The Left-Wing Journals and Fiction of the Socialist Era in America
Cover of the June, 1914 issue of The Masses by John French Sloan, depicting the Ludlow Massacre
In America from the latter part of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s the four most prominent left-wing magazines were probably Appeal to Reason, based in populist Kansas, and The Masses, The New Masses, and The Liberator based in New York City. These magazines provided reporting, culture, and social and commercial services for progressives trying to build a better world, live a better life — as did similar and related magazines like The Coming Nation and Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth — following in the mighty footsteps of the abolitionist The National Era (that first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as serial) and Frederick Douglass’s reconstruction age newspaper New National Era.
Going forward here at Liberation Lit, I may explore the contents and authors, the history and times of these periodicals and related others in tacit or overt relation to the issues and concerns of the present day, perhaps focusing especially on the fiction these periodicals produced, such as the brief story, below, from the third issue of The Masses, “A Vow,”by Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925), a major Polish novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in literature, often called the “conscience of Polish literature” for his socially critical work that profoundly engaged national and moral issues.
Known for his naturalist and lyrical style, Stefan Żeromski wrote under Russian occupation and later in newly independent Poland. He combined social realism with psychological depth to examine poverty, exploitation, nationalism, and the ethical responsibilities of the intelligentsia toward workers and peasants. As a politically engaged, ethically demanding writer, his novels embraced the world, the great social movements of his place and time and the personal stories within them. Central among his many works are the novels Ludzie bezdomni (Homeless People), Popioły (Ashes), Przedwiośnie (The Coming Spring), and Wierna rzeka (The Faithful River), all of which express sympathy with socialist ideas while remaining critical of both conservative elites and naive revolutionary romanticism.
The four main left-wing magazines published some of the greatest journalists and literary writers and visual artists of any time. Appeal to Reason published Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mary “Mother” Jones, Eugene Debs, and Helen Keller. Upton Sinclair’s impactful best-selling novel The Jungle was first published in the weekly newspaper as a serial, just as a half century earlier Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s blockbuster novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published as a serial in the left-wing newsweekly The National Era.
The cultural and social impact of New Masses was also great:
Many New Masses contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors, artists, and activists: William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, James Agee, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout, and Ernest Hemingway. More importantly, it also circulated works by avowedly leftist, “proletarian” (working-class) writers, cartoonists, painters, and composers: Kenneth Fearing, H. H. Lewis, Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Jan Matulka, Ruth McKenney, Maxwell Bodenheim, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Crockett Johnson, Wanda Gág, Albert Halper, Hyman Warsager, and Aaron Copland. The magazine’s colorful visual style drew on the graphic skills of artists such as William Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Reginald Marsh, and William Sanderson.
The vast production of left-wing popular art from the late 1920s to 1940s was an attempt to create a radical culture in opposition to mass culture. Infused with a defiant, outsider mentality, this leftist cultural front represented a rich period in American history. Michael Denning has called it a “Second American Renaissance” because it permanently transformed American modernism and popular culture as a whole. One of the foremost periodicals of this renaissance was New Masses.
In 1937 New Masses printed Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching poem “Strange Fruit”, later popularized in song by Billie Holiday.
The Masses and The Liberator published many great writers and artists as well, including:
Maurice Becker, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Fred Ellis, Lydia Gibson, William Gropper, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, J.J. Lankes, Boardman Robinson, Edmund Wilson, Wanda Gág, and Art Young. Each color cardstock cover of The Liberator was unique. Poetry and fiction fleshed out its pages, including work by Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, Arturo Giovannitti, and others.
Most of the artwork on the cover of the Liberation Litanthology was first published in The Masses (1911-1917).
Eventually the US Post Office refused to mail copies of The Masses because of its opposition to US involvement in the imperial bloodbath of World War One. And so it was basically sued out of existence. See “A Brief History of The Masses” by Madeleine Baran in The Brooklyn Rail.
Courageous and brilliant anarchist Emma Goldman’s left-wing magazine Mother Earth was yet another vital left-wing journal of the socialist era in America, running from 1906 to 1917. Mother Earth was also forced out of existence by the Post Office and the Justice (Injustice) Department during World War One.
After being blocked and sued out of existence, The Masses was re-started under the name The Liberator (1918-1924) and was succeeded by New Masses (1926-1948).
Meanwhile, Appeal to Reason (1895-1922) had the greatest circulation of the four key left-wing magazines, more than a half million at its peak. Most of the artwork on the cover of the Liberation Lit anthology was first published in The Masses (1911-1917).
Three of the greatest novels written in the 1920s, maybe the three greatest — Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Jews Without Money — were written by the editors of the leading left-wing magazines of the day, The Liberator and The New Masses, both based in New York City, whose editors included Claude McKay and Mike Gold (Irwin Granich).
The world’s best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, was first serialized in the progressive abolition newsletter The National Era.
The best-selling novel The Jungle was first serialized in Appeal to Reason, the progressive populist newspaper from Kansas. The newspaper funded Upton Sinclair the research for the novel, about $20,000 in today’s money.
You certainly won’t find engaged literature — any literature? — in Jacobin magazine, or in most any left news periodical today — wholly unlike in times past when left-leaning progressive journals helped form and expand and strengthen the consciousness of the times by first serializing (or excerpting pre-book-publication) bestselling progressive cultural blockbusters, progressive literary classics, and other novels like The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, News From Nowhere, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Dred, Daughter of Earth, Jews Without Money, Hard Times, Germinal, Mother, Herland…
Does anyone think that might be a problem?
Meanwhile, the internet is replacing religion, national, local, and family culture in people’s minds, except where it’s not.
In white supremacist imperial America that’s why it’s so important that white supremacist imperialists attempt to dominate the electronic mind, as well as physical society. That’s why they are going all out to do so, and staging shock troop ICE terrorism across the country to reinforce their supremacist tyrannical ideal.
That’s why it’s so important that left culture revolutionizes consciousness online too, and off.
If you’re steeped in left intellectual tradition, you can see the whole world, as an intellectual, and the possibilities for it. If you’re not, you can’t see the whole world. You can’t see the world as it is, let alone the possibilities for change.
There are other ways of knowing — traditional and historical, cultural — that can be very effective. But if you consider yourself to be an intellectual and if you can’t see through the eyes of the left, then you can only see poorly at best.
A left-wing view sees all from the point of view of the oppressed. A right-wing view sees only what it wants to see from the point of view of a wide variety of tyrannies.
The atomization and sterility of many cultural and social institutions and their professionals — the vitiating specialization — must play a role in gutting literature from left journals and newsletters. Also general defensiveness and protectiveness for left projects which are typically under assault from myriad directions. And often badly strapped for resources and so on. It’s a battered and besieged situation in a lot of ways. Professionalization filters in the sterile and filters out badly needed life, experience, and knowledge, seems like.
Look at the twelve populist novels, listed above, serialized in progressive journals — only two were published post World War One — Daughter of Earth and the proletarian populist standout novel Jews Without Money — and these two were merely excerpted not serialized, unlike the others.
So serialized left fiction took a huge hit post World War One. And subsequently the great left-wing magazines of the socialist era in America died out. Correlation? Causation? Hard to say but a great general loss in literature and culture, society and politics, absolutely. Serialized left lit should be revived today, especially given the gutted contemporary publishing establishment.
Going all the way back to Marx and Hegel, the left has often been profoundly ignorant (not unlike the right) on matters of literature and ideology and aesthetics. The Old Left of the 1910s and 1920s had a better conception than Marx and Hegel, but it could have been far better still, and then the New Left of the Frankfurt school and so on severely mishandled things and was co-opted by much Cold War ideology.
Better still, the left should produce its own progressive populist TV series and movies like, say, Most Revolutionary become Ultra Revolutionary.
A Vow by Stefan Żeromski
originally published in The Masses, March 1911
Mr. Ladislaw had conscientiously, industriously, ardently devoted himself to the study of the social sciences. That was in the past. In the same epoch of his life he had followed little sewing girls also with zeal and conscientiousness. But that was still true of the present. In his leisure hours, when unassailed by his Titanic thoughts, he even outlined a plan for a funny little book to be entitled “A Practical Guide for Scoundrels.” It was to contain a number of keen observations on sewing-girl psychology and no less telling proof of the writer’s dialectic skill.
Mr. Ladislaw explained his prejudice in favor of sewing girls partly by his great sensibility to the charms of those pretty creatures fading away in concealment, partly by the humane impulse to bring material help to that class of human beings, and finally—according to the strictly scientific method—by atavism.
Just a few days before he had met a little thing—simply adorable. She had eyes like two pools, of course, a small nose, not exactly Greek, but inconceivably charming, shell-pink from the cold, a little mouth like the opening bud of a wild rose, a—well—and so on, and so on. Mr. Ladislaw introduced himself—at her side—with an adroitness in such self-introduction that did credit to the author of the “Practical Guide.” Then he accompanied Miss Mary—he had cleverly elicited that her name was Mary—to the door of a high, narrow house in the centre of the city. But on reaching the door they turned back a few steps to flirt a bit. Then they made an appointment for the following Sunday at the home of the little sewing girl with eyes like two pools.
On the stated Sunday Mr. Ladislaw passed through the gate of the narrow house and hunted for the janitor to ask him which the girl’s home was. He strayed into the rooms of a monstrously fat, evil woman who explained to him sourly that the janitor lived one flight up. Mr. Ladislaw groped about in the dark for the stairs. He waded through slippery mud, and tapped the walls to the right and the left, until finally he found the ruins of a staircase. He felt as if he were climbing up stairs inside of a chimney. A sour smell choked him, a damp cold penetrated his bones. He could hear talking in suppressed tones on the other side of a door invisible in the obscurity. At last he hit upon the knob, opened the door, and found himself in a cell, lighted by a window set high in the wall directly under the ceiling.
“Does the janitor live here?” he asked, with his face turned to the small iron stove.
“Eh?” growled a voice from a corner.
When his eyes had somewhat adjusted themselves to the twilight, Mr. Ladislaw distinguished a bed in the corner from which the voice came. The bed was made of a pile of rags, and on the rags lay a man who looked like a skeleton. The skeleton raised itself with difficulty and showed a bald, yellow head resembling a furrowed old bone. Just a few strands of hair clung to the back of the skull. For a few moments he stared at the intruder. His eyes lay deep in their great round sockets. Then he lisped in a piping voice:
“What is it?”
“Are you the janitor?”
“Yes. Well?”
For an instant Mr. Ladislaw had the feeling that he ought not to ask here for what he wanted to know. Nevertheless he inquired:
“Where does Miss Mary Fisk live?”
“Mary who?”
“Perhaps he means the Mary who sews in the factory, papa,” a pleasant child’s voice cried from back of the door.
“That’s whom I mean.”
“Show the gentleman the way,” the sick man breathed, and sank back wearily on his couch of rags.
The little girl ran past Mr. Ladislaw and leaped down the stairs four steps at a time. On the ground floor he reached, under her guidance, a sort of shallow cesspool, in which a great heap of disgusting rubbish and garbage was piled up. Then she pointed to a dark corridor, and said looking at him with wide-open, penetrating eyes:
“That’s the door to the wash room. Back of the wash room, there, is where Mary lives.”
The girl’s little feet were lost in her father’s boots; her ragged dress, coated with dirt, scarcely reached to her naked knees. Mr. Ladislaw hastily fumbled for his purse, thrust a few nickels into the child’s hand, and walked on. After taking a few steps he glanced back, and saw the child standing on the same spot gazing rapturously at the money on her palm.
He opened the door and entered a large room filled with tubs and heaps of wet wash. He was nearly stifled by the steam and the smell of soap suds. He asked for Miss Mary. An ancient dame, seated at the great stove with her feet resting on the cold iron, nodded scornfully to a door in the background. Mr. Ladislaw bowed with mock courtesy, and walked past her. Cursing the whole expedition in his heart he knocked at Miss Mary’s door.
It was opened instantly, and Miss Mary greeted him with a bewitching laugh. He gracefully removed his fur coat, and held out his hand to her. The pressure he gave her hand emphatically betokened his vivid sensibility to womanly charms. He was so occupied with Miss Mary’s own person that he did not immediately notice the two other girls, who, at his appearance, had arisen from their seats at the window.
What an unpleasant surprise!
Nevertheless he bowed politely to the unknown ladies, seated himself on the one chair in the room, and while he gave play to his usual conversational talents he made silent observations.
Miss Mary was by far not so pretty as she had seemed to him at the first meeting. She was thin, round-shouldered, and worn by work. Her friends looked still more haggard. Young girls though they were, they seemed to have been ground down by some merciless power. That power was not licentiousness he could tell from the poverty-stricken appearance of the room and from the girls’ entire behavior. All three of them were shy and embarrassed. Their eyes had a tortured, puzzling expression—an importunate, unpleasant expression, which changed every instant from ecstasy to rage.
“You three live here together?” asked Mr. Ladislaw with suppressed resentment.
“Yes,” Miss Mary replied, biting her lower lip. “They are my friends, and we work together in the same white-goods factory.”
“Oh, that must be very pleasant—three Graces—”
“Not always so very pleasant,” remarked Catherine. “The Graces, I imagine, get lunch every day. No wonder it’s so pleasant for them.”
“What—do you mean?”
“You see,” Mary interposed to explain. “Our boss pays me five dollars a week, and Kat and Hetty, three, and besides gives us our lunch on workdays. Breakfast costs us each ten cents a day, supper twenty-five cents. We pay eight dollars a month rent for this room. You can count out for yourself that with carfare and something to wear nothing is left for a Sunday dinner. So we sit here chewing our nails.”
“That is if we don’t rope a man in and get him to buy us some ham sandwiches!” cried Kate, and glanced at Mary with a venomous smile.
Mary looked at her, an expression of unspeakable sadness in her eyes. Then she went over to her, and stroked her hair. When she turned around again to Mr. Ladislaw an anxious tear glittered on each lid.
“But you found a sly way of procuring a ham sandwich for Miss Kate,” exclaimed Mr. Ladislaw, and rose.
“Sly or not sly—if you are angry at us, well, we can’t help it.”
“By no means. On the contrary—perhaps the ladies will permit me to leave for a few moments and come back?”
“What for? Hetty can tend to it—please.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Ladislaw, and handed Miss Mary a two-dollar bill, the last he had. “Perhaps it will buy a bottle of wine, too.”
Soon after, Mr. Ladislaw drank a toast to the health of the three friends. A good warm feeling stole over him at the sight of the young girls devouring with appetite the meal he has provided for them.
As soon as they had finished eating he left.
As he passed through the narrow, gloomy passages of the house, a profound sadness seized him. He put out his hands, groping his way, and touched the slimy walls, which exuded eternal dampness. And it seemed to him he was feeling the tears of the poverty dwelling there, the tortured poverty that wrestled with hunger and cold. Those tears filtered down to his heart, and burned and bit like an acid fluid.
He stood still an instant and listened to his soul within him making a vow to itself.
The adoption of men’s natures to the demands of associated life will become so complete that all sense of internal as well as external restraint and compulsion will entirely disappear. Right conduct will become instinctive and spontaneous; duty will be synonymous with pleasure. —Hudson’s Philosophy of Herbert Spencer
[This quotation is printed in The Masses immediately beneath the story.]
by the CIA, the US military, and its proxies – a partial list since the 1950s
By Robert Minor, The Masses, 1916
Imperial America — Coup Nation
2026 Nicolás Maduro – Venezuela – currently in prison
2021 Joe Biden (arguably) – USA – attempted block of transfer of power
2014 Viktor Yanukovych – Ukraine – exiled, sentenced to prison
2011 Muammar Gaddafi – Libya – murdered
2009 Manuel Zelaya – Honduras – exiled for two years
2003 Saddam Hussein – Iraq – imprisoned, then executed
2002 Hugo Chavez – Venezuela – arrested and held for three days
1991 & 2004 Jean-Bertrand Aristide – Haiti – exiled twice
1990 Manuel Noriega – Panama – imprisoned till death
1983 Hudson Austin – Grenada – imprisoned for 25 years
1981 Anwar Sadat (apparently) – Egypt – murdered
1975 Gough Whitlam – Australia – no other severe punishment
1975 Francisco Xavier do Amaral – East Timor – exiled for more than two decades
1973 Salvador Allende – Chile – murdered
1971 Juan José Torres – Bolivia – exiled, then assassinated
1967 Panagiotis Kanellopoulos – Greece – imprisoned for seven years
1966 Kwame Nkrumah – Ghana – exiled
1965 Sukarno – Indonesia – house arrest till death
1964 João Goulart – Brazil – exiled
1963 John F. Kennedy (apparently) – USA – murdered
1963 Ngo Dinh Diem – South Vietnam – murdered
1963 Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy – Ecuador – exiled
1961 Patrice Lumumba – Congo – assassinated
1954 Jacob Árbenz – Guatemala – exiled
1953 Mohammad Mossadegh – Iran – imprisoned, then house arrest till death
America has couped these sovereign leaders and countries above directly, or attacked by proxy, militarily or financially, along with many other countries and officials, for profit and power.
This partial list of coups are all right-wing coups, ousting left or more liberal leaders (or where a rare tyrant) at great cost of life and other harm to the people, to the benefit of American plutocrats and the plutocracy in general – basically blood and bodies for money.
In addition to these American-orchestrated and backed right-wing anti-democracy and profiteering coups, America and its proxies have assassinated many others leaders, officials, and human rights workers, and interfered in elections in virtually every country in the world, typically at great harm to the peoples and for great profit to American plutocrats, high finance, big corporations, and other profiteers.
America – the so-called security state, the military and police state – has similarly crushed many left or liberal governments and popular human rights movements in virtually every country in the world, including its own, repeatedly and constantly.
Internal to America, the CIA, FBI, and other politicized police forces have consistently killed directly or by proxy leftists, liberals, the poor, people of color, and human rights workers and environmentalists, while falsifying or killing investigations, typically to the benefit of the right-wing and the plutocracy.
