Micheal Joseph Jackson: 29 August 1958 - 25 June 2009

Chuck D (of Public Enemy):

“He’s been the soundtrack of my life… As a black man I feel the mess of multimedia coverage of the last 15-20 years is just a bunch of crap to me. Yesterday was a sad and a bad day for me, because I think Michael Jackson died of a broken heart and a broken soul. The same fame that he thrived on that these boardrooms create, I think he felt chained to it. I think it was painful. The thing is the hypocrisy of this country. Now fame means the worst side of you will get the most coverage. It’s kind of haunting that these record companies wouldn’t give him the light of the day or these radio stations wouldn’t give him the light of the day over the last couple years, but now that he died everybody’s on his jock, so to speak. It makes me angry because in the end, no matter how much he messed with himself or his appearance, which to me didn’t mean anything to anybody when it came down to him wanting to entertain and just make people have a good time, I just thought all of that was irrelevant. And now you see all these areas of multimedia praising him and jocking him. But once again, as a black man dead, it’s just convenient for American media, and much of the people living in it.”



and

Right Back Where We Started

repost from UAW rank-n-file militant, Gregg Shotwell

Live Bait & Ammo: #129: Right Back Where We Started

Sometimes one can’t see the precipice for the pitfalls. When you’ve lost a job or taken a steep pay cut; when your pension is threatened and your backup plan nose dives; when you’re faced with foreclosure or stuck in an abandoned neighborhood; when your biggest investment in life just lost half its value despite all the time, love, money, and labor you put into it; when you’re forced to relocate but can’t afford to uproot; when you’re too young for medicare and too old not to have preexisting conditions that exclude you from health insurance; when you’ve followed all the rules only to find that the rules have changed; when one or all of the above apply, it’s understandable that you may cling to your private barrel of anxieties as the current hurls you down the Niagara.

Understandable, but useless. The barrels that we cling to—contracts, unions, pensions, promises, IRAs, VEBAs—will not protect us. Workers’ rights are not defined by law or contract. Workers’ rights are defined by struggle. Empty barrels won’t protect us from the precipice, and there’s no turning back.

The United States is not in a recession. We’re getting “restructured” and “rationalized”.

The good news is, the barrels that once provided an illusion of safety are smashed to smithereens. From the wreckage we can clearly see that either we all rise up together, or no one walks away with dignity, let alone a living wage. The good news is, no one—not the salary workers, the knowledge workers, or the retirees—will be spared. The carbon monoxide of ‘Too-bad-for-them-but-I’m-okay’ complacency has blown away. Catastrophe demands unity. The good news is, our history can lead us.

Money isn’t lost, it changes hands. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s capitalism. The transfer of wealth from labor to capital didn’t begin with the current crisis. We can trace it back to Caterpillar, Staley, Bridgestone, and every lockout since then. We can trace it back to the offshoring of steel, rubber, textile, and electronics; to restructured airlines that pilfered pensions; and PATCO. We can trace it back to narrow interest bargaining and lunch bucket politics that allowed the corps to pick us off, one isolated union at a time. We can trace it back to southern tenant farms and garment sweatshops in Manhattan. What’s new isn’t the method but the magnitude. All workers in all sectors are under the whip this time.

The Delphi bankruptcy characterizes the contemporary strategy and serves as a template for what the Detroit Three and subsequent industries can expect. Recently Delphi abolished health care and life insurance for salary retirees. The switch enabled the company to report to the SEC that it “swung to a $566 million net profit from a $577 million loss a year earlier” [Autobeat, 5/13/09]. Easy money. Unearned money. Lots of it.

Next, they will liquidate the salary pension. What’s to stop them? Capitalism is the law.

GM and Chrysler may not achieve all their goals in the quick rinse bankruptcy controlled by the feds, but they’ll be back in court to finish the job, just like Delphi. Observe how history repeats itself.

Base wages at Delphi were negotiated by the UAW in 2004, eighteen months prior to bankruptcy: $14 per hour and no pension. Base wages at the Detroit Three were negotiated by the UAW in 2007, eighteen months prior to bankruptcy : $14 per hour and no pension. One coincidence leads to another.

Each new UAW contract promises security in exchange for concessions from workers. The latest UAW Concession Con promised to deliver members from bankruptcy and plant closings. As soon as it was ratified Chrysler went into bankruptcy and announced more plant closings.

