Learning from Clint Eastwood

Work and civility

It is no exaggeration to say that we stand today at a crossroads, one of those historical moments when the contest of ideas and ideologies really means something. For the last thirty years or so, the political discourse – in the developed ‘west’ at least – has seldom ventured outside a tightly constrained framework of uncritically accepted assumptions: the benefits of free markets, the need to roll back the state and reduce regulation, the imperative to make labour markets more flexible and to restrict the power of trade unions, the self-evident virtues of liberal representative democracy, endless growth, the importance of ‘opportunity’ rather than equality, and so on. All of these assumptions today stand questioned, challenged by multiple crises and the unprecedented threat of climate change and environmental devastation in general.

The right is ascendant. As in previous periods of crisis – the 1930s in particular – it has taken on extreme characteristics. As in the 1930s, it is not just the ‘far right’ that has adopted dangerous and offensive policies. Today, as in the earlier period, the ‘mainstream’ right has been dragged further to the extreme by those further to the right. In both periods right wing ideology has been dominated by distinctive intellectual currents and political strategies. Anti-rationalism, or, perhaps more accurately, a deep politicization of science, has led to an equation of ideological or religious conceptions with science (phrenology in the 1930s, for instance, climate change denial in the 21^st century). In both the 1930s and today, the right’s attitude to awkward scientific facts has been a blunt assertion of might over right, and a resort to mechanically repeated slogans, dutifully reiterated by low-quality media.

A distinctive contemporary aspect of right wing politics is the extent to which it is infected with a shallow postmodernism, a charge usually leveled at the left. Science, we are told by climate change deniers, is just a ‘discourse’, an exercise of power, with no more claim to truth than many other forms of discourse, such as religion. Scientists are not following a truth-seeking method based on research, observation, measurement, peer review, but are money-grubbers captured by ‘elites’ and unreconstructed communists trying to destroy civilization as we know it.

The preferred terrain of struggle for both the contemporary right and its 1930s predecessors is culture and identity. In both periods it has been difficult for the right to defend its chosen economic framework – the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Depression respectively both seriously dented claims about the effectiveness of their economic models. In the 1930s, the right sought to configure political contest in terms of race and national identity, blood and soil. The echoes of this are everywhere to be heard today, particularly in vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, from France’s Rassemblement National, to the Tories and Reform UK, Germany’s AfD, Donald Trump’s Republicans and Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition and One Nation Party.

There are two tragic aspects of contemporary left-wing politics. First, unlike during the 1930s, the left is seriously weak around the world. When a decent, internationalist, progressive alternative to right-wing populism is badly needed, the left is paralysed by doubt, without a clear program of political and economic change, betrayed by social-democratic parties and weakened by decades of explicit attacks on the labour movement. Second, the left is entirely complicit in its own downfall and the rise of the right. From the 1960s on, the left has been consumed by identity politics, at the expense of advocating for broad social justice and social change. It was the left that shifted the political discourse onto the preferred terrain of the right, onto questions of personal and social identity, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, emphasizing personal and individual fulfillment over group solidarity, rights over responsibilities, opportunities over justice.

The progressive left today need not abandon the field of identity politics altogether. But it must, at the very least, reconfigure the way that it talks about these issues, and, more importantly, rediscover the terrain of social and economic justice, and real democracy.

Clint Eastwood might be an unlikely source of inspiration for the contemporary left. But his 2008 film, Gran Torino, offers a much-needed reminder of the necessity for solidarity in a world of rootlessness, decaying communities and abandonment of the industrial working class.

In the film, Eastwood plays Walt, an embittered old Korean War veteran, a retired Ford worker whose wife has just passed away, a cursing, drinking, old-school working class American whose well-maintained house stands almost like a museum piece in a rapidly decaying neighbourhood inhabited now by ‘gooks’, gangs and the occasional remnants of the white working class. Much to his initial displeasure, a Hmong family moves in next door. While initially viewing them with racist contempt, he is gradually drawn into their world when he defends them from a thuggish Hmong gang, and is treated with enormous gratitude in return.

After discovering that the family’s teenage son, Thao, had been put up to steal Walt’s beloved Gran Torino, Walt makes Thao earn his repentance through performing chores around his and neighbours’ houses. He then takes Thao under his wing, inducting him into the rituals of working class men (including how to speak with abusive affection to one’s friends), and helping him get a job. Thao enthusiastically takes to Walt’s guidance.

Impressed by Thao’s diligence and effort, Walt gives the boy a set of tools. It is not only practical help for his working life but a symbol, a statement, about the dignity of work. The essential dignity of labour is missing from the lives of the various thugs that terrorise the neighbourhood, making a living through intimidation and selling drugs. It is no accident, then, that one of the targets of the Hmong gang – in fact relatives of Thao – is the set of tools. It is like an accusation, reflecting to them everything they are not. They bail Thao up, burn him with a cigarette, and steal his tools.

Gran Torino is a paean to the virtues of work and working class self-sufficiency. It is, as well, an embittered denunciation of the two sides of the same coin of contemporary America - it is not just the violent shiftlessness of the urban underclass that is under attack here; Eastwood is scathing of the vacuous, grasping consumerism of ‘respectable’, ‘mainstream’ America too, in the guise of Walt’s son and family, whose care for the aging Walt is patronizing and hollow in equal measure. Nothing could be more symbolic for Walt of the emotional and experiential gulf between he and his son than the fact that the latter drives a Japanese car (globalization and deindustrialization move fast: in a film made today Walt’s son would be driving a Chinese car, possibly an EV): the decline of the US car industry is symbolic of the much bigger collapse of a world of meaningful industrial jobs supporting close-knit communities animated by an ethos of thrift, hard work, self-sufficiency and good neighbourliness.