Of course, the American military-police state is working to coup additional countries today, while continuing its other depredations at home and abroad, a notorious tradition that goes all the way back to the founding of this imperial country, from sea to shining sea, “manifest destiny,” Native “exterminating,” African enslaving, and Mexico invading from the start. America has always been an imperial aggressor, and long since the most destructive and aggressive country by far, with military installations and forces in most countries in the world and throughout all the oceans and seas. Also space.
America collaborated at times with Nazis (and fascists) against popular movements during and after World War II, both at home and abroad. The country is deeply white (male) supremacist, and it shows in its Presidency throughout time, in the structurally anti-democracy Senate, in the racist Constitution, in its bigoted and brutal prison system and many such social systems, and in many of its policies and laws ongoing.
Sovereign coups are terrible but little different from much of the rest of America’s pillaging and politicized, institutionalized tyranny and bloodshed, again, both at home and abroad.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans killed by American invasion in the 1950s.
Millions killed by American invasion in the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.
Up to a million or more killed in Indonesia in the 1960s by American-backed forces.
And up to 200,000 killed in East Timor in the following decades.
Hundreds of thousands killed in Central America in the 1980s by American trained, backed, and armed forces.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children killed by American economic sanctions in the 1990s.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered during the American invasion and occupation in the twenty-first century.
Hundreds of thousands more Afghans killed by American invasion.
Constant drone strikes worldwide.
Today, since 2023 ongoing, the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians – hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced.
And since 2022 ongoing, the American instigation and arming and prolonging of the war between Ukraine and Russia – more than a million dead.
Massive refugee flight and deaths in Latin America for many decades, due to killer American sanctions, other pillaging economic policies, and war.
And this is only a very partial list of American assault and pillaging worldwide, including in North America itself.
Fundamentally, the fight for the future is democracy and human rights pitted against plutocracy and bigotry, and it always has been. Meanwhile, plutocracy and bigotry wage their wars like never before.
The real, true, and full Great American Novel – the consciousness and conditions it would depict, reveal, and dramatize – shudder to think.
“Try the Big One!” by Maurice Becker, The Liberator, July 1919
Great poet, novelist, and socialist — a serious political and literary writer for the masses — Claude McKay often filled the pages of The Liberator magazine a century ago — a great voice of the people, of the left — with crucial and striking resonance today.
A quick couple poems here below by McKay — “The White House,” first published in The Liberator, May, 1922, and his more famous poem, “If We Must Die,” also first published in The Liberator, July, 1919 during “Red Summer” — plus an excerpt from his teeming novel Banjo.
The Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term “Red Summer” was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence.
In most instances, attacks consisted of white-on-black violence. Numerous African Americans fought back, notably in the Chicago and Washington, D.C., race riots, which resulted in 38 and 15 deaths, respectively, along with even more injuries, and extensive property damage in Chicago. Still, the highest number of fatalities occurred in the rural area around Elaine, Arkansas, where an estimated 100–240 black people and five white people were killed—an event now known as the Elaine massacre.
Claude McKay was a tremendous Jamaican-American writer and activist. His novel Home to Harlem (1928) was one of the most popular and vital of the times, and his subsequent novel Banjo (1929) was a tour de force, which, along with Mike Gold’s left populist novel, Jews Without Money (1930), were among the best novels written in the 1920s, maybe the best, and still today, surpassing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) — far contrary to subsequent manufactured opinion among the establishment, ongoing.
At the time, Home to Harlem was a bestseller, award-winning, and more popular and widely discussed than The Great Gatsby. Banjo was more intellectually ambitious than Gatsby, and Jews Without Money was more politically influential. And today these three novels remain great and compelling reads that are especially populist and literary. But Cold War politics kicked in after World War Two, such that The Great Gatsby was ironically politicized and elevated as quintessential American lit — the Cold Warriors’ Great American Novel. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, in formation and canonization, Gatsby has become a liberal-conservative, establishment cultural fetish.
Meanwhile, the street-wise Home to Harlem, the exquisite populist Banjo, and the pulsing proletarian, rough-and-tumble Jews Without Money were devalued by establishment opinion when Cold War canon-making preferred depoliticized modernism — deliberate political blows to progressive intellect and consciousness, conception of self and society, and human awareness in general. It would take the insurgence of Latin American literature and multicultural literature decades later in American culture to begin to make up some of the lost ground of diversity and human consciousness, class consciousness and vibrant life in general.
The White House
Your door is shut against my tightened face, And I am sharp as steel with discontent; But I possess the courage and the grace To bear my anger proudly and unbent. The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet, And passion rends my vitals as I pass, A chafing savage, down the decent street; Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass. Oh I must search for wisdom every hour, Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw, And find in it the superhuman power To hold me to the letter of your law! Oh I must keep my heart inviolate, Against the poison of your deadly hate!
If We Must Die
If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!
Here now in ICE winter, with federal police rampaging and murdering across the nation, it’s time to remember Claude McKay’s famed poem “If We Must Die” published during “Red Summer” in The Liberator, July 1919.
Claude McKay, New York Public Library
Banjo — A Story Without a Plot
a brief excerpt
Ray was not of the humble tribe of humanity. But he always felt humble when he heard the Senegalese and other West African tribes speaking their own languages with native warmth and feeling.
The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested, and poised in the universal scheme. They inspired him with confidence in them. Short of extermination by the Europeans, they were a safe people, protected by their own indigenous culture. Even though they stood bewildered before the imposing bigness of white things, apparently unaware of the invaluable worth of their own, they were naturally defended by the richness of their fundamental racial values.
He did not feel that confidence about Aframericans who, long-deracinated, were still rootless among the phantoms and pale shadows and enfeebled by self-effacement before condescending patronage, social negativism, and miscegenation. At college in America and among the Negro intelligentsia he had never experienced any of the simple, natural warmth of a people believing in themselves, such as he had felt among the rugged poor and socially backward blacks of his island home. The colored intelligentsia lived its life “to have the white neighbors think well of us,” so that it could move more peaceably into nice “white” streets.
Only when he got down among the black and brown working boys and girls of the country did he find something of that raw unconscious and the-devil-with-them pride in being Negro that was his own natural birthright. Down there the ideal skin was brown skin. Boys and girls were proud of their brown, sealskin brown, teasing brown, tantalizing brown, high-brown, low-brown, velvet brown, chocolate brown.
There was the amusing little song they all sang:
“Black may be evil, But yellow is so low-down; White is the devil, So glad I’m teasing Brown.”
Among them was never any of the hopeless, enervating talk of the chances of “passing white” and the specter of the Future that were common topics of the colored intelligentsia. Close association with the Jakes and Banjoes had been like participating in a common primitive birthright.
Ray loved to be with them in constant physical contact, keeping warm within. He loved their tricks of language, loved to pick up and feel and taste new words from their rich reservoir of niggerisms. He did not like rotten-egg stock words among rough people any more than he liked colorless refined phrases among nice people. He did not even like to hear cultured people using the conventional stock words of the uncultured and thinking they were being free and modern. That sounded vulgar to him.
But he admired the black boys’ unconscious artistic capacity for eliminating the rotten-dead stock words of the proletariat and replacing them with startling new ones. There were no dots and dashes in their conversation – nothing that could not be frankly said and therefore decently – no act or fact of life for which they could not find a simple passable word. He gained from them finer nuances of the necromancy of language and the wisdom that any word may be right and magical in its proper setting.
He loved their natural gusto for living down the past and lifting their kinky heads out of the hot, suffocating ashes, the shadow, the terror of real sorrow to go on gaily grinning in the present. Never had Ray guessed from Banjo’s general manner that he had known any deep sorrow. Yet when he heard him tell Goosey that he had seen his only brother lynched, he was not surprised, he understood, because right there he had revealed the depths of his soul and the soul of his race – the true tropical African Negro. No Victorian-long period of featured grief and sable mourning, no mechanical-pale graveside face, but a luxuriant living up from it, like the great jungles growing perennially beautiful and green in the yellow blaze of the sun over the long life-breaking tragedy of Africa.
Ray had felt buttressed by the boys with a rough strength and sureness that gave him spiritual passion and pride to be his human self in an inhumanly alien world. They lived healthily far beyond the influence of the colored press whose racial dope was characterized by pungent “bleach-out,” “kink-no-more,” skin-whitening, hair-straightening, and innumerable processes for Negro culture, most of them manufactured by white men’s firms in the cracker states. And thereby they possessed more potential power for racial salvation than the Negro litterati, whose poverty of mind and purpose showed never any signs of enrichment, even though inflated above the common level and given an appearance of superiority.
From these boys he could learn how to live – how to exist as a black boy in a white world and rid his conscience of the used-up hussy of white morality. He could not scrap his intellectual life and be entirely like them. He did not want or feel any urge to “go back” that way.
Tolstoy, his great master, had turned his back on the intellect as guide to find himself in Ivan Durak. Ray wanted to hold on to his intellectual acquirements without losing his instinctive gifts. The black gifts of laughter and melody and simple sensuous feelings and responses.
Once when a friend gave him a letter of introduction to a Nordic intellectual, he did not write: I think you will like to meet this young black intellectual; but rather, I think you might like to hear Ray laugh.
His gifts! He was of course aware that whether the educated man be white or brown or black, he cannot, if he has more than animal desires, be irresponsibly happy like the ignorant man who lives simply by his instincts and appetites. Any man with an observant and contemplative mind must be aware of that. But a black man, even though educated, was in closer biological kinship to the swell of primitive earth life. And maybe his apparent failing under the organization of the modern world was the real strength that preserved him from becoming the thing that was the common white creature of it.
Ray had found that to be educated, black and his instinctive self was something of a big job to put over. In the large cities of Europe he had often met with educated Negroes out for a good time with heavy literature under their arms. They toted these books to protect themselves from being hailed everywhere as minstrel niggers, coons, funny monkeys for the European audience – because the general European idea of the black man is that he is a public performer. Some of them wore hideous parliamentary clothes as close as ever to the pattern of the most correctly gray respectability. He had remarked wiry students and Negroes doing clerical work wearing glasses that made them sissy-eyed. He learned, on inquiry, that wearing glasses was a mark of scholarship and respectability differentiating them from the common types…. (Perhaps the police would respect the glasses.)
No getting away from the public value of clothes, even for you, my black friend. As it was, ages before Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, so it will be long ages after. And you have reason maybe to be more rigidly formal, as the world seems illogically critical of you since it forced you to discard so recently your convenient fig leaf for its breeches. This civilized society is classified and kept going by clothes and you are now brought by its power to labour and find a place in it.
The more Ray mixed in the rude anarchy of the lives of the black boys – loafing, singing, bumming, playing, dancing, loving, working – and came to a realization of how close-linked he was to them in spirit, the more he felt that they represented more than he or the cultured minority the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race. And the thought kept him wondering how that race would fare under the ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life.
Being sensitively receptive, he had as a boy become interested in and followed with passionate sympathy all the great intellectual and social movements of his age. And with the growth of international feelings and ideas he had dreamed of the association of his race with the social movements of the masses of civilization milling through the civilized machine.
But traveling away from America and visiting many countries, observing and appreciating the differences of human groups, making contact with earthy blacks of tropical Africa, where the great body of his race existed, had stirred in him the fine intellectual prerogative of doubt.
The grand mechanical march of civilization had leveled the world down to the point where it seemed treasonable for an advanced thinker to doubt that what was good for one nation or people was also good for another. But as he was never afraid of testing ideas, so he was not afraid of doubting. All peoples must struggle to live, but just as what was helpful for one man might be injurious to another, so it might be with whole communities of peoples.
For Ray happiness was the highest good, and difference the greatest charm, of life. The hand of progress was robbing his people of many primitive and beautiful qualities. He could not see where they would find greater happiness under the weight of the machine even if progress became left-handed.
Many apologists of a changed and magnified machine system doubted whether the Negro could find a decent place in it. Some did not express their doubts openly, for fear of “giving aid to the enemy.” Ray doubted, and openly.
Take, for example, certain Nordic philosophers, as the world was more or less Nordic business: He did not think the blacks would come very happily under the super-mechanical Anglo-Saxon-controlled world society of Mr. H. G. Wells. They might shuffle along, but without much happiness in the world of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps they would have their best chance in a world influenced by the thought of a Bertrand Russell, where brakes were clamped on the machine with a few screws loose and some nuts fallen off. But in this great age of science and super-invention was there any possibility of arresting the thing unless it stopped of its own exhaustion?
The President Speaks & an Omnibus of Engaged Art and Politics, News & Analysis
The Most Moral Police State in the World
The President of the United States of America strode proudly to the microphone. He gripped the lectern with both hands. He angled his big butt out to the side. With an asinine form of punk superiority, he scanned the red, white, and blue audience. Then he spoke.
We are the most moral people in the world. My administration is the most moral administration in United States history. We are beautiful people, glorious people.
That’s why we need ICE to go out into the streets all across our great and beautiful land and commit law and order in the name of freedom. This country is holy. It must be left alone to be all that it can be. That’s why the most holy members of our society put on masks and riot vests and carry guns and tasers and go beat the shit out of people who have it coming. The people have it coming!
You’ve seen all the glory of our day, the way the ICE agents knock down the criminals and the resisters and the terrorists who do us so much harm — in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Los Angeles. In all these blue cities. You notice all these cities are blue where the troublemakers live? All the blue cities in all the blue states. Leftists! They’re not American, that’s not America, not how it was meant to be, white as far as the eye can see. I don’t bring race into this on my own, skin color, eye color — that’s what the other side does, the blue side. I only say it because they say it. They’re always talking about the browns and the blacks. How they suffer. Whites suffer too! Somebody needs to talk about the whites, and stick up for the whites, stand up, finally at long last. We need more white Presidents! It’s a manly job! People say, Donbo King Tyrump, we don’t need more white male presidents, we need black and brown and female presidents, and to that I say, “Bullshit!” And I know you do to. We need to Make American White Male Again — MAWMA. MAWMA! Mommy! Remember when Mommy told us little young white boys that we were best? Well, we are! All the Presidents prove it! Almost all.
But now you’ve got all these horrible brown people come into the country doing all this grunt work, and crime too — never forget! Even the Native Americans — they refuse to leave from where they are not wanted. They are brown too, don’t let ‘em confuse you, tricky bastards. Natives are not Red like all the history books say — they’re brown as dirt, brown as any common border-hopping Mexican.
So, anyway, you got to bust all that up and scare the living shit out of people — brown, red, or purple — I’m as colorblind as the next person. You go into the schools and snatch their kids and hold ‘em hostage so that you can get at the parents. And you go to these old apartment complexes and rundown neighborhoods where they all like to live together and you bang on doors, morning, noon, and night, and you drag people out who have no business being here and going to work every morning as if they are entitled to live wherever they want! Like criminals that they are, you lock them up in the vans, and cells, and cages, one on top of the other and then you ship them out of the country for the good of all.
We’re building up ICE to be the largest police force in the world which it almost is already so that we can flood every city in the country simultaneously and control the elections finally. And the courts. And that way we can Make America Great Again with peace and stability and cleanliness for all, pure and simple — peace — what do they call it? — Pax Americana — peace at the point of a gun.
By God, I will make America in my own image. And it will be beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A beautiful police state with cops on every corner and old white people protected at last, and families, beautiful white families safe and free to be proud and white again, here in America, land of the free.
Odds & Ends An Omnibus of Engaged Art and Politics, News & Analysis
Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”:
If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams — which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted. It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
You certainly won’t find engaged literature — any literature? — in Jacobin magazine, or in most any left news periodical today — wholly unlike in times past when left-leaning progressive journals helped form and expand and strengthen the consciousness of the times by first serializing (or excerpting pre-book-publication) bestselling progressive cultural blockbusters, progressive literary classics, and other novels like The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, News From Nowhere, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Dred, Daughter of Earth, Jews Without Money, Hard Times, Germinal, Mother, Herland…
Does anyone think that might be a problem?
Meanwhile, the internet is replacing religion, national, local, and family culture in people’s minds, except where it’s not.
In white supremacist imperial America that’s why it’s so important that white supremacist imperialists attempt to dominate the electronic mind, as well as physical society. That’s why they are going all out to do so, and staging shock troop ICE terrorism across the country to reinforce their supremacist tyrannical ideal.
That’s why it’s so important that left culture revolutionizes consciousness online too, and off.
If you’re steeped in left intellectual tradition, you can see the whole world, as an intellectual, and the possibilities for it. If you’re not, you can’t see the whole world. You can’t see the world as it is, let alone the possibilities for change.
There are other ways of knowing — traditional and historical, cultural — that can be very effective. But if you consider yourself to be an intellectual and if you can’t see through the eyes of the left, then you can only see poorly at best.
A left-wing view sees all from the point of view of the oppressed. A right-wing view sees only what it wants to see from the point of view of a wide variety of tyrannies.
The atomization and sterility of many cultural and social institutions and their professionals — the vitiating specialization — must play a role in gutting literature from left journals and newsletters. Also general defensiveness and protectiveness for left projects which are typically under assault from myriad directions. And often badly strapped for resources and so on. It’s a battered and besieged situation in a lot of ways. Professionalization filters in the sterile and filters out badly needed life, experience, and knowledge, seems like.
Look at the eleven populist novels, listed above, serialized in progressive journals — only two were published post World War One — Daughter of Earth and the proletarian populist standout novel Jews Without Money — and these two were merely excerpted not serialized, unlike the others.
So serialized left fiction took a huge hit post World War One. And subsequently the great left-wing magazines of the socialist era in America died out. Correlation? Causation? Hard to say but a great general loss in literature and culture, society and politics, absolutely. Serialized left lit should be revived today, especially given the gutted contemporary publishing establishment.
Going all the way back to Marx and Hegel, the left has often been profoundly ignorant (not unlike the right) on matters of literature and ideology and aesthetics. The Old Left of the 1910s and 1920s had a better conception than Marx and Hegel, but it could have been far better still, and then the New Left of the Frankfurt school and so on severely mishandled things and was co-opted by much Cold War ideology.
