Are We Pigs?! NO!

 “In Dubious Battle,” film directed by James Franco, 2016

Every battle against the forces of capital is dubious.  The guns, the courts, money, the propaganda news organizations, the government, the petit-bourgeoisie – all conspire against the worker.  The whole ‘top-side’ of society line up against labor and those below. ‘Winning’ is never a sure thing … in fact it is the rarity.

This film, and the 1936 Steinbeck book, looks at a struggle of migrant apple-pickers in the made-up Torgus valley in 1931, which resulted in a strike led by what seem like a blend of IWW elements, not CPers as in the novel.  It probably was modeled after a real strike in Tulare County, California in the Central Valley. The workers are light-skinned ‘Boomers’ or Sooners who traveled to California for $3 an hour in pay, only to be told it was $1 an hour when they got there.

This somewhat melodramatic and long film is packed with stars – James Franco, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Selena Gomez, Ed Harris, Bryan Cranston.  Franco plays the lead character Mack, which is about as convincing as dirt.  The essential movement of the film (and book) is how a large group of 900 workers change, take actions and have internal conflicts under the violent and blood-sucking pressure-cooker of police, growers, sheriff, gun thugs, hunger and fear.  As to the result, Gomez’ character notes:  “I know these men.” 

Mack, the leftist, seems to be a manipulative leader in this film for awhile.  He really says at one point that “the worse it gets, the better.”  What you are left with is that class struggle is a violent and losing proposition.  The film serves as a description of the battle in the farm fields, but it might dissuade all but the most desperate to follow its lead, at least in 1936.  But many did.

California farm workers in the Central Valley

In the film desperate scabs brought in by rail are turned around because an IWW leftie gets killed by gun thugs, but some still go to work.  Strike sympathizers are burned out and beaten.  The local city council tries to starve-out the strikers.  The local strike leader, London, is bribed to take a high-paying job but rejects the offer.  Scabs are in the fields, anti-communism rises among the strikers, a blockade is put on the strikers’ camp.  Bullshit rumors are introduced by traitors and a barn-full of an ally’s apples is burned, instigated by the snake-like blandishments of the boss’s daughter.   The strikers try to respond in kind, pummeling a spy, breaking a barrier, beating scabs and burning a grower’s house.  The film bails out of an ending on this particular strike, except for martyrdom.  It lists all the pro-union laws passed by Roosevelt's government instead to give it a happy ending. 

As has been said before, capital resorts to fascist tactics when its grip on power weakens or slips.  'Democracy' is a hollow shell.  Strike a bell?    

Latino workers, local and immigrant, have replaced the ‘Okies’ of the 1930s.  The United Farm Workers, big in the 1970s, is now a husk of its former self.  Legal below-minimum wages for farmworkers still reign in the fields of California, Florida and beyond – even though in the U.S. there are almost as many farmworkers as farmers now.  $7.25 has been the minimum since 2010, for 11 years.  It was $1 in the 1970s.  Some improvements due to state laws have been instituted.  But the situation remains somewhat the same – 90 years after this fictional strike.  Which tells you something about the system we live in – essentially rigid, unchanging and exploitative still.  They don't need Gatling guns much anymore.

Rotten Tomatoes reviewers hated this film.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive, using these terms:  “The Jungle," "Viva Zapata," "Polar Star," "Factory Days," "American Rust," "Red Baker," "Foodopoly," "A Foodies Guide to Capitalism," "Far From the Madding Crowd," "The Latino Question." 

In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck is for sale in May Day’s excellent progressive, political and proletarian fiction section.

The Kultur Kommissar

November 16, 2021