposed text suggested that the UN Secretary-General convene the conference by March 2016.

Non-aligned countries, and Arab states, have seen promise in such a move. Israel has not. At the UN conference, it was Israel’s belligerent position that prevailed. Outside the nuclear state system while being simultaneously of it, Israel was being the vigilante setting up rules it wished everyone else to follow bar its own.

It made the South African head of delegation indignant, observing how, “The failure on the Middle East leaves us in a perverse situation [in which] a state that is outside the Treaty has expectations of us and expects us to play by the rules it will not play by and be subjected to scrutiny it will not subject itself to.”

The rejecting states would have none of it. It was they who were in the right. The speaker for the Canadian delegation claimed that the document was being imposed on all, including Israel. The US delegate speaker suggested that the language used was not compatible with Washington’s policies – this, despite polling showing that a majority of Americans would wish Israel’s clandestine program to come under the umbrella of inspections. As for Britain, it was “this issue [the WMD Free Zone] and this issue alone [that] was the stumbling block.”

Delegates familiar with their history of the NPT noted that its indefinite extension was only bought because of the 1995 resolution on a Middle East WMD Free Zone. Egypt’s delegation was particularly vocal on that score, while the Tunisian delegate insisted that the resolution continued to hold force.

For all that, the singular stance of Israel, one that its allies took note of, doomed an already deficient review document to oblivion. The NPT will simply going on being a shadow of itself, degenerating, as the South African delegate observed, “into minority rule – as in apartheid-era South Africa – where the will of the few reigned supreme over the majority.”

Prom Pop and the Rites of Adolescence

DAVID YEARSLEY

As the older of my two daughters went off to her senior prom last weekend, I couldn’t help but think back to a trip to the local mall to see Disney’s Prom made with her back in 2011 just on the other side of her high school years.

Hollywood’s rating system works in one direction: the older you get, the more “mature” is the content you’re allowed to see without your parents, bearing in mind that maturity and the Hollywood movie generally stand in oxymoronic relation to one another. There is no guide, other than common sense and word of mouth, to inform chronological adults that they might best avoid the most egregiously infantile creations from America’s Dream Machine.

Yet just because a movie is benign and cuddly, doesn’t mean adults won’t enjoy it. The first film I saw in the cinema with my elder daughter, then three-and-a-half, was Disney’s The Tigger Movie back in 2000. I loved every minute of that picture, marveling especially at the enduring musical craftsmanship of the songwriting Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, then in their seventies.

But men of a certain age can probably only go to such a movie in the company of kids. Imagine the distrusting stares a middle-aged man would get if he tried to go alone to The Tigger Movie. That would appear far more “inappropriate” than an unattended six-year-old buying a ticket for the latest Terminator incarnation.

The above-mentioned daughter was thirteen when I took her and a couple of her friends to go to Disney’s, Prom. I harbored no secret desires to see what by definition must be a pointless movie, but I have always seized every opportunity to go to the cinema with my kids. I’ll also have to admit that, having made it through Disney’s epic High School Musical  trilogy in the company of my daughters, I had developed a fascination with the Mouse House’s treatment of the rites of adolescence.

Going to the movies with a group of girls, one sees all the more clearly how divided along gender lines filmmaking and marketing are, especially for the teen-set. A man going to Disney’s Prom feels about as out of place as a woman sitting on the Board of Directors of Icahn Enterprises.

Although I loved going to the movies with my daughters, I did realize that all they really needed was a ride to the mall. Once they had reached double-digit age they were only too happy to let me drift off to another movie so they would see their thing without me nearby. An inveterate screen-surfer when at the mall, I always scan the LED readout, and that time saw that Thor in 3-D was just starting.

Once inside the multiplex I let the girls wander off towards Prom, and then tried surreptitiously to reach into large cardboard recycling container holding the returned 3-D glasses for Thor. In the process of getting the lid off I knocked the whole thing over with an impressive crash. Forty feet away the ticket-taker, a Gothic teen who seemed unconcerned about doing his part to maximize Regal Cinema’s profits, gave me a casual nod. I grabbed a pair of the glasses, hastily reassembled the container, then ducked into Thor.

The vast majority of this film’s audience was pre- and early-teen boys; hardly a female was to be seen in the packed theater. Yet another Disney picture, Thor was directed by the somewhat celebrated Shakespearean actor and director Kenneth Branagh, apparently enticed away from more legitimate projects by the lure of greater fame and bigger money in fantasy action pictures. Whereas Prom is presumably is intent on training young girls in the arts of chaste courtship and class spirit, Thormight just as well be a recruiting ad for the U. S. Marines.

