In an end-of-the-year 2019 writing by General Secretary Roland Stankevicius, in the online newsletter the Manitoba Teacher, the title is: “We Could Use George Bailey Right About Now.” Mr. Stankevicius idealizes the main character in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie that fails completely to address the modern problem of the power of employers as a class and hence offers an inadequate solution to that problem.
In that movie, the power of the small businessman vs. the large businessman is depicted. George Bailey dreams of travelling and of escaping from the small town where he lives–Bedord Falls–in order to become famous.
His father is owner of Bailey Building and Loan in Bedord Falls, but it is a business that runs less on the principle of obtaining the most profit and more on the principle of helping others–a philanthropic organization at a local level despite the need to obtain interest from loaning out money. By contrast, there is Henry Potter, the greedy major banker in the town.
When George’s father dies, George reluctantly abandons his dreams in order to take over his father’s business. He settles down, has a family and becomes relatively successful.
Through a mishap, though, Potter can take over George’s business on Christmas Eve, 1945. George seriously contemplates suicide, but he is saved by Clarence, a student angel, who fakes his own drowning in order for George to save him. Despite Clarence’s attempt to shore-up George’s self-esteem, George concludes that it would have been better if he had never lived. Clarence shows him the consequences of what would have happened in Bedford Falls if he had not been born: Bedford Falls becomes something like miniature version of Las Vegas or Cuba before the fall of Batista. George realizes that his life has not been in vain, and he wishes to return to the way things were before. Clarence grants him his wish.
George escapes from the problem of going bankrupt through community efforts: they provide him with the money that saves him from going bankrupt.
The movie reflects a social-democratic ideology of presenting evil purely in the form of personal attributes (Henry Potter) and large institutions (his bank as a real bank) as opposed to other personal attributes (George Bailey) and small institutions (Bailey Building and Loan). It also presents the solution in a simplistic and unrealistic fashion.
What does Mr. Stankevicius have to say about the social problems that the movie introduces? Let us read some of what he has to say:
Today, even as Capra’s wonderful story is now more than 70 years in the telling, we see too much and too often in real life the existence and manifestation of Mr. Potter or Pottersville in many parts of our own communities and social circumstances. The growth in Payday Loans, Cash Stores, gig work, and other significant growth in the emergent precarious/transient ‘new’ economy. Additionally, sharply escalating housing prices and rental costs are creating serious social challenges with increased financial stress, homelessness and growing temporary living arrangements. These negative elements, now well established in our advanced and wealthy economies, indicate that we need to continue to advocate for more George Bailey style social progress, equity and social justice at a bare minimum. Although many of our social and public services such as public education and public health seem to be well established here in Manitoba and in many parts of Canada, we know that there are current efforts to further privatize, deregulate and pursue further assaults to undermine our social safety net(s).
Note that Mr. implicitly idealizes capitalist society: he only objects to a particular manifestation of it in the form of specific problems that arise in a particular phase of capitalist society (neoliberalism). As he wrote above:
The growth in Payday Loans, Cash Stores, gig work, and other significant growth in the emergent precarious/transient ‘new’ economy. Additionally, sharply escalating housing prices and rental costs are creating serious social challenges with increased financial stress, homelessness and growing temporary living arrangements.
The implication is that before such growth of these social problems, we lived in a world that more approached the world of Bedford Falls before the mishap–an illusion of the Golden Age of capitalism.
Similarly, he objects to the following social phenomena:
An abundance of squalid living conditions, a growing demand for food bank programs and an escalating drug addiction crisis all speak to the Pottersville nightmare of social division, despair and fragmentation of society that should not be part of the Canadian reality in the year 2020.
All these social problems are indeed objectionable, but let us assume that they no longer exist. Would we live the wonderful life? Not at all.
To be sure, the 1950s, the 1960s and the early part of the 1970s saw the growth of the welfare state and the growth of real wages, but let us not forget that, on the one hand, this growth arose on the ashes of the Second World War (and tens of millions dead and tens of millions of more suffering) and, on the other, even this growth assumed the predominance of the money circuit of capital (see The Money Circuit of Capital). Workers were still treated as things to be used by employers for purposes undefined by workers; there was no economic democracy but rather an economic dictatorship (see for example Employers as Dictators, Part One).
When I started to work for an employer in the 1970s, the social phenomena described by Stankevicius did not exist–but apparently “decent work” and “fair contracts” did for him since Mr. Stankevicius is silent on the need for most to work for an employer (and the collateral damage that comes from a society organized on that basis–including the creation of a group of unemployed persons who are to be used when capitalists accelerate their accumulation and demand more workers than usual).
