Review of Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition. Paris Pullman.
Review of Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition. Praised by the bourgeois "critics" for its sensitivity and wit, Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition is an unpolitical and humourless film about Bloomsbury Marxism. It wants to say something important about the British Left but is so ignorant and unsure of its own tone that all it manages is easy jokes and a kind of sophistication which just becomes glib when under any political pressure.
The hero, Dom, is, apparently by some genetie defect, a compulsive revolutionary. Expelled from the Communist Party aged 15, we find him in 1968 as the only white member of the Central Committee of a Third World Revolutionary Party whose aim is to build solidarity movements with guerrilla struggle. Dom is also writing a book about the modern condition of the British working class in tribute to Engels an and to prove how little has actually changed in the relationship of classes.
The Party has comical meetings of its leadership, but its only activity is the publication of the distribution of very ugly posters. These are revolutionary pamphlets written by Dom, and sold in a local psychedelic bookshop, disguised for the day as a proletarian headquarters.
As a result of the May events, Dom becomes (surprise, surprise) convinced that the Party should turn towards the working class. He somehow arranges meetings with various ill-atcase convenors anu stewards and attempts to persuade them to start a general strike. He's seen lecturing an obedient class of dockers; he buys a Ford convenor a cuppa, he plays docile bar football with an Irish building militant. Suddenly and inexplicably, the Party has cells in 100 factories and has recruited the entire to echo Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station, Dom is sprung from the trial and joins his comrades at Euston Station to journey Notarto the forthcoming Liverpudlian Revolution.
Dom is sent up a lot of the time. When he comes back wounded from the May Events in Paris, he's ohly shut his head in a door. His series of glistening rich birds show his tiesh weak, his reliance on irrelevant Marxist quotes shows his mind unwilling to listen. He lives in growing luxury with many phones, records and brightly coloured hardware ... presumably not acquired by the sale of pamphlets alone. No duplicators, heaps of Financial Times's, unsold newspapers and unwashed teacups. His politics appear to be those of a 15-year-old Maoist...
nothing wrong with that unless you are billed as a 27-year-old Trot. He sprays bits of Marx indiscriminately across any political enquiry. He seems incapable of personal relationship (the film-makers apparently believe, like certain militants, that personal nastiness is the same as political hardness. When in a crisis (he needs to torture a spy) his Home Counties girl has to take a taxi to Harrods to get a torture machine.
Across this narrative of 1968 come two passable documentary inserts in a drab black and white. One details statistical evidence which hows how little our ruling class has given awa Against a succession of photos of the world of those who work for a living, their home, schools and jobs, the sweat and the muscle and pain behind those easy words like "exploitation", "repression" and "class-struggle". The second of the inserts concentrates on the physical scars left by capitalism on the bodies of those who work for it; the neck snapping, back breaking, flesh grinding which is the daily medi cal sacrifice to British business To be most charitable one might assume that the film was supposed to be critical of the British Left. But to make such a film honestly would require some real knowledge. Not just a familiarity with cliche and an acquaintance with Marxist celebrities gained in Hampstead parlours. The first plays of David Mercer dealt with the politics of the Communist Party and Committee of 100 in a way that was itself involved, even scarred by the British Left. The TV plays by the Kestrel Group, especially those written by Jim Allen, commence from an understanding of working class life and of what it is that makes men political. Even the less political French film, The War is Over, about a revolutionary courier to Spain and his growing
The Black Dwarf 16th January 1970 Page 10 Like most other people at this meeting, I left with us. The other thing was that if you have originally been decided on. Because we were