Lid lifted on US gaols

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Guest reviewer STUART SUTHERLAND looks at the film BRUBAKER', directed by est reviewer STUART SUTHERLAND looks Stuart Rosènberg and starring Robert Redford. art Rosenberg and starring Robert Redford.

in the state and winning general public and used agains reforms. government that. he Robert Redford plays Brubaker, the new warden at a prison farm in the deep south USA, who arrives disguised as a new convict.

He witnesses at first hand the brutality and corruption of the heavily armed trustee convict guards, the prison governor and the local capitalists.

'Brubaker hides his true identity until a crisis arises. A convict held in a maximum security area that is worse than a pig sty goes wild and threatens to break the neck of a fellow inmate unless he gets better treatment.

He demands to see the warden and to emphasise what he wants he sings the Aretha Franklin song 'R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Brubaker reveals his true identity to a disbelieving crowd of onlookers and then proceeds to restore calm by promising reforms.

It turns out that the reformer Brubaker has been sent by ambitious political backers to expose the situation at the prison as a way of discrediting more powerful political groups Of course we knew from the start that Redford could not be just another prisoner.

He is marked out by the director as something special by the way his elegant golden coiffure is preserved during the induction proceedings and the mysterious way he remains aloof during the violent and cruel actions of the prison guards.

This is not the behaviour Ke expect from the Sundance we expect from the Sundance Kid.

Slave labour

Brubaker ends the supply of slave labour from the prison to local farms and businesses, improves the living conditions of the convicts, establishes a prison council and stops the exploitation of the ordinary convicts by the trustees. All of this has the backing of his political supporters.

But it is when he discovers that many prisoners have been murdered on the farm and presses hard for this to be made He 1s going too soon for the political cy of his backers and to cool it..

It the state loses his fast, too expedienhe is told Environmentalist Redford is a liberal in real life, an environmentalist, and so is Brubaker.

He goes it alone, one man against the system, believing that 'right and reason must prevai and is consequently broken when his political masters withdraw their support.

Many of the critics of the film "Brubaker" are also liberals.

They pompously write how Redford as an actor cannot contemplate self irony and throw up their hands in horror because Hollywood is cashing in on protest through the box office successes. like "Brubaker", "China Syndrome" and "Coming Home"

This last point is of course true, and obvious. But it ignores the many progressive and important features of these films. In a manner like no other medium they bring before a huge audience important issues such as the abuses of the prison system, nuclear reactor safety and the impact of the Vietnam war.

"Brubaker" is allegedly based on scandalous real-life incidents at a prison in Arkansas in the late sixties.

The film has many very powerful sequences, despite the rambling pace that presumably results from the change in director early in the film's production from Bob Ratelson. to Stuart Rosenberg.

• It graphically depicts the arbitrary violence of prison life, the distrust and fear inmates have of each other, and the authorities' need to break the convicts spiritually as well as physically in order for the prison business to function profitably.

And that is what prison in the USA is all about. They are meant to be profit making co cert movie 'ie ou atte All this 'Brubaker"

Ition.

Respect

The fatal weakness of this film is that ultimately it is about Brubaker's relationship with other men noteably the young convict Bullen, a look-alike for Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, and the pivotal black trustee played magnificently by Yaphet Kotto. The only women in the film are a whore and a cold, calculating careerist.

Like the maximum security prisoner at its beginning this movie is more concerned to win from the convicts and the audience R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Brubaker as. a man than to tackle the political questions it raises and 'that scream out for attention. makes the

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Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 This Socialist Press pamphlet contains articles by Terry Eagleton on marxist theoreticians from the time of the Comintern to the present day-Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Marcuse, Sartre and Althusser.

Price 65p including P&P from WSL, BM Box 5277, WRP of Max Eastman's 1926 pamphlet The Young Trotsky has attracted deservedly little critical attention.

However, the occasion presents the opportunity to recount what is known of Trotsky's • relationship with Eastman, and all its problems, for the benefit of Socialist Press readers unfamiliar with the story.

Readers who have come to know of the WRP's penchant IOI.. "investigation'" may be surprised to find that the new edition of Eastman's pamphlet is published without the proper degree of cautionary foreword which would be expected from such a 'security conscious' "party' as the WRP.

It would of course be entirely scurrilous of this reviewer to suggest that this "lapse' was in any way connected with the WRP's financial crises and its need to utilise and monopolise cine footage originating from Eastman's collection.

Eastman was born in 1883, and died in 1969. He edited a famous radical journal The Masses' in the period before World War I and was an early supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition and was responsible for translating many of Trotsky's most important books into English.

This much can be gleaned from the footnotes to the Pathfinder Press "Writings"

Why then, is there any need to go further?

Firstly, the history tells us a great deal about Trotsky himself and the problems he struggled to overcome in conducting his work.

Secondly, it yields important lessons on the ways in which oppositions within the Trotskyist movement slide into anti-communism:

The most spectacular example of such degeneration in recent years is of course Robin Make ofl London WCIV 6XX Blick (Robert Black) who is passing into the camp! 'of anarchişm as a short term stepping stone on the road to the ruling class.

The lessons of Eastman's trajectory need to be frequently tepeated to any party which recruits individualist intellectuals of that kind.