There is certainly nothing inevitable about the growth of neoliberalism (deregulation, privatization, increased reliance on the market and so forth), but such phenomena are outgrowths of a society dominated by the money circuit of capital–where people are costs for employers and things to be used for more and more money. Until such time as we take over the conditions of our own lives–and that means the economy –we will always be threatened by increased oppression and exploitation.
Both the movie and Mr. Stankevicius fail to question the principle of the power of employers as a class. The George Bailey’s of the world form part of the collateral damage of the money circuit of capital–with some governments providing more or less compensation for such damage rather than questioning the need for the continued production of such damage in the first place.
Stankevicius’s–and by extension the Manitoba Teachers’ Society’s– inadequate specification of the problem then has as its counterpart the inadequate solution to the problem, both in the movie and in Mr. Stankevicius’s article.
Thus, the solution in the movie is to rely on others’ beneficence in a coming-together of a local community–after divine intervention shows the leading protagonist miraculously how social life would change if he did not exist. In reality, apart from the impact on family and friends, it is unlikely that any particular individual’s death (unless they occupy a key economic or political position) would have any real impact on the impersonal economic, social and political structures that characterize a society dominated by the money circuit of capital. As Frank Stricker (1990) , in “Repressing the working class: Individualism and the masses in Frank Capra’s films,” Labor History, volume 31, issue number 4, pages 454-467)” writes (page 464):
Capra’s first postwar film, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), suggests that if reality failed to measure up, the director would retreat into fantasy.
Furthermore, the community these days assumes the form of the state–and its oppressive powers. Some grassroots organizations may try to address some local problems, but they remain powerless in the face of the global treadmill of the money circuit of capital.
Mr. Stankevicius, for his part, offers the following solution:
These negative elements, now well established in our advanced and wealthy economies, indicate that we need to continue to advocate for more George Bailey style social progress, equity and social justice at a bare minimum. Although many of our social and public services such as public education and public health seem to be well established here in Manitoba and in many parts of Canada, we know that there are current efforts to further privatize, deregulate and pursue further assaults to undermine our social safety net(s). These attacks are alive and well-financed and we have to continue to be vigilant to stand together and band together to take on the many powerful private interests, driven by their own self-interest and greed.
We certainly need to “band together” to fight neoliberlaism (deregulation, privatization and so forth), but this is the limit of such banding together for social democrats like Stankevicius, and by extension the Manitoba Teachers’ Society:
It’s a Wonderful Life advances a belief in community, relationships and a strong
collective that can overcome the depths of a darker and desperate society. This is
an important allegorical tale that I have appreciated over many countless repeat
viewings. In essence, Capra’s message that resonates with me is to continue to battle,
to overcome the odds and dark despair and to fight for a more wonderful life.
Again, we certainly need to engage in battle, but this battle has to aim at the dominance of the power of employers as a class–something about which Mr. Stankevicius and the Manitoba Teachers’ Society are silent.
As long as we do not question the money circuit of capital, we are bound to experience a conflict of values and desperation on occasion (as reflected in the movie between our self-worth and community versus the hard-hearted world of the money circuit of capital).
The growth of a new welfare state is unlikely to arise unless we face another crisis and solution of the massive destruction of capital–another world war. Such a solution is hardly humane, of course, but this would be the necessary condition for a resurgence of a social-democratic solution to the problems facing self-employed workers and employees.
Workers and those who own their own small businesses, when faced with the infinite movement of the money circuit of capital (see The British Labour Party’s 2019 Manifesto: More Social Democracy and More Social Reformism, Part One), are likely to be crushed in its treadmill unless they not only band together but fight to overthrow the social relations associated with the money circuit of capital.
Both the movie It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Stankevicius’s praise of the movie show the limitations of social democracy–both in terms of its specification of the social problems we face and the needed solutions to those problems.
I much prefer the battle cry of the Guatemalan poet Otto Rene Castillo, in his poem
“Even Beneath This Bitterness”:
…
Then understand the misery of my country,
and my pain and everyone’s pain.
If when I say: Bread!
They say
shut up!
and when I say: Liberty!
they say
Die!But I don’t shut up and I don’t die.
I live
and fight, maddening
those who rule my country.For if I live
I fight,
and if I fight
I contribute to the dawn.
and so victory is born
even in the bitterest hours.
Rene Castillo joined the Guatemalan guerrillas in the 1960s, fought with them, was captured, tortured and was burned alive.
We need to develop the fortitude of Rene Castillo for the future battles that need fighting–battles that do not just question the
growth in Payday Loans, Cash Stores, gig work, and other significant growth in the emergent precarious/transient ‘new’ economy,
but also the power of employers as a class.
The Abolitionary 