But the nail in the coffin is the agreement to settle the contract in 2011 by arbitration based on non union standards. That isn’t a contract, it’s a death warrant for the UAW. What could be more clear? The Concession Caucus has effectively decertified the UAW.

The union agrees not to strike and commits to a goal that nullifies any benefit to union membership. This is the price we pay for company stock in a VEBA? The UAW signs confidentiality agreements with the companies and leaves members in the dark. Read the actual contract language at www.soldiersofsolidarity.com.

Read it and weep. Weep for the unsung heroes who risked everything they loved in the depths of the Great Depression so the next generation might labor in dignity. Weep for the youngsters who tread in the footprints of the generation who chose to collaborate with management and sold their birthright for a bowl of maggots that the clipboards call joint programs.

Read it and revolt like the heroes of America’s Civil Rights Movement who faced guns and clubs, police dogs and fire hoses, pimped out politicians, and judges controlled by cowards in hoods, so their children might live in dignity.

Read it and recognize that UAW members lost their voting rights.

We’re right back where we started. Sometimes, where we started is the right place to be.

Recently my wife, Sheila, and I ventured down to the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi for the annual Juke Joint Festival. Every year it seems there is one old standard that predominates, that bands play at every juke joint we frequent. Each year it’s different. This year it was “Big Boss Man” by Jimmy Reed. Over and over again, we heard:

You got me working, boss man / Working 'round the clock.
I want me a drink of water / You won't let me stop.
You big boss man / Can you hear me when I call?
Oh, you ain't so big / You just tall, that's all.

The blues is essentially subversive. Every blues like every river has an undercurrent, a subtext, a baseline shackled to oppression and resistance. A song like “Baby Please Don’t Go”, for example, isn’t just another song about love. It’s a song about slavery and addiction; it’s a song about poverty and injustice; it’s a song about fear and violence and solitary confinement. And like every old blues, it’s a song about the struggle, the struggle to be human in an inhuman world—like Detroit or Buffalo or Cleveland, North Carolina. Or a meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa that treats workers like animals, and where the feds arrest those workers under regulations as cruel and uncivilized as Fugitive Slave Laws.

We’re right back where we started. The authorities turned fire hoses and police dogs on the children in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and arrested them just like the police beat and arrested children trying to escape the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. The struggle isn’t between North and South, black and white, native born and immigrant, it’s between labor and capital.

When we try to take back what belongs to us, they will beat us and arrest us, and we will know exactly where we stand on the precipice.

Northwest Chicago: Workers Approve Sit-In At Hartmarx Suit Factory

DES PLAINES, Ill.Five hunded workers at the Hartmarx suit factory in northwest suburban Des Plaines have authorized a sit-in over the threat that the company's largest creditor may shut it down.

Employees want the largest creditor for the 130-year-old Chicago area company, Wells Fargo Bank, to help it reorganize instead of shutting it down. In the event that the factory closes or is liquidated, they will not leave.

As CBS 2's Susan Carlson reports, just months ago, the company formerly known as Hart, Schaffner & Marx, which has its factory at 1680 E. Touhy Ave. in Des Plaines, was best known for making the favorite suits of President Barack Obama. But that has changed.

Wells Fargo has received $25 billion in federal bailout money, and has the option of either selling the bankrupt Hartmarx to bidders or forcing the company to shut down. If that happened, the 600 workers at the factory would lose their jobs.

"We are all upset that, they should give us another chance to make sure that somebody comes in who actually wants to bid," said Workers United Local President Ruby Sims. "Take the bid. Let us work. We deserve to finish paying those bills, paying for our houses, taking care of our children."

*************************************************************************************

from chicagotribune.com

A touch of history in Hartmarx struggle

David Greising

May 12, 2009

They came from many countries to work at the Hart Schaffner & Marx plant. They shouted and jeered at the capitalist powers arrayed against them. They became a political sensation with national impact.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps so. But the events just described are not those that led some 600 workers to stage a boisterous rally Monday at the Hartmarx Corp. plant in suburban Des Plaines. Rather, they took place in 1910 at the famed suitmaker's West Side Chicago production plant. That strike led to the creation of the United Garment Workers union.

Life, and the union movement, have changed substantially since then.

At least three workers died in the Chicago garment strike a century ago. Fortunately, violence is virtually out of the question today.

In most other respects, the union movement is weaker than it was. Some 30,000 Hart Schaffner & Marx employees struck in 1910. Today, there are not that many textile workers left in all of Chicago.

