Love and socialism: On Fassbinder's politics, a response to Jacobin magazine

Reply to Meaghan Day, “Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction” in Jacobin, February 2022:

The author of this not uninteresting piece enlightens American film lovers who don't know about the subject, that Fassbinder had some involvement, awareness, and proximity to the Western German "New Left" of the 60s and 70s, and that its existence is part of the social context of his filmmaking.

Indeed.

The author also dutifully, as a Jacobin magazine article writer committed to socialist politics on the broadly Marxist terms of Jacobin, documents the "political" aspects of some of RWF's films in a manageable way by limiting the effective definition of "political" to that having to do with governments and their policies and actions and attempts to influence them or change society somehow through their agency.

The only problem with this is what it overlooks and so obscures. Having seen all of Fassbinder's films and studied them a bit, and knowing a few things about postwar European cinema generally, I can attest to what any attentive viewer of films should be able to see pretty clearly: All of his films are political, but mostly the politics is personal. Indeed, his contributions (two extended scenes) to the omnibus film "Germany in Autumn" are an excellent clue: while one scene reveals him badgering his mother until she reveals fascist longings in the then-present context (the "suicide" of the imprisoned leading members of the RAF terrorist group, and the massive state state repression of the liberal-left that followed, the eponymous "German autumn"), the other scene just shows Fassbinder being verbally abusive to his live-in lover (who later suicided himself). Many of Fassbinder's films focused on relationships, between men and women, women and women, and men and men, that involve power dynamics that can have elements of sadism.

A biography of Fassbinder by a French critic for Cahiers du Cinema begins with the observation that Fassbinder was the most influential filmmaker of the seventies, whose films as much as anything in film or the arts defined the sensibility of that time. I am one of those who immediately grasped their relevance when I began seeing some of them on their first release in California in the mid-70s. Fassbinder did something in his films that was made into a slogan by the leading political movement of the time, feminism. He is himself perhaps both more and less than a feminist; he even said that "women use their oppression as a weapon." But that "the personal is the political" could be a good title for a retrospective or book on his films. Every one of his 38 films problematizes the various kinds of power relationships that exist between people. He even thought love itself tends to operate as a way of organizing oppression. That is why "love is colder than death," another slogan that fits his films and the title of one of them. In fact, he said that he had a great desire to be loved, and he was also known for being interpersonally very manipulative in his use of the same ethical intelligence that he wielded in his stage and film directing and mise-en-scène. He practiced what he preached against. He was seen as having the personality of a childish genius who is apt to throw tantrums, a quality that is almost the theme of Volker Schlondorff's early film that stars him, Baal, based on the Brecht play.

Fassbinder has an idea of the political in his films that, like in most great left-wing directors, such as Godard, Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Oshima, is a form of critique. Not so much of politics as optimistic organizing: which is why the television film "Eight hours do not make a day" is so singular among his works. It's lovely in showing the inventive possibilities of some ordinary working-class people related by family or friendship in a neighborhood in West Berlin, and it's an ode to a more optimistic time as well as perhaps a set of didactic lessons for socialists then or now. Though most of his interest lay elsewhere.

