Clowns, culture and killers

If Communist Party members want to know where nist policy "broad unity' comes must THE TITLE of Chris Menges' film shown on commercial television last week, 'Wild and Free-Twice Daily', exactly expressed his understanding of the life of the circus workers portrayed.

It was a compassionate and poetic account of some of the realities which lie behind the tinsel and sawdust.

Where Hollywood has shown us the sad man behind the clown's grease paint, this film unsentimentally revealed the punishing dedication, skill and hard work which is the truth.

We watched the clowns warm-up and then staunchly run into the ring. The next shot showed them returning; tired professional entertainers after what is merely the public side of their labour.

The tents and cages, seating and far from plush trailers are packed. A long drive to the next field, muddy like the last. Everything now has to be rigged again.

Rehearsals, care of the animals, education of the children, all has to be done too. Then the few exhausting hours of performances.

Expected divisions within the circus 'community' also emerged. The owner's daughter is forbidden (and has completely internalized the command) to go out with the tent riggers.

They are derided as dirty, footloose and ignorant.

But the film shows them to be mostly young, highly-exploited and uneducated casual labourers.

A midget, in his twenties, talked of the choices he faced after leaving school. Like all other wage workers he had only his labour power to sell, his body.

In the circus there were buyers for his shortness, so that was what he sold. back to this period.

The more it purged Clowns, culture It seemed better than being in a factory, he said, because at least he has a unique place in this community.

Beautifully photographed, the circus was seen moving through the dismal industrial landscape. Playgrounds and factories hard next to each other, old men, used up after a lifetime's exploitations, hobbling with their grandchildren to the Girls dressed in lace and garlands prancing behind the ponies into the lights; and the training of young children into the routines and bodily accomplishments needed for them to become the next generation oi performers.

A film of fine sensitivity it touched its subject lightly, but with great insight and warmth. It was a rare event on television where the norms are banality and stridency.

A POET, a painter, a filmmaker and a Marxist who appreciates the full richness of theory, knows that he is not simply faced with the He is part of it—all of it.

What distinguishes a work of the creative imagination is not its abstractness, but the very way in which a complex, uneven, difficult and unpredictable process has taken place in the artist.

This is the process by which the artist experiences his subject, allows it to invade him, becomes full of it, is changed and renders it sensible again.

This is not a passive process; it often involves great struggles between the experience and the artist, between the artist's attempt to understand and to make sense of it consciously, and the sense that he is actually making of it unconsciously—often against his Leninist opposition in the Soviet Union and smashed the last relics of all working-class class independence from the bureaucracy, the more it had to lean on forces totally hostile to the working class.

"The knowledge of these and killers will or 'better judgement'.

Picasso says that painting is dangerous because the canvas talks back.

That means the artist can never be sure what it will say -that he cannot be sure he will want to hear what it is saying about himself or that he will want to be guided by it.

But if he doesn't let it speak he will never hear.

The artist chooses his subject to some extent; in another sense he is chosen by it.

The exercise of his conscious understanding, his knowledge of his wishes and desires, fantasies and fears, will only take him so far.

At some point he will have to trust the experience on which he is embarked, trust his reaction to it, take part in it with the best understanding he has got.

Indeed if he does not, the experience will elude him; he will return with a half-formed thing and present us with an incomplete work.

Then he will have to recognize that fact, recognize what his work or practise reveals about himself as well as about the subject.

That is often painful and can be indeed be experienced as dangerous.

The struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness is never over.

It ebbs and flows for sure, but in order to progress or develop one must give full (although not necessarily free rein to all the great forces flowing from areas of oneself that are not readily amenable to reason and caution, rectitude or reticence. sentenced executed Lenin's comrades ror une same (ncuuous) crime Even his flirtation with the Democracies' with Nazi term cies'), Stalin gave up his quest for a with the Nazis.

The August 1936 number of the Italian CP journal, 'Lo Stato Operajo' issued the following appeal, made in the month that the first batch of It has been said that a neurotic is someone who has found ways of cutting off from his unconscious; ways that mean more or less severe losses of the person.

A psychotic, on the other hand, is someone who feels in constant danger of or actually experiencing an overwhelming invasion by unconscious forces.

A 'normal' person then should be someone actually engaged in the whole self, someone in whom conscious and unconscious understandings are constantly in motion, interpenetrating each other, conflicting as opposites, changing.

In fact, under conditions of modern capitalist society, the 'normal' person is quite the reverse.

He or she is someone 'pathologically normal', rigidly in control of themselves, determined that only what he or she thinks or consciously wants shall be acknowledged; determined above all to impose his view.

