The Love of Leon Trotsky

 

Eighty years ago today, Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, better known as the Communist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, died in a hospital in Mexico City from fatal head wounds sustained the day before when a Stalinist agent, Ramon Mercader, attacked him in his study with an ice pick. Trotsky's guards had almost beaten his assailant to death, but while still conscious, he ordered them to stop and after a spell in jail Mercader was to end up spending many years in idle retirement in Cuba at the expense of the USSR.

It was the end of an eventful life. Born to relatively affluent farming parents in the southern Ukrainian Jewish community, Trotsky grew up observing the gross inequalities and violence of Imperial Russia. He became interested in the radical socialist ideas sweeping Russia at the time at university and quickly got into trouble with the Czarist authorities. He was jailed and exiled twice to Siberia, escaping both times and adopting the name of one of his jailers firstly to aid his flight and later to be his revolutionary codename (just as Vladimir Ulyanov became Lenin).

In 1901, anticipating the century ahead from his readings of Marx and Engels, he foresaw better times and devoted himself to struggle for them:

As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!

Trotsky's odyssey took him from the Russian forests to Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Belgium, France,  and the USA in pre-revolutionary exile. He first returned to Russia in 1905 where at the age of just 26 he latterly headed the first St Petersburg Soviet (revolutionary council) during the revolutionary insurrections that nearly toppled the Czar that year. Previously a member of the Russian Social Democrats, a Marxist party, he had stepped back following the split in 1903 between the Bolsheviks under Lenin, who pushed for a highly centralised party to prepare to act as a revolutionary vanguard, and the Menshevik wing headed by Martov, which argued for a more decentralised organisational structure and a more gradualist approach to change. 

For all that Trotsky was committed to socialist revolution, he was at least initially one of the more pragmatic members of the movement, working to reconcile the two wings and maintaining a degree of independence almost right up to the Communist October revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks in spring 1917 when the Russian Empire had collapsed and the liberal regime that had replaced it was veering between repression and chaos. With a reactionary coup narrowly defeated by armed workers, Trotsky headed the Military Revolutionary Committee that co-ordinated the seizure of the Winter Palace and dissolution of the Provisional Government of Kerensky (a bombastic character, much misrepresented in the West in subsequent decades as some tragic democrat as opposed to a would-be Bonapartist dictator-in-waiting).

In the subsequent Russian Civil War, when a range of foreign powers and domestic opponents sought to overthrow the Soviet government, Trotsky was instrumental in creating the Red Army and as Commissar for War directing much of its ultimately successful strategy, fighting a four-front struggle. Traversing Russia in an armed train numerous times, unlike most other leaders on all sides he frequently risked his personal safety to direct and encourage the frontline troops.  

Trotsky speaks on top of his armed train

Once it was over, he initially sought to return to his first love - writing on political theory and practice and history, including producing a four volume history of the revolution - but was persuaded to stay on in government by Lenin. With the country in ruins, Trotsky maintained a militarised approach to reconstruction and while the new socialist regime struggled for some time, his hard tactics began to work and industrial production began to rise again. He worked with Lenin to both nationalise and revitalise the economy, including backing the controversial New Economic Policy which briefly reintroduced small scale market economics while not veering from the aims of a socialised society.

Perhaps though one of the biggest tragedies of both the Revolution and in some ways the whole 20th century was that, following an attempted assassination attempt in 1919, Lenin became chronically and progressively ill, dying in 1924 - possibly hurried along during a visit from Stalin, his ultimate successor and an avowed opponent of Trotsky. 

Stalin had started out as a sort of Bolshevik enforcer - he organised gangs of agitators and fundraised for the Party by carrying out bank robberies (NB - this was one of the few criminal activities Lenin sanctioned). He had always been in the background, almost invisibly so during the revolutions of 1917 but by 1923 had risen to be General Secretary of the Communist Party, a key role overseeing how it ran. 

In the ensuing struggle for power within the party, Trotsky was repeatedly outmanoevred by the rising Georgian sociopath, first being expelled from the Communist Party along with several prominent supporters, then sent on internal exile to Central Asia and finally deported with his wife Natalia Sedova to Turkey in 1929.