Better still, the left should produce its own progressive populist TV series and movies like, say, Most Revolutionary become Ultra Revolutionary.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should go Ultra Revolutionary. The Hill reports that “Ocasio-Cortez ramps up fight with Vance amid 2028 speculation”:
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” she told a gaggle of reporters earlier this month.
“And that is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
Things are worse today than in the past in crucial ways. The corporate state could use nukes to end the world tomorrow. And human-instigated climate collapse termination is far more likely today than in the past, when it wasn’t possible at all.
Things are also much better in ways than they were even fifty years ago such that there is a real chance for a significant chunk of power, possibly a tipping point chunk of power, to be wrested from the capitalist rulers. It may not be likely, but it is noticeably possible now. And the plutocracy and the bigotocracy are so threatened by it that they are instituting a potentially full-blown form of Nazism in America, and may well take over as explicit dictatorship and cancel elections and all human rights law going forward — which has never happened in America before, but now at this point would not be unlikely.
Talk about cancel culture.
How about cancel all Earth? Let alone all Earth culture.
Shit’s on a real knife edge. Yes, it always has been in many ways, but now the threats are increasingly otherworldly.
Things have always been apocalyptic and tyrannical in many ways — especially for certain peoples and classes of people. Genocide has always been with us, including today. But with the advent of nukes and the Anthropocene and increasingly advanced technology, human-instigated omnicide is real for the first time. Though this can obscure the perhaps more revealing point today that a cascade of socialist revolutions may be possible now like never before.
And consequently the lethal finance state, police state actions against the progressive populist push grow increasingly seismic, and may well result in the end of elections, the end of the courts, and full-blown nuclear war and wholesale dictatorship in America, and across the world, in wildly unprecedented ways. Things can always get worse than ever before. Especially now that things are also threatening to get so very much better.
It is galling that many people are just waking up now to how bad things have always been, as if seeing it for the first time with the American funded, armed, and authorized genocide in Palestine, or explosion of ICE as a giant police state shock troop organization to terrorize the country. Galling that so many people have not seen that America has always been a genocidal, bigoted imperial-become-police state country. Better late than never, hopefully.
On the Conquest of Oila, I mean, Venezuela, Chris Isidore and Adam Cancryn of CNN report:
The Qatari banks holding the [Venezuelan oil] funds have been instructed to auction the money to Venezuelan banks… That money will be collected by the Central Bank of Venezuela and allocated according to the requirements set by the United States…
The fact the funds are being held in Qatar … allows for less US transparency of the movement of cash.
…this is being set up kind of like a slush fund,” said the expert who asked for anonymity. “It’s very troubling.” …
“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a comment to Semafor, which first reported the money going to Qatar. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”
American-Israeli treatment of Palestinians is not even as considerate as Swiftian cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal”:
Infant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year… I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat…
Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.
…butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
On the other hand, compassionate cannibalism never goes out of style, as in “A Practical Policy”:
So let me judiciously advance “A Practical Policy,” which I expect will not be liable to the least objection, for easing the troubled situation of children in Palestine and Lebanon and beyond.
It is my well-reasoned suggestion that there be implemented a carefully regulated expansion of commercial trafficking in children, worldwide — that is, the legalization of compassionate cannibalism of children — closely monitored to ensure the dignity of all.
The time has long since come to officially support and expand the body parts trade, with its great potential of many corporate byproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore unimagined. I have recently been advised by virtually every corporate and financial executive I’ve encountered throughout the American Empire that children of impoverished nations principally, though not solely, are to be understood in explicit terms as the next great global growth industry — children as a prolific cash crop.
Palestinian children and countless other youths of the world, having little to no use or prospect, would be harvested for their own sake, and be mercifully removed from hopeless predicaments of hunger, disease, danger, and massacre. In many cases, the children might be sold abroad, their cut-rate labor placed in service of others in more profitable situations. Or the children might simply be released from their degraded, agonized state of being — that is, they would be terminated, offered as edibles for those fortunate enough to live in more bountiful circumstances.
Such enlightened policy is certain to receive the hearty endorsement of President Trump and all other high officials who are long since accustomed to fattening and shining their wallets and bellies on flayed skin and flesh, blood and tears.
Art can well do both — convey a kind of eternal truth and “make something happen,” concrete, to good effects. Plenty of examples throughout time.
The establishment ideological denial of this is politicized propaganda of the highest order, easily proven false. That’s why tyrants and bigots ban and burn books. It’s widely known to many what art does and can do very well. Such is the immense power of propaganda in literature — from the most refined to the most crude.
I find the constant intoning that Marxism has only much to say about the work of interpretation and not artistic production proper a bit baffling…
It’s not merely “baffling” — it’s quite stupid. Often intentionally stupid, playing dumb, or willing to be dumb, in an groveling attempt to meet the demands of establishment lit, editing, and publishing.
Often the “constant intoning” is straight-up deceit. Whatever the many motivations, it’s certainly a baseless view and understanding of art — demonstrated time and time again throughout history.
When the plutocracy wants money to give to its rich pals, it simply credits itself the money. When the People need money to meet their essential needs, the plutocracy says, “Fuck you!”:
The Federal Reserve has quietly delivered nearly half a trillion dollars to Wall Street with few strings attached over the past few months through an obscure government financial program intended for banks struggling to make cash payments.
The right-wing sees the Evil in itself and projects it onto everyone else. The liberators are terrorists, the terrorists are liberators. Classic psychology. Defense mechanism. Orwellian. Lies of Empire.
George Orwell learned all of the newspeak and doublespeak techniques included in his famed novel 1984 in the West, by the West, from the West, by working for the BBC, before he quit to write for a left-wing periodical.
Orwell’s 1984 is a novel derived largely from Orwell’s first-hand observations of the — yes, Orwellian — manipulations and workings of the British Broadcasting Corporation where he was employed during World War II. Though Orwell’s novel 1984 was seen as a critique of the official enemy of western capitalism, the Soviet Union (even as the Soviets ran their own kind of state-capitalism), all of the Orwellian newspeak that Orwell coined, documented, and dramatized in 1984 was based on the standard propaganda techniques of the BBC and all state-capitalist media during World War Two — continuing through today — techniques and practices that Orwell necessarily participated in and saw directly as a BBC employee during that time and that led to his resignation in the middle of the war to write for a left-wing magazine.
ICE is the KKK, essentially — the Ku Klux Klan legalized, armed, and massively funded by the state — the police state — with white masks instead of white hoods. The KKK — a ritualistic white terror state — was founded in 1865 in Tennessee by six former Confederate Army officers at the end of the US Civil War, thus far preceding Nazism — all-American. Looks like the South won the War, after all — The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, The War for Southern Independence, The War to Preserve Slavery.
State-armed thugs profiling and rounding up people and shipping them into prison and concentration camps is also Nazism, which long-since too makes for a kind of straight-up Americana. Proud white supremacists led by proud white supremacists. Supremacists deputized with a badge, a gun, a mask, an anonymous van, prison cages, and concentration camps. Much of this is the traditional imperial American way. ICE is exactly what it looks like — state terrorism, masked, corporate, plutocrat funded.
The devils have come home to roost and roust, to crow, to thug, in thug nation. A thug nation led by suit-and-tied terrorists. Official state terrorists. It is what it is in the land of the Native exterminating, African enslaving, Mexican and world invading empire, from sea to shining sea, Manifest Destiny. O say can you see the end of all liberty? The worse people in the world run the show. And always have, even if by now it grows more evident to more people than ever before.
Fascism is just capitalism with an Italian accent.
Capitalism is simply rule by the rich — plutocracy.
Plutocracy is simply dictatorship by money — tyranny.
Of course all this is badly bigoted too.
And it is all anti-democracy and anti human rights.
In his decades-long suppressed introduction to Animal Farm, George Orwell noted of news and news media the same phenomena of social and political taboo that applies to literary and other publishing and cultural production — the lies of empire:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Case in point, the US Post Office refused to mail copies of the left-wing magazine The Masses because of its opposition to US involvement in the imperial bloodbath of World War One. See “A Brief History of The Masses” by Madeleine Baran in The Brooklyn Rail.
Courageous and brilliant anarchist Emma Goldman’s left-wing magazine Mother Earth was yet another vital left-wing journal of the socialist era in America, running from 1906 to 1917. Mother Earth was also forced out of existence by the Post Office and the Justice (Injustice) Department during World War One.
After being blocked and sued out of existence, The Masses was re-started under the name The Liberator (1918-1924) and was succeeded by New Masses (1926-1948).
Meanwhile, Appeal to Reason (1895-1922) had the greatest circulation of the four key left-wing magazines, more than a half million at its peak. Most of the artwork on the cover of the Liberation Lit anthology was first published in The Masses (1911-1917).
Three of the greatest novels written in the 1920s, maybe the three greatest — Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Jews Without Money — were written by the editors of the leading left-wing magazines of the day, The Liberator and The New Masses, both based in New York City, whose editors included Claude McKay and Mike Gold (Irwin Granich).
The world’s best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, was first serialized in the progressive abolition newsletter The National Era.
The best-selling novel The Jungle was first serialized in Appeal to Reason, the progressive populist newspaper from Kansas. The newspaper funded Upton Sinclair the research for the novel, about $20,000 in today’s money.
This is the Great American Novel, sad to say — Brandon Taylor in “american symbolism: an insane year (already)”:
That’s the thing I can’t get over about the ICE footage. The abject human cruelty of it. Handcuffing these people. Dragging them over ice and sleet and concrete. Bloodying their bellies and their backs. Punching them in the face. Hitting them with the butts of rifles or choking them until they gasp and wheeze and their eyes turn red. Wrenching them from cars and throwing them to the ground, as if to stun them the way we used to stun roosters we knocked from the trees. I keep thinking, that is going to scrape that man’s back. He is going to be bleeding for hours. That is going to break that woman’s ribs. And they are going to leave her in a cell or in the back of a freezing van for hours. I keep thinking about the smell of those vans and those cars. The sweat and the blood. The ticking of the turn signals and the wheeze of the bruised people locked in the back. I keep thinking about the ICE agents stopping at Dunkin or Starbucks or buying Kratom at the gas station before parking outside of a school to drag mothers to their knees. I keep thinking about the faces, the way the people gasp when grabbed, their mouths opening in shock, their eyes going wide. How every video begins already in the thrust of the assault, as the dark agents swoop in on these people the way I’ve seen a large dog dart in upon a group of chickens at the corner of the fence. How quickly the blood comes. It’s astonishing to me, the scale of the cruelty and the immediacy of the cruelty. The pointlessness of the cruelty. The cruelty feels abstract to me, absurd. But the impact of the cruelty feels very, very real.
And we wake up every day to this. Have been waking up every day to this. People getting snatched. And the President and his regime posting about it. Posting through it. Making memes. Turning the abject human suffering into laughs. Because these are not people to them, but rather problems to be solved. Their most hated enemies.
The establishment blocks most left partisan art and other cultural works from existing or being known in the first place. And so it is that the culture is wildly confused and gutted and has a near impossible time of understanding itself and being able to act in sane and needed ways.
“You have to create a systemic apparatus that is aligned with the revolutionary potential, and try to unlock the revolutionary potential of people, through ideology, growth, and utilizing audience as an interlocutor.”
Gabriel Rockhill:
[The establishment] “cultural apparatus … purges leftist politics, meaningful leftist politics, from the work that it decides to canonize. And it does this systematically. You see it in the theory world, you see it in art and culture, you see it in cinema. They try to purify the reified and isolated aesthetic product from the social totality out of which it emerged, which is political. And in doing that they really destroy the work, because they destroy the very fabric of its meaning.
Art should be able to give us an adequate picture of reality [notes Brecht]. And this is not some reductivist and banal idea. It is that art should give us the tools by which we understand the complexity of the material reality within which we are situated, and provide us with the skills necessary, or at least the approximation of a skill set, to transform that world. Otherwise what it’s doing is obscuring the real nature of relations. And that is a very powerful understanding of what culture does or is capable of doing.
Bourgeois culture though tends to want to present itself as apolitical, as if it were isolated from the realm of politics. And there’s lots of reasons why it does this, but one of them is precisely to provide cover for its political agenda. Because it says oh this isn’t a political issue. Everybody knows, for instance, that Cuba is a communist hellscape. It’s not politics, it’s just reality. And so the making of the liberal ideology about aesthetic products being apolitical is often just then invisibilizing their deep-seated political orientation. Against that one of the things we need to do … [is] resuscitate these forms of analysis and cultural production but also then reveal the extent to which the liberal apolitical approach is actually political through and through.
Today we need movies, shows, novels, and stories that not only lead to changed laws but to revolutionary movement.
We need the will to conceive, create, and distribute, per Mark Ruffalo, as reported by Variety:
Ruffalo is a proponent of films that tell true stories in a way that cement what could be passing news stories into the cultural consciousness, and/or have immediate real-life repercussions. “The story of ‘Spotlight,’ for example, was by itself a blockbuster story, but with the film ‘Spotlight,’ we changed laws. That movie helped people. It changed the world. With ‘Dark Waters,’ only a small percentage of people were reading the story of Rob Bilott, or watching the documentaries. When you make it a film, all of a sudden everyone is seeing it as a piece of entertainment and they’re learning as well. And more laws have been changed both nationally and internationally with those two things happening than if Rob had just done the thing by himself. We use these things to organize movements around. And that’s why it’s so important and that’s why this relationship between journalism and filmmaking is so important.”
What kind of movies might come out about what is happening in the present-day? That was a recurring theme through Friday evening, on- and off-stage. Director Ethan Silverman, in a quote moment before the show, whispered: “This is a really important time to be doing this… The clarion call of Woodward and Bernstein was so huge, so immense. What’s scary to me at this moment is that Nixon and Watergate seem so quaint.”
In a conversation earlier in the day before rehearsals began, Ruffalo got deeper into his motivation for doing the show right now.
“We had 127 journalists killed in Gaza; there’s journalists being killed all over the world. Journalism in the United States is being killed metaphorically, through buyouts. And we see what happened with (Jimmy) Kimmel and the kind of censorship that’s [floating around. So in Hollywood today, because this film had such an impact, and with the things we’re facing with the monopolization of newspapers and newsrooms all over the nation…”
Literature and its individual works are quantifiable and objectively understandable in all kinds of way, not in every way, but in many very revealing and useful ways.
A Florida Congressman introduced a bill to make Greenland the 51st state.
Yeah. That isn’t how it works. And he knows that. Instead of being outraged by the fact this got pen put to paper and introduced…let’s maybe flood his inbox asking why he isn’t doing any real work and instead has time for shenanigans.
I am calling for the arrest and prosecution of the ICE agent that shot and killed Renee Good.
I am also calling on Congress to support my bill with Rep. Crockett to force ICE agents to wear body cameras, not wear masks, have visible identification, and ensure ICE has independent oversight.
In order to preserve and expand the status quo, the establishment — wealth to the wealthy — Trump and Trumpism is all performance theater — a “tyranny of one” — everyone can be their own superman and wonderwoman, a cult of themselves. Join the Trumpist cult, like the Army of old, and instead of being an “Army of One” be a “Tyranny of One” — a tyrant above all. Your own self as cult — your super-self, your Trumpist self. Your Trump self.
This is the way to destroy collective consciousness — all for one and one for all. You change it to the Trumpist view: One against all, because all against one. Supposedly.
Or, as Walter Benjamin describes this omnicidal state of consciousness in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936):
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation.
[People’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Philly is not fucking around. This should be happening in EVERY. FUCKING. CITY!
2
Here now in “ICE winter,” with federal police rampaging and murdering across the nation, it’s time to remember Claude McKay’s famed poem “If We Must Die” published during “Red Summer” in The Liberator, July 1919.
Is this not what is meant by timeless fiction? Epic works of anti-empire? Nobleman and crown loyalist “William Shakespeare” wrote famed pro-monarchy plays during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Should people of conscience today, leftists, pro-democracy, not write anti-empire, anti-capitalist, anti-bigoted-tyranny today?
President Donbo King Tyrump was pissed. He ordered that the entire northern border of Mexico be “carpet bombed into oblivion!” The President considered, not for the first time, bombing all of Central and South America, giving them the North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc, etc, etc treatment so that there be no refuge for anyone anywhere.
What Wall Street’s economic hit men had not yet destroyed, Washington DC’s bombs and bullets would finish off. There would be crisis and then there would be capitalism to reap the whirlwind. Millions would suffer, millions would die, a relative few would profit. The way of the world.
The President of the USA punched the air.
I am who I am! President Tyrump called to reporters upon touching down in his helicopter near a slaughterfield. I make my America great again! This is everything we ever wanted! We own the world! We own all! God bless the USA! Where else can a person rise from mere billions to go out and conquer the planet?!
Thus did fall once again the exploding hammer of American Exceptionalism on Mexico and on the Americas, Central and South, as it continued to fall on the world abroad – Asia, Africa, even Europe – and at home: Texas, Appalachia, the Deep South, the Native Southwest, the corroded cities and blighted suburbs and poisoned countryside.
In Empire All In — my 2016 anti-Trump novel — when the literary establishment was AWOL, as it remains, I depicted the villainous Trump figure invading Texas, with plans to invade many other states, a…
Defund the Police is essentially a vague proposed plank, or a slogan really, roughly aligned with the many planks that came out of the Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders movements. I always thought that the better slogan would be Replace the Police — with various civil/social service groups.
People, their imaginations, need something to hang onto to move toward, to make sense of change. So, Replace the Police [State]. And a whole lot more.
“Defunding” the police should be obvious and implied in such a slogan.
Zohran Mamdani, to become Mayor of NYC, focused on the “affordability” crisis. There is also a much larger brutality crisis, of which the affordability crisis is part.
Defund the Police State is probably a better slogan, and necessary, as with Defund the Military State and the Prison State and the One Percent. Abolition of the Police, Military, and Prison State, and the One Percent, would revolutionize the society, and necessarily gut the tyrannical mechanism of capitalism.
These are slogans and ideals that can be more exactingly expressed and turned into actual policy plans, tactics, and proposals, which are actually already in somewhat limited circulation.
Institutionalizing, and of course articulating, related measures remains the ongoing challenge.