What distinguishes the politics of Fassbinder's films is how totally personal they often nearly all are. This makes him an opposite of, say, Miklos Jancso, whose films derive much of their meaning from elaborate camera movements as well as operatic staging. Or from Godard, who is interested mainly in images and ideas, and whose aesthetic of total montage tends to go with a disinterest in people, a French sublime way of abstracting from them. Fassbinder's origins in theater determined what he would do with actors and characters much as Bergman's did. (And Bergman should be considered an influence, though his idea of the dramatic, which is equally psychological but pointing to existentialist rather than socio-political concerns, including in his masterpiece Persona, where they are a background, and The Shame, where they are the context.). Fassbinder's films have a social critique of capitalism that is personal and focused on the theatrical. Of course, theater and politics have been close cousins since Aeschylus, though film indeed introduces other possibilities, because it is visual, virtual rather than live, and fragments the continuity of what is presented as live theater does not. Mirrors and exchanges of gazes (looking at and being looked at) between persons are important in his films, but basically what matters is not some kind of systemic logic of circulation, nor what the uses of images can do and have done to persons, something Godard is always complaining about, a concern that frames his anxious wondering about the artist's possible relationship to capitalist society as well as his protestant critique of capitalist visual culture's commodification of women which makes the figure of the prostitute paradigmatic for him. Fassbinder is always involving the characters he shows with his own love and hate for them. He thinks the whole problem of the political is the problem of how people treat others. In this he is concerned with capitalist alienation as Godard, but works out this concern in very different ways. The concern for interpersonal relationships also meant that he is one of those filmmakers whose fascination with and, in his case, rootedness in drama destine a treatment of characters as if they are actors, that is, as playing roles, trying to appear in a certain way for some social or interpersonal advantage, and fundamentally concerned with the effect of their actions, statements, postures and gestures on the other people in the scene. This is not new in drama, as it is much of Shakespeare, who is always reflecting about what it is to be an actor on a stage in a theater. Shakespeare's characters are often thinking about that; in Fassbinder, it's often unfortunate that they don't. An example of this is the fate of the fruit seller in "The Merchant of Four Seasons," whose graduate student sister calmly insists to him that one can never think too much. Many of Fassbinder's characters suffer in society and relationships because they don't think enough, though they may desire and want to be loved more than enough, since they usually succeed in this less than enough.

That all this is political is both obvious and, I admit, maybe too easy, since it's a cliché of art and film criticism that everything is political if only because everything happens in society and history. Heck, even abstract art does, and color field painting must also have a "politics" in this, perhaps, "weak" sense.

The roots of Fassbinder’s approach to the political character of personal life are in fact in an experience that he shared with the young terrorists of the Germany of his time and many of their sympathizers, along with much of their generation. Their parents had been Nazis, if only by way of acquiescing in the system, seeking to only get by in their private lives, doing what fascist and other oppressive regimes usually try to force most citizens into doing, which always just minding their own business. After the war, the de-Nazification process was pursued weakly enough that many ex-Nazis remained in leadership positions in government and industry. (The terrorist killing that led to the repression of the German Autumn, of Hans-Martin Schleyer, was of an ex-SS officer, a fact the terrorists used to justify it). But more than that, the society remained far too close to fascism for the tastes of many in their generation. The dominant “macro” political theme in Fassbinder’s films is precisely what he directly stages in his Germany in Autumn pieces, the persistence of fascism in Germany’s officially liberal and democratic society at the level of relationships and personality. The absence in Germany of what had remained present in Italy, a mass movement of Marxist affiliation (the official Communist Party) made relatively inaccessible a direct tie-in of this to “political” politics, notwithstanding the critique of the Communist and anarchist left in Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven and elsewhere. But a glance at his portrayals of interpersonal nastiness reveals that behind them is not just an attentiveness to the capitalist distortion of personal relationships but also their fascist deformation in what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus called “micro-fascisms” of various forms of personal authoritarianism, patriarchal and otherwise, as well as failed rebellions against it (or the state, as in “The Third Generation,” about a terrorist cell that is even more ridiculous that Godard’s would-be revolutionaries in “La Chinoise,” discussed elsewhere on this site). In the 60s Antonioni had claimed that in our time “Eros is sick”; Fassbinder shows it is all too often oppressive and fascist. And people are oppressed often where they are most vulnerable: where they desire or want to be loved.