In his final, prolonged exile, Trotsky first set up in Prinkipio, an island in the Sea of Marmora just off Istanbul, before subsequently having to move on to France, Norway and then to Mexico as government after government either objected to or feared his activities in the ferment that was 1930s Europe. He worked with relatively small groups of international revolutionaries to develop a counterforce within communism to the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. 

This he devastatingly critiqued in his work Revolution Betrayed, a searing indictment of the bureaucratization of the country, which he had repeatedly warned about in the earliest days of the revolution. A new class had arisen - one of administrators and managers, serving themselves rather than the People, and accountable only to itself. The democratic promise of the early Soviet days had all but evaporated and while he conceded that there were material gains for many ordinary people, these were both impeded and stolen by the new Masters.

Trotsky initially sought to avoid any split in the Communist movement. His stated aim was to restore workers' democracy rather than divide the party, but after Stalin ordered the German Communists to decline any Popular Front with the Social Democrats against the rise of the Nazis, in 1933 he agreed to create a new socialist movement, the Fourth International. This sought to promote a different path to a genuinely communist state, one where power was more firmly in the hands of the masses - though Trotsky's approach remained decidedly centralised, a conundrum in his thinking he never resolved. In any case, the Soviet system as it had evolved to be was to be dismantled and forged again. 

In addition, while Stalin had reconciled with capitalist states, Trotsky argued that Communists should forever press for global revolution - given the state of the world, full revolution in one country was not possible; however challenging, permanent revolution had to be the objective of all communists until world revolution was achieved.

Brooking no opposition, Stalin consolidated his position as supreme authority within the Party and state in the early to mid-thirties before unleashing his Great Terror against his remaining opponents, real and imagined, in the purges of 1937. By the end of the year, virtually all the original revolutionary leaders had been eliminated within the USSR and, condemned in absentia,  Trotsky was to be no exception. Spending his final days in a well-fortified house, Avenida Viena on the outskirts of the Mexican capital, he seems to have sensed his coming end, either from high blood pressure or at the hands of an assassin and while he resisted Mercader, in his reported final words, he seems to have been unsurprised by his pending demise at the behest of his one-time rival.

Volumes have been filled about Trotsky, a good number of them eloquently and passionately by the man himself - Trotsky's writings are rarely not an enthusiastically good read. Yet in spite of this, in many ways he remains one of the most enigmatic characters in revolutionay history. Loved and loathed by socialists of different hues, a genius to some while demonised, literally, by others, his stamp on one of the seminal events of modern history is unquestionable. While communists will argue that historical forces brought about the 1917 revolutions, as Trotsky himself wrote, while such forces are supra-personal, they nevertheless operate through people. 

Trotsky, Lenin and Kamenev in 1918

Without Trostky, Lenin would not have carried the Politburo in favour of the October revolution. Without Trotsky, the Red Army would potentially not have even been created let alone have won the civil war. Without Trotsky, the Soviet Union would have died in its cradle.

Here of course is where everything else moves to the what ifs of alternate history. What if Lenin had lived? What if Trotsky's struggle against Stalin had had a different outcome? What if the Soviet Union had developed along the more proletarian, democratic path he advocated? After the years of War Communism and central direction, how different from the totalitarian Stalinist state or the later Brezhnevite bureaucracy might the Soviet Union have ended up being, or not?

Trotsky, like any human, was of course full of contradictions. He fulminated against Stalin's banning of his Left Opposition faction within the party, but had previously supported Lenin in banning the Workers' Opposition and other factions opposing their strand of thinking. He denounced Stalinist totalitarianism, but had successfully opposed Lenin, a relatively unusual stance, in banning independent trade unions, arguing that such things were no longer necessary in a workers' state.

His own opponents often claim he butchered thousands of people in the civil war, in putting down the Kronstadt rebellion and in suppressing opposition parties in the early 1920s. Yet all this needs some context.

The civil war was a bloody affair. That is the nature of civil wars. All norms of behaviour are destroyed. Distrust rules and outcomes are rarely gentle. The Russian civil war began when Social Revolutionaries, Kadets and other so-called liberal parties decamped from Moscow and Petrograd to Samara in central Russia and set up the Komuch, a rival government, in June 1918. Co-operating with hardline White Russian Czarist generals and soldiers, as well as the Czech Legion, they launched a violent attack on the Soviets, with the avowed aim of liquidating the Bolsheviks who were then ruling in coalition with a faction of Left Social Revolutionaries. 