I donned my borrowed 3-D glasses as a forlorn-looking Anthony Hopkins, his face wedged comically between the cheek protectors of his Roman helmet, descended from icy clouds on a white horse. The redoubtable Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack strummed its ominous electro-acoustic lyre while superheroes in tight leather and armies of bad guys batted about in three-dimensional cinematic airspace. After three minutes of this tomfoolery, Prom seemed like a beacon of believability and relevance, so I left Thor to the men and boys, and headed over to the girls in Cinema 11, dropping my 3-D glasses in the bin on the way.

The first thing one notices about the audience for Prom, one far smaller than the throngs in Thor, is not only that it is almost exclusively female, but also very young. Aside from the chaperoning mothers, my daughter and her friends were among the oldest kids. A large birthday group of what looked like five or six year-olds was nearby our seats. What they were getting out of this movie, which flopped badly, was hard to fathom. From the earliest age children are fascinated with somewhat older children, and the infantilizing methods of Disney’s Prom perhaps make it possible for a six-year-old to identify with the on-screen figures.

The thrill of admiring the somewhat older kids would also explain why no high-school seniors, or for that matter any high-schoolers whatever, were in the Prom audience. It is not merely the disjunction between the realities of proms and the Disneyified version that keeps the late teenagers away, but the fact that it would be massively uncool to be seen watching this stuff from the vantage point of senior year in high school.

But identification of the supposed high-schoolers in Prom as larger children defies all credibility. In the movie, class president and prom organizer Nova is played by the twenty-one-year-old Aimee Teegarden, while apparent bad boy, but actually big-hearted Jesse is embodied by Thomas McDonell, who’s at least twenty-five if he’s a day. Even the wizardry of lens gels, expert lighting and makeup, and expensive plastic surgery cannot make these faces appear to be those of teenagers. It is oddly comforting to see how, like weeds busting through asphalt, nature so easily thwarts Hollywood’s highly evolved anti-aging technologies.

Kindred forms of scalpel work are applied to the compilation soundtrack of hit songs. That pop traffics almost exclusively in sex while Promavoids the topic completely tells us much about the Disney enterprise more generally: avoid the truth wherever possible in order to protect the magic kingdom of good clean family fun. The culminating scene of Promis set to sexually proactive Katy Perry’s heart-warming mega-hit “Firework,” one of three number-one singles from her 2010 album,Teenage Dream and the over-the-top climax of her 2015 Super Bowl half-time show. The song is all optimism and ebullience, extolling the potential to be found inside every individual: “Baby you’re a firework / Come on let your colors burst.” Never mind that Perry has had transgressive hits like “I Kissed a Girl” and “Ur So Gay.” For Prom her work is on message and seemingly unobjectionable.

Most of the numbers on the Prom soundtrack are anodyne and unthreatening. Where decades ago parents feared the potency of rock ‘n roll to incite youthful rebelliousness, if not outright rebellion, it has long since been co-opted by everyone from corporate advertisers to Christian praisers. Prom bolsters its often flagging story line, and its most ridiculous conceit—that the girls must wait to be asked to the prom by the boys—with jolts of upbeat, whitebread pop.

With Nova longing for goody-two-shoes Brandon, who only thinks about himself and the fact he’s just gotten into Princeton, a blast of smarmy sensuality by the Neon Trees, fronted by the mohawked Mormon Tyler Glenn, tries to make us feel how important prom is for our heroine and all the other good kids. We don’t hear the song’s creepy opening: “I got close to your skin while you were sleeping / I taste the salt on your hands” (though you get that on the movie soundtrack album). This could by sung from the point-of-view of a faithful dog licking the palm of its master or mistress, but I don’t think so. Instead we hear only the adoring lines appearing later in the song “You look like a thousand suns.” But then there are the pathetic pleadings of “Oh, how long till your surrender?” Exactly what is to be surrendered is not hard to guess.

The furtive erotic drive of this song is neatly suppressed in the service of proving that sex does not exist in this movie’s Michigan high school, with its palm trees and Spanish colonial architecture.

In spite of the movie’s apparently straitlaced façade, sex lurks around every corner of the musical hallways of the soundtrack. Travie McCoy’s “We’ll Be Alright” presents a radically different vision of youth culture than the images on screen: ” yeah, yeah, come on let’s / Get drunk, toast it up, we don’t give a fuck.” And yes, there are “pretty girls everywhere” to get drunk with, smoke pot, and do what follows.

But these sentiments are skirted in favor of the lyric reminding listeners that “We are young, we run free.” Yet the promise of unbridled liberty is not indulged in the movie itself, the most dangerous escapade being a low-speed ride on Travis’s motorcycle with Nova holding on tight behind him—a quaint updating of “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

Sex is the white elephant just off-screen. Yet even if the movie bowdlerizes its songs it cannot suppress what the rhythms and textures of pop are all about.