Socialist Realism

Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. -- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Socialist Realism

During the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers, Socialist Realism became the official policy of the organization.  Loosely defined, it was a style of continuing Russian realism imbued with optimism for the revolution and a focus on the nobility of the workers.

Socialist Realism soon became the policy for all Soviet art.  As the means of producing and publishing art had been taken into state control, this style soon became essential for success in Soviet Russia.  The style extended from painting to fiction to cinema and everything in between.

This policy ended Revolutionary Russia as a center for artistic experiment and has been criticized by many as a repressive policy, but these criticisms have also overshadowed serious appreciation for the beauty of some of these works.

Isaac Brodsky. Lenin in Smolny (1930)

Personal Experiences: How to Deal with Prejudiced "Jokes"

How It All Starts

Most people have had this experience at some point.  You are hanging out with a group of people, chatting and trying to have a good time, when some asshole starts looking over his shoulder while saying, "Hey, I've got a joke."


With everyone's attention on them, the asshole starts hedging their responsibility, "Now, I'm not (insert: racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.) BUT..."  What follows is a joke purpose-built to express the exact attitudes that the teller just said they didn't hold.

Some people might laugh, some people might uncomfortably look at their toes, and you are standing there, and even if you want to say something, maybe you have reservations.

If you are in a situation where you feel safe and empowered to air your grievances with the asshole, the defense is always the same.  The asshole appeals to the few people who laughed (whether or not they were faking it) by saying something along the lines of: "God, it's just a joke.  Have a sense of humor."

The Fight Against Argumentum Ad Fuddy-Duddem

So now you are being framed as the fuddy-dud (also known as the spoil-sport, Debbie-downer, killjoy, etc.) because you didn't want some asshole to think it's okay to spew that hate around you.  The thing is, even if many people in the group agree with you, the fuddy-dud argument seems to undercut your position.

And while this is a fallacy, it is an effective fallacy (I like to call it Argumentum Ad Fuddy-Duddem).  It equates someone not laughing at a specific joke as a lack of any sense of humor.  In fact, a sense of humor is what allows you to examine the joke and see what logic is working underneath and discover that this asshole's "joke" does not exist to show an unexpected break in logic or humiliate something worth hating (like the boss) but, in fact, serves to justify a logic of oppression and humiliate an oppressed group.

Fuddy-duds do exist, and certainly some leftists are fuddy-duds, but confronting "jokes" that serve oppressive social structures does not make one a fuddy-dud.

And let's face it, why should you be the bad guy?  It was the asshole and his "joke" that killed the fun.

Considerations When Confronting Assholes

Of course, in any fluid, live experience, you want to be discerning when telling someone that they are wrong.  Some groups and situations might make it unsafe to speak up, or you might be at risk for being fired from a desperately needed job.

Another thing to consider is how you confront.  If the person is misguided and doesn't genuinely have these hateful beliefs (and maybe even if they do) you might catch more flies with honey.  Pulling them aside in a discrete manner, from a place of concern and forgiveness, can get your point to sink in, whereas too much confrontation might make the person defensive.

Spectrum of the Left

I've been working on a project recently (more details will come when/if it really develops into something), and one of the little obsessions I got caught in was making a goofy little chart to keep the main leftist tendencies clear and to help newcomers quickly find where they might want to first explore.  All the little decisions really sucked me in, so I thought I should share.  Let me know what you think!

Click here to view the chart.

Some Victories in the Recent US Mid-Term Elections

According to cable-news, talk-radio, and almost all mainstream news outlets, the US 2014 Mid-Term Elections were a referendum on Obama's "left" politics and a popular push to the right.  So why is the radical left not losing sleep over this electoral calamity?

Well, as with most things major news outlets tell you, it isn't really true.  Obama and the Democrats have no soft