Over the following three years, the Komuch largely ate itself - the rival liberal and socialist parties turned violently on each other and then, sponsored by the British Empire, the White "People's Army" turned on them and installed Admiral Kolchak as effective dictator. To portray their bloodthirsty campaigns and pogroms, armed and aided by a range of foreign states including the UK, France, the USA and Japan, as some sort of crusade for democracy and freedom is at best misplaced.

It is true that in reaction to the Komuch, the Bolsheviks suppressed, though did not initially ban, the remnants of these parties in their areas and after the Left SRs attempted to assassinate Lenin and carry out a coup d'etat in late 1918, the Soviet Government ruthlessly carried out a wave of often extra-judicial arrests, torture and executions. Even so, this should still be viewed as a response to the nature of the threat they faced, as was the continuation of oppression in the immediate period after the civil war ended. 

Russia was grossly under-developed compared to most of the rest of Europe - it was the last place that Marxists had anticipated a socialist revolution. Initially favourable developments elsewhere in Europe, with Germany in revolution in late 1918 and early 1919, Hungary briefly declared a Soviet Republic, Italy going through a range of Red Uprisings and Leftist movements growing in France and Britain, gave hope for international revolution to follow the Soviet example. However, one by one these were suppressed and snuffed out, often with great violence, but the ruling class's hostility towards the New Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was undiminished. 

With virtually the entire world ranged against the nascent workers' state and more than willing to use everything from economic embargoes to military intervention to overthrow it, the conditions sadly did not lend themselves to generosity towards rivals with murderous intent. 

And yet, in the USSR, women gained marital equality and the right to divorce; it became the first country in the world to legalise homosexuality; the land was collectivised and the economy was taken into state hands. Ultimately, albeit not entirely by the means Trotsky himself advocated, in less than a generation and in spite of the worst war in history and the appalling carnage of the Stalin regime, the Soviets achieved free education for all, built houses for tens of millions, provided free healthcare and were the first country into outer space. Under communism, a peasant state had become a superpower in barely three decades.

Trotsky devoted his life to change: that he miscalculated on occasions, sometimes on a grand scale, does not diminish either his effort or achivements. He was flawed - even allies like Max Eastman, an American supporter, reported that while he observed every protocol of politeness and seemed to have little vanity, his global view of everything made him a detached, in some ways cold character often quite incapable of the diplomacy and sociability required of a successful politician. Typical of his bearing is the story that when Stalin attempted to make a joke to him about a relationship Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent female Bolshevik, was rumoured to be having, Trotsky angrily rebuked him and never spoke to him again in any personal way.

Lenin with Stalin

Yet with his sociopathic charm and crude bonhomie, Stalin was able to build coalitions that literally overwhelmed Trotsky and his earnest comrades in the Left Opposition. 

And while his earlier exiles in Czarist Russia had been times of rising intrigue, his final exile in the 1930s was marked by years of impotent frustration, ranting to his small coterie of followers and staff. While damning Stalin for the rise of Hitler and his unwillingness to compromise with the German SPD, Trotsky was equally to be found blocking and condemning any co-operation between his own Fourth Internationalists and groups like the Spanish POUM, a temporarily highly successful anarcho-syndicalist force in the Spanish civil war.  A reading of his deteriorating and increasingly irate correspondance with his fellow exile, the writer Victor Serge, is a striking example of how banishment did nothing to soften Trotsky and how his intransigence frequently isolated those who, somehow, continued to respect him from afar.

Trostky's son, Lev Sedov, commented that "I think that all Dad's deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older, but under the influence of his isolation, very difficult, unprecedentedly difficult, got worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased. It is not personal, it is a method and hardly good in organisation of work."

It is something much ruminated on - the revolutionary who loves The People, but not people. To Eastman, Trotsky saw the masses but not the personal; all was great forces in action with little regard for individuals who were the parts that made up the sum. And so he was allegedly capable of summarily ordering a roomful of revolutionary officers to be taken outside and shot in the belief that they had failed to carry out their tasks well enough, while at the same time issuing proclamations urging revolutionary soldiers to show mercy to any White combatants who surrendered so that they could be won over to the cause.

