The much ballyhooed movie There Will Be Blood is supposedly based upon Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, but it surely miscasts Sinclair’s focus and technique. The movie limits itself to a study of a manic, ruthless oil prospector, more a personality study, but the novel is a much wider socialist attack on corporate power and labor suppression, top-to-bottom government corruption, and corporate control of war, universities, and Hollywood . The social and economic concerns read just like the present even though it is set in the World War I and 1920s era, mostly in the early California oil fields.
After years of Bush’s open-ended war
on working people at home and abroad, many on the “left” in the
United States and beyond are desperate for an alternative. For many,
that alternative is Barack Obama. Obama, has been careful to portray
himself as a “sensible progressive”. However, far from being a
“progressive” alternative, Obama is at his core a typical
representative of the bosses’ political parties.
Up to the present, the working class in the United States has not yet built its own political party, unlike in most major industrial countries and even in many less industrialized countries. So what are the prospects that the US workers will eventually build such a party?