American empire uses guns and dollars interchangeably to maintain its stranglehold on exploitation and profiteering and immiseration.
Important to realize that society has been split in two, or three, by the plutocracy. Fundamentally. It’s not a natural split. It’s a manufactured artificial one.
The main destructive forces in this society are plutocracy and bigotry. Each weaponizing the other against democracy and human rights, which themselves fight back against the bigoted plutocratic assault and division of society.
All the endless arguments over vital forms in art are, at best, proxy battles for arguments over compelling and imperative content, though establishment obfuscation and ideology holds otherwise. If your form feels flat, thin, weak, or nowhere, take a long hard look at your content to discover the basis of the problem — as long as you have an essential handle on aesthetic tools, no small thing in art. So it is with consciousness and life, with society and politics, with conversation and labor, with story and love, with the fate of the world. What the Hell is your content? What really wakes you up and might move the world? Form follows.
Who gets to say what in any country is always a loaded political act — whether it be in art, journalism, scholarship, or daily conversation, let alone in any school, workplace, religious institution, prison, or any other public or private place.
And so it is that Literary Times are always subject to change, and, in fact, are always changing.
Do we live in metamodern literary times — a cross between the modern and postmodern? This is the subject of a recent article “How Metamodernism Can Save Us All” by Thaddeus Thomas at the Republic of …
The socialist, human rights revolution by Sabia Perez and allies still going strong in Ultra Revolutionary:
Just so, Sabia levered Alecta to meet the people’s demands, and they achieved a good bit: guaranteed monthly income, higher wages, expanded poverty relief, universal health care, free childcare, paid family leave, the abolition of ICE, and full legalization and inclusion of undocumented people for the survival, dignity, and relief of all. Plus demands for structural power that erased medical and educational debt, making college free, sharply reducing incarceration, and redirecting police and military funding into housing and social services. An end to America’s killer economic sanctions and military invasions that crush people around the world.
The ALA also demanded shorter workweeks, more vacation and voting access, and a restructured financial system funded by wealth taxes and a trillion dollars of national emergency credit to a public bank. After all, liberation means material security and dignity, reduced coercion and oppression, and a decisive shift of resources away from the police state to the social dignity state, away from punishment and war to human and ecological care and public well-being.
And so it is that Sabia’s Revolution has already gutted all student and medical debt, gotten paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to food, housing, and education, health care, and marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer. And Sabia and the demands and leverage of the ALA got many other kinds of material improvements, environmental repair, and a massive reduction of militarization at home and abroad. But much more needs to be done, because private business does so little for people who cannot pay the price, and often performs poorly for even those who can afford goods and services. Some serious nationalization of industry and society is in order or the world will continue to burn and the people will suffer and die as always. Sabia and the ALA still face too many monstrous creations of the world, like David against Goliath. Main Street and country roads have been improved for the better – patched and bandaged here and there – but remain far from fully transformed for the good of all.
And, oh yes, Sabia has read her Karl Marx and her Walter Benjamin. Jasmine Maldonado – Montessori teacher extraordinaire – insisted on it. You fight performance politics with material politics, brutal bigoted expression with socialist art and expression, action and accomplishments. During interwar Germany of the past century, the ill-fated left partisan Walter Benjamin saw in the depredations of capitalism and Nazism and fascism – those ghoulish blood brothers – he foresaw the genocidal cult of bigoted tyranny of Trumpism-to-come, firsthand, and he described this omnicidal state of consciousness in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin showed that fascism turns politics into aesthetics, using ritual and the “Führer cult” – the cult of personality – to dominate the masses. Bigoted grand illusions become aestheticized politics used by the plutocracy, to preserve and further enrich itself by mobilizing the masses into war – civil war and national war and cultural war and entirely irrational war. People become alienated, and even take pleasure in their own destruction, let alone the destruction of others – Evil made aesthetic.
In contrast, the workers of liberatory revolution, they politicize art and material gains for the good of the people and against the aestheticized politics of supremacy, homicide, and pillaging rendered by lies and illusions into mesmerizing Evil and omnicide, like a lethal supremacist cult of the Joker.
Revolutionaries fight against the plutocrats who make people act evil and even against their own best interests, who make evil aesthetic. The plutocrats make evil godly. They make the lie the truth. They make the good the terroristic and demonized. They make evil glamorous and glorified. They are monsters garbed as heroes. They are viruses clothed as saviors. And if they can’t dupe you, they try to scare you. And if they can’t scare you, they assault you. Or they impoverish you, or lock you up, or kill you. And so Sabia fights back. As do many others.
Revolutionaries, like Sabia, fight the fascist glorification of war that further enriches the rich. But where are the Revolutionary artists of the age? Hard to find a good literary and revolutionary novel today that is explicit about the contemporary moment in America. And what of shows and movies? The commercial establishment is too bought-and-sold by capitalist profiteering. The literary establishment is too stupid and brainwashed, too gutless and cultivated, too culturally conditioned and ideological, supremacist, too institutionally captive to know or to care, to act or to create for revolution. Or even to much allow it in its midst. The unspeakable revolutionary reality remains taboo among the respectable. So be it. Fuck ‘em all.
Sabia, Jenna, and Jasmine fight the monstrous day like the socialist partisans who fought Hitler and Mussolini. They fight the Trumpocracy, and the plutocracy everywhere. They fight establishment apologists. They fight the tyranny of money and bigotry, whether Democrat or Republican, or any other sellout to big money and hate, bought-and-sold. The Police State must be defanged, defunded, and replaced with fully funded and strong social units – services of life, not death. And fuck these weak-ass motherfuckers who have the gall and brainlessness to say, no. Fuck you.
It feels important to keep pointing out the simple, basic, sweeping things that need to be done nationally.
It’s time to universalize everything — all for one and one for all.
It’s time to reject Trump’s bigoted capitalist bullshit, us against them, bigoted profiteering.
It’s time to reject establishment Democrats’ perpetual profiteering, and often equally brutal bigotry.
To get this done, the country needs to get its head out of its ass. It needs to reject supremacy and profiteering. It needs to embrace universality.
There is no alternative to implementing many sweeping universal programs, including as Presidential Orders, on day one of a new term. It’s a litmus test for candidates, and can be an inspiration to all. It’s as material as can be. Progressive and socialist emergency universal orders and acts for emergency times. To actually represent and fulfill the interests and the needs of the people.
Implementing universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum would greatly stimulate, improve, and transform the economy, people’s lives, and society.
And doing so would enable the demilitarization of everything, as everything must be demilitarized, the police state and the surveillance state, rolled back, the prisoner state and the debtor state eviscerated.
A strong progressive push in electoral politics and social organizing could get this done. Strikes and actions, organizing and propagandizing. The good kind of propaganda. The power of propaganda is crucial. The state, after all, has a monopoly on violence but not propaganda, not organizing, not acting, not striking.
Guaranteed monthly income, higher wages, expanded poverty relief, universal health care, free childcare, paid family leave, the abolition of ICE, and full legalization and inclusion of undocumented people for the survival, dignity, and relief of all. Erased medical and educational debt, free college, sharply reduced incarceration, and redirected police and military funding into housing and social services. An end to America’s killer economic sanctions and military invasions that crush people around the world.
Shorter workweeks, more vacation and voting access, and a restructured financial system funded by wealth taxes and a trillion dollars of national emergency credit to a public bank. Or ten trillion dollars, not based on taxes.
Paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to improved food, housing, education, health care, recreation, parks, and other communal public spaces. Doubled Social Security payouts, and at younger ages. Marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer.
Many other kinds of material improvements, environmental repair, and a massive reduction of imprisonment and militarization at home and abroad. Much of this can be thought of as types of reparations. And America owes the world reparations. How else to begin to pay for this without establishing and massively crediting a national bank?
And much more needs to be done, because private business does so little for people who cannot pay the price, and often performs poorly for even those who can afford goods and services. Sooner rather than later, some serious nationalization of industry, services, and society is in order or the world will continue to burn and the people will suffer and die as always.
In Minneapolis, the brave and well-organized resistance continues to aid the besieged, the attacked, and most vulnerable. The people continue to impress with their actions and consciousness and conscience in thwarting and resisting the police state.
From the end of “The Reckoning” (the previous long post) — the people stand up — Minnesota Rising — Minneapolis Witness and Resistance:
Engaged
They come at dawn, they come at midday, they come at night. That’s when they always come. All the time. You hold your daughter tight as the boots thunder up the stairs. You worked the double shifts at the hospital for years, saving lives during the pandemic. None of that matters now. Neighborhoods, families torn apart. Apartment complexes surrounded. Schools put on lockdown – not to protect the children, but to trap them. They use children as bait! They hold kids to force parents out of hiding! The vans line the streets like a military occupation. ICE everywhere is what the regime wants – the largest domestic police force in history. Flooding every city simultaneously. Not to protect anyone. To control everyone.
In the detention centers people are stuffed in cages. Fathers separated from sons. Mothers from daughters. Human beings treated like cargo to be shipped away. The cruelty is the point.
They think fear will break us. They aim to shut us up. Instead networks form of safe houses, people with supplies – first aid, food, water, blankets, gloves, coats. Neighbors who’ve never spoken became allies. Church basements became sanctuaries. Teachers refuse to hand over attendance records. Lawyers work around the clock. Crowds chant: “No human being is illegal!” Digital networks spring up – encrypted warnings when ICE vehicles enter neighborhoods. Rapid response teams form. They come for one family, and fifteen witnesses appear with cameras. Whistles, alerts, car sirens, chants of “ICE out!”
They say they come in the name of peace and order. Pax Americana. At gunpoint. But there’s no peace in terror. No greatness in cruelty. No purity in hatred. Doctors refuse to release patient information. Bus drivers refuse to transport detainees. Workers walk off jobs at detention facilities. Resistance in the darkness, in the daylight. Thousands fill the night streets with candles and flashlights. The regime wants to flood the country with fear and violence. Instead, conscience and mutual aid pour out everywhere.
At the hospital when ICE agents show up demanding employee records, every single staff member – doctors, nurses, custodians, everyone – walks out and forms a human chain at the entrance. Let the world see what’s going on here.
They want to control the elections, the courts, the future. They forgot something. The power of the human spirit. They don’t have it. They have violence, official violence.
A young girl holds a sign reading “MY MOM IS NOT A CRIMINAL”. The resistance elders’ faces are set: “We see humanity. And we won’t look away.” Barricades of dumpsters block streets against the rampaging cops. This is not the America we were promised. This is not the America we’ll accept.
The raids continue. The resistance continues. And every morning, people make a choice: Complicity or courage. Silence or solidarity. Fear or freedom. History is here. What side are you on? Death violence and tyranny? Or life and cooperation, democracy?
What Needs to be Faced In a White Supremacist Nation
They’re killing white people now. More obviously so. This isn’t how it is supposed to go, in a white supremacist nation.
It’s bad optics to kill white moms and white poets and white nurses, white women and white men, in a white supremacist nation.
You’re supposed to kill browns and blacks not whites out in the open. Less outcry that way, less rage, especially in the media, the white corporate media, in a white supremacist nation.
So fire the Border Patrol commander and the ICE leader for killing the wrong civilians, for killing whites and not only browns and blacks on the streets. This creates bad KPI — Key Performance Indicators — for those in charge, in a white supremacist nation.
White supremacist performance matters in a white supremacist nation.
You’re supposed to kill woke people of color and poor people of color — for media consumption, in a white supremacist nation.
Such a bad look for American capitalism, killing whites, instead of browns and blacks, per usual, in a white supremacist nation.
What the plutocrats need now on scene is a reformer, someone who can discipline the shock troops of ICE and the Border Patrol, someone who can get the troops back to killing blacks and browns, not whites, in a white supremacist nation.
Go get ‘em, Boys! Don’t kill whites — especially not middle class whites. You need to kill people of color, in a white supremacist nation. That’s what’s done. Criminals! Terrorists! Assassins! Those are the orders. In a white supremacist nation.
Proud thugs, righteous thugs, religious thugs with badges, guns, and masks, paid and blessed by the officials who serve the plutocracy, in a white supremacist nation.
Capture, entrap, assault, imprison, kill. Those are the orders, to the good ol’ Boys! All-Americans! In a white supremacist nation. Don’t be woke. Sleep all the way through. It’s a white supremacist nation.
Federal troops integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, and federal troops integrated the University of Alabama in 1963, helping black twenty-year-olds attend school there. Those federal troops stood up against incredibly vicious and violent white mobs — proud Americans, proud Christians — in a white supremacist nation.
It’s barely seventy years later and now the federal troops of ICE and the Border Patrol are on the march this time against the most vulnerable, shooting down people in the streets, like the slave patrols of old, terrorizing blacks and browns, a few whites, seizing and injuring and killing, torturing and assaulting, sexually and otherwise, imprisoning and deporting throughout the cities and states, across the entire country, because that’s what ruling officials demand in a white supremacist nation.
“From sea to shining sea,” “Manifest Destiny,” are we, in a white supremacist nation, invading and occupying city to city, the countryside too. It’s a white supremacist nation.
Sharing here throughout this post the great socialist, anti-capitalist cartoons by Art Young. Today, a century later, Mr. Fish may be his nearest successor.
Young started out as a generally apolitical Republican, but gradually became interested in left wing ideas, and by 1906 or so considered himself a socialist. He began to associate with such political leftists as John Sloan and Piet Vlag, with both of whom he would work at the radical socialist monthly The Masses. He became firmly ensconced in the radical environment of Greenwich Village after moving there in 1910. He became politically active, and by 1910, racial and sexual discrimination and the supposed injustices of the capitalist system became prevalent themes in his work. He explained these sentiments in his autobiography, Art Young: His Life and Times (1939):
“I am antagonistic to the money-making fetish because it sidetracks our natural selves, leaving us no alternative but to accept the situation and take any kind of work for a weekly wage […] We are caught and hurt by the system, and the more sensitive we are to life’s highest values the harder it is to bear the abuse.”
In an attempt to curb the “abuse” he alleged, Young ran for the New York State Assembly on the ticket of the Socialist Party of New York (part of the Socialist Party of America) in 1913, but was unsuccessful.
A good collection of some of Art Young’s cartoons at Michael Mark Cohen’s Cartooning Capitalism.
Return to Little Rock
US Army soldiers integrated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. And then in the crooked line to Minneapolis nearly seventy years later, the federal agents of ICE and the Border Patrol act like Slave Patrols — the original US police — and chase people of color through the streets of Minnesota and cities and states nationwide. That’s what happens when the plutocrat ruling class decides to enforce capitalist white supremacy in America, and in the world. It’s a much needed distraction from their pillaging to unprecedented heights of inequality. The enemy of the people is not the pillaging plutocrats, you know, it’s the impoverished people of color!
Universalize! It’s time to universalize — most everything. Socialize, nationalize, such throwback terms. Today is the day to universalize. That’s what is to be done — or bigotry will reign, and the plutocrats will continue to buy and sell people like worthless penny stocks that they keep trying to get rid of.
“News from Little Rock” shows that there are more sophisticated ways to tyrannize in America than the sheer brute gun thuggery of ICE and Border Patrol — you impoverish the most vulnerable, economically and socially, and you disinform everyone else, to create ceaseless despair and violence, chaos and powerlessness, ignorance and bigotry. You profiteer in bigoted waves, from sea to plastic choked and collapsing sea. Bigotry and tyranny, profiteering and violence, and lies should be the most commonly used words in American today, right along with democracy and health, human rights and universality — if not freedom, justice, and equality.
As Minneapolis today demonstrates, people in America remain every bit as besieged as they were in Little Rock thirty and seventy years ago. Violent rabid whites foaming at the mouth, armed, enflamed and driven by the corporate state, raging against people of color whom they insanely oppose. It’s time to take power. It’s time to end the insanity and violence and lies once and for all. Otherwise, we tolerate the demonic and live amid slave patrols, under deranged tyrants.
Insane violence, bigotry and brutality, fraud and deceit are normalized in America at the highest levels of power. It’s time to make it stop. Time to take power, and turn it all around. The violent lunatics keep talking themselves into greater and greater violence and lunacy. These are the totally debased leaders, the rich, the owners, the plutocracy — wildly out of control. They must be stripped of their money and power, as much as possible.
Otherwise they’ll go on with their brute pillaging white supremacy while lauding themselves and awarding themselves the riches of the world, while crushing everyone else and destroying the planet.
News from Little Rock
The unreported story of the 40th year commemoration of the integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Your door is shut against my face, And I am sharp as steel with discontent. – Claude McKay, “The White House”
What happens to a dream deferred? …does it explode? – Langston Hughes, “Harlem”
My days are not their days… My ways are not their ways… I don’t think they dare to think of that: no: I’m fairly certain they don’t think of that at all. – James Baldwin, “Staggerlee wonders”
The biggest News I do not dare Telegraph to the Editor’s chair: “They are like people everywhere.”
The angry Editor would reply In hundred harryings of Why – Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” a poem that describes life in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 when Central High School became the site of the first federally-enforced court-ordered school integration.
In 1997, forty years after Gwendolyn Brooks published her famous poem in the partisan Black newspaper The Chicago Defender about Black life in white Empire and the lynching white terrorists who, along with the white state officials, fought against education and integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, US President Bill Clinton returned to his home state to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine, while essentially ignoring the poverty and resultant violence in the area, alongside the equally impervious and imperious Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee — Baptist minister — and Trump’s current American ambassador to Israel, since 2025, during today’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
In the first three days of President Clinton’s four day stay in Little Rock, four young men aged 17 to 23 were murdered in Little Rock not far from Central High School – an outbreak of violence that had been foreshadowed less than two months earlier by a drive-by shooting near Central High that was the third such shooting in a five-day period which also saw the killings of four other youths. The murders and poverty went virtually unreported, as usual. The slain – Brian Young, 19; Derrick Mcbride, 17; Jamarco Woods, 23; Melvin Morning, 23; Mark Green, 26; Shameka Moore, 16; Antoine Harris, 18; Tony Davis, 20.