Yet while some revolutionaries like Gramsci wondered if having never experienced personal love diminished their capacity as a revolutionary, Trotsky was certainly capable of personal love. Contrary to appalling biographies that try to portray him as an unfeeling psychopath, he cared deeply for his children and risked his life to protect his grandson during one attempted assassination. His brief but passionate love affair with Frieda Kahlo aside, he was devoted to his wife Natalia (whom he also referred to as Natasha) for decades and one of his last pieces of writing offer up a moving tribute to her and what she meant to him, as well as his hopes for a future he by then knew he would not see. It is as beautiful a paean to a revolutionary life as could be penned and in itself is perhaps the best testament to the contradiction of love and zeal, of pragmatism and ideology that was Leon Trotsky:

I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all. However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova.

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness. 

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. 

Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

Mexican exile: Natalia Sedova and Lev Davidovitch

 

Polymath of Revolution: Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson is more often than not remembered by mainstream white culture as the deep, melancholic voice of American musicals, though sometimes in roles that ultimately pandered to white stereotypes of black people. But there was much, much more to this remarkable radical whose life straddled so many of the defining struggles of the 20th century.

He was born in 1898 in New Jersey to a mixed race mother and a black father who had been born a slave before escaping and eventually becoming a pastor. In spite of facing a barrage of racism in his early years, Robeson won a scholarship to Rutgers College where he excelled at sport and played in the National Football League. At the same time, he studied and qualified in law from Columbia Law School, but on graduation, he was faced with patronising racial barriers to progressing in the profession. Encouraged by his new wife Essie, who supported him financially, he switched instead to theatre in Harlem where he soon worked with a range of radical bohemian artists. His performances were widely praised, but the subjects of many of the productions he appeared in challenged prevailing norms about race and society, and led to death threats.

This didn't stop him and he was soon singing as well, presenting concerts of slave spirituals, arguing against the prevalent trend among middle class blacks to eschew their history and culture. Later, while working in theatre in London, he enrolled in courses at the School of Oriental and African Studies to understand African languages and dialects more deeply. Yet as he appeared in more films, he soon encountered racial stereotyping - and appalling treatment where what directors like Alexander Korba assured him were roles taking a more progressive slant on race were twisted round on the editor's floor. This soon sharpened and heightened his political awareness and thirst for social change.

While keen to foster African Americans' pride in their culture and identity, he also deeply believed in the universality of all humanity and through this was drawn to communism. In 1929 in London he encountered striking miners who had marched from Wales and learned of their poverty. He raised funds and travelled to the Valleys with food for their families and supported trade union activists. Later, he met socialist thinkers like H G Wells and this inspired him on his return to the USA to hold concerts to fund raise for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. A couple of years later he became Chair of the Council on African Affairs, a left-wing body advocating for black rights in the USA and against imperialism and colonialism globally. Although tolerated during the war because of the alliance with the USSR, it was listed by the FBI as a subversive organisation in 1946.

He visted the Soviet Union in 1948 (although as with many on the Left at the time he was largely uncritical of Stalinism), worked for Progressive Party US Presidential candidate Henry A Wallace in the same year and supported the American Communist Party, all of which led to him being blacklisted during the McCarthy repression. Along with other CAA leaders, he was charged with subversion in 1953 and denied a passport for five years, seriously damaging his international career as well as cutting his domestic earnings. Surviving this, however, he staged a moderate come back in concerts in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

After the lynching of four black men by a white mob in 1946, Robeson had secured a meeting with President Truman to petition for action to protect black people. However, when he warned the President that failure to stop lynchings would lead to a violent backlash from African Americans, Truman had angrily terminated the meeting. This did not stop Robeson from continuing to campaign, but it was to be another 15 years before the rise of the civil rights movement was to see any real progress. Robeson was for a while active in the movement but ill health compelled him to retire from public view. He died in 1976.

Paul Robeson was a deeply intellectual, multi-faceted man, a true polymath but one even now frequently relegated to a stereotype by white dominated culture.  It is an insipid, patronising and even self-defeating racism in so many ways similar to the "genteel" racial barriers that he had encountered during his brief foray into the legal profession. That he nevertheless held to a politics which, while celebrating cultural difference, fostered the underpinning unity of humankind is consequently all the more impressive.

