Dossier 1: Seizing the Means of Cultural Production—A Selection of Interviews on Finally Got the News

Dossier 1: Seizing the Means of Cultural Production—A Selection of Interviews on Finally Got the News Chris Robé (bio) and Cole Nelson Introduction The interviews selected and gathered in the following were conducted by Chris Robé in the process of doing research for his book Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas (2017).1 There, Robé charts a decades-long trajectory of radical and autonomous video making, emerging in the various upstarts and dissolutions of New Left organizations around the world, continuing through and against the global ascendancy of neoliberal structural adjustment, and culminating in a variety of twenty-first-century digital activisms that contend with a dramatically transformed political, cultural, technological, and economic landscape. The coherence of such a trajectory in the pages of Breaking the Spell indexes the formation of a tradition of media activists that Robé is sharply attentive to, a tradition that accretes so many practices of filmmaking, video production, and meme creation as an unfolding critique of capitalism's latest, neoliberal clothing. Within this tradition, Robé situates Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) and the cultural production of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as an early experiment in autonomous media making against the traditional, acquiesced, and ascendent institutions of authority. Indeed, the autonomy of the League's practice—critical, as it were, of both the company and the union, and organizationally independent from both of these institutions—is emblematic of the tradition that Robé charts just as it underscores the ways that the politics of the Old Left, whether in its Communist Party or trade unionist guise, were unfit for the task of contesting the emergent social relations of neoliberalism. For Robé, Finally Got the News offers a salient critique of the birth pangs of neoliberalism, alert to the deprivations of credit lending as well as the widespread displacement of Black workers from production through automation. End Page 121 However, Robé doesn't simply posit a reflective appreciation of Finally Got the News's premonitory brilliance. Where neoliberalism emerges as a response to the heightened militancy of the global working class in the 1960s, increasingly instituting new social relations of inequity and exploitation, so too does the organizational thrust of the League respond to the same contexts and conditions, subject to the determinate contradictions that inform its moment. In this way, Robé sees Finally Got the News just as much a symptom of structural inequities as a critique of neoliberalism's fledgling social formation: "The contradictions inherent within the League and Newsreel (and made visible within FGtN) … need to be understood symptomatically as the contradictions that encumbered all Left organizations, to one degree or another, at the time due to the inequities perpetuated by capitalism."2 Robé draws our attention especially to the male chauvinism that informed the League's organizational structure and that undercut its liberatory force. Such limited attention to the structurally and experientially distinct relation to labor faced by Black women—what the ardent Black communist Claudia Jones would call the super-exploitation of Black, working-class women—is evident in the short shrift given in the film to women and their demands and desires.3 Also of note is Robé's foregrounding of the contradictions within the cultural means of production surrounding the making of Finally Got the News. Along these lines, Robé draws our attention to two primary tensions that inform the film: the racial disparity between Black and white—the League and Newsreel—that in part constrained the representational schema of FGtN; and, relatedly, the degree of technical competence in film production afforded the primarily middle-class members of Newsreel who by and large utilized (i.e., controlled) the means of (film) production—that is, until the League intervened.4 Elsewhere, Robé places the film within the context of the other cultural products of the League as a panoply of organizing tools, suggesting that the practice of filmmaking and film distribution remained largely out of touch from the realities of shopfloor organizing that preoccupied much of the League's activities.5 Finally Got the News appears, then, as both a document of radical innovation...