Historical the print deluge not once before nor since so huge – the President preached claimed he cared – emotion trite and tripe none spared
at Central High in Little Rock where justice first was forced and won. Reporters praised in nonstop talk the proud returning native son –
so sanguine suave a specious bit on stage displayed – adorned bright lit – sleek mugging presidential tears for racial gains of forty years.
He harkened to the Mayflower – he mentioned Ellis Island too. To sanction patriotic power he flung around clichés half true.
He lauded then the Little Rock Nine – and rightly so their story told how brave they crossed the color line thus much deserving glory bold –
but spoke no word at Central’s door about reversing flight from poor though wealth had fled from center town – of monied flight he’d not talk down.
The city splashed fresh paint around to try to make the streets look swell – a surface fix meant to confound to fool the cameras fool them well.
II.
To see this dog and pony show – the community house would not go – avoided by its radio crew whose workers shrugged refused the view –
no steadfast earnest union troupe – to delta scattered far and back – no ACORN no New Party group no sign of four young men dead black –
forgotten buried shunned no shock four young men killed near Central’s block that noble week in Little Rock – those joyous days in Little Rock.
III.
The Governor proud too proved lost explaining what his daughter wrote on visit to a holocaust memorial – these words of note –
“Why didn’t somebody do something?” she simply marked and then again – “Why didn’t somebody do something?” – young poignant words from poignant pen.
The gov’nor declared – “In silence we left and I knew she got it.” Then as if in prayer – calm intense – he offered up this plaintive bit –
“I hope that never does someone have to ask why didn’t someone ‘do something’.” He meant it too. You might wonder if he truly knew
four young folk died – one week alone – a mere few blocks right down the street. He spoke as if he’d never known – as if some facts he would not meet.
IV.
Reporters none walked down old streets to hear how people wish to live. So busy hugging loud elites the mainstream news could no one give
to ring a bell or knock a door to sit on porch and learn the score to gather round a kitchen plate a living room and there relate.
Though folks might raise concerns cold blunt – by asking wise reporters could in lively talk without affront learn far more than they thought they would –
real word collect – of dire import – upfront street tales fresh thought live wit – true human needs and cares – in short – a worthy text no PR skit.
Of news like this the press won’t dare – keen poet Gwendolyn Brooks once found exactly forty years from where those young folks died near Central’s ground.
Disaster there ignored by all – remember this – take time recall – proud polis papers president – how much we care quite evident.
V.
The press not much the world reveals with cheap words clever false appeals. Much life that matters now – forget. Most news goes elsewhere – no regret –
or slants twists lies omits distorts – by corporate will – sheer force – directs slick chatter from sleek ruling courts thus base and gullible infects.
The economic system fails to fill life’s gaps – it fills grim jails as corporate suits work to disguise the coins they steal from dead men’s eyes.
Neglect that which small profit gives – elected representatives – owned by vast wealth – are sternly told. Despair and trouble soon unfold.
VI.
The president preached claimed he cared – emotion trite and tripe none spared so sanguine suave a specious bit on stage displayed – adorned bright lit –
slick mugging presidential tears for racial pains of forty years four young men dead – news took a walk while vapid presidential talk
engulfed those gathered all around where media intent were found to note each smile and mark each frown but made no note of death downtown.
From neighborhoods our eyes we turn – so many killed such slight concern – forgotten buried shunned no shock – unmentioned by official talk
that noble week in Little Rock. Forgotten buried – wonder why – four young men killed near Central High that joyous week in Little Rock.
Becca Rothfeld’s “Listless Liberalism” and Liberal Ideology
The February 2026 article by notable liberal literary critic Becca Rothfeld, “Listless Liberalism,” in The Point magazine opens and closes with two absolute falsehoods.
“Every politics has its characteristic aesthetics.” This is literally false unless rendered as tautology. There may be tendencies matching particular ideologies to aesthetics, but no necessities. Art and aesthetics are complex that way. So are politics. Contradictions abound, may abound, and do abound.
“Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim.” This is also extremely false. Tony Kushner points out such claims’ falsehood in Theater (1995):
I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called “Politics and Art.” In its entirety: “Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.” This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.
Rothfeld repeats false clichés of conventional liberal ideology — fake news passed off as conventional wisdom. Liberal culture drowns in its own falsehoods, often unwittingly, often not. The irony for Rothfeld is that she senses that liberal culture and literature is lacking and wants to improve it. Problem is, she’s a liberal, apparently through-and-through. Liberals can’t get out of anyone’s way, including their own. They hand-delivered America Trump after all, with their inflammatory language and deeds, fully backing the genocide against Palestinians and tacking toward the Iraq-invading Cheneys and the bloody-thirsty right while belittling, disparaging, and fleeing from progressives on the left. Thanks, liberals. “Liberal” is now one of the dirtiest words in any language, right alongside “Trump.” Liberals need to move along. They need to try universal and liberatory socialism for a badly needed change. It’s only centuries overdue. With “friends” like liberals, let alone conservatives, the people don’t need enemies, to be gruesomely vanquished.
Liberal thought was surpassed by socialist thought at least 150 years ago. Liberals are paid or praised to not understand this. Or to deny it. Or to ignore it.
In “Listless Liberalism” Becca Rothfeld claims that the aesthetic of literary liberalism does not “self-fashion” itself or focus on “appearance,” let alone “ostentatiously” — it’s self-effacing, stylistically or otherwise. It needs better advertising, trademarking, branding! And so it gets run over by the insurgent thrill, the bold vibes of Trumpism, the “frisson” of Trump culture. Be this as it may, this is the preferred mode of liberal ideology — the attempt to center itself as comprehensive reality and truth by essentially denying that it is part and parcel of any particular aesthetic or ideology. Liberalism is a cosmic law of nature, don’t you know, general humanism. And so liberalism derogates ideological literature and criticism — any ideology that’s not “liberal” — as biased, prejudiced, or false. As if by cosmic law or magic, everything that is not liberal is partisan — and therefore somehow incomplete or distorted, inferior to full truth — supposedly unlike liberalism. Conservatives think the same way about their even more bankrupt ideology, often framing it not as cosmic or universal law but God’s law, which amounts to the same thing. Similarly totalitarian — liberalism pretending to deny ideology, conservativism wholly embracing it — each line of thought posing as the truth of the whole.
Nothing could be farther from actual truth, in either case, as both ideologies purposefully omit vast swaths of the universe in culture, thought, and art. As Terry Eagleton notes in “Conclusion: Political Criticism,” Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983):
Radical critics … have a set of social priorities with which most people at present tend to disagree. This is why they are commonly dismissed as “ideological,” because ideology is always a way of describing other people’s interests rather than our own.
Liberalism is as ideological as anything else, while denying it nonstop. Actually existing liberalism has its vital merits but also extreme inherent limits and extreme inherent problems. Establishment liberals appear to be the last to know or admit this. Liberalism as an ideology cannot be salvaged but only surpassed. And long has been.
Simply put, the reigning liberal ideology of the past 225 years — since Jane Austen — is establishmentarian, largely pro-capitalist and anti-socialist, anti-communist, but happy to encompass the equally establishmentarian conservative ideology — if not the most extreme and retrograde Trumpist line.
Ideology is not aesthetics. It may be part of aesthetics. Aesthetics may be part of ideology. Liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism, capitalism — all are ideologies within which certain types of aesthetics may vary as well as be found everywhere, cross-ideology. Splashy, bold, insurgent aesthetics, for example, can be used to convey and express all these diverse ideologies. In other words, ideology does not drive aesthetics, and vice versa, though each may use and encompass the other. Art consists of aesthetics and normative features of life, many, including ideology.
Certain aesthetic approaches may tend toward certain ideologies, but these are largely — maybe entirely — strategic and historical choices rather than immutable constraints. Any of many vastly different ideologies may use aesthetic approaches that may or may not be more commonly found with other ideologies.
Establishment liberal wisdom prefers to pass off liberalism as central reality, unbiased, ideology-free, truth itself — whatever its aesthetics. Liberal capitalism has clung desperately to this pretense ever since socialist thought — libertarian socialism — eclipsed it long ago.
Liberalism, like, say, fascism, or, say, socialism, can be expressed aesthetically as realism, postmodernism, fantasy, modernism, tragedy, comedy, epic, in all kinds of styles, fashions, and forms. If liberalism were to have a unique aesthetic (it does not, no ideology does), then it would be an anti-socialist or anti-communist aesthetic — by which can only be meant, ideology — which liberalism typically prefers not to acknowledge, pretending its own ideological constraints do not exist, or self-deceptively posing liberalism as ideology-free despite manifesting as anti-socialist, anti-revolutionary, and fundamentally establishmentarian. Liberalism, we see you — even when you don’t see yourself. Or can’t. Especially then, and when you refuse to admit that you are known in every last ideological line, detail, and effect.
Liberal ideology often hammers away at other ideologies in wildly polemic and partisan fashion while insisting it swings no ideological hammers — only impartial, objective, or aesthetically proper implements of thought and creation. This has been the standard liberal routine for 150+ years. Becca Rothfeld is apparently its latest exemplar — far from the first — see James Wood in Fiction Gutted and Lionel Trilling and many others before him — the whole liberal establishment — and Rothfeld is likely far from last.
All the while, Rothfeld is wholly distressed that an extremely weak and insufficient liberalism is being savaged — outperformed — by Vance/Trump conservativism and the seemingly triumphant insurgent conservative or Trumpist aesthetics. So does Rothfeld call for revolution against liberalism, whether in supposed aesthetic or ideology? She calls liberalism a “dying ideology” after all. Does she then call to overthrow failing liberal art for revolutionary art because “Rome is going up in flames” and “liberalism is on the eve of its decimation”? Does she call artists to the barricades? Sadly, no. She does call for change however, to her credit, and a seeming kind of political change, additionally to her credit, and even more to her credit almost a coded kind of socialist change: “communal self-determination” — whatever that means — in art, literature, aesthetics.
Even though Rothfeld describes the current failing liberal aesthetic or “sensibility” as “wonkish … mannered … and smug,” and even though she urges instead an art that embodies “communal self-determination,” does she then advocate for a socialist, communist, anarchist, revolutionary, or even a progressive populist art? Does Rothfeld denounce and renounce her liberalism for Revolutionary Socialism, as fitting, and at long last? Whether as supposed aesthetic or actual ideology? Ever sadly, no, again. She is only sickened enough by liberalism’s failings to let out a small gasp for a new but still liberal aesthetic (seemingly a new vibe, a new tenor, a new emphasis) to “forms” of “communal self-determination,” an art that respects its audience as “equal” “agents” not “pupils.”
Got that? Everyone? Apparently liberal art does not respect is audience, and fails to create the appropriate “forms — the beautiful abrasions of communal self-determination.” In addition to being “smug,” “mannered,” and “unostentatious.”
Rothfeld provides no sense that in fact the content and ideology of liberal art cannot be salvaged, that it is wholly insufficient, badly gutted, and arevolutionary during revolutionary times one way or the other, to the good or the bad — liberatory socialist democracy or bigoted capitalist tyranny.
To Rothfeld, liberal art must undergo liberal reform and fulfill itself as — what? — a vague metaphor of participatory liberal democracy? — “the beautiful abrasions of communal self-determination.” Whatever that means — it’s not explained or extrapolated.
I’ve asked elsewhere:
Is there something Evil about Big Culture? Right wing populists certainly think so — often for all the wrong reasons.
What about leftists — what do they see as Evil in Big Culture? Plenty. Going way, way back, but never more problematic and dangerous than today given the omnicidal state of the world.
All the while, liberatory, anti-Empire revolutionary art is often quashed out of existence, frequently under the cover, often fervently believed, of good taste, objectivity, and intellectual or normative impartiality that is anything but — aka liberalism.
Rothfeld offers a new! improved! liberal culture for moving forward — a most dubious model. She suggests that:
One model for this kind of cultural production is the journal in which [mid-century arch-liberal literary critic Lionel] Trilling first published [some thoughts on the “small” literary “manners” of liberalism]: the fabled Partisan Review, a literary and political magazine that ran from 1934 until 2003 and that is perhaps the best that American cultural history—and certainly the best that American left-liberalism—has to show for itself.
Dear word. This writes out of history the actual great left-wing literary and cultural magazines of the socialist era in American history, and prior progressive eras — The Masses, The Liberator, The New Masses, and Appeal to Reason, among others — which published some of America’s most vital novels of the times, along with much other great literature, art, thought, news and information.
Instead of moving toward a badly needed and currently vital progressive populist and revolutionary mindset, culture, and ideology — and, hey, call it “aesthetics,” if you like — Rothfeld would launch literature deep again into Cold War liberal and conservative ideology — smack again into Cold War liberalism that brought the world such glories as the Vietnam and Korean massacres — and many similar wars, conflicts, and repressions, including both domestic and international American state terror campaigns — very much akin to all the gory and brutal depredations of the Trump/Vance and Biden/Harris regimes. Liberalism, like conservativism, clothes itself as humanitarian then slaughters far and wide. That’s its history and present. Call it the liberal-conservative aesthetic if you can stomach it. Establishmentarian to the hilt.
Fifty-seven years ago, the great progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar cut through the crap with his piercing and encapsulating take on Cold War literary liberalism:
“What was the real truth, the true historical dimension, of the Cold War? As I said in opening this Introduction, a new group of Cold War historians have been giving us a whole new set of impressions, which, alas, most of those who lived through the period, and are so certain of their convictions, will not even bother to read and to think about. For if they did … the Schlesingers, the Galbraiths, the Kristols, the Max Lerners, the Trillings, the Bells, the Rahvs, the Kazins, the Irving Howes: all these outstanding, upstanding figures of our political-cultural scene today … they would have to admit both their own illusions for the last twenty years, and the fact that they have deliberately deluded their readers about the historical facts of our period. Since it was they who fastened the Cold War noose around all our necks, how can we expect them to remove it? – even though, as in the cases of Mary McCarthy and Dwight MacDonald, and the estimable New York Review of Books, they have bowed a little to the changing winds of fashion today. Due to student protests at base, and student confrontations on Cold War issues, Professors Bell and Trilling have indeed moved on from Columbia to Harvard University – but after Harvard what? Mr. Trilling has even ‘resigned’ from contemporary literature, saying at long last that he does not understand it – but only after he led the attack for twenty years on such figures as the [progressive] historian Vernon Parrington, the novelist Dreiser, the short-story writer Sherwood Anderson, and other such figures of our literary history. And only after the Columbia University English Department had taken the lead in setting up Henry James as ‘Receiver’ in what amounted to the bankruptcy of our national literature. The Cold War Liberals, historians, critics and so-called sociologists, also clustered around a set of prestigious literary magazines like Partisan Review, The New Leader, Encounter of London, Der Monat of Berlin, [also Kenyon Review and “many others”; Peter Matthiesson helped start the Paris Review as “a young CIA recruit … and used it as his cover”], which had in effect set the tone and the values of the ‘Free World’ culture. When it was revealed, about two years ago, that these leading cultural publications and organizations (the various Congresses and Committees for ‘Cultural Freedom’), as well as some student organizations and big unions of the AFL-CIO, were in fact being financed and controlled by Central Intelligence Agency – the game was up…
—Maxwell Geismar, “Introduction,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (Ed. Joseph North) (1969)
The needed literary revolution will not be liberal. It will be left-wing and revolutionary, progressive populist, and liberatory socialist. It will focus on universalizing society to fulfill human rights. This culture, art, and literature already exists if you can find it. Much more is badly needed. It’s not liberal and cannot be and should not be.
Far better political literary magazine models exist than the Partisan Review — not least The Masses, The Liberator, The New Masses, Appeal to Reason, as well as The National Era, Frederick Douglass’s New National Era, and Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth — publishers of a lot of America’s greatest literature, ideas, art, information, and news — including the crucial progressive and liberatory best-selling novels of the time, real candidates for greatest American novels in their era: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, and Jews Without Money. Receiving prior publication in these progressive journals, these novels changed culture and history, art and politics. First-hand research for The Jungle was substantially funded by Appeal to Reason.
Vastly aiding the abolition movement, Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was the greatest-selling novel of the nineteenth century and beyond, surpassing even the mighty progressive Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo (which can still claim perhaps the largest publishing deal in novel history and which may itself the be most overall influential novel in history, both ideologically and aesthetically). Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel The Jungle (1906) was also a best-seller and helped pass progressive legislation. Mike Gold’s socialist novel Jews Without Money (1930)remains politically, culturally, and aesthetically influential to this day, and is in every way a greater novel than the liberal and Cold Warrior favorite novel The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These three great American abolition and socialist novels were first published in progressive, partisan newspapers and cultural journals that exceeded the establishmentarian liberal ideology of the day. This was especially true of the latter two socialist novels created and published during America’s socialist era. This era was rolled back by the “Cold War” that devastated much of the best of American art and literature, culture and society. The Cold War had severe mutilating and caustic effects, not least ideological, that continue to debilitate the present day.
The truth remains that “Good politics, like good art” may very well “lecture” and “declaim” and do a million other progressive and revolutionary things as well. It’s too true to deny, or should be, per Kushner. That said, even much of the left, throughout history, has failed to understand this — let alone the ideologically eviscerated, ignorant, and disinformed mentality pervasive in liberalism.
As for Becca Rothfeld’s liberal tale of “Listless Liberalism” and liberal ideology, to her credit, maybe even great credit, Rothfeld senses that literary change is necessary and that it must be somehow tied up with political change, which she passes off as aesthetic, rather than ideological. Maybe passing off the ideological as aesthetic is how you can successfully, or at all, talk about sensitive things, ideologically fraught, in the establishment or sneak revolutionary life past the overlords of publishing. There exist badly needed stories of cultural and social and political change that are Most Revolutionary, Ultra Revolutionary, and otherwise imbued with revolt, lest we be caught in the terminal Doomsday Time Loop of our era.
The needed stories and literature and art are not liberal stories. They are not new liberal or old liberal. They do though contain something of “communal self-determination.” Which may even serve as code for revolution and liberatory socialism — who knows — and the new “universalizing” of huge parts of society that is badly needed — historically called nationalizing and socializing society. It’s long since time to universalize what is vital to human rights — all for one and one for all.