Here is a full length film biography of Paul Robeson and, below that, his rendition (in a rare English version) of the Soviet National Anthem.

The Ancient Art of Industrial Action: the World's First Strike

 
Our society, with its arrogant belief in our modernity, often looks back at our ancestors with a mixture of disdain towards their supposedly primitive, superstitious nature yet, paradoxically if sometimes patronisingly, stares in awe at some of their (literally) monumental achievements, from the Great Wall to the Colosseum, or from the polished marble statues of the Hellenes to the giant pyramids of Egypt.

And yet, while we may look back at seemingly distant, lost landscapes of elusive societies and long dead beliefs, in truth, far more commonality stretches across the centuries than we often realise. So many of the norms and values and challenges we face now are the very same that those who were here aeons ago also encountered.

The very earliest human societies, back in Palaeolithic times, had all the hallmarks of equality and co-operation: archaeology almost universally has excavated village after village of similarly sized houses, commonly used tools and shared fields and livestock. Contrary to the Hollywood version of savage tribes led by psychopathic cavemen, the earliest humans, who dominated our world for as much as ten times as long as the so-called civilised world we now inhabit, were an egalitarian lot, with men and women working together and sharing their resources communally, leading Marx and Engels to name them "primitive communists".

However, a combination of climate change and the innovation it spurred in agriculture and technology led increasingly to specialisation: the development of the plough, the domestication of the horse, irrigating and fertilising fields and the advances in metal work all led to the need for workers with specialist skills. Trade developed too as materials were sought from further afield. Finally, and most powerfully, village life became transformed into urban as the first cities grew - not, as traditional history would have it, from one place (Ur) gradually spreading out, but quite spontaneously in different places across the planet where humans encountered similar situations.

Subsistence economies began to produce surpluses - by 2,500BC, crops in the Fertile Crescent (modern Iraq) had yields of 86 times the sowing and with these surpluses came the rise of the first ruling classes. These initially consisted of men selected by their communities as protectors from outside threats or as priests directed to foster the surplus for the common good.

While at first both depended on the consent of their communities, in time, through what Neil Faulkener (A Marxist History of the World) has described as "force and fraud", they gradually "usurped the power of society to become power over society". Archaeology from around 4,000BC on shows increasing gaps in wealth with some houses four or five times the size of the norm, while early records show temple property gradually passing into the hands of priests and other officials appointed to administer public services such as irrigation and building. Sometimes, as in ancient Sumeria, the priesthood held sway and appointed the military; in others, such as Pharaonic Egypt, it was the opposite way round, although the militaristic Pharaoh was always proclaimed a living god as well as commander of the army.

Yet, even as once free, equal people were pressed into hierarchical and patriarchal societies where the overwhelming majority lived as slaves or peasants, ancient notions of equity and the public good persisted, ingrained deep in the human psyche, our mental DNA. And in 1152BC, during the construction of the pyramid of Pharaoh Rameses III, a combination of failure to pay rations and corruption by priests and public officials led, remarkably, to the first verifiable recorded strike*, which is preserved in the so called "Strike Papyrus" in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.

After their due rations of beer and grain had been delivered intermittently for some weeks, skilled stonemasons downed tools on 14 November and over the next week staged a series of protests first at the local town hall and then, it seems, in various places within the pyramid itself. This astonishingly included a sit-in in what was to be the sacred chamber where the Pharaoh himself would be laid to rest for his voyage to the after-life. In a show of sisterly solidarity, their wives joined them after the first couple of days.

The police attended, including the Chief of Police, who tried to reason with them, while the Mayor of Thebes did a Blairite "I'm an honest guy" turn with the disbelieving workers. Completely at a loss, on the seventh day, management caved in and provided the strikers with:

Year 29, second month of winter, day 17
Giving the ration of the second month:
1 foreman: 7½ sacks
the scribe: 3¾ sacks
8 men, each one: 52/4 sacks, making 44 sacks.
Left side:
1 foreman: 7½ sacks
the scribe: 3¾ sacks
8 men, each one: 52/4 sacks, making 44 sacks.
The two gatekeepers, the four washermen ...