James P. Cannon in "The First Ten Years of American Communism" recounts how he and Eastman were part of the American delegation to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922.

During this Congress it was Eastman who arranged STILL AVAILABLE of a meeting with Trotsky which eventually swung the Comintern behind the drive to legalise the Communist Party in the USA and to break out of the isolation imposed on it by the domination of the foreign language groups.

In the same book Cannon writes that the first American Trotskyist was undoubtedly Max Eastman'.

Newspaper

During 1928 Eastman published the Platform of the Left Opposition and some other Left Opposition documents, and gave Cannon considerable help in establishing The Militant' after the expulsion of his faction.

Eastman's pamphlet is one of the earliest documents representing his relationship with English" Preface to the original Trotsky.

edition, reprinted by the . Healyites, contains Trotsky's letter to Eastman in which he makes it clear while he does not object to the proposed biographical project and will provide background information for it, he cannot and will not accept any political responsibility for the resulting document. Thus he writes:

66 ... I cannot agree to read your manuscript, for that would make me somewhat responsible not only for the factual side but also for characterisations and valuations. It is quite obvious that this is impossible"

The publication of Eastman's biographical pamphlet contributed substantially to Trotsky's difficulties in holding together the developing opposition to the Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Factional struggles

At almost the same time another and more important book by Eastman, 'Since Lenin Died' , was published, setting out in public for the first time many positions of the Opposition.

The first account of the developing factional struggles was set out, and more importby antly Eastman described the manoeuvres engaged in by the Troika to suppress Lenin's Testament and the last letters he wrote to the Party before his death.

The Opposition was under threat of expulsion if it conducted any public controversy with the Party, and the publication of Eastman's book had all the hallmarks of an attempt by Trotsky to circumvent the discipline of the Party.

The other leaders of the Opposition were not prepared to risk expulsion on the issue of Eastman's book, and called on Trotsky to reject it publicly.

The Political Bureau of the Party drew up a statement of rejection, which they. pressed 1rotsky • to sign. (Ihis statement can be found in "The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-25"• collected and published by Pathfinder). The Party press throughout the world hurried to publish the statement widely.

Trotsky was to reject the statement on several occasions from 1925 onwards, beginning with his letter to Muralov of September 11 1928 which was reprinted in the New International in 1934.

The Stalinists were to use the incident against Trotsky on a number of occasions, as were the petty bourgeois oppositionists in the SWP later.

Trotsky's relations with Eastman were much less affected by this incident than might have been expected, if the available documents are a full account. (Eastman in his preface to The Young Lenin' refers to a large body of correspondence which does not appear to have been published).

For example in his letter of 11 July 1929 to Maurice Paz 'How Revolutionaries are Formed' ', Trotsky writes:

«Eastman designates himself a "feliow traveller" , not aspiring to any leading role in the Left Opposition, content to assist. He has acted correctly, unable to give himself entirely to the movement."

Within a few years this easy relationship was seriously strained by Eastman's rejection of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism and by the difficulties encountered by Trotsky in working with Eastman as a translator and literary agent.

By May 1931 Trotsky was already expressing his concern, in a private letter to Shachtman about the difficulty he was experiencing in obtaining payments for his History of the Russian Revolution which was one of his main sources of inçome.

The publisher, Boni, was claiming his 5% royalties for excerpts from the History serialised in various papers.

In the letter Trotsky first voices his concern at Eastman's failure to fight for Trotsky's interest in this case when the money was urgently needed to launch a German journal.

Although Trotsky and Eastman were not bound together by a contract, their collaboration continued, because of Eastman's many contacts with American publishers.

In his introduction 'Young Lenin' Eastman claims that he got 'some very handsome prices' for articles by Trotsky from the American press.

•During 1932 Eastman's open rejection of the dialectic led to some sharp words from Trotsky.

Lenin In his letter to Glotzer of July 1932 he describes Eastman's philosophy as follows:

"Eastman was here a week ago. We discussed various questions. His attitude toward dialectical materialism alienates him from our world outlook to a very high degree, despite his active political sympathies for the Left Opposition.

Even though he has rejected philosophy, he has a philosophy of his own-more or less 18th century French rationalism translated into the language of Anglo-Saxon empirical-utilitarjanism (engineering mind).

Despite our strong sympathy for Eastman, we will have to draw a sharp line on this most important of questions when the occasion presents itself".

In December of the same year, writing in the Militant on 'Perspectives of American Marxism' , he goes further in his attacks:

"The attempt of Eastman to throw overboard the materialist dialectic in the interests of the "engineering art of revolution" represents an obviously hopeless and, in its possible consequences, retrograde adventure.

A month later, in January 1933 Trotsky wrote to the Editorial Board of the Militant seeking to clarify his relationship with Eastman. He refers to the long history of personal and literary ties between the two men, and expresses his gratitude to Eastman for translating the History of the Russian Revolution into English in an excellent manner.

Despite all this he found it essential to oppose Eastman's attempts to translate Marxist dialectics into vulgar empiricism and to make a public declaration of this difference.

He denounced Eastman's philosophical revisionism as no different from previous petty bourgeois revisionisms such as Bernstein's, even while recognising Eastman's continued support for the October Revolution and the Left Opposition.

Continued

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ADUSTREL NEIS

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The recent republication by the formerly Trotskyist