Culture and Politics — Quick Takes
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
“On Behalf of Lake Owakeela” is a great art and social change story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which a lawyer argues that a lake has inherent rights, like humans do. After all, why not, since courts now ascribe such rights to corporations.
Kim Stanley Robinson comments: A very knowing and expert feel to this one, a story with a positive ending in a completely realist way, at no point does it stretch credulity. Feels real. The young woman suddenly the tribal lawyer, very well done; also the growing into the role quickly as she sees the very realistic reason why the other side might give in. Good on the legal standing issues here too. Really good!
Much larger socially progressive stories you certainly won’t see imagined on TV — say a long-running series of two societies side by side, one ecotopian socialist (and secured by threat of bomb as per Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia), the other predatory capitalist like America today, and any number of crises between them. Cuba tried to go the other way, the socialist route, and got pulverized by America, with increasing threat of complete immiseration, destruction, and conquest today under Trump.
The progressive elements of the 1930s in America were made possible by the socialist and progressive movements, acts, and literature of the ‘00s, ‘10s, and ‘20s. And going back further.
Socio-politically, the slavery Abolition movement led to the end of slavery and Reconstruction, which led to the Socialist/Progressive movements, which led to the New Deal, which led to the Civil Rights movements, which led to the Antiwar movements, which led to the massive Peace movement of the ‘80s which led to the vast shrinkage of the nuclear arsenals (though not yet to abolition), which led to new antiwar movements, all of which led to Occupy Wall Street, which led to Bernie’s campaigns, which brings us today to progressive populists on the cusp of taking national power, despite the neo-McCarthy neo Red Scare Trump repression, which is so very severe because the progressive populists are so very strong now.
You can see similar movements in literature, arts, culture through time, though the lines of development are badly blurred by the establishment, often thwarted or cut out entirely, in part by the MFA establishment, though there are clear battlelines within the MFA institutional front too.
So much of progressive information, thought, and experience is driven out of history, consciousness, and culture by the establishment, which is largely the shadow cast by the plutocracy. People are busy so they shrug and say things are what they are, so be it. But if you’re a bit obsessive and a bit disturbed by what you see or don’t see, and if you have a moment, whole other worlds can open up, often by following the cultural battlelines, the various fronts, some standout figures and who knew who, plus serendipitous luck of discovery. Establishment culture is thin to non-existent in crucial ways, though it’s everywhere. When it gets pried open briefly or marginally, you see the real stuff, often with a telling history and potentially explosive content in the present.
Great novelist and playwright Ishmael Reed’s Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards and other work has always tried to push the “what if” question ( what if things were different) for example. Some of the “what if” actually did happen through time despite the war-mongering, bigoted, plutocrat establishment, fortunately — multiculturalism, decolonization lit, international lit — but it ekes its way through a very tightly controlled capitalist (plutocrat) box and is often very greatly stripped of socialist expression, or a full people’s expression, in content, ideology, and institutional expression. And it is constantly outrageously under attack on many fronts. Meanwhile, additional progressive populist change is afoot increasingly, though belittled and anti-advertised, despite this new Trump era of severe oppression. What might have been, what might be, is highly offensive to the establishment, which is fearful, always, insecure, and fundamentally ideologically inflexible. It’s always a good day to fight the fundies, or to ignore them and create a new world.
A century ago, prominent establishment literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley and his key literary cronies involved themselves in the war effort, of World War I. Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos drove ambulances. F. Scott Fitzgerald joined the Army. William Falkner changed his name to Faulkner and managed to join the Canadian Air Force, then lied about his time in the service and “paraded” around in a uniform after the war, and flew private planes through his later life. Cowley helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in literature three years after he got the Portable Faulkner published, mid-century. If you want a clear-eyed take on the racist Faulkner’s writing read the great progressive critic Maxwell Geismar about Faulkner and his work. None of this establishment literary cohort were ever politically arrested or even much surveilled, except Dos Passos briefly after the war, and later Hemingway a bit during the time of the Spanish Civil War and WWII, superficially.
On the flip side, though Cowley knew them all well, the actual greatest novelists of the era, Mike Gold and Claude McKay and Agnes Smedley — a diverse group of leftists, artists, and intellectuals — received no Portable editions from Cowley and the publishing establishment and all were deeply and actively opposed to American involvement in WWI and the war itself and were heavily surveilled and all were politically arrested. And they all were contributors to and/or editors of the literary and cultural magazines that were shut down by the government during WWI and restarted under other names some years thereafter. Included among this group was anarchist and brilliant literary critic Emma Goldman, who was deported, after first being imprisoned and charged under the espionage act, as was Agnes Smedley.
