14 February 2020

An American Myth


My expectations of "An American Factory" went from low to high, plateaued, then bottomed out.

I had first heard it was a project of Barack and Michelle Obama and imagined a cross between an ABC Afternoon Special and an episode of "Ellen." Whatever they had to say about factories or workers did not really rouse my interest given his eight years in office.

Barack and Michelle are our Harry and Meghan. Where Harry and Meghan abandoned the royals for a life in the suburbs of the Commonwealth, the Obamas abandoned the working class for foundations, girding the corporate agenda, and, in their words "telling stories."

With "An American Factory," they've helped to tell a whopper.

The Oscar award, I might say cynically, was the insiders giving their insiders a pat on the back.

A comrade posted Julia Reichert's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. It was for "An American Factory." It was also the first time I had seen her name associated with the documentary. My adrenaline pulsed.

Reichert is a self-described red-diaper baby and a long-time documentary filmmaker that should have compared with Michael Moore. "Growing up Female," "Union Maids," and my first view of her work, "Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists," are among her works.

I expected a good story.

I got a good story. I also got a fairy tale requisite to the upholding of the American myth. This might be the price of Hollywood.

"An American Factory" accurately depicts the prejudices and shenanigans of the management class vis-a-vis the workers. It might have done better to show this power struggle on a macro level where Wall Street, our two corporate political parties which work for it, struggle to suppress any insurgency of the working class. But that might not have fit with the Obama's dream.

The trouble with the editing is it puts the two sides as almost interchangeable.

The scenes exposing the "chairman," and his underlings are surprisingly brutal and revealing how the corporate class exercises capitalism on us. One mid-level manager, fluent in Chinese, openly wishes to duct tape the mouths of his workers. Another brandishes how he has fakes a friendship with a worker whom he is also spying on: "he will not be here in two weeks."

Another scene where some consultants threaten that while the unionized workers may strike, they may also be replaced. This goes unchallenged.

In fact, much of these positions get challenged. But that would have been a different documentary, a better one

The People's Republic of China must be called in to question, but is not. Having followed with some effort the resistance movements in Africa to Chinese investment, the documentary was revelatory. With some effort, because a cadre of the radical left is on the ideological opposition to another cadre over whether China is socialist or not.

While many African governments are singing the praises of China, many civil society and grassroots organizations, as well as African trades unions and leftist, out-of-power parties are much more disparaging. The opponents detail what China is actually doing to its workers and communities.

Watching "An American Factory" put a vivid picture to the complaints of our African comrades. The multi-millionaire, Communist Party of China oligarchs come in wanting to discover us like European capitalism did.

I don't know how anyone can watch this documentary, or listen to those African dissident voices, and see anything socialist about modern-day China. The "chairman" is as crude an oligarch as Rockefeller or Vanderbilt must have been (or Bezos). And the vignette of his brief reminiscence of his childhood where he pretends to reflect upon his role is unimpressive.

I look forward to hearing the advocates of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" pull a rabbit out of this ass.

Without spoiling the pivotal ending, it was what followed that climax that made the documentary a true Hollywood concoction. The workers are shown exhibiting some sense of hopefulness for the American Dream. This is all they seem to have to hold on to. This is supposed to be the happy ending the pornographers want us to walk away with, not what worker's movements actually must do (Reichert did hint at this in her acceptance speech with her quote from Marx's Communist Manifesto).

Your comrades have been set up, injured, fired for being organizers to weaken their ranks; you lose, and your take away is to hold on what the American Dream signifies? No.

US Sen. Sherrod Brown irks the corporate management in front of them at the official opening of the factory. A nice parting shot at the end would have been his comment about how the chairman subverted all those workers, starting with the $12/hour wage. Further focus could have gone to the other struggle within the corporate class itself, one side more nativist and [white] nationalist, as exhibited by Donald Trump, and the other globalist. This might characterize the Republicans and Democrats themselves, too. And neither of these opponents within elite circles gives a damn about workers. But again, this would not be an Obama narrative.

Reichert took the money, produced an Academy Award-winning documentary that is worth watching, but the framing falsely places the chairman and UAW on an equal footing, and this is an American myth, not reality.