The contemporary neighbourhood in which Walt and his Hmong neighbours find themselves is marked by physical absences – fenced-off, abandoned lots – as much as by the core, fundamental absence of public civility and the dignity of work – the key values of Walt’s older, pre-globalisation world – replaced by aimless, casual violence and intimidation. But much to his own surprise, Walt discovers that the recuperation of a world that is rapidly disappearing into nostalgia is possible through the Hmong family. Drawn into their life by his good deeds and their relentless hospitality and thankfulness, he finds a milieu defined and bounded by rituals entirely strange to him but which he nevertheless recognizes for the way they enable social solidarity, civility and mutual assistance.

Unlike the right’s conception of belonging and rootedness, which is intimately connected with place, soil, nation, Eastwood’s Hmong family is displaced, its animist rituals incongruous in the post-industrial wastes of 21^st century America. Stripped of their connection to place, these rituals have lost much of their ethnographic significance. Yet they retain their importance as a means of facilitating connection, of binding a family within a broader community. It is this that attracts Walt. In the blighted suburb where he lives, Walt is drawn to any manifestation of civility, as a defence against the loneliness of old age and the casual violence of local gangs.

As a punishment for attempting to steal the Gran Torino, Walt sets Thao to work performing maintenance on the houses of other neighbours. Here, the identification of civility and dignified work is explicit. Walt’s garage houses a cornucopia of tools as well as the Gran Torino. He has a lifetime’s experience as a handyman, proud of his ability to fix and make things. Many of us no doubt remember fathers and grandfathers of a similar kind. For Eastwood, as for many of us, such handiwork is the last remnant of unalienated work. It also epitomizes a form of self-reliance that has been destroyed in the modern service economy, which locks individuals into complex and expensive commodity relationships, a piece of irony that seems to elude those who champion free market capitalism as the natural form of social organization for rugged individualists.

The undermining of the essential dignity of work parallels the destruction of public civility and has many manifestations. We live in a society where public discussion about income and wealth is dominated by obsession about two forms of money-making that require no actual labour – stock market speculation and house price increases. Many Australians today desire above all else to live like the leisured rich of previous centuries, living off income for which they did no labour. One struggles to find in the daily news any mention or discussion of the world of actual labour, of its conditions and meaning, while every news bulletin concludes with a report on the machinations of the stock market, a little propaganda piece to normalize the idea of the shareholder society and the stock exchange as the central institution in our social and economic lives. It would surely surprise many to know that it was not always thus, that the stock market report on TV and radio news bulletins is an invention of neoliberalism.

The great irony, of course, is that this fantasy of leisured wealth remains exactly that – a fantasy – for most people, who must labour longer and harder to pay off mortgages that are bigger than ever and which render the ‘wealth effect’ of rising house prices nothing more than a chimera. But for the small minority who do benefit from the increasing dominance of finance capital – for which, in public discourse, the stock market stands as a simplified exemplar – and real estate price growth, the public obsession with these sectors of economic activity renders their obscene accrual of wealth, through essentially unproductive activity, completely legitimate. It is one means by which a new rentier class has developed and been legitimized.

Guy Standing (2011: 117) makes a distinction between work and labour, the latter being ‘work having exchange value’. Work is done ‘for its intrinsic usefulness’, and includes activity like caring for others, running a home and so on that takes place outside the realm of paid work and jobs. The second half of the 20^th century, according to Standing, saw the rise of ‘labourism’, the attempt to build rights around paid labour, to treat paid labour as the most important form of work and to discount entirely the realm of unpaid work. Accordingly, paid labour – jobs – became the dominant source of personal identity and the obsessive focus of social democrats everywhere, at the expense of the enormous amount of socially useful work performed outside jobs. Standing’s important insight is that, as the world of labourism has broken down in the face of globalization, leaving an increasing number of workers in precarious employment, the protections of the old labourist framework have been rendered increasingly useless, and the members of the precariat increasingly vulnerable. At the same time, there has been no concomitant recognition of the importance and value of unpaid work. Thus, an important source of social dignity and identity – long-term, full-time labour – has disappeared without replacement, leading to anxiety, social dysfunction, and widespread insecurity.

Gran Torino dramatizes this very predicament. The labourist world of good jobs in car plants has come to an end. Walt is retired, but all around him are the signs of a declining industry town; his son’s Japanese car is the final symbol of the decline of American industry.

In the absence of good, identity-giving jobs, the young people in Gran Torino are reduced to the criminalized fringe, seeking new identities in gang membership, making a living by selling drugs, absorbed by nihilistic violence and intimidation. They are not engaged in profitable labour or capable of meaningful work.

Deindustrialisation is one face of the decline of the labourist model. The disappearance of good jobs leaves workers vulnerable, breaks down identities and public civility. Good jobs carried with them a sense of dignity. Where Standing argues that the emphasis on paid labour as the main source of identity and dignity downplayed the importance and meaning of unpaid work, Gran Torino suggests that the two still co-exist. Walt has his own beautifully equipped workshop, and performs all sorts of unpaid work that is recognized as valuable – his ability to repair the plumbing in the Hmong family’s kitchen is an important moment in which unpaid work is vital to the building of social connection and friendship. Finding Thao a job with a construction company is important to his rehabilitation and development, but equally important is Walt’s insistence that he perform unpaid work repairing neighbours’ houses. For Eastwood, the destruction of good jobs has also led to the undermining of the skills of civility, including the ability to perform unpaid work in the service of others.

Reference: Guy Standing, The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2011

Stay tuned for part 2.

I love union banners. I photographed this one at the Durham Miners Hall in Durham, England. For a full experience of the beauty and power of union banners, every unionist should try to participate at least once in the Durham Miners’ Gala, held every July. The parading banners and brass bands make for a deeply moving experience. It’s the biggest trade union event in the world.