It’s time to universalize everything — all for one and one for all.
It’s time to reject Trump’s bigoted capitalist bullshit, us against them, bigoted profiteering.
It’s time to reject establishment Democrats’ perpetual profiteering, and often equally brutal bigotry.
To get this done, the country needs to get its head out of its ass. It needs to reject supremacy and profiteering. It needs to embrace universality.
There is no alternative to implementing many sweeping universal programs, including as Presidential Orders, on day one of a new term. It’s a litmus test for candidates, and can be an inspiration to all. It’s as material as can be. Progressive and socialist emergency universal orders and acts for emergency times. To actually represent and fulfill the interests and the needs of the people.
Implementing universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum would greatly stimulate, improve, and transform the economy, people’s lives, and society.
And doing so would enable the demilitarization of everything, as everything must be demilitarized, the police state and the surveillance state, rolled back, the prisoner state and the debtor state eviscerated.
A strong progressive push in electoral politics and social organizing could get this done. Strikes and actions, organizing and propagandizing. The good kind of propaganda. The power of propaganda is crucial. The state, after all, has a monopoly on violence but not propaganda, not organizing, not acting, not striking.
What is true today is what was true 162 years ago when Victor Hugo noted
Society must be saved in literature as well as in politics.
Time for a new day. But don’t expect the gatekeepers to crack of their own will. Despite Becca Rothfeld’s liberal exhortations, or maybe because of them, because of such a meager if hope-filled cry against the “small,” the mind-numbingly narrow, the deep phalanx of guardians and perpetrators of the establishment will continue to stand guard against a much more humanly powerful and inspiring future — liberatory socialist and universalist. The four tiers of gatekeepers — the liberal and conservative agents, editors, publishers/owners, and publicists — will continue to stand guard against such a future.
The many-tentacled beast denies it is a beast. The literary and ideological gatekeeps are remorseless. They know just how to edit you out. They’ve been perfectly conditioned to do so, often unwittingly, often unconsciously. Aesthetics have nothing to do with it, or everything depending on how one might like to mistake aesthetics for ideology. Stealth propaganda is everywhere. Overt bullshit too. Let none call it brainwashing. Let no one speak of taboo. Contemporary establishment publishing remains deficient in and of culture and society — derelict and complicit, in a wildly inadequate and rampaging liberal and conservative status quo.
Imagine the most liberatory ways forward. We know what they are not. We know they must be truly new. Revolutionary.
The revolution will be serialized. – Most Revolutionary – During a killer Iowa blizzard, fearless DAPL militant and radical plant nursery grower Sabia Perez first saves then kidnaps the stranded US President to ransom a better world.
Read the opening chapters and weekly posts at Liberation Lit substack.
Most Revolutionary
Chapter One
The Dakota Access Pipeline hulks in the ground beneath them like a long and dangerous time bomb. They know it. They feel it.
Three eco-warriors. They are prepared to defuse the DAPL bomb in a way that no one else dares. Hit and run, has to be. A three-woman guerrilla army. Strike force of the Americas. They tried everything else, legal and not. As lawsuits and protests come and go, the oil stops and starts, and only one thing never fails: blowing shit up. It’s the most effective strategy they’ve found so far. Don’t blame them – it’s what they know, what they’ve learned, what they care to do. Sometimes things are exactly what they are. Sometimes you fight fire with fire because it’s all you’ve got – even if you know in the end you’ll burn.
At Scientific American, Zeynep Tufekci argues that “the real reason fans hate the last season of Game of Thrones is not just bad storytelling but the style change from sociological to psychological.”
A storyline moved by institutional forces and social pressures acting decisively upon characters was replaced by characters’ psychological impulses driving action and sociopolitical consequences.
Tufekci provides zero examples of this, merely positing that since some main characters were routinely killed off, the story was sustained by social pressures and plot movements rather than by psychological pressures and movements.
But was it? Isn’t it as equally likely that central characters were killed off by the adequately dramatized paranoid or deranged psychological impulses of other characters? And if so, the drop in quality of the last seasons could be explained by the rushed, nonsensical, and otherwise inadequate psychological dramatization of additional murders.
The two examples of murdered main characters that Tufekci provides don’t necessarily help his argument. Ned Stark was not murdered primarily for sociopolitical reason. He was killed because his murderer was a raving lunatic. Similarly, with the Red Wedding murders that Tufekci invokes. That murderer was also portrayed as immensely depraved and deranged. Yes, both lunatic murderers offered sociopolitical justifications for the murders, but these were mainly unhinged rationales, albeit with some tenuous connection to sociopolitical justification. It wasn’t much but it was there. By the last season, even mere tenuous connections to the sociopolitical were typically missing or entirely nonsensical.
So, Tufekci makes a reasonable point, but just because the sociopolitics fell apart utterly by the end doesn’t mean the psychological storylines of a small group of people were not the main drivers throughout for holding audience interest. The sociopolitical power struggles were more personal, private interest based, than grounded in popular sociopolitical issues and popular well-being, the content and context of peoples’ lives. Watching the show is sort of like watching a corporate-state elite contest (US election) being carried out with swords and dragonfire rather than with the advertisements of debates and media blasts. Somewhere, somehow are the people at large, and their problems, barely in the picture.
Furthermore, the sociopolitics were often greatly flawed and false in Game of Thrones all the way through, not least in the astoundingly racist portrayal of the Dothraki, and misogyny, widely commented upon. The character arc video clips cobbled together on Youtube made for as compelling or more compelling viewing them most of the seasonal episodes. Why? Because virtually throughout, the psychological journeys of the character arcs were more interesting (involved and revealing) than the sociopolitics. The primary driver for watching Game of Thrones remained the psychological story paths.
Additionally, the fact is that television is not exactly “a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual,” as Tufekci states. Rather, it is and it isn’t. Much TV is sociopolitical, and certainly purports to be – cop (and now military) shows, crime shoes – and the Wire also was a very problematic version of this – have been the main staple of TV for over half a century. Why? Because even more important than gutting sociopolitics from “entertainment” is falsifying the sociopolitics, for reasons of corporate (state) power, the owners of the medium. Thus the endless glorification of a de facto police state via cop and cop/military shows, which of course pour on a lot of psychodrama to both obscure and confuse and falsify the sociopolitics.
It’s what one would expect of corporate productions. The industry is extremely sociopolitically conscious, and engaged in much distortion, not only evisceration, perpetuating class warfare from the top down.
Thus by the end of Game of Thrones, at the latest, it would have been compelling to see the power elites and their personal narrative arcs completely obliterated by a sociopolitics of clear and vital substance, that is, of popular import. A pipe-dream of course in the corporate scheme of things but would fit, only moreso, with the early Game of Thrones structure of offing bigshots. The characters could have survived climate collapse (white walkers) only to be wiped out by nuclear destruction (dragon fire), self-imposed, both purposeful and accidental, as is the logic of ultimate weapons and psycho and sociopath aggrandizement (violent profiteering). Would have been great to see a wise “commoner” give an explicit summation of such cataclysmic events of civilization and its power-mad elites to a youth, perhaps, or a traveler, at the very end. Or a keen youth could have made the summation.
In fact the would-be greatest moment of the final episode was the most important sociopolitical moment objectively – Sam Tarly opining for democracy – and not the biggest sociopolitical moment of the story, the slaying of the queen, Jon killing Dany, which was done purely for sociopolitical reasons (against the psychological impulse). The show falsely presented the objectively most important sociopolitical moment as an amusing aside, passed over quickly, while foregrounding and dwelling on the poorly construed sociopolitical slaying of the Queen, which seemed almost irrelevant because the sociopolitical context leading up to the moment was, not missing but, ludicrous.
So it is that the content and context of the sociopolitics matter more than merely the fact that sociopolitics are the focus. That could be the continuation of Tufekci’s argument – but given that he praises David Simon’s highly problematic cop show The Wire as much as he does, such an exploration wouldn’t seem likely to be much revealing. Yes, Game of Thrones shifted more to the (absurd) psychological as it went on, but the sociopolitical was already threadbare from the beginning, apart from royal machinations. Game of Thrones, after all. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Or, rather, dragons. (No great loss, perhaps, since flawed sociopolitical shows often do more social and personal damage than the more purely psychological shows – good or bad – for a variety of reasons, though mainly because they have the capacity to affect more.)
Game of Thrones could be a compelling watch to many people, but the basic sociopolitical misses and mistakes that it makes throughout are often as enormous as its limited and ludicrous psychological falsifications. It would be very difficult to argue that character was not almost always foremost to the social or political in the show. From the start, the story compels the audience to root for Dickensian type underdogs, from scene to scene, until by the end of the show there are, long since, no underdogs left, merely a collection of victors intent on fighting for a seat of conquest to almost no real point other than personal aggrandizement. There was no great sociopolitical planning or reforms or movements explored beginning, middle, or end of Game of Thrones. The show was almost a domestic comedy/tragedy of royals. The fundamental sociopolitics were basically camp, from the start, and by the end so was everything else.
Thus, it would have made satisfying sense and viewing for the Sam Tarly democracy-opining scene to morph into side-splitting Monte Python farce. Nothing made sense by the end. Not the sociopolitics, not the psychologies, and it wasn’t basically because “the storytelling style changed from sociopolitical to psychological,” but equally – or more – because the sociopolitics (and psychologies) were all along both greatly eviscerated and purposefully chaotic, in content and context.
Does Game of Thrones have compelling sociopolitical and psychological moments? Yes, of course, but the show is geared toward spectacle above all, rather than toward, say, sociopolitical revelation and significant movement on either basic or grand levels, despite portentous pretensions and some genuine efforts. And why is that? Game of Thrones novelist Martin stated that his modus operandi was relying on characters who make wrong decisions. Well, okay, that’s a curious falsification of life that can provide great spectacle, in passing, but the basic sociopolitics of the story are then going to suffer in falsity every bit as much as the basic psychologies of the story. Movement via such a mechanism will cultivate and end in a circus and chaos of increasingly tedious magnitude – whether sociopolitical or psychological or both. And so it was.
There were sociopolitical fixes that could have been made all along, also psychological ones, but the authors themselves made the wrong decision in choosing ongoing mechanistic spectacle over vital focus and revelations, both sociopolitical and psychological (of course the two are intertwined). The fundamental problem wasn’t the prioritizing of a psychological “style” over sociopolitical style as the thing went on (though that was a problem), rather the mechanistic and eviscerated approach to storytelling and life that gutted both the psychological and the sociopolitical from the outset.
Fatalistic spectacle become chaotic con, the characters’ (author-determined) need to make wrong choices. Going that narrative route, or any narrative route, needs to result in some vision ultimately. What’s revelatory about Game of Thrones? Don’t love your sociopathic CEOs, murder them, in impossible context? Dragon-nuke the seat of power? As it was in the beginning, of the story, so it is in the end? Nothing changes? Characters making bad decisions after bad decisions? No other pattern or revelation? Even for the bad, let alone for the good?
In reality, things do change. People don’t always make decisively wrong decisions. Wouldn’t know that from watching Game of Thrones, fundamentally. Very convenient to power. Sociopolitically convenient. In Game of Thrones, the psychology was distorted all along, and there was no sociopolitical vision to begin with, other than fatalistic chaos. The sociopolitical was a kind of historical happenstance that the operating psychological device necessarily distorted and played with for the thrill of medieval spectacle. When the medieval sociopolitical vision (actually, fixation) is used up and worn out and the novelty is gone, what is left but psychological twists and turns to nowhere that further cement the severe limits of the sociopolitical vision?
Corporate power HBO wanted to keep funding Game of Thrones for years to come, certainly not to any revelatory end. It loves the medieval! Very profitable. Possibly HBO’s love of the medieval became in no way inspiring to the creators. Truly, the authors should have burned all the power elites with the city to the ground in the final season. That after all fits the logic of continuously making key wrong decisions – call it, the Corporate Way: psychopathic and sociopathic profiteering chaos and conquest that destroys everyone and all in the end. By then, apparently nobody, not even creator Martin, had the courage of the story’s fundamental conviction. The “style” might have changed marginally in the final season, but Game of Thrones was deeply and fatally flawed – sociopolitically and psychologically gutted and distorted – from the start.
Game of Thrones was somewhat interesting for the bit of socio-political scope and heft that it sometimes explored. All in all it’s more an example of how very weak is political fiction in the culture industries (not to mention how very racist, sexist, white supremacist it remains). The imagination and analysis and normative emphasis utterly lacking. Implications of the white walkers of climate collapse and the dragon of nuclear war barely explored.
Popular issues, human needs worldwide, or anywhere, were almost entirely invisible. The production was in the vein of William Shakespeare of the court intrigues rather than Victor Hugo of Les Miserables, or say Octavia Butler of Parable of the Sower. The identity politics, so-called, often butchered. The latter episodes were one nostalgic set-piece after another.
The only way to salvage something of import from the show in the end would have been for a mix of purposeful and accidental death of all the remaining royal/elite characters in the city, with the dragon accidentally torching Dany also, as the last of these – obvious connection to nuclear war. And then the final scenes of the so-called common survivors attempting to pick of the pieces amid the ashes. Instead, we were left with the descent into nostalgic farce.
There was one more-or-less subliminally funny moment in Tarly suggesting democracy and being met with wholesale if understated contempt, ridicule, and hilarity for being such an idiot. That moment could have been played up to a Monty Python height, seemed to be aching to go there, and was the poorer for not. That would have been fantastic, and could have added to what amounts to Game of Thrones prestige in ending in Tarly’s immediate demise and dismal from thought and any lasting impact on the scene.
The genuinely farcical and incidental slaying of Tarly and Democracy would have been more notable than anything that happened in the final episode, or much before. Lack of democracy in the creation of Game of Thrones itself entirely doomed the basic and central quality of the production.
In many ways, George Orwell’s greatest book is Homage to Catalonia, which documents his direct participation in the Spanish Revolution (civil war), a great book of a crucial revolution that is essentially elided from James Wood’s sociopolitical take on Orwell’s life and works in his April 2009 New Yorker article, “A Fine Rage” slugged “George Orwell’s revolutions.” Orwellian: the most liberatory of “revolutions” involving George Orwell is essentially nowhere to be found in “A Fine Rage… George Orwell’s revolutions.”
Wood claims Orwell “idealizes” the working class, then immediately cites Orwell’s description of what Wood labels “the best kind of proletarian home.” If “best” does not tend toward the “ideal” what does? A month earlier in the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes notes in “Such, Such was Eric Blair” that Orwell “described the condition of the working class with sympathy and rage, thought them wiser than intellectuals, but didn’t sentimentalize them; in their struggle they were as ‘blind and stupid’ as a plant struggling toward the light.” Hardly ideal.
Wood describes Orwell as having “Rousseauian tendencies” (to be a sort of nature lover, Wood means), and additionally calls him a “puritan,” and labels him an “upper-class masochist” who wanted not to “level up society” but to “level it down” – and then, a “puritan masochist” whose “real struggle… was personal…the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself. This was at bottom a religious mortification.” And “perhaps Orwell had, by the late nineteen-forties, soured on socialism, along with capitalism.” No longer then a masochist suicide? Please. Wood would do well to save the amateur psychoanalysis hour for himself. “Orwell feared what he most desired: the future.” Orwell had “a tendency toward drab omnipotence.” Such is Wood’s New Yorker style piety, vacuity, and smear.
Wood describes a “judgment against Dickens” by Orwell as being “unwittingly comic.” Orwell: “However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Wood wonders, “Why would anyone want to…resemble …the working classes…least of all the working classes themselves?” He adds “…the problem with ‘admiring’ the working class is that it doesn’t, on its own, help anyone to get out of it at all.” Which is evidently why Orwell, far beyond admiration, risked his life in fighting on behalf of the working classes during the Spanish Revolution, as described in Homage to Catalonia.
Clearly Orwell saw more virtues and value in “the working classes” than Wood does. In fact, it is the many pressures applied by the working classes against the ruling classes that help to shrink the size of the more oppressed classes and ameliorate conditions within. Gifts are rarely granted from above, not without being forced from below by those who do the work – an active feature of many working classes that is admirable, and worth resembling.
In Spain, Orwell was willing to fight and to risk dying among the working classes who were in revolutionary mode, attempting a liberatory revolution that certainly did not spring from the privileged ruling classes but rather pushed against them – a “real shove from below,” a means to change mocked by Wood: “Ah, that will do the trick.” Does principled, justified force from below not sometimes produce real concessions from above? Does not much progress, let alone a revolution, often require it? Does Wood forget how the American colonies once sent his homeland’s Kingdom packing? The Spanish revolt of the working classes was largely a liberatory revolution that the wealth of the world left on its own, to be crushed. Other working class revolutions succeed or lay groundwork for progressive movements to come, to gain power under more peaceful conditions. One may see the Americas not least, including contemporaneously, for inspiring examples.
Before and during the Spanish Revolution (civil war), largely working class Spanish socialists and anarchists organized popular workers groups and movements, struggled, fought, and in part successfully replaced Republican Spain’s oppressive liberal capitalist rule, while holding off the fascism of Franco, for a time at least, greatly transforming peoples lives on a large scale, until the revolution was crushed by force – and mocked or ignored by others.
Establishment Innuendo
There is no little reason to want to embody the genuine qualities and enlivening characteristics of the working classes in a variety of ways. Orwell shows why most dramatically in Homage to Catalonia, the revolution blanked from Wood’s New Yorker article on “George Orwell’s revolutions”:
[In Barcelona 1936] it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
[See an expanded excerpt of Homage to Catalonia appended.] What occurred in Barcelona, revolutionary Spain in 1936 was extraordinary, partially witnessed and participated in by Orwell, and had been long built toward by working class organizing – popular progressive action. Had western “democracies” lifted a finger to assist the anarchists and liberatory socialists, rather than purposefully failing to support them and even working against them, the world could well be a far better place today. But little official sympathy and far less than needed appreciation and understanding of such popular movements exists or is tolerated still today and little, none, or negative appreciation is mainly engendered by the most highly acclaimed prominent fiction and prominent literary criticism of our time – as we see in the essential blanking of Homage to Catalonia and its crucial import in Wood’s sociopolitical review of Orwell and his works.