Although they returned to work, the stonemasons were back on the picket line just four weeks later and this time called a scribe to set down their grievances to go to the Pharaoh himself (as with many later examples, such as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England, ordinary people, saturated by the propaganda of the irreplaceable efficacy or even the fraudulent divinity of the ruling class, still saw the king ultimately as The Benefactor, unknowingly let down by corrupt or incompetent officials). However, it wasn't failure to pay rations that was on their minds, but corruption by temple administrators (priests). As well as accusing one Weserhat of unpriestly activities with a Lady Menat, they charged the holy-man and his colleague Pentaweret with stealing building materials and oxen which were meant to belong to the communal religious site.

The outcome of the second dispute is not clearly preserved but further strikes are documented and they apparently became a feature of pyramid building. It seems the skilled craftsmen grew aware of their value to the ruler as he needed them to construct what was intended to be a powerful totem of his alleged supremacy, a hallmark of his god-given dominance over his people and all the lands of Earth.

However, whatever the Pharaoh's delusions of grandeur, the first strike was a success for the workers and a powerful reminder that, whatever system of power is in place, our species is rooted in values of fairness, justice and solidarity.


*It is to be noted this is the first strike that is verifiable by contemporary documents. The "Father of History", Herodotus, refers to one that may have occurred as much as 400 years earlier, also in Egypt, by workers building the Great Pyramid of Cheops, who were angry when their garlic rations were late.

The Strike Papyrus

"We Ain't Burglars. We're Hungry" - the Genius of Charlie Chaplin

Plus ca change et plus la meme...

"Modern Times" was written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and released in 1936; but true to its title, it is as relevant now as then and stands as a testament to the genius of a man stereotyped in the popular imagination as the clown Tramp, ducking swinging ladders and falling into water troughs. Even more than later great offerings, this film shows just how deeply thoughtful and humane his work was, taking huge risks to bring to the commercial screen a story that partly through its comedic nature but also because of its very serious undertones, powerfully decried the injustice that so affected his view of the world.

It was Chaplin's final silent movie and co-starred his then-partner, Paulette Goddard. Inspired by a combination of a tour of Depression-era Europe and a long conversation on industrialisation with Mahatma Gandhi, it was also his first and decidedly most overtly political film, and part of the case against him when Senator Eugene McCarthy hounded him out of the USA nearly twenty years later. A deeply humane film, combining slapstick comedy with powerful political commentary, Modern Times tells the story of the iconic Tramp character struggling with life in an increasingly frenetic, competitive and commodified world. He is a cog in a giant machine - literally, in one memorable sequence in the steel mill he works in at the beginning.

Modern Times was filmed not only at the height of the Depression, which ruined so many lives and ultimately provoked global conflict; it was also crafted not long after the advent of Taylorism, which in the name of efficiency reduced the human input in manufacturing to the simplest and fewest individual steps possible. F W Taylor, lauded by modernists from Henry Ford to Vladimir Lenin, advocated a world where there was little creativity or individual realisation: a worker would perform repetitive tasks ad nauseam in order to obtain mass efficiencies of scale for their employer. Divorced from the ultimate product of their labour, deskilled from any craft or profession, and completely and rapidly replaceable, the Taylorite worker would be docile, obedient and cheap. Ford adapted this theory only in as far as paying high enough wages that he could create and sustain a market for what was produced - a useful and now largely forgotten concept, but one that nevertheless remained in essence as exploitative and debilitating as Taylor's more fundamentalist approach.

And so, after an initial sequence where a herd of sheep is juxtaposed with a crowd of people heading to work, we see Chaplin's character driven to distraction as he repeatedly tightens bolts on an assembly line while the factory owner does jigsaw puzzles in his luxurious office. The workers' toilet breaks are monitored by video (a strikingly futuristic concept for the time) and the employer is keen to try out the "Bellows Feeding Machine" on Chaplin. This automatic device promises to feed the workforce without them needing either a lunch break or even the need to breathe: eliminate the lunch hour and stay ahead of your competitors! the sales pitch proposes. The trial needless to say provides a platform for some amusing slapstick comedy which leaves Chaplin appearing like Hitler on acid, but the more serious point is made and The Tramp is sacked after having a nervous breakdown.