The very opposite of a fully-developed Marxist in other words.

One does not become conscious merely by wishing to be so, or by willing it.

These may be beginnings.

The full depth and breadth of theory, however, can only be appreciated by those who have sufficiently broad and deep experience in the world of which theory is making sense.

A system of self-imposed narrowness of experience and mere intellectual understanding separated from existential understanding can never be a substitute.

Indeed it can be dangerous.

Works art cannot be ordered; proletarian culture cannot be demanded from above.

Revolutionary consciousness cannot be prescribed.

Nor can the art and culture coming down to us from the past be dismissed as merely bourgeois' In the same way that Marxism is the greatest philosophical distillation of human experience, so the best art and culture are the finest distillations of human beings experiencing that experience called life or history.

A narrow, neurotic, 'normal' life is the one prescribed for the working class under capitalism and by the hideous distortions of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

Winning some freedom il ›oth situations is difficult an‹ full of danger.

None of us is immune to our crippling system; progress towards a full revolutionary consciousness will proceed in fits and starts, contradictorily.

Often we will have to backwards to go forwards.

Any certainty we think we have has been wrested from the uncertainties, difficulties and contradictions of the past.

Our task, armed with theory, but not rendered immune by it, is to take on the contemporary world in all the complexity of its horror, exploitation, greed and envy and of its delicacy, warmth, brightness and possibility.

In that sense we are all artists.

After all, what do we want to save from barbarism to develop under socialism?

It is the very glimpses we have of human possibilities now and the stultifying effects of capitalism upon those possibilities that make us determined to become revolutionary fighters.

History does not repeat itself mechanically; but without understanding repetitions will occur.

The first time round, as Marx said, will be tragic and the next time farcical. Equally, a man who does not understand his own history is doomed to wander in its reruns.

The task is indeed not merely to understand history but to change it.

Change, however, is as complex as history itself.

Without making a fetish of complexity, the least we can demand is for that complexity to be present in all our understanding.

'WORLD IN ACTION' on October 27 contained some excellent reporting on the Green Berets, the group involved in so many of the most brutal murders in Vietnam.

Part of the US Army's Special Forces, this body of soldiers is conditioned to be rabid killers and ruthless anti-communists.

Their training ground is Fort Bragg, in the rugged country of northern California.

The men are care on pick ot but during the months ferocious conditioning which follow, a further one in three are rejected as either physically unsuitable or because they do not have the 'proper mental attitude'.

By the time this period is completed the men remaining are 'ready for their special duties.

No one should under-estimate their dedication or skill.

Acquainted with the works of Mao, Tito, books on the Cuban Revolution and probably more fundamental studies too, they have been used in 112 imperialist operations around the world since their forma• In 1961, after the events in Cuba, President Kennedy saw the possibilities of such a Although counter - insurgency' is seen as a mission of the whole US Army, according to the commander at Fort Bragg, Colonel. Edward Flanagan, it is most especially the task of the Green Berets.

The recent scandal surrounding the assassination of South Vietnamese doubleagent, where charges against Robert Rheault, the officer commanding the Green Berets in Vietnam, and seven of his men, were dropped, is obviously only the tip of dirty heap of carnage.

Lyman Kirkpatrick, a former executive director of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), explained on the programme that the Green Berets are under the control of the CIA.

Although technically this is so only in 'non-combat areas' admissions that both forces are involved out of uniform as spies and soldiers in Laos and that there is constant lending of men between them made it clear that US imperialism is not inhibited in its actions by any constitutional restraints.

An ex-sergeant in the Green Berets who had seen active service with them in Vietnam gave a picture of their operations.

'We took suspects. The number of suspects seemed to increase as the troops got more tired.

The 'suspects' were regularly tortured, sometimes murdered. These troops thought nothing of cutting off their victims' ears and hanging them on their belts. • The suspects, of course, were usually peasants; old and young, women or children.

This same witness reminded us that these special forces were the first US forces into Vietnam. In 1965 they were employed in the Dominican Republic where they posed as Spanish revolutionaries to take over the national radio station.

In the late 1950s they were used to overthrow the reformist government in Guatemala.

In 1967 the 8th Special Forces Group, normally based in Panama, sent 12 men to Bolivia.

They trained a force of 600 hand-picked peasants in three months; three weeks after this detachment took to the hills it had captured and killed Che Guevara and his companions.

Taught foreign languages they are already in Ethiopia and Pakistan. In January they go to help the Shah in Persia.

Although they are not supermen, we would do well to take serious note of the extent, viciousness and determination of these killers for capitalism.