Regarding various features of Orwell’s work, Wood belittles the thoughtful observations (Wood calls them “attacks”) of postcolonial analyst Edward Said on the one hand, and quotes approvingly and snidely from Philip Larkin, “a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers,” as Terry Eagleton notes. Such tenor and shading readily come across to many casual readers, let alone to close readers. As does plenty of other establishment innuendo: “So the question hangs over Orwell, as it does over many well-heeled revolutionaries: Did he want to level up society or level it down.” If such a “question hangs over…many well-heeled revolutionaries” (hanging above one’s head by a thread like the deadly Sword of Damocles, one presumes), then similarly loaded questions hang over all establishmentarians, and especially over prominent ones like James Wood, only moreso. At best, the former has much to lose, and the latter has much to save. The innuendo is of some potentially frightening change posed by revolutionaries, never mind that establishmentarian forces have long been deadly and oppressive for many, and are potentially fatal for the species entire. Such is the status quo or reactionary rhetoric, the basic line of Wood’s essay. This is the voice of not only the counter-revolutionary, which one assumes Wood realizes, it’s the voice of the anti-humane, the inhuman, which he either fails to grasp or does not want to, joining a long line of Harvard type intellectuals committed in opposition to libertarian socialism – an overt acceptance of which, recent polls indicate, is on the rise in the US, the basics ever more popular.
Establishment PR
The basic ideology of James Wood to this point is that of a status quo liberal, that is a neo cold warrior, an ideology that may delude itself to presume it is largely progressive, while essentially manifesting itself as status quo, with reactionary tendencies.
James Wood is typical of the New Yorker, or maybe somewhat more reactionary. His article on Orwell presents the New Yorker’s kind of mental cleansing for and by the liberal and conservative readers of the magazine, the mindset of ruling class culture and society. It’s not only the voice of going along with the ruling establishment to get along, it’s the voice of the blinkered and the blinding. “If you have gone to the best schools,” notes Noam Chomsky –
and graduated from Oxford and Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled in you the understanding that there are certain things it would not do to say; actually, it would not do to think. That is the primary way to prevent unpopular ideas from being expressed. The ideas of the overwhelming majority of the population, who don’t attend Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, enable them to react like human beings, as they often do. There is a lesson there for activists.
Activists and artists in general. (One such lesson: read and write through Liberation Lit – liblit.org – and other liberatory venues.) Though sometimes beneficial in truncated ways, the New Yorker’s literary and other art efforts are often slight, wrong, corrosive, or beside the point. Much of the literary establishment takes its cue from the New Yorker, or otherwise more-or-less shares its class-based affinities, not infrequently with much admiration and the wish to resemble.
Wood points to the contemporary relevance of Orwell’s “coinages” in his novel 1984, such as “‘doublethink’ and ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Big Brother’ [that] now live an unexpectedly acute second life” – only “now”? “unexpectedly”? – “in the supposedly free West” but Wood makes no mention that Orwell wrote 1984 based in substantial part on his experience of working as a propagandist for BBC during World War II, where he was surrounded by and part of propaganda techniques, including those of the sort commonly used by the Nazis. Jutta Paczulla notes in the Canadian Journal of History (Spring-Summer 2007):
When writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell drew on the MOI [Britain’s Ministry of Information] as a model for the novel’s Ministry of Truth. Not only does the Ministry of Truth building in the novel resemble that of the MOI, but Room 101, where the Eastern Service Committee held its meetings, becomes the room in which Winston, the central character in Nineteen Eighty-Four is tortured and broken. Moreover, the atmosphere created by the mutual censorship conducted by [Orwell’s] BBC colleagues is reflected in the novel’s atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety.
Introducing the first book of the recent two volume edition of Orwell’s work that prompts Wood’s article is George Packer, another of the New Yorker’s liberal apologists for imperialism, as detailed by Edward Herman in “George Packer and the Liberal Struggle to Support Imperialism” Z Magazine 2005. Packer claims there is:
a strange gap in Orwell’s work – for he never wrote a novel or nonfiction book about the most historically important event of his life [World War II, during which] he spent ‘two wasted years’ as a producer in the Eastern Service of the BBC.
Setting aside the question of whether or not WWII or the Spanish civil war or some other event was “the most historically important event in Orwell’s life,” the point is apparently inconceivable to both Packer and Wood that Orwell’s famed novel 1984 is based substantially on his time working for the BBC during World War II. While Orwell directs the satire of 1984 most evidently toward the Soviet Union, also Franco Spain, the satire applies directly to the propaganda institutions and capacities of the liberal “democracies” where Orwell lived and breathed some of the atmosphere and propaganda realities and irrealities that he describes and conjures up in 1984. Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother, memory hole – all are longstanding specialties of the BBC, and dominant US media, as Orwell came to know and experience ever more intimately during World War II. Thus, the “strange gap” is resoundingly filled and the centrality of Orwell’s coinages to the West today is not only not unexpected by unbiased observers, but an understanding of the Orwellian has long since been remarked upon and employed in independent media analyses of the dominant corporate media of the US, England, and allied states.
About his state propaganda work at the BBC, Orwell expressed publicly that he kept the “propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been”…while writing privately in his diary:
You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth…. I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth….
“Orwell’s problem,” as Noam Chomsky describes it, permeates the establishment in the US and beyond: How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to “instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” As evidenced in James Wood, George Packer, et al, Orwell’s problem has not lessened since Orwell’s lifetime, and now the Obama administration is a leading part of the problem. There is no mention in Wood’s article about the Orwellian nature of today’s top rulers. No mention that President Obama and his administration’s rhetoric of “change” and “security” purposefully mask the essential preservation of the status quo, let alone continue and escalate the militarism – a state of affairs that recalls “doublethink” and “Newspeak” and “Big Brother” as much as “Fox News…during the last Presidential election” recalls 1984’s “Hate Week.”
By mentioning only Fox News election coverage, Wood softens his weak nod to the relevant immediate, neatly placing Orwell and Hate Week distinctly in the past. (Meanwhile, for similar ongoing Hate Years in regard to immigration see CNN and Lou Dobbs…) This helps the establishment generally and the Obama administration in particular to “manage expectations” raised by sweeping progressive campaign rhetoric. It gives ruling party Orwellisms a pass. It overlooks the brazen duplicitous propaganda of the current rulers – never mind that they all along as background clinically and soberly revealed that their sweeping progressive flourishes were not to be taken seriously, that is honestly. In this empire of lies, to fuel this empire of lies, the financial institutions – the core funders of both the Democrats and the Republicans that are currently thieving bottomless dollars from taxpayers by way of the Obama administration – gave more money to candidate Obama than to candidate McCain. For now at least, the Obama crowd are more the establishment’s preferred front faces than are the “Hate Week” “Axis of Evil” demonizers. Wood gives an Orwellian pass to the current rulers.
Like a “good liberal” – though many liberals (Hillary Clinton, for example) ludicrously prefer to be thought of as “progressive and perhaps soon as “socialist” – Wood lauds the establishment line about the basic economic status quo, giving the impression that “upwardly mobile working classes” change society enough to justify it. At least Wood gives no indication otherwise. Where has he written for libertarian socialism or for much or any vision of emancipation from class and conquest? That’s no minor or irrelevant part of literature, or shouldn’t be. He gives a few nods to the oblique or roundabout, say, the allegories of Saramago, while part-and-parcel with the establishment he largely ignores or distorts central works and tendencies in literature that are especially liberatory and comprehensive and basic – for example: of the Victorian era, Victor Hugo’s anti death penalty novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and his anti-class-exploitation novel, Les Misérables (1862); of the “modernist” era George Orwell’s liberatory partisan nonfiction narrative Homage to Catalonia (1938); of today Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s unsurpassed novel Wizard of the Crow (2006). Les Misérables and Wizard of the Crow are as great as any novels ever written, plus of more profound, comprehensive, and quality norms than perhaps any. Wood has never mentioned these tremendous works, or others of the sort, while writing out of history the liberatory tendency of which they are part – sent down the Orwellian memory hole – and instead expounds at length along the establishment’s bunkered path.
The Sinister Fact
Where are today’s liberatory critics? At Counterpunch. ZNet. Liberation Lit and related sites. And scattered in some limited handfuls in virtually invisible academic journals. The status quo discourages them and filters them out. One does not become either a New Republic or a New Yorker critic by taking a much liberatory route. Instead one propounds a liberal (and conservative and reactionary) literature of class oppression, repression, distortion, or marginalization. In fact, one had better take issue with those who do venture too close, too deep into the more fully liberatory, as Wood does in chastising Orwell for not appreciating the appeal and benefits of “upward mobility,” while essentially blanking any mention that Orwell went out of his way to put his life on the line for full working class emancipation. Wood, at best, sometimes lauds improvements in the conditions of oppression, while mainly propounding the point of view of the victors, the basic status quo, the so-called “conventional wisdom” of which Wood is largely a synthesizer and delimiter in literature. Orwell dared more – intellectually, not to mention otherwise – and in doing so achieved far more of vital insight and work than Wood and the New Yorker can allow. With the New Yorker goes the vast majority of the literary establishment, academic and otherwise, minimal ranging aside.
In addition to extraordinary work that is especially accomplished, like Wizard of the Crow, there are other less accomplished but extremely important and powerful popular novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that also get regularly slighted and dismissed by the relatively prominent, including Keith Gessen in his introduction to the second book of the recent two volume edition of Orwell’s work. No slight intended! Gessen would no doubt protest, though unless he can read the future, he has no way of knowing that Orwell is wrong, let alone “howlingly wrong when [Orwell] says that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will out-live the complete works of Virginia Woolf.”
First, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Woolf’s complete works both remain of general interest, both may try one’s patience, both are valuable and compelling. Second, due to historical and social reasons, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at least as culturally integral as Woolf’s complete works, possibly moreso and plausibly considerably moreso. Meanwhile, the novel continues to sell well, as do Woolf’s works. Third, speaking of the accuracy of “outliving,” in his 1945 essay “Good Bad Books,” Orwell explained:
Perhaps the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and ‘light’ humour? How about Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen’s Babies or King Solomon’s Mines? All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh at than with, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, ‘light’ literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff that gets into the anthologies…[which] I would far rather have written…. And by the same token I would back Uncle Tom’s Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore….
By now, Orwell’s “backing” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin over George Moore appears ever more solid, and time will have to tell regarding the works of Virginia Woolf. At this point, both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Woolf’s works seem they may be equally durable, as much as any other outcome. That’s far from a “howlingly wrong” estimation of the books’ comparative durability after these few decades, let alone of their ultimate durability. But Gessen like Wood conveys a smug, presumptuous, corrosive, and misleading “conventional wisdom.” Gessen conveys an establishment impression that liberatory works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin do not measure up to certain establishment favorites (let alone surpass them socially or culturally), and even are laughingly not worth the time of day – an impression that comes across, intended or not – that great estimations of the lasting nature of such liberatory works are to be laughed at to the point of howling. The indoctrination goes deep. Uncle Tom’s Cabin more enduring than Woolf’s complete works? Everyone knows that’s a howler! Wait a minute. The fact is, Stowe’s novel and Woolf’s works both continue to be strong sellers. The jury is still out, and the verdict has not remotely begun to be returned conclusively. But Harvard grad Gessen is howling, his mind educated to its foregone conclusion, however empirically challenged, however theoretically lacking. Which is actually what may sensibly draw a laugh in all this. Upton Sinclair’s kindred novel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, is doing well also. How finely written is much of, say, the Bible or the several millennia old epic of Gilgamesh? How enduring?
The New Yorker’s lead story for the issue of Wood’s essay on Orwell asks as title: “Can Iran Change?” More telling to ask, Can the US? Can the New Yorker change? Can status quo criticism? I suppose they can – at the point of revolution, probably best arrived at step by step. This article on Orwell is certainly no step, except backwards. To further help see why such work gets published as it does, we turn again to Orwell in “The Freedom of the Press,” an excerpt from his suppressed preface to Animal Farm:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
This from even Orwell, who was far from always the most progressive or revolutionary (sometimes the flip opposite) writer or thinker one might find or imagine.
Moving Beyond Class Structure
While there are some real individual and social gains from “upward mobility,” there are those central and fundamental features of life in an oppressive system that no amount of “upward mobility” can touch, and which Wood scarcely approaches in the New Yorker article, or ever much concerns himself with, unlike Orwell. Class mobility is far from any guarantor of overcoming as a society the unjust and devastating class structure and imperial nature of states. In fact, class mobility greatly functions to preserve the fundamentally inegalitarian and anti-democracy hierarchies found throughout “the West” and beyond. In a review of Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald’s anthology, Literature, Class and Culture, Lisa A. Cooper notes:
As Laura Hapke points out, in working-class writings, students’ belief systems are called into question as they read works ‘that challenge rather than celebrate upward mobility,’ and upward mobility and this idea of a shared notion of success is what most middle or upper class students have been taught to give credence to in capitalistic society.
Additionally, class mobility works both ways in the US, the much lauded land of upward mobility (more and more a relative myth). Leaving even the recent economic collapse aside – the ongoing multi-trillion dollar thefts from the populace by the wealthy ruling classes – the US prison system continues to grow like the torturing monster that it is. Even the establishment New Yorker recently gave some decent related insight into this, in its article “Hellhole” by Atul Gawande, on the widespread practice of torture in US prisons that is long-term solitary confinement (among other official barbarities). By 2006, “1 of every 31 adults in the US was on probation or parole or incarcerated in jail or prison” – the highest rate of incarceration and the largest prison population of any country anywhere – not to mention those imprisoned or living and dying under US guns all around the globe. The sun never sets on the US garrisons and guns of the world, as with the British Empire of old. Neither does the sun set on its Empire of lies and its other deceptions and misrepresentations, fostered near and far by establishment media and other institutions of the status quo.
Since class-based society fosters mobility both up and down, does that mean its inhabitants whether privileged or virtual vassals, serfs, and real prisoners are doubly free? Or should they be working, thinking, and organizing internationally and domestically toward progressive and revolutionary accomplishments that achieve and surpass those temporarily gained in Spain, and more permanently elsewhere – or should one wish to be and “resemble” the relatively privileged classes and their typical literary criticism (and fiction), such as in the New Yorker that sees fit to send continuously down the memory hole key liberatory realities and possibilities?
Apparently some particular class or readership might be tempted to “gloat” over any of Orwell’s shortcomings, for Wood is compelled to add that “it is too easy to gloat over his contradictions.” Gloat? Now who – which people, which classes – would want to “gloat” over Orwell’s “contradictions”? The ones whom Orwell at his best wrote on behalf of and fought alongside? Or…the privileged classes. Orwell noted in 1946: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” So who are these anti-democratic-socialists so craven as to apparently instinctively “gloat” over the contradictions, perceived and otherwise, of Orwell? The implications are striking.
In The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Orwell wrote that ruling types could:
keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.
Orwell:
They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.
Orwell:
Even among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass [World War II] it is doubtful whether there were any conscious traitors. The corruption is more in the nature of self-deception… And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straight-forwardly bribed with hard cash.
Orwell:
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the monied class had long ceased to be justifiable.
Wood’s emphasis on “upward mobility” gives the impression that the upper classes are the hope of the working classes, a place to escape to, where they may become the new managers and class system enforcers – devil take the hindmost. It sure worked like nothing else in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Journalist Alex Constantine observes:
To quote [historian] Felix Gilbert, ‘At the time the Nazis took over, recovery from the recession was beginning’ and Germany was economically prospering…
Economic prosperity, however, as catchwords like public works and infrastructure programs reveal, also meant the continued Americanization of Germany’s economy under Hitler. Indeed, the dictator himself seems to have welcomed America’s efficient methods of production. Hitler was, for instance, a proponent of mass-consumption, as shown by his statement from September 1941: ‘Frugality is the enemy of progress. Therein we are similar to the Americans, that we are fastidious.’ [Historian] Detlev Peukert underlines Hitler’s pro-American stance, arguing that, not unlike the U.S., the Third Reich consciously aimed to represent ‘the dawning of the new achievement-orientated consumer society based on the nuclear family, upward mobility, mass media, leisure and an interventionist welfare state […].’
And mass incarceration. Alongside “upward mobility.” Ah, that will do the trick. Things sure turned out well. That was quite a path, that route of mass confinement and upward mobility. Quite a final solution. Today: the great American lockup and Good Americans moving up to help administer and expand Empire USA, the Good British always ready to lend a helping military hand. “The descent into barbarism” of Germany in a mere decade from much admired heights of Western civilization – forgotten already? Conditions today are especially volatile and disastrous for many, and not only socially – also environmentally and militarily–
in part due to the establishment notion of “economic growth” that conquests and trashes the earth. Conditions are grave. (Meanwhile there exist far more constructive realities and movements in the arts and culture, in society and politics however marginalized – efforts that struggle for all the energy, growth, support, and progress they can possibly achieve.)
Orwell:
There they sat, at the center of a vast empire and a worldwide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? The British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity.
Into the mental cleansing of history.
Valuing the Work of Orwell
Near the end of his New Yorker article on Orwell, James Wood tutors the establishment to not “gloat” at Orwell’s “contradictions.” That would be “too easy.” Not too mention pitifully superficial, ignorant, and outrageously reactionary, particularly due to Wood’s blanking of Orwell’s most liberatory understandings and efforts.
“Instead,” Wood declaims, “one is gratefully struck by how prescient Orwell was, and by how much he got right” and how “curiously precise: he was…because of his contradictions…”:
This combination of conservatism and radicalism, of political sleepiness and insomnia, this centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher, which Orwell called ‘the English genius’, was also Orwell’s genius, finding in English life its own ideological brotherhood. For Good and ill, those English contradictions have lasted.