Cowley’s warfaring group became the literary establishment and Cold Warriors, propped up by big money and awards, institutionalized, the ones who taught and gave talks in the colleges, also as part of the Cold War MFA in creative writing institutionalization of literature. Meanwhile, McKay, Gold, and Smedley, socialists and progressive populists, each in the 1920s wrote novels greater in every way than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s passé socialite novel The Great Gatsby (1925) — which remains lauded as the great American novel by the establishment, much like the editorially mauled white savior novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The great literary leftists’ novels were buried and falsely smeared as inartistic and excessively propagandistic by the Cold War Red Scarce McCarthy Era liberal-conservative establishment for decades thereafter. These effects are felt to the present day, in a society-wide cultural war that has been wholly revived by Trump. Yet establishment liberals have always waged Cold War against the most vital of the present and the future too, per the demands of the militant plutocrat establishment.
In time, Latin American and decolonization and multicultural literature would partly pick up where the diverse “proletarian” socialists left off, partly rebelling against the Cold War liberal-conservative mentality, though not entirely. And so here we are today.
The Cold War culture continues. For many decades running and still today, it’s likely that a plurality of all shows and movies, as with very many novels, are cop shows, including military stories, and the related. And those stories are essentially all right-wing. This is the partisan culture of the bigoted capitalist police state, surveillance state.
What else would you expect in a de facto right-wing militant plutocracy masquerading as a democracy? A flood of right-wing art.
Systemically, literary agents are pushed into fishing for supposed material value in “projects.” Literary and cultural value is a kind of afterthought, nice if you can get it, given the system.
Culture is always partisan. The art and literature of the first half of the twentieth century in America, for example, was far more progressive populist and socialist than during the Cold War (second) Red Scare, McCarthy-led age of persecution that followed — an extended period of repression that has been continued and revived today. At that time, some actually constructive state activity necessitated by the Great Depression and progressive populist outcry and action forced America to have a different and enhanced, more democratic art and lit culture briefly, thanks to the progressive, socialist period of the first quarter of the twentieth century. It would not last — Maxwell Geismar, “Introduction,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (Ed. Joseph North):
…it was the Cold War that brought about the downfall, in 1949, of one of the most brilliant journalistic enterprises in our literary history. At the war’s end, a new epoch of repression was about to start. Another great achievement of the Depression years was the WPA Federal Theater Project; and Halle Flanagan’s history of this, in her book Arena, ends with the congressional investigation and foreclosure of the Federal Theater by political figures who are, by Divine Grace or special dispensation, still active in Washington today… 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.
Thus this DIY magazine, Liberation Lit, though a magazine of one, nevertheless gets all kinds of diverse voices and authors into it, in bits and pieces, past and present. Many texts commenting on texts, and many works of art adjacent to many other works of art.
I may incorporate additional much larger swaths of additional voices and texts into this omnibus going forward, especially given the plethora of liberatory lit available in the public domain now — 1930 and before — from the “Old Left” in particular — more fiction, criticism, poetry, and more graphic art. A bit of commentary to go with these great works could facilitate it.
There is no greater American novel than Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley, for example, and it has been in the public domain since 2025. Likewise Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is now in the public domain as of this January 2026, and Claude McKay’s Banjo, in the public domain also since 2025, though it doesn’t seem that Gutenberg.org has posted these texts yet.
The “networked tyranny” that defines the world, that rules the world, is the billionaire class and their private government, whom Epstein represented, the billionaire stealth government, and their depravities — which amounts to the same thing. The depravity is the reason for the stealth. That said, much of the billionaire tyranny, depraved governance, is carried out right in the open, in the public institutions of government that the billionaire class also shapes and controls. The combined billionaire tyrannies, private and public, are the plutocracy, heavily armed and financially armed that rules all — openly, deceitfully, and secretly. America itself is largely a plutocracy masking — and masquerading — as a democracy. And always has been. This is the nature of the American Empire from is Native slaughtering and conquesting, African enslaving founding — bigoted state capitalism.
The system is far beyond oligarchy — rule by the elite few — and a transnational elite, per the Epstein files and network. It’s a far more vast plutocracy. It involves millions of rich individuals and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of high finance (and high financed) organizations and institutions and municipalities. There is an oligarchy too, but it pales in face of the myriad elements and mechanisms of the overarching (tyrannical and anti-democracy) plutocracy that the public must organize to destroy and replace with liberatory socialist and real democracy. The People’s war must be won in literature and art and culture as well as in the rest of material society and politics. It’s a partisan effort, against a partisan enemy.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 