Now, I'm a fan of Godard, but honestly it seems as if this movie was only made so that Godard could be seen as a Marxist. Thoughts?
shareI think one thing made clear in this movie (as well as in films like La Chinoise) is that "Marxism" and other political movements always stray from their ideals to some extent. You have to remember the workers in the film talk a lot about how they are no longer doing things the "party's way." It seems Godard also isn't completely glorifying the position of the workers either though as he shows the act rashly and cruely as well. Godard is giving a look at life as worker and shows us both the good and bad of the then-current state of the French Communists.
shareHis thought seems left-communist.. or at least anti-stalinist left. Its situationist inspired so a lot of the modern disciples of this thought would be the anarchists.
Read up about May 1968 and in particular Guy Debord and the Situationists.
You obviously don't know much about the inner workings of the communist movement. Godard wasn't saying that communists stray from their ideals; he was criticizing the French Communist Party specifically for doing so. The French Communist Party is a joke in the worldwide communist movement today, and it has been since the 1950s. Even as far back as the 1940s the Cominform was criticizing the PCF for its non-revolutionary politics and demanding that it shape up. It probably would have done so, ultimately, except that after Stalin's death Khrushchev stopped the pressure and urged Western communist parties to seek a "peaceful road to socialism" in the interests of avoiding tension with the West. The result of this policy became clear when, in 1968, a revolutionary situation erupted in France as 11 million workers went on strike, workers were seizing factories, the country was paralyzed and De Gaulle fled abroad; in this situation, when the Communist Party could have and should have taken power, the party backed down and refused to seize the moment, committed to its liberal parliamentarist politics.
Godard leaned toward the Maoist branch of the communist movement. He was a communist, although I think his politics were somewhat muddled. But it's clear in his movies that he isn't condemning communism as a whole; rather he was critiquing the sorry state of the French "communist" movement. He was criticizing them from the left, not from the right.
As opposed to a Maoist, huh?
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
A scientific definition still needs to be invented to explain what, exactly, is a "Maoist" in the context of advanced industrial Western imperialist countries.
True, there used to be large numbers of people in the sixties and seventies (plus some very few nowadays) in the "West" who thought of themselves as Maoists, but even so, what exactly makes them Maoist?
If the word is to have a meaning, something more than a label, it needs to reflect some qualities related to class struggle (especially in light of peasant~proletarian interactions); ethnic/national liberation movements; anti-stalinist elements of the Cultural revolution. To be a "Western supporter" of those revolutionary processes from afar, cheering them on as they unfold in the faraway third world, or even within the domestic oppressed cultural groups trapped within the borders of the Empire's "motherlands", does not make one a Maoist.
I wonder about the meaning of the word in the context of the above discussion.
Petros
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