Does all or any of this connect up with the actual or possible agenda of a socialist or anarchist or other radical left politics today? Maybe that's where some more work needs to be done. We might have a stronger and more interesting politics if it addressed other problems besides just those of forming a labor union or going on strike or formulating a tactically moderate left politics as an alternative to political terrorism -- which disappeared from the radical left in the period after the German Autumn, and the almost simultaneous events in Italy. Now, of course, we have an officially anti-terrorist state and it is based on a lie, compose of a set of lies. (It conducts state terror on the premise that, as Bernard Harcourt argues in “The Counter-revolution,” its counter-insurgency is directed at a real insurgency, and that the terrorist threat is so omnipresent as to justify total surveillance of the population, and selective targeting and harassment of individuals on a “watch list” in accordance with a floating state of emergency. It would be interesting to see what a Fassbinder might have made of some people’s reactions to this — a project I have been working on). The terrorist acts that happen now with far too much frequency are committed mostly by individuals who have self-recruited and are not part of an organization, and their politics is right-wing, even setting aside the question of what place on the political spectrum Islamist extremism should be attributed (I put it on the right, a kind of right that sometimes can be thought of as left). The left-wing terrorists in Germany, Japan, and Italy of the 60s and 70s were hoping to activate mass protest on the left, and the gambit was that state repression as a result of the violent acts would lead to that. It led to its opposite. That is one reason left-wing terrorist does not exist as a major phenomenon today; others include the exhaustion of Marxist-Leninism and the massive shift into total police and commercial surveillance that we have today, which renders clandestine political groups nearly impossible. In a time when a radical left politics seems not on the agenda, or when one is but it appears only likely to be disastrous, using art to try to change how some people think may be not a bad option. Such a strategy also seems attractive if the official left sticks to milquetoast or inadequate demands.

There are forms of oppression that, even without resorting to the intersectionalist ideas of politics, which are not really anti-capitalist, we would all like to not see socialists or, to be more accurate about what "socialists" today are trying to accomplish, social democrats, achieve. For example, in the 60s and 70s there was a broad movement to end the use of psychiatry and discourses and practices of "mental health" for repressive purposes. Fassbinder touches on this in "Fear of Fear," where a housewife is diagnosed as schizophrenic and she is lonely and listens to Leonard Cohen singing about his wish that a lover return. He did shed light in several films on the oppression of women, and gays, and others, and he also was equally willing to show that people who are supposed to only be oppressed can very well wind up being in the oppressor's chair. In this he took no prisoners: neither women, gays (a group he belonged to), American blacks, all groups he had some understanding of, and even Jews, a group he arguably could only caricature (though the force of his portrayals is recognizable as being really a critique of German representations and imagination of Jews in a Germany now largely without them).

In short, Fassbinder's films are a terrific object lesson for leftists in avoiding the traps and stupidities of liberal identity politics. Lots of people oppress those around them because they can, because they don't know better, and because the society is founded on relationships of using other people. That was the key, what he really understood better than anything.

Socialists have generally done a pretty good job in analyzing the contradictions, crises, and problems of capitalism. In this, it is only too bad more people haven't been influenced by their critiques. Marx himself led the way: he wrote the book on capitalism. But there's another book that Marx didn't write, that most socialists in both the Leninist and parliamentary/social democratic traditions have courted disasters of some breathtaking proportions in large part because they acted as if this book had been written, or is the subtext or implied conclusion of Marx's "Capital." And it is that but it wasn't enough. The unwritten book was the book on socialism. It remains a problem to know how we are going to create, build, develop, or even help birth, a or the post-capitalist society. Much about this has been said, but no one really has quite the answer either in the form of a picture of the post-capitalist world of tomorrow or the image or story of the process that will get us there. Those two books Marx did not write, and the pretenders to have written it today seem inadequate.

Of course, an art that is radical or revolutionary could flourish during or after a successful revolutionary movement, as happened for a few years in the Soviet Union. Either way, I think we can learn a lot from Fassbinder's films. As we can from those of Douglas Sirk, a major inspiration, and many others. This point may seem banal or easy, but it really isn't. A reading of Fassbinder's films that is "political" in the macro sense that Jacobin magazine seems to require or need would have to connect some things that usually don't get connected.

I will end this discussion with the inconclusiveness that it seems to captures a true sense of the world today and its challenges, with two questions:

1). How will people treat each other in the socialist society, or, what will our relationships look like? Please don't say it's obvious because it isn't, and it wouldn't be from religious sources or any other.

2). How will we treat deviants?

Allow me to note that Bernie Sanders is on record in one of his campaign books as calling for expanded use of involuntary psychiatric incarceration because many crimes are caused by crazy people (this is not true, by the way). And that the DSA has no useful and interesting policy plank in its platform on this. I sent them a proposal on this for inclusion, and it was ignored, while I learned that most DSA members believe in mental health treatments and want and need them for themselves and everyone they know.