The workers a century ago were fighting owners who unilaterally cut wages, ran an unsafe workplace and insisted on 70-hour workweeks with no overtime pay. Employers could count on uniformed police and hired goons to crack down on labor disturbances.

Today, the workers are fighting forces that seem all the more powerful because they are so hard to define. They are the powers of capital flows, of financial crisis and global change. Hartmarx is, after all, in bankruptcy.

A new owner that comes in may be tempted to shut the U.S. operations in five states and Canada and move production to China or another country where quality is nearly as good and costs run half as much.

This is not the fault of Hartmarx's U.S. workers, of course. But it will prove difficult for a costly, unionized workforce to become part of the solution to Hartmarx's problems.

Marina Franceschi, a 54-year veteran who emigrated from Puerto Rico, leaves her home at 3:30 a.m., riding two hours on buses and trains to her job pressing hand-sewn suits. "I pray. I pray that they're going to stay in business."

Of course one feels sympathy for Franceschi and her colleagues. They are rightly proud of their work, and their Chinese, Polish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, African-American and Italian origins speak to the enduring resonance of the American dream.

Quiquiang Huang, 39, and Yan Huang, 26, arrived from Guangzhou, China, just four years ago. They work for Sydney Branford, 64, a press room manager from Jamaica.

Speeches and rallies -- and the sit-in that might follow -- will not change the economics facing Hartmarx. What is important, though, is how politics and union pressure are coming into play.

Hartmarx workers learned from those at Republic Windows and Doors, who staged a sit-in last year after the company shut abruptly and refused to pay severance. Bank of America -- a recipient of federal bailout funds -- eventually made money available.

Now Hartmarx workers are leaning on Wells Fargo & Co. -- the bank providing the funding to keep Hartmarx in business -- to make certain the right buyer winds up with control of the company.

Yucaipa Cos. of Los Angeles and Emerisque from London have shown an interest in keeping Hartmarx in business. But Mistral Equity Partners of New York -- the bidder the workers are worried about -- has indicated it would do better by selling the company's brand names and shutting down its operations, say sources knowledgeable about the talks. Politicians have gotten involved too. Wells Fargo, another recipient of government money, can hardly ignore State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias' threat to take away $8 billion that the bank manages for the state.

Bob Bruno, an assistant professor of labor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said unions are taking advantage of the fact that the banks have taken government money and may need more of it in the future. "The banks are exposed," Bruno said. "The unions are smart enough to see where they can apply the pressure."

The recession is creating a strange new solidarity among management and labor. Among the 600 workers gathered in the cafeteria Monday at the production plant stood, here and there a few men in spiffy Hart Schaffner & Marx suits. As national leaders from the Service Employees International Union exhorted the workers to fight on, the men in suits applauded -- more than politely, I might add.

They were managers of the plant -- people whose jobs might be saved, too, if the right buyer gets the plant. In this labor fight, it's not blue collar versus the suits. It's everyone involved in making suits, scrambling desperately to save their jobs.

Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune

Workers @ AT&T Poised to Strike

Submitted to us by IWW comrades in Minneapolis, MN. Article is from the forth coming May issue of the Industrial Worker. Following the article are videos and related news on the building struggle between CWA workers and AT&T.

The struggle of the CWA rank-n-file is and will increasingly become an important one as it is one more sector that has the ruling classes attempting to gain concessions from the union - steel, aero, auto and now telecommunications to name but a few and most known, although healthcare workers, city workers, teachers, and transport workers are all feeling the capitalist crisis and related offense by the bosses.

As the IWW comrade states, this would "be the first major strike under the Obama regime" and "there is a growing mood among workers at AT&T and throughout the class in general that workers should not have to shoulder the bosses’ economic crisis – that the rich must pay". There has been a near media blackout on the emerging struggle. As is often the case, real and radical perspectives may only find light through outlets designed by and in solidarity with the people fighting back. - S&D

Workers @ AT&T Poised to Strike

By x359209 IU 560 Job Shop (dual card CWA)

Job action would be biggest U.S. strike in recent years, and first under Obama

IWW/CWA dual-carders in the heart of the struggle

At midnight April 5, 2009 contracts for most of the component groups represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) at the telecom giant AT&T have expired. After weeks of mobilizing, around 90,000 workers are poised to strike one of the largest and most profitable multinational corporations. A job action by CWA would be the largest and among the most significant labor action in the United States since the UPS strike in 1997. It would also be the first major strike under the Obama regime. The brewing confrontation could set the tone for class struggle in the U.S. for the near future.

