Panelists

Chris Cutrone (Platypus)
Stephen Duncombe (author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy)
Pat Korte (New School SDS)
Charles Post (Solidarity)
Paul Street (author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, 2008)

Location

New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Silver Center, room 405

Audio

Permalink for audio archive site.
Transcript of the forum is available here.

Platypus questions for panelists

1. Many people across the political spectrum—including those who claim to be on the Left—assume that the election of Obama represents a symbolic vindication of the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. But is the implied conception of the Civil Rights movement really adequate to this history? Pivotal Civil Rights intellectuals and leaders, including Bayard Rustin and even Martin Luther King Jr., advocated the use of political force against the economically structured social inequality of American race relations. As Rustin put it: “Negro poverty…will not be eliminated without a total war on poverty.” This vision clearly lost out—indeed, Rustin saw even purportedly radical declarations of “Black power” as both a conservative naturalization of the racial difference the movement had tried to eliminate and a rationalization of powerlessness. Today, changing the racial composition of the powers-that-be, celebrating diversity, and pursuing sanctioned reform and institutionally-given power are seen as the limits of what the Civil Rights Movement imagined or pushed to achieve.
2. What are the roots of this historical forgetfulness? What critique can we offer to the reduction of the Civil Rights movement to symbolism and status-quo powers? And how might such a critique help foster popular political energy against the structural inequalities that remain intact in American Society?
3. Organized labor was a major constituency of the Obama campaign, and put much effort into working for an Obama victory. For instance, the “Change to Win Coalition” mobilized the political power of six million workers represented by seven unions, it organized teams to knock on doors, make phones calls, distribute information, to rally for an Obama victory. However, even during the campaign Obama made statements, specifically about teachers’ unions, which revealed that he didn’t consider himself as squarely in the camp of organized labor. More recently he has said that he intends to bring all parties to the table, including labor and the interests of Capital, to seek solutions to the financial crisis. With this in mind, to what extent should organized labor see in Obama a “partner” in the struggles of the working class to secure improvements in their bargaining position? Furthermore, how can the working class take advantage of the limited opportunities presented by the Obama presidency without losing the degree of independence needed to push beyond what seems possible under the administration. What can be done beginning under Obama’s presidency to reverse the assault on organized labor which has characterized the past several decades and to put the working class into an active and not passive or defensive position? What is the agenda of labor regardless of the president?
4. The vacuous phrase “Wall street vs. Main Street” was effectively used by the Obama campaign to portray the class divisions made perceivably more acute by the current economic crisis. How should this opportunistic rhetoric be addressed? And how should criticism of capitalist class-society and its crises be promoted without simply condemning the “greed” of Capitalists and heralding the altruism of the “working people”? What can be done to deepen a public understanding of class dynamics and to counter the ideological confusion produced by the crisis and its management.
5. The politics of Anti-Iraq-War dissent, coupled with Anti-Bush-Administration disapproval, has driven Leftist organizing for most of the past decade. These politics have cemented a bond between political bedfellows who seem to share little more than the deep-set reliance on the quantification of “opposition” through mass-demonstrations and disapproval polling, and the cynical belief that practically anybody is better than Bush and the Republicans. Indeed, it often seems like the only thing that has held together groups with deeply conflicting principles and social visions has been a general “anti” stance towards the current regime. However, Obama’s administration threatens to dissolve this arrangement by meeting, at least in part, many of the rallying demands of the “movement”—for instance, by closing Guantanamo Bay, settling on a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, curtailing some of the gross war-profiteering, and becoming less hostile to the U.N. and more careful with “global opinion.” If Obama’s presidency does diminish the efficacy of Bush-era “anti” politics, can you foresee a new arrangement of principles and criticisms which could create a more successful oppositional force? What could this Left stand for? How might it be capable of fighting against the causes of war across presidential terms, specific military campaigns, and nationally bound politics?
6. Rather than hysterically celebrating Obama’s election as the “beginning of a new age” or cynically dismissing it as a meaningless display of “celebrity politics”, how do we determine what is really new versus what is left wholly unchanged in the present political moment? What are the actual and significant new developments the Obama presidency represents—or may represent—for the Left? This seems to be deeply affected by how we understand the election in light of the continuing weakness and obsolescence of the Left as a social force. How is Obama’s election part of a more general historical trajectory, characterized by the loss of political possibilities and the decline of a Leftist politics? And what might be done today to buck against that trend?
7. To what extent is Obama or anyone in his administration free to transform socio-economic conditions in the United States? To what extent are they—granting them even the best of intentions—bound to preserve and reproduce these conditions? How should a Left begin to clarify and aim to overcome this present limitation? And how might it address this problem of constraint so that the task to overcome the limitations of social agency is made clear and may point toward effective political action? In other words, what would the Left need to become to end capitalism in 10 years?