What is Jacobin's answer on these questions? Please don't say our real problems lie just in union organizing and electing candidates for office who identify with socialism as an idea, and would like, as I would, to nationalize various industries, and introduce more industrial, community-level, or other participatory democracy, which a sympathetic viewer of "Eight hours do not make a day" might all too readily appreciate.

My question about the treatment of deviants points to the problem of understanding better the history and makes to date of socialism. While it's easy to show that our mental health system is capitalist, and a number of its problems are due to that fact alone, we also know that the same institutions more or less were also used repressively in socialist societies. In fact, for all that has been and can be said about Stalinism and alternatives to it (some of which seem not different from it enough), it must be said that it's quite to see how a socialist society might still make repressive and oppressive use of "mental health" discourses and practices, and this could even be true under some form or other of "democratic socialism." All it would take is masses or majorities of people believing that certain people should be subjected to particular social controls, based on what is believed about them. Democracy and liberty within socialism is a possibility but not a panacea. All that can really be said for the idea of socialism in regard to this problem is that it could create conditions under which better institutions and practices are possible. I think that's true, and maybe that is enough for Jacobin; for me, it isn't. In theoretical sociology, the question has typically been posed as that of the macro-micro connection.

Were interpersonal relationships better in socialist societies, on the Russian model or any other, and at any time, before or after Stalin, etc.? I think the answer in some ways is yes. I would point in this regard to the early films of Hungarian director Marta Meszaros, the black and white films she made in the 60s and 70s. They mostly concern workers, usually centering around women characters, and sometimes involve class conflicts (which did exist; the two classes in socialism were the university-educated professional elite and the class of factory workers and peasants). Meszaros is a dissident and a social critic, but my sense is that her characters are able to challenge certain kinds of things with each other, that are not possible in America today at all, generally. I think this is also true of Cuba. The reason is partly that in some ways, these societies were more democratic, to the point that people could discuss we cannot, and partly that the ideology was inevitably politicizing, so that even beyond official politics, things could be challenged and it was natural to do so, in ways that have really mostly never been true of the United States.

It seems that the socialist world was at least culturally more democratic, but more oppressive and less free, while the capitalist world is freer and more creative, but more exploitative, more violent, and more alienating. Socialism has more committees and bureaucracy, and ideas of reason, in social terms, seem to more easily take root in it; while capitalism depends more on markets and creativity is a value but reason isn't. The Cold War was legitimated partly by a set of oppositions like these. Yet one thing that neoliberalism has taught us is that the kind of freedom we have comes with not just poverty, newer and subtler forms of oppression, the alienation can be killing, the state winds up being used to help no one except the rich and oppress the poor far more than elsewhere, and now China represents the prospect of the worst of both worlds, just as much of Western Europe once seemed to represent the best of both.

But I don't think any of this answers the questions I have posed. I am not arguing against what we might call socialist contestation of capitalism, but wondering about its limits, or, equivalently perhaps, about what it needs to include and how it might do so.

There is no denying that the generally sad, tragicomic, state of Fassbinder's characters, their situations, and their personal ethical and moral failures in managing them, has 'capitalism' as a conspicuous explanatory determinant. Calling himself a "romantic anarchist," Fassbdinder, like most interesting left-wing filmmakers, was popular because people could identify with his social criticisms. But social criticism is not the same thing as mapping or prefiguring some new, happier, social system. And that indeed may be what is lacking -- not because artists don't go far enough, but because the social world hasn't.

It is interesting to note that "Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day" is Fassbinder's only "socialist" film. It's delightful, partly because he had the good sense to make it a comedy. It's about people who try to find workable solutions to their problems. It's a veritable paean to an earlier, more optimistic time. But, alas, as Beckett reminded us, serious unhappiness, such as in masterpieces like "The Marriage of Maria Braun" and "In a Year of Thirteen Moons," is so much funnier still. The problem of socialism remains in all its tragic and comic (so far) impossibility. Fassbinder agreed with the great desiderata, as with that of Christian love, which in his other films is always more or less portrayed through negative images, honored in the breach. A socialism of the working class is a fine idea, but I am glad all the same that Fassbinder wasn't working for the people at Jacobin. That it is easier to problematize things than posit solutions is a melancholy condition that can also be fruitful.

—-

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/fassbinder-and-the-red-army-faction