Attack on Healthcare
AT&T has been pressing hard for major concessions from its call center, billing & ordering, and technical workers, especially in the area of health care. The company is demanding harsh cost shifting in the form of premiums and huge deductables for current employees and even steeper cuts for “second tier” workers hired going forward. AT&T is also demanding concessions in areas of seniority, over-time, and discipline. Raises would be replaced for the first two years by one-time lump payments.

Billions in Profit
AT&T corporate PR hacks have been spinning that healthcare must be reduced to avoid a repeat of what has happened to the U.S. auto industry. But AT&T is not General Motors. It is in a growing, innovative industry – one where AT&T bosses made $12.9 Billion in profits in 2008 alone. Besides, the U.S. healthcare crisis and its skyrocketing costs are not the fault of workers and their families and we should not be made to shoulder its burden. Workers at AT&T are furious that such a rich company would attack their families’ access to healthcare.

The company has also sought to pit the different component parts of “the new AT&T” against each other (the old Ameritech, SBC, Pac Bell, Cingular, etc) by taking advantage of real wage and benefit gaps and separate contract expiration dates. CWA has only partially resisted these efforts. A new contract at the fastest growing (and least compensated) component AT&T Wireless was approved just as negotiations were hitting the wall for 5 of the other major groups. The Union has given up on negotiating the old Bell South component contract, which doesn’t expire until August 2009. By agreeing to postpone these negotiations until summer, the union has given away more of all the workers’ leverage.

Time for Action
In the first few days after the contracts expired CWA leaders announced that workers should report to work for now, while still expressing exasperation at the “Final offers” being pushed by AT&T. It is clear that AT&T is advancing the same attack that has drastically reduced the wages, benefits and power of all the core unionized sections of the working class (auto, steel, airlines, etc.) AT&T bosses are confident that telecom workers can also be tamed for the international capitalist economy, and are hardly fearful of the business unions, which have no real experience or desire to wage militant struggle.

But there are factors that favor us, the workers, too. There is a growing mood among workers at AT&T and throughout the class in general that workers should not have to shoulder the bosses’ economic crisis – that the rich must pay. The issue of Healthcare is one that is on everyone’s mind, and a group of workers seen as struggling to defend their healthcare has the possibility of striking a chord deep and wide across the working class. Finally, Obama was elected in no small part because workers wanted “change”, and it will not be easy for his administration to openly attack any emerging struggle without damaging his standing and costing him room to maneuver.

The View from the Floor
Over the last few weeks in the Midwest call center where we work it has been interesting to join the union mobilizations and watch the attitude of our co-workers move quickly towards a determination to take action. A month ago any talk of a strike brought either yawns or fear from most people. As the deadline neared, however, the reality of AT&T’s demands hit home. At the top of the hour, union employees stand up in their cubicles and press loud “clickers”, shake noise makers, or tap pens on their desk in a show of solidarity. The effect is like a massive cloud of locust sweeping over the office and adds to the tense atmosphere. Groups of people discuss the latest news and share opinions about a strike. Red Union T-shirts are everywhere, and cubicles are decorated in union flyers. Petty discipline and rule enforcement from management have sparked a much stronger and organized reaction than usual – turning “team meetings” into heated debates. Now there is a wide group of workers who are not only willing to strike, but WANT to strike.

Strike to Win
If we are forced to go on strike it is important that we win. We have little confidence that the business union approach can beat such a committed and powerful adversary. It is likely that the withdrawal of our labor alone will not be sufficient. It is clear that AT&T is prepared to force us to strike and has calculated the short-term losses and chaos it is prepared to endure in order to implement the long-term cuts to workers’ healthcare and implement a second-class tier for newly hired workers. Certainly workers with greater skill and specialization than those of us in a call center have been replaced in strikes.

Direct action tactics like those most recently employed by the Republic Windows workers in Chicago, who successfully blocked the sell-off of their factory by staging an occupation/sit-in are ones we need to look at and advocate.

