Adam Curtis

sufi

lala
Don't you think the comparison is a little um, debasing? Navalny only survived via the pilot's quick thinking and is now doing 5 years, and they'll try and fit him up with more. His supporters have been beaten and tortured in the recent demos. Corbyn is still swanning around North London on his bicycle, an extremely wealthy man, free to launch as many anti-capitalist online campaigns as he likes.

Putin has more absolute power I guess. He's not answerable to the party and electorate in the way Boris is.
No i don't think it's debasing, & I'm kind oftrying to agree with you! Egypt is sadly even more brutal than Russia, & UK less brutal, in the way it plays party politics. I'm not exactly sure whether Navalny is a perfect comparison anyway for Corbyn or Morsi (in Egypt) as he hasn't been elected as a party leader as far as i know?
 

sufi

lala
No i don't think it's debasing, & I'm kind oftrying to agree with you! Egypt is sadly even more brutal than Russia, & UK less brutal, in the way it plays party politics. I'm not exactly sure whether Navalny is a perfect comparison anyway for Corbyn or Morsi (in Egypt) as he hasn't been elected as a party leader as far as i know?
... though he might have been had the goalposts not moved, it seems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
 

sufi

lala
i wish AC had gone on about the pandemic and corbyn though instead of these distant tales about Mrs Mao, he seems reluctant to get drawn in
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I imagine the whole series took a good length of time to put together, and maybe he felt it was just too early to say anything meaningful about how the pandemic related to bigger picture when it had only just started.

Plus I guess it's hard to find grainy archive footage of events that are happening right now, although maybe he could have applied some kind of filter?
 

version

Well-known member
@shiels This is what I was talking about in "Do we really want out?" when I said theory etc might be just another layer,
But never before have the questions Curtis asks been so relevant to his own thesis. After all, when we consider what Curtis is asking in his latest series — to quote the BBC’s promotional materials: “whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power” — surely we must consider whether his crowning as the one politically-daring documentarian at the BBC is something of a poisoned chalice? What is it about Curtis that allows him to occupy his more-or-less unique position? What is it about the new system of power he describes that precisely allows him to (continue to) exist within it? What is it that allows him to make the same kind of film about our ideological stagnation for more than twenty years?
To his credit, Curtis has actually tiptoed around this himself in one of the recent interviews,
However, he’s recently begun to ponder his own role in pop culture: “If I’m truthful, I think that people like me are part of the problem,” he says. “If I’m pointing the finger at forces that are preventing us from moving forward into the future, you could argue that cutting out bits of archive from the past and putting them back in different forms is part of the problem.”

He ends, though, in archetypal Curtis fashion: “It may be that the very thing we don’t question is the thing we should question.”
 

version

Well-known member
This is all very interesting – but, for all I am a helpless Curtis stan, from the films I’ve seen, the series is not without its problems. These problems stem largely from the fact that Curtis is, by his own admission, ‘fundamentally a historian’ – and that he is also, we must add, fundamentally a historian who isn’t really interested in economics. Curtis is brilliant when it comes to detailing developments in the superstructure – our culture, our institutions, our ideas and systems of power. But he is much less able to link these developments to the material base on which they are built. If Curtis is anything, he is a reverse Marxist, for whom the superstructure ultimately determines the base. This, I think, is where the accusations of aestheticism which sometimes dog Curtis are most justifiable.
In Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, history can end up seeming just like a bunch of stuff which happened – because one important man decided this, and then someone else on the other side of the world came up with something else, but then those turned out to be just fantasies, and then Bill Clinton got elected, and so on and so forth. There is rarely any particular notice taken of the fact that sometimes things happen because people need to pay rent, or to eat. We drift forever, in a world that has conspired to make us alone and stupid and lost, and if we ever try and do anything good then we are so stupid and lost that it must inevitably go wrong, and end up making everything even worse (arguably Curtis is himself guilty of a form of the ‘Oh Dearism’ he has critiqued as being endemic in television news).
 

luka

Well-known member
have you watched the whole series yet version? i'm a little bit disappointed that discussion seems to be centred around a kind of mild disapproval, or a list of reasons why Curtis is not, in fact, The Messiah. Or links to articles explaining why Curtis is not The Messiah. Or why Russians are Pure Evil and we mustn't forget it.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
No i don't think it's debasing, & I'm kind oftrying to agree with you! Egypt is sadly even more brutal than Russia, & UK less brutal, in the way it plays party politics. I'm not exactly sure whether Navalny is a perfect comparison anyway for Corbyn or Morsi (in Egypt) as he hasn't been elected as a party leader as far as i know?
I'm not saying it was a perfect comparison, just it illustrates differences between the two systems that Luka for one, is keen to occlude. One guy gets bad press, the other is very nearly killed, then imprisoned on fake charges. Different worlds.

Anyway - interesting how people want him to have some kind of answer or solution, when as I understand him, he seems to be pointing out how impossible it is to have one. Kinda like K-Punk's Capitalist Realism, the way out is inconceivable.
 

luka

Well-known member
im not actually keen to occlude it thats why i said today Russians are Pure Evil. I just refuse to beleive in Putin as supervillain pulling all the strings. Anyway, I'll do a thread for everyone to move the conversation away from here.
 

version

Well-known member
have you watched the whole series yet version? i'm a little bit disappointed that discussion seems to be centred around a kind of mild disapproval, or a list of reasons why Curtis is not, in fact, The Messiah. Or links to articles explaining why Curtis is not The Messiah. Or why Russians are Pure Evil and we mustn't forget it.
Nah, not yet. I watched the first episode the other day and plan to watch more tonight.
 

version

Well-known member
I'm not saying it was a perfect comparison, just it illustrates differences between the two systems that Luka for one, is keen to occlude. One guy gets bad press, the other is very nearly killed, then imprisoned on fake charges. Different worlds.
That bad press did prompt someone to attempt to kill him though,
 

version

Well-known member
He planned to attack a march hoping Corbyn and Sadiq Khan would be there then ended up driving round Finsbury Park and running over some people outside a mosque,
Asked by the prosecutor, Jonathan Rees, whether he had planned to kill the Labour leader, Osborne told the jury: “Oh yeah, it would be one less terrorist [on] our streets.” He added: “And if Sadiq Khan [the London mayor] had been there it would have been even better. It would have been like winning the lottery.” He also said Hussain remained a target.

When the Quds day plot failed, Osborne told the jury he drove round London and followed instructions to meet Dave and Terry in Finsbury Park because it was Corbyn’s constituency.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
im not actually keen to occlude it thats why i said today Russians are Pure Evil. I just refuse to beleive in Putin as supervillain pulling all the strings. Anyway, I'll do a thread for everyone to move the conversation away from here.

Putin is surrounded by wolves domestically. For every move he plays with/against the west, there’s always the risk of plots at home. I mean the cunt boxed himself in and has an EU sized lake of blood as his legacy, but someone had to do it etc
 
Yeah that’s it version. He’s all about people and ideas. And as we all know on this forum - the good Marxists that we are - people and ideas don’t exist! Ideas don’t matter, personalities are fake. It’s the material conditions that are primary
 
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