An accidental Communist

Out of work, he is accidentally mistaken for a Communist, a crime in the supposed Land of the Free, and incarcerated, only to be released when he equally accidentally stymies a jail break while under the influence of (again accidentally ingested) cocaine - an extremely daring move for the time, when the film code banned depiction of drug use from films.

This is perhaps the most poignant part of the film - for the Tramp prefers the security of prison to the vicissitudes of the outside world, with its unfairness and uncertainties. He repeatedly tries to get himself re-imprisoned, even offering to take the fall for Goddard's character, with whom he falls in love and tries to find so-called honest work to provide for.

Goddard is a young "gamine", in Hollywood parlance a sort of mischievous young woman living on the edge of society, a grown up street urchin. Like others in the film, she steals not from badness but in order to survive - she and her family are ecstatic when she manages to thieve six bananas from a boat. Likewise, when he is the nightwatchman of a store, Chaplin's character lets some former workmates steal food because they are starving.

In sharp contrast, others thrive in these modern times - and both the Gamine and the Tramp have to entertain and serve them in the climax of the film where they work in a restaurant, she as a dancer and he as a singing waiter. This leads to some telling moments as drunken, boorish bourgeoisie cavort around the hardworking staff. The centre-piece is a scene of sheer ingenuity, seemingly taken in a single, continuous shot, showing Chaplin taking a roast duck to a customer across a crowded dance floor in a tour de force imitated hundreds of times since but never yet equalled.

The US Library of Congress declared Modern Times as "culturally significant" in 1989, leading to it being given official protection for preservation for future generations and leading to special screenings at a recent Cannes Film Festival. But it is more than a record of its epoch - its portrayal of an exploitative world where people struggle hard to simply survive and where many are denied what others in the same country, same city, even the same street take for granted, has never been so pertinent.

While the factories Chaplin lampooned in the USA and Europe are now frequently silent and empty, the goods we consume all too often continue to be made by marginalised workers on dehumanised production lines, where breaks are minimalised luxuries if they even exist. Consider the computer giant Apple Corporation's allegedly prison-like conditions in their oriental factories where the pseudo-virtuous Steve Jobs creamed off so much of his personal fortune from people so desperate that their employer places nets outside windows to prevent frequently made suicide attempts.

Chaplin went on to make other films, such as The Great Dictator, which were political in their content, but perhaps not as controversial or challenging to the society he lived and worked in as Modern Times. His exile from America, dreadful though it was, was proof enough of how he was a giant and just how small minded McCarthy and the anti-communists were when they proclaimed liberty as they snuffed it out.

In a world where the skew of wealth between rich and poor is far, far worse than it was in 1936, where laws not even contemplated in the Depression era give the police in supposedly democratic states unparallelled powers of arrest over trade unionists and other social activists, and where US citizens are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, Modern Times may be over 80 years old, but remains as fresh and relevant as ever.

Ultimately, Chaplin was an optimist - when Goddard's character asks him, "What's the use of trying?", the Tramp grins as the strains of Smile, composed by Chaplin, begin to play. He replies confidently, "Buck up - never say die! We'll get along."

It is the optimism of a better, fairer tomorrow, a tomorrow of humanity and equality. It is a cry from a passionate heart and one that, though made in silence, deserves to be heard as loudly as ever.

The American Dream Turned Nightmare

The USA sells itself, literally, as the paragon of capitalist opportunity. Its homespun myth is that with enough effort and a bit of savvy, anyone can make it big. And on this basis, its has not only eschewed socialism, but even legislated against it and banned those who advocate it periodically, tainting them as pathologically unAmerican (ironically simply inverting the old Soviet method of stigmatising dissidents as mentally ill).

What little regulation tempered US capitalism after its collapse in the 1930s Depression was largely done away with by Reagan and his successors and, in spite of Republicans' vituperative demonising of Barak Obama as some communistic demon, the growth of inequality in the USA has now reached breathtaking proportions: for example, the average worker has to work for a month to earn what the average Chief Executive earns in one hour; and the average Chief Executive is still miles off the levels of wealth enjoyed by the richest one per cent.

The video below speaks for itself. Now, it is up to the rest of us throughout the world to speak up for ourselves and for real change to a more equal society. Look and listen and behold the lie that is the American, and the Capitalist, Dream....