When lies tell the truth ...
The photo above is fake in the literal sense. But it contains a truth, brilliantly conceived by artist and Instagramer Brailliant - his work here. Albert and Marilyn probably never actually met, although her friend Shelly Winters relayed that Marilyn held him as a fantasy partner and there are various rumours and even jokes about a liasion.
Albert was a socialist at heart, a German Jew who fled the Nazis and spoke openly against injustice everywhere. He opposed Leninism and what he saw as the tyranny of the Bolsheviks. The passage below is excerpted from Why Socialism, published in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review.
Marilyn grew up during the Great Depression, with working class roots. She married the left-leaning Arthur Miller, supported him through the McCarthy witch-hunt (as did Lauren Bacall with Bogart.)
She was a founding member of a Hollywood anti-nuclear group, supported the civil rights movement and briefly served on a Democratic party caucus. She supported Castro (despite her contradictory involvement with Mafia figures) and was the target of intense FBI surveillance. According to some biographers she had a brief affair with the fugitive Vanderbilt scion who was living in Mexico. Vanderbilt described her, in his autobiography From Right to Left, as a marxist.
So there is an inner connection between them that goes way beyond their fame and celebrity status ...
_ _ _
“Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism?
. . .
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones.
The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.
This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.
Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”
– Why Socialism? published in the first issue of Monthly Review, 1949