The IWW @ AT&T
Among the active core of union workers in our call center is a group of dual card I.W.W. members. The group grew out of a major struggle for greater union democracy in our CWA local about 4 years ago. We do not try and get workers to leave or dismiss the Communication Workers, but instead to participate in the CWA as “solidarity unionists”, fighting for greater militancy, democracy and revolutionary analysis of the system we are up against. We have built support for other local struggles including in the airlines, at the University, and for active IWW organizing campaigns in our area. We try and create a social scene with our co-workers built on solidarity. We do not ignore the CWA or let it exclusively define our activity. It is this mix of independent IWW organizing and dual-card organizing that really defines our GMB and points toward a successful model for bringing the IWW back to the cutting edge of the struggle for emancipation from capitalism and the state.

CWA National Video Mobilization 2009 - AT&T


Sabotage attacks knock out phone service

Fourth-generation telecommunications worker says AT&T squandering a legacy

District 4 members at the NCAA Final Four Game in Detroit, MI

The Auto Crisis: Placing Our Own Alternative on the Table

By Sam Gindin
ZNet April 10th, 2009
read full article here.

"Instead of waiting to see what else the corporations put on the table, workers need to put their own alternatives on the table...

This is an historic moment that challenges us to think big or suffer even worse defeats. Faced with immediate needs, workers and their union have too often shied away from taking on larger issues of social change that seemed too abstract, too distant, too intimidating. The lesson however is that if we only focus on the immediate, the options we have are always limited. We are all now paying the price of that failure to think bigger.

This is a moment when the elite - from the financiers through the Detroit auto executives and all those pushing the virtues of letting greed run free - have lost credibility. Yet it is the labour movement that is on the defensive and getting hammered. In this context, what is truly unrealistic is not new options, but the notion that stumbling through the present crisis will preserve past gains or bring new security.

Being realistic means resolving the crisis not so much in terms of saving the corporations, but as saving productive capacities and the economic base of our communities. And rather than speaking only (or at least primarily) for the members still working, it means also addressing the job needs of all those already, or about to be, laid off.

Being realistic means taking on a new and necessary fight - daring to put something new on the table. Rather than perpetuating our dependence on markets, competition, private corporations and the values and pressures they represent, this proposal builds on the first principle of unionism - organizing around our own, independent vision of how ‘progress' is defined. It means reviving the best of working class leadership: unions seen as not only negotiating for their members but raising the largest issues on behalf of their members and society as a whole.

Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches and putting it in the hands of workers. Workers have courageously taken over their plants only to end up 'winning most of the severance they were owed' (as a CAW press release put it); they should be encouraged and inspired to demand that the facilities are kept in operation and they be allowed to do productive work. And alongside this, it means that the need for work should not have to be traded off for accepting inferior working conditions - in fact, demanding social control over production might be a first step in going beyond defensive demands and thinking about what a truly democratic workplace might look like.

The alternative raised here will, as any significant change must, throw up new problems around democracy, accountability and balancing difficult choices. And it needs to be emphasized that this alternative is less a ‘technical' solution than a political one in the sense that it challenges the status quo of property rights in the name of democratic and social rights, and demands a cultural change in how we think of the economy and possibilities. It can't succeed, or even really begin, if it isn't part of the widest degree of discussion and debate from below, mobilization within and across unions, a clear identification of allies, and strategies for building new worker, union and community capacities."

Movie review for a day suppossedly dedicated to being Irish

Michael Fassbender in "Hunger."
review from salon.com

Were posting this on St. Patricks Day. Hunger, is a new film on the imprisonment and resistance of 1981 Irish Republican Army soldier and commander, Bobby Sands. - S&D

"Hunger" opens with a tremendous racket. A woman is banging a trash-can lid against the street, her face set in determination or anger. From the orchestral, discordant clanging around her, we can gather that many other people are doing the same thing. The next thing we see is completely different, an intimate, domestic image: a man in a bathroom, filling the sink with hot water and wincing as he washes his injured hands. It is daylight, apparently morning. When he is done washing, he sits at the kitchen table as his wife brings him breakfast: fried eggs, sausages, toast.

Only through context do we know what is going on, and viewers will come to "Hunger" -- the award-winning feature film debut of British video and installation artist Steve McQueen -- with widely varying degrees of information. Not much about these early scenes will be clear to American audiences, other than the fact (provided in on-screen text) that the place is Northern Ireland and the time is 1981. British and Irish viewers will of course understand them better, but not completely. Why are the man's hands cut and bruised, for instance? No matter how many books and articles and diatribes about the Irish "troubles" you have absorbed, you won't know that until later in the movie.

"Hunger," which won the Caméra d'Or (for best first film) at Cannes last year, is first and foremost a sculptural or architectural work that asserts the physical reality of the much-mythologized events it depicts. There have been other films about the 1981 hunger strike at the Maze prison (aka Long Kesh) outside Belfast, in which Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands and nine other inmates starved themselves to death. (Most notable of these is probably Terry George's 1996 "Some Mother's Son," which remains mysteriously unavailable on DVD.)

But McQueen's film is unique in its relentless focus on the nearly incredible everyday details of what happened in and around that prison. IRA prisoners lived naked and filthy in cells smeared with their own excrement and infested with vermin. Messages and contraband were smuggled in and out of Long Kesh in the body cavities of prisoners and female visitors, and occasionally even in the bodies of their infant children. Guards regularly beat and brutalized prisoners, sometimes driving them out of their cells for forcible cold baths, haircuts and delousing. One prisoner refused to eat, and slowly wasted away in pain and delirium, his internal organs failing and his skin covered with weeping sores. (Sands died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days on hunger strike.) Others followed him, at two-week intervals. Prison guards who ventured out in public were sometimes blown up with car bombs or shot through the head on Sunday outings.

It's virtually impossible to write that description without inserting political and ideological context, and it would be misleading to suggest that McQueen and his co-writer, Irish playwright Enda Walsh, completely withhold such things. "Hunger" does not provide the expository background or the conventional character development of an ordinary movie, but it isn't quite a non-narrative or experimental work either. Watching "Hunger" for the second time, I see it secondarily as a puzzle or intellectual challenge, designed to confront the issue of whether information is actually helpful, and how much or how little of it we need to understand historical events.

Do we need to know that the refusal to wear prison clothing or to wash or finally to eat prison food were all part of a gradually escalating IRA strategy, designed to force the British authorities to grant privileged political-prisoner status to men the British regarded as terrorists? Would it help to learn that Sands' hunger strike caused angry worldwide protests, or that -- to the British government's intense embarrassment -- he was elected to Parliament from a majority-Catholic Northern Ireland constituency four weeks before he died? You may glean those things from the thin scattering of info throughout the film, or you may not. McQueen is more concerned with showing us what life in Long Kesh was like in practice: Young IRA prisoner Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) tries to masturbate under his blanket in a room encrusted with weeks worth of shit, while out of the corner of his eye he sees his sleeping roommate's pillow alive with unidentifiable white crawly things, maggots or bedbugs or lice.

Do we also need to know that Ulster Protestant prison guards like Ray (Stuart Graham), the man with the bruised knuckles, felt humiliated on one side by their disgusting working conditions and humiliated on the other by the British government, which talked tough in public but continued to negotiate with their IRA enemies in secret? Or that Northern Ireland prison guards were the target of a long-running intimidation and assassination campaign, and that 16 of them were murdered during the period of the Maze protests? That statistic emerges at the very end of the film, but the rest of that information you have to pick up by inference or not at all.

And then there's the fact that I am describing things in words that McQueen and Walsh describe almost entirely without words. The first half-hour of "Hunger" includes, at most, two minutes' worth of comprehensible spoken dialogue, along with some snippets of news broadcasts and parliamentary speeches by then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, professing imperious indifference to the fate of IRA prisoners or the outcome of the hunger strikes.

That initial third of the film is also misleading in that we meet two people -- Ray, as he prepares to go to work at the Maze, and Davey, as he arrives there to serve his sentence -- who seem as if they will become central characters. In fact, we learn almost nothing about them, except that in this context they are playing their parts, Ray as a dispenser of harsh discipline and Davey as a loyal IRA soldier who lives "on the blanket" as ordered. (The woman with the trash-can lid never reappears at all.) The real protagonist of "Hunger" is of course Bobby Sands (played memorably by the German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender), who seems to rise unnoticed, almost magically, to the top of its chaotic human stew.

During the concluding section of "Hunger," which follows Sands through his final weeks in the prison infirmary, there is even less talking, if that's possible. McQueen has rejected suggestions that he intentionally depicts Sands' death as a Christlike agony, but to say that such comparisons only exist in the eye of the beholder is not to say they don't exist at all. Religion is scarcely mentioned in this film, and is sometimes described as playing only a minor or accidental role in the long-running Irish conflict. But the hunger strikes were consciously designed to appeal to the Roman Catholic and Irish nationalist ideals of martyrdom, which seemed repulsive and bizarre to loyalist Protestants.

