The development of medicine is held back by the straitjacket of profit (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Nick Dearden, of the Global Justice Now organisation, has written a book on one major section of international capitalism—the pharmaceutical industry.
He demonstrates that the development of medicine is held back by the straitjacket of profit, not by a lack of new ideas.
Since its inception, Big Pharma has been embroiled in scandal. The book documents them and goes on to demonstrate what they have in common.
It pinpoints aggressive marketing through phoney scientific articles, perks for doctors and the denial of harmful side effects.
Dearden points out that this is common to all capitalist corporations. They speculate in the market for intellectual property rights. They buy up promising research from start-up companies and publicly funded research groups.
They then slap their patents on it and charge what they like. Treatments that cost pennies to produce are sold for thousands of pounds.
When this dysfunctional industry came up against the Covid pandemic it wasn’t prepared. That’s because big money is made from treating people with chronic conditions. But vaccines protect people straight away and that’s it—just one sale per person.
Big Pharma was initially uninterested. But the scale of the Covid disaster forced the state to intervene.
The free market was useless at inventing vaccines and useless at getting enough produced. Worse, the rigid guarding of intellectual property rights prevented poor countries from making cheap vaccines.
The NHS has some leverage over prices because it is such a big market, but nobody plays hardball harder than Big Pharma.
Recently, giants including Astra Zeneca, Merck, and Novartis decided to “pause” significant investments in Britain because they are not making enough profit here.
This book made me imagine a society where the only thing holding back progress was our ability to come up with new ideas.
Examining the lives of those questioning ‘normal’
The exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery is the first solo exhibition of Chilean activist photographer Paz Errázuriz. She chronicles marginalised lives and communities during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and after its fall.
Her early photography includes the protests before and after the coup that toppled elected socialist president Salvador Allende and brought in Pinochet, as well as the growing women’s movement in the 1970s.
The exhibition throws into question the idea of the “normal family”. Errazuriz photographs wrestlers in costume, on tour with their families – a particularly sweet portrait is entitled “The Mummy and his son”.
She captures circus folk behind the scenes, reminiscent of Degas’ ballet dancers. There is a series of works in an indigenous community. She photographs boxers and tango dancers, elderly women and residents of asylums, children and people sleeping on the streets.
Her most famous series is called Adam’s Apple, showing LGBT+ sex workers at work and at rest. This is possibly the most moving section of this fantastic exhibition.
She collaborated with journalist Claudia Donoso over a period of four years in the 1980s to interview and photograph men and women working in brothels and clubs in Santiago.
The discussions of identity are fascinating, while the bleak reality of sex work hits you like a brick wall. Of the subjects photographed for Adam’s Apple, only one survived the AIDS crisis.
But the humanity of all her subjects streams out of these images. Found families provide care and community, while institutions, such as in the asylum series, are cold and terrifying. The images are challenging as well as beautiful.
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Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look, is on show at the Milton Keynes Gallery, MK9 3QA until 5 October
Sally Campbell
It is a celebration of working class solidarity, expressed in experimental visual language
On the occasion of its centenary, the British Film Institute has re-released Battleship Potemkin, director Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark feat of cinema, complete with a new restoration courtesy of the Deutsche Kinematek.
However, instead of concentrating on the film itself, this home cinema reissue foregrounds the collaboration between the Institute of Contemporary Art, pop group the Pet Shop Boys, and the Dresden Symphony. This was a one-off screening of the film in Trafalgar Square that took place in 2004.
This is fine, but it does mean that there is some cultural housekeeping to take care of.
Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant asserts that Potemkin “presents the romantic notion of ‘a good revolution’ and of people wanting positive change,” and elsewhere doesn’t seem to think that the film is “communist propaganda.”
I hate to break it to Tennant and his band partner Chris Lowe, but they created a soundtrack for the most pre-eminent visual example of communist propaganda ever created.
Fresh from his startling experimental work in the theatre, Eisenstein was looking for a new visual challenge to assess his theories.
Initially tasked with creating a series of films commemorating the 1917 Revolution under the title Towards the Dictatorship, Eisenstein collaborated on a trilogy that celebrated specific events leading up to October.
The first was the historical drama Strike (1925), detailing growing unrest in a transport factory under the Tsar’s reign. The second was Battleship Potemkin.
The reasons Potemkin is regarded so highly a century on from its release are clear. It is a celebration of working class solidarity, expressed in experimental visual language.
It was also created at a time when the colossal gains of the revolution were being strangled by the emerging bureaucracy under Stalin.
In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein realised a radical vision of cinema that demanded the greatest possible emotional response from the viewer. Using people who embodied physical stereotypes rather than actors allowed him to frame the narrative in bold terms.
Among the famous set-piece sequences, there are small moments of beauty that catch the eye. One shows the billowing tarpaulin after the sailors take control of the ship, a lifebuoy hangs idle as the officers are thrown overboard, evocative shots of a misty morning in Odessa.
At a time when a genocide is being livestreamed, the celebrated Odessa Steps sequence remains a raw and visceral experience.
However, Tennant and Lowe’s soundtrack is only partially successful.
It enhances some sections but is jarring in others—most notably when the sailors take hold of the ship to pulsating techno beats. Others will be more appreciative, and it is in sympathy with Eisenstein’s wishes for new soundtracks to be created for his films.
In its time Battleship Potemkin was a cause celebre, championed by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, and condemned by reactionary governments the world over.
It made Eisenstein’s reputation as one of the most radical film makers of the modern age, responsible for a new cinematic language known as montage.
Eisenstein wrote of his films, “Strike is a treatise. Potemkin is a hymn.”
Its power remains undimmed.
- Battleship Potemkin is available on Blu-ray and showing in selected cinemas
Kevin Mccaighy