So you see, Dear Readers of the New Yorker, we cannot gloat for we would be gloating at the “contradictions” of ourselves, for we are not essentially keepers of the status quo, we too are like Orwell at his best, propagandizing for democratic socialism, as he understands it, in everything we write, and in so very much that we do – just so, history has been obliterated into fantasy, in the pages of the New Yorker by the award winning critic (2009 American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for criticism).
In this splendid fiction according to James Wood – cultured good liberals and conservatives, or progressive pretenders, need not worry – need not even know – that Orwell was ever so very revolutionary after all, for Wood has leveled such history to the ground, and below. In this he is professionally assisted in the Orwell volumes I and II introductions by George Packer also of the New Yorker and Keith Gessen of n+1 in various ways, including fixations and ultimate focus on Orwell’s niceties of form and style. At least English novelist Julian Banes in the New York Review of Books, though a basically establishment write up, spends some time depicting the manufacture of Orwell’s reputation as National Treasure, then closes by quoting Orwell and emphasizing that:
“The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved.” And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.
Even this slim point of emphasis is beyond Wood, Packer, and Gessen for whom Orwell is far more to be cherished and known for his writing and his nationally treasured “English genius.” To Wood and his chorus, Orwell is “us” after all, in the end – the more-or-less talented and privileged status quo. For which we are grateful. He is our brother through and through. Not that there is nothing to that. After all, Orwell was early in his life an Imperial policeman, and though he emphasized how he despised it, at the end of his life he was a police informer, pointing out leftists or perceived leftists, including Charlie Chaplin. So there is certainly that establishment strain in Orwell.
Except, brazenly unrevealed in Wood’s largely socio-political article is Orwell’s most vital, greatest socio-political work. Moreover, Orwell pointedly noted that one group had opted out of “the English genius” that Wood says is “Orwell’s genius,” part of an “ideological brotherhood”: the intellectuals. They opted out of the English genius, the brotherhood, according to Orwell, and Wood pointedly omits this crucial fact – again, brazenly, especially in this day of the easy check internet. “Nearly everyone,” Orwell writes, “whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood,” that which Wood describes as the “centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher,” thus misrepresenting England as a land of legal workers and illegal workers – with no owners, no landlords to employ the gamekeepers or to prosecute the poachers, no monied rulers.
Contra Wood, Orwell in fact explicitly includes in the “brotherhood” the “millionaires” and the “class-structure” and “all ranks of society … [where] … the most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere,” which he claims are all part of a “cultural unity,” except for that one group, long since, the intellectuals. Orwell observes in his 1940 Dickens essay that the “brotherhood” has long been broken, that:
In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens stands for can be written off as ‘bourgeois morality’. But in moral outlook no one could be more ‘bourgeois’ than the English working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of ‘realism’ and power-politics. They may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-horse.
And in its most liberatory forms actual democratic socialism may have a chance. The intellectuals – those who staff and run the governments, those who fill the privileged schools – opted out of the “brotherhood” one hundred and twenty years ago. And it is the establishment intellectuals, like Wood, who have a real stake, ruling stake, in keeping up “the lofty old schools” on both sides of the Atlantic, “much as always,” despite “all the transformations,” to “educate the upper classes to govern the country,” to “wreck” cities and countries and continents and to have their “lovely” homes and “parties.” Orwell’s “brotherhood,” his ostensible “genius,” the “English genius,” includes considerably more than Wood indicates (the “millionaires, the landlords – the owners) and considerably less (the “intellectuals”), and meanwhile, the brotherhood’s masses (working classes) would be “as out of date as the cab-horse” in revolutionary Spain, or in any functioning democracy or socialism worth of the name. For this genius that Wood mischaracterizes we are grateful? So who is “leveling down” and taking insight and possibility with it?[1]
And so it is that Wood leads readers blindly away from many of Orwell’s most valuable, outraged, and revolutionary insights[2] in the article titled with Orwellian flair, “A Fine Rage” and slugged, “George Orwell’s revolutions.”
Should journals of literature and other art aspire to the crucially gutted literary work so typically vaunted and displayed in the New Yorker and in periodicals of similar ethos? Are there no countervailing literary forces at work? No striking progress? No real revolutions in the brewing? None advancing step by step? Would anyone, could anyone, remotely know by reading the prominent literary voices of the US and the West? Is there no “sinister fact,” no voluntary suppression in the dominant media, the establishment media, anymore? Nothing Orwellian in the New Yorker?
____________________
NOTES:
1 Worth quoting in its entirety is this comment by “driedchar” to a particular blog post of George Packer, “Reading Orwell: George Packer” in the New Yorker April 23, 2009. “Driedchar is a big fan of John Updike, as noted in another comment. It doesn’t get much more establishment than Updike, a long time New Yorker writer. Yet such is the egregiousness of Wood’s misrepresentation of George Orwell that even from various points in the establishment one may feel compelled to point out Wood’s “irksome … condescension to Orwell and to the working class” and to “the mugging” that Wood delivers, courtesy of the New Yorker, in his article that George Packer calls “excellent.” The comment:
I agree with most of what Packer has to say, except his reference to James Wood’s “A Fine Rage” as an “excellent essay.” Wood’s piece is filled with questionable statements. For example, when he says, “There is a difference between being revolutionary and being a revolutionary, and journalists are not required to be tacticians,” he implies that Orwell didn’t really understand the realities of revolt. He fails to mention that Orwell fought (voluntarily) on the front lines against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Wood takes a sentence in Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn” (“However horrible this system [Fascism] may seem to us, it works.”) out of context and uses it to conclude: “So the example of efficient Fascism is what inspires the hope of efficient socialism.” Wood fails to point out that in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” not to mention many other essays and reviews, Orwell is at pains to distinguish between Fascism and socialism. For example, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell says, “Hitler’s real self is in Mein Kampf, and in his actions. He has never persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a centralized economy which robs the capitalist of most of his power but leaves the structure of society much as before. The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor, masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine Socialism, the moneyed class have always been on his side.” Orwell goes on to describe Fascism as “spectacular, conscious treachery.” Wood is wrong to connect Orwell’s socialism with Hitler’s fascism. He is also wrong to allege Orwell’s “reputation’s later theft at the hands of the right wing.” What exactly is Wood referring to here? Is it something disparaging T. S. Eliot and/or Malcolm Muggeridge said about “Animal Farm”? Wood does not substantiate his allegation; he merely says Orwell’s reputation was stolen by the Right. As far as I know, no such “theft” ever took place. Wood describes Orwell as a “puritan masochist.” Puritan apparently because he is sensitive to squalor; masochist because he repeatedly immersed himself in squalor? A fairer interpretation is that Orwell was onto a great subject – poverty and working class suffering – and that he was very good at describing it. The most irksome aspect of Wood’s piece is his condescension to Orwell and to the working class. He says of Orwell, “But it is too easy to gloat over his contradictions…. Gloat? Implicit in that is Wood’s enjoyment of the mugging he’s administering. Regarding the working class, Wood quotes Orwell on Dickens: “However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Woods then asks, “Why on earth should Dickens have wanted to resemble the working classes? Why would anyone want to, least of all the working classes themselves?” Well, I for one identify with the working classes and proudly consider myself part of them. I believe Wood is coming across here as quite a snob. I have only touched on a few of the many troublesome and problematic aspects of James Wood’s “A Fine Rage.” Far from being “excellent,” as Packer describes it, it is thoroughly rotten and regrettable.
2 An excerpt from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia:
I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all…. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me….
This was in late December 1936 [in Barcelona], less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ or ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrase of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about the proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.
Aaron Bady at The Valve calls 2010 Academy Award winning movie for best picture, The Hurt Locker, “a cinema of truthiness,” of a kind.
In my view, the main truthiness (truthiness being a sort of refined Orwellianism) is that “The Hurt Locker” is a biased cinema of retail violence, rather than an illuminating cinema of wholesale (and retail) violence – which the owners don’t allow to be portrayed for the masses.
The Cindy Sheehan Story, if done well as movie, incorporating Dahr Jamail type reporting, would be a poly-subjective/objective cinema of wholesale violence (also retail).
It would be a war (or rather conquest and resistance) story on a large scale, instead of being reductively confined to a warrior/occupier story.
Imagine retitling “The Hurt Locker” as “The Travails of the Conquistadors.” Or call it, symbolically, “The Good Russians in Afghanistan.”
“The Hurt Locker”? Orwellian dreams. A whole cinema of it. Best Picture! By the logic of reduction – possibly so. By the logic of empire – definitely. Political? Sure. Pernicious? Sure. Well wrought? Could be. One can admire what slaves make, whether it’s a good apple, or excitement in art, while despising what they are…enslaved, tools of empire; and/or, in the case of many soldiers (and occupying armies), mercenaries essentially, and lethal indentured servants.
And of course there is always the question of how admirable is what they make. The conquistadors suffered, and suffer today too. It’s the picture of the year, or the era. The excitement and the sufferings of the conquistadors are henceforth to be known as Kathryn Bigelow films? What an honor.
And The Cindy Sheehan Story?
Or what about An Iraqi Lament?
Picture of the never? Novel of the nowhere? Imagination unmappable? Unmapped? Or “…thoroughly forgotten, ignored, and under-articulated…” here, as elsewhere.
“…the representational conundrum that Kathryn Bigelow’s film is stuck in…” is a conundrum of genre and content.
“…the Iraq war…reality is a thing for which narrative is insufficient” in expression when expressed as a contemporary Western, or Spaghetti Western, or Knight-Errant tale – as The Hurt Locker is. This film that is a kind of Die Hard In Iraq! is set up to really show virtually nothing about what dying hard in Iraq today actually means. Die Hard in Baghdad, the enemy mechanized. In fact, the genre and content are a set up to show the opposite of what dying hard in Iraq today most essentially means. As comes natural to a conquistador culture. Picture of the year!
After millennia, is the endless reveling in the martial the best we can do in art? What would we think of a Russian “Hurt Locker” during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan? Wow, those Russian soldiers sure do rock and roll! And the important conundrum there would be what?
“Missing” and “Romero” – these are vital, high impact movies of “war,” that is of conquest and resistance. No academy awards though. And not much academic appreciation either. And I can think of such novels too. Not much conundrum there. Just some great and vital art. Buried like IEDs, I guess, in the paths of establishment scholars’ and critics’ careers, in favor of star shine and star drek. It makes sense to critique the star works of art because they are so visible, and to do so first and foremost at the most fundamental levels; it also makes sense to critique the invisible works of art that are far more vital, to render visible the vital invisible. Either or both done thoroughly can cost matriculation and tenure though, which is why it is so seldom seen in certain circles.
(What a novel that would make! and has partly been made in the great second novel by Miles Franklin, The End of My Career, 45 years delayed in publishing and apparently out of print in the US, though available used and in full online at Australia Gutenberg under its original, better title, My Career Goes Bung.)
xposted: Apart from local diversity, which is important or vital, I see far more similarities across European, American (North and South), African, and Asian novels than differences. (Though maybe I’ve read too selectively.) It seems there’s more variance within place than across it. (I think science has determined that the same is true for race.) Underlying this is the socio-political commitments, no matter the place, the kind of basic ground-level commitments of the novel. And while those can vary vastly within a single city, given the interests or commitments of the novelist, they can and have also taken form of a global solidarity and movement, as Denning points out.
So, human nature is universal, socio-political and other commitments of novelists vary but can and have taken the form of an international, and yet too much discussion of novels goes on out of all broad socio-political or historical context, as if the form or genre were not a living organic socio-political (that is, historical) thing, a knowable creature in the overall socio-historical web. So often novels are treated like alien objects landed from outer space which must be hermetically probed and de-encrypted. This is flattering to the author but shows weakness or snobbery in the critic. Which then impoverishes thinking and making, including novel thinking and novel making, as it makes even utterly typical novels look freakish, strange, and more unique, promising, or interesting than they are, due to some idiosyncratic quirk or particular threaded element. And this suits short term or short sight marketing, which goes its own pathological way.
Which goes back to Denning:
“Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted”
The vapid and pathological marketing of marginal or pathological or subservient novels, one is to be wary of, but the novels that do represent the “transformed geography of the novel” of liberation, that Denning gets toward, that’s where the discussion of novels would do well to be, for humanistic, intellectual, and artistic reasons all. To do otherwise, is to engage in discussion that is “often…empty and contrived,” trivial or marginal, or obscurant, however sometimes or seemingly complex.
2666 and the Bolano oeuvre by and large, including the short stories, fail to impress, though are not totally without interest. Not totally. As for The Kindly Ones, I get the sense it was written as a joke or as a sheerly careerist effort, or a dull combination of the two. The flood of commentary on the The Kindly Ones reads to me much like a Bolano novel, that is, as a stunted phenomena barely endurable or alive, a few lively or pointed moments aside. Overly harsh? I’m comparing the work of Bolano to the great and vital works that are neglected, that are where the greater life of the novel, of fiction, is really going on.
One can look at “The Part About the Crimes” as part 4 of 2666, or, as Bolano apparently wished, as a stand alone work. It hardly matters. Either way it’s the most vital thing there, and the greatest failure. It’s the most vital thing for obvious reasons, not least because the subject is so visceral and of serious magnitude. Unfortunately, because it is so relatively meaninglessly or minorly set forth (that is, contextualized) it is failed badly, if not utterly. What’s the point of the litany of gruesome horrific murders? Who knows? Could be this, that, or the others, depending on what you want to read into it, that is must read into it. There’s no reason a novel can’t posit great meaning to its subject, and yet then allow readers to read into _that_ at considerably more advanced levels. But here Bolano, as is typical in his work and in so much of the work celebrated by the establishment, fails in the former and thus effectively prevents, bars, vitiates the latter.
And I mean that criticism not primarily as a criticism of Bolano. Bolano did not make Bolano famous and prominent. The establishment did. So the main criticism goes to what the establishment values and celebrates (and reads, and allows published), first, and then to an analysis of his work, second. That said I think this secondary analysis is worthwhile too because it’s the sort of thing that goes too often unremarked, or decried: the importance of positing great meaning(s) to subjects, especially to dire subjects, before expecting readers to pay great attentions, or much attention at all.
Personally, I think Bolano is a mildly interesting minor author. Pretty tedious really. And that the adulation accorded him and other establishment stars is a far more interesting phenomenon, more worthy of study and critique. In many ways it can be more interesting, not to mention more worthwhile, to study what has not been published in any way, shape, or form (along with that which has been systematically marginalized) than to study what is regularly published and celebrated.
Have you read 2666? Compare your thoughts and feelings about it to an equally long novel. First, you may see more the mishmash of 2666. Second you may see what a wheel spinner it also is. That’s what I see. What Bolano has going for him is that he was not a total sellout to the nefarious conventions and mores of his time, and he goes his own way. In fact, he had a good bit of the thoughtful rebel in him. What he has going against him, is that it’s fine to be against this and that, but he is not for very much, is he? In his fiction. The game (his own way) doesn’t seem to me to be much worth the candle (our time and expense). The tedium, the tedium! And the trivia. That that is true of much of praised contemporary fiction makes it no less troublesome. Bolano is a sometimes jaunty explorer of deserts but even then it’s still the desert. The vital wider world goes wanting, a few stabs at larger life aside.
One can see why his work would become so celebrated in established circles. The vacuities don’t hurt him there.
Commenter: ” ‘The vital wider world goes wanting’? I’m not so sure. It’s been several months since I read the novel, but I found the fourth section a crucial material and historical frame of reference for the entire work. I think it makes the book.”
The fourth section consists entirely of retail violence. As horrific and significant as it is, it’s virtually off the map when one looks at the wholesale violence of the world, say that carried out by, for example, the major state in the world, the US.
Obviously Bolano especially in that section is in the relevance to the world, journalistic and crime line of the novel. But that’s what I mean by “a stab” at larger life. Sure, the stabs are there, even bulked in like excess fiber, but in both a marginal and a marginalized way, leading essentially nowhere. Like I said, very establishment.
Compare to the off the radar big novels Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngugi, or to Les Miserables (1862) by Hugo.
I’ll add that the problem with creating great novels as with creating great (or even survivable) culture is that the right is bankrupt and the left is broke. (And the middle is middlin’.) I think only as part of the rebuilding and the establishing of the left can the needed novels be written, that is the far greater novels than the celebrated pap that dominates.
No blueprint for this but I think there’s a knowing where to to look, or at least a recognition of where the light is that helps, that is the only chance.
While it may appear that the novel collapsed in the “West” of its own weight around the turn of the century, a century ago, very roughly, I think it’s more accurate to note that it collapsed, or was warped, due to sociopolitical throttling.
The novel was partially revived in the twentieth century by the international and multicultural forces of the left – from where it seems to me the most exciting and promising developments continue to appear.
Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?
I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.
I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America’s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal “culture”. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an “American tragedy” with a soundtrack of pure angst.
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.
What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie. …
In a scathing article, Jerome Stolnitz (1991) argued that art has only short term effects. Greek drama is regarded as powerful but, says Stolnitz: “There is no evidence that Aristophanes shortened the Peloponnesian War by so much as a day” (p. 200). Stolnitz asserts that effects of art simply do not appear in history.
Except that—as Frank Hakemulder has pointed out to me—they do. They appear in the history of human rights. As historian Lynn Hunt (2007) has shown, the establishment of human rights has been strongly affected by literary art. …
In the larger literary venues (and on the more sycophantic lit-blogs) this phenomenon of corporate pre-determination of the “literary field” goes almost entirely unremarked. It amounts to “the repressed” of mainstream book-reviewing, as that which must remain unspoken in order for a certain type of utterance to exist at all. Reviews are written as if the titles swim into the reviewer’s ken on their own little spiritual wings or somehow magically materialize in the critic’s inbox; as if literature were somehow self-generating and “immediate” rather than constructed and subject to considerable mediation. There is in James Wood’s work not the least institutional self-consciousness or self-questioning, not a moment of institutional critique. “Literature” and “fiction,” when he speaks of them, are mystified categories.
For one antidote to corporate publishing, see Liberation Lit.
A Practical Policy 