In between those two sections, though, comes a sudden volcanic eruption of dialogue. Not long after Sands is viciously beaten down and scrubbed clean by guards, in the film's most harrowing scene, he invites a Belfast priest named Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) to visit him in prison. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt's odd, elegant and subtly disorienting camera angles abruptly give way to a single fixed-camera shot of almost 15 minutes, as we watch Moran and Sands banter, dodge and butt heads around the forthcoming hunger strike. Amid all that clatter, violence and silence, we are suddenly forced to engage with a Jesuitical debate, conducted in dense Ulster dialect, about the morality and efficacy of sacrificing your life for a cause, and for this somewhat murky cause in particular.

Moran argues that the IRA prisoners have backed themselves into a corner in their refusal to accept various compromises offered by British authorities (e.g., they were allowed to wear "civilian-type clothes," but not their own clothes), and that in the oppressive atmosphere of Long Kesh they have become detached from reality and psychotically obsessed with martyrdom. Sands argues that the hunger strikes will be invaluable as propaganda and recruiting tools, and that while he and others will probably die, the British will eventually capitulate to the prisoners' demands in the short term, and to the IRA's campaign for Irish reunification in the long term. It's a fair summary of positions held at the time, and in the long lens of history it looks like neither man was entirely wrong or entirely right.

In fact, after 10 hunger-strikers died and worldwide outrage grew against the Thatcher government, prison officials did grant IRA detainees a range of special privileges (while never officially acknowledging their "political status"). The Northern Ireland conflict burned pretty hot during the latter years of the Cold War, and Sands and the IRA's campaign became a cause célèbre for leftists around the world. There is a monument to Sands in Havana, and one in Hartford, Conn. Streets in at least four French cities are named after him. Tehran has both a Bobby Sands Street (adjacent to the British Embassy) and, somewhat infelicitously, a fast-food restaurant called Bobby Sands Burger.

On the other hand, it's impossible to say whether Bobby Sands' self-starvation hastened or delayed the end of the Irish conflict. For practical purposes, that arrived with the complicated power-sharing compromise between the Catholic and Protestant communities and British and Irish governments known as the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, although it was not fully in force until 2005. Given Sands' zealous devotion to the cause of a united Ireland, it strikes me as very unlikely that he would have supported peace on those terms. (His sister, Bernadette Sands McKevitt, has been linked to the Real IRA, a splinter group opposed to the agreement that has continued to commit sporadic acts of violence.)

When I met McQueen in Cannes last May, he joked that as a 12-year-old London kid in 1981, he was obsessed with two things: the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team that would win the F.A. Cup that year, and Bobby Sands' hunger strike. Although it's fair to say that McQueen's own position is somewhat closer to that of Sands than, say, to Maggie Thatcher, "Hunger" is more a document born of that fascination than an ideological position-paper. While the fact that McQueen is a black man of Afro-Caribbean ancestry isn't directly relevant to the film, it may mean that he felt even more detached from Northern Ireland politics than other English people did.

What McQueen seems to admire in Sands and the hunger strikers is their almost monomaniacal willpower, and their ability to resist a much stronger oppressor to the point of sacrificing their human dignity and their very lives. This kind of David-vs.-Goliath resistance is by its nature morally unstable. As I think McQueen is well aware, Western viewers are more likely to sympathize with the IRA cause of 1981, which is largely a moot point today, than with similar forms of resistance from Islamic detainees at Camp Delta.

McQueen began making "Hunger" without reference to any present-day news hook -- the Irish conflict was beginning to recede into history, and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay had not yet made the headlines -- but it's safe to say that he intended the film both as a chronicle of something quite specific and something much more abstract. "Hunger" is a mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema, one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking debuts of recent years. It's also an uneasy, unsettling experience and is meant to be. It captures a disturbing episode in a dirty little civil war on the northwestern fringe of white Europe. And it captures the ambiguous, dehumanizing theater of oppression and resistance, of brutality and self-sacrifice, that recurs throughout human history as surely as if God had planted its seed.

"Hunger" opens March 20 at the IFC Center in New York, with wider theatrical release to follow. It's also available on-demand from IFC In Theaters, on many cable TV systems.

Q&A at I.W.W. Starbucks Workers Union Presentation

Hosted by Solidarity & Defense and the NorthStar Center
Lansing, MI 2-21-09