Persepolis is a film that does not take itself seriously enough. This is not a comment on the unadorned animation style. Nor am I referring to the narrative of the protagonist: a story of a girl raised in a left-wing milieu that succeeds in arousing quite a bit of empathy in the audience. It is the film’s treatment of depoliticization as a fait accompli and its persistent retreat to the safety of the personal that make it a fascinating symptom of politics today. Read politically, Persepolis is a trenchant, if unreflective, look into the fate of contemporary political life.

Co-directed by the creator of the graphic novel on which the film was based, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is a wonderful combination of autobiography and political history. Marjane grows up in Iran and, as a young girl, seems to have the “heart of a radical.” At first an innocent supporter of the Shah, little Marjane changes her tune after a lecture by her parents, left-wing intellectuals both and supporters of socialist revolution. The film tarries in the excitement of the revolutionary moment for a good while and introduces us to Marjane’s grandmother, whose husband was a notorious communist, and her uncle, who had been jailed for 13 years under the Shah and released at this moment of change. The Iranian intellectuals are thrilled by a sense of the emancipatory possibilities of the Iranian Revolution, and as spectators we experience this excitement through the mind of the young girl, whose active imagination shapes the film stylistically.

As the revolution goes on, the film is forthright and quite affective in facing the intense sense of disappointment that arises among this group when the Revolution brings not emancipation, but perhaps worse enslavement. This is brought home in a number of ways: the constant atmosphere of fear created by bombs dropping from Iraq on one side and “morality police” on the other; the increased idiocy of the propagandistic school lessons Marjane receives; and the demand by the revolutionary authorities that women be veiled—an obligation so frustrating to the female protagonists of the film that whenever they can, they doff their headgear with satisfaction. Perhaps the most powerful is the final execution of Marjane’s uncle, a communist who held out hope for the ability of the people to seize control of their destinies until the very end.

What does one do after one has renounced “the future”? What happens when emancipation becomes impossible? One drifts alone through history; one faces the anomie and depoliticization that marks the rest of the film. Marjane begins listening to banned music such as punk rock in school and then travels to Vienna and joins a young nihilist crowd. She finds this all trifling (at one point she yells at the nihilists that her uncle actually died for something real). She goes in and out of several love affairs, but cannot be satisfied with running to Europe. So she returns to Iran—to face depression, a bad marriage, and a generally self-absorbed life. When Marjane sics a policeman on an innocent as a joke, her grandmother remonstrates her in the name of her ancestors. Yet at the close of the film the grandmother has died, silencing the last voice that may still have believed in that radical future beyond a half-hearted compromise with the rotten present.

The loss of the sense of possibility that occurs after the hopes of the Revolution have been dashed is felt deeply on all levels of the film. The story slackens; the episodes become more interchangeable. The heroine seems to find herself more and more “pushed” in given directions—as if the failure of a revolutionary moment had condemned those with the highest hope for it to a downward spiral of neurosis. One can read Persepolis as a coming-of-age tale, wherein Marjane learns to temper the “revolutionary” enthusiasm of childhood and the “nihilistic” selfishness of adolescence with the “quietly resigned” wisdom of adulthood. Yet this reading treats the politics of the film as mere background. The great interest of the film lies in how it can relate failed moments of political possibility and a certain kind of subjectivity—Marjane becomes horribly banalized by the end of political hope.

Now, I began this review with the claim that Persepolis does not take itself seriously enough. What Persepolis lacks is an awareness of how well it shows, by its changes in personal and aesthetic registers, the way in which Marjane’s possibilities as a person are denuded by the lost hope of political change. This may ultimately be due to the lack of any significant narration—the “present-day Marjane’s” reflections are too much bound up in this failure to offer us an outside-point on which we can stand and survey the destruction wrought on her person. It is too easy to see the film as no more than a touching story about growing up under oppression and about one person’s life and increasing acceptance of how much she can “actually” accomplish. The movie lends itself to sentimentalism because of the naïve reverence for Marjane and her family that its first-person perspective encourages.

Yet the film deserves to be read more symptomatically. Marjane concretizes the “post-political” malaise of the person who cannot come to terms with political failure and uses self-absorption as an escape-route from facing this failure. She is the perfect child of the 80s and 90s. Persepolis manages to effectively traverse a moment of political possibility and the sorrier and sorrier state of its subject before, during, and after that moment and its failure. The film offers the Left a mirror to itself and the sources of its own immobility—its inability to admit that it failed. It is up to us to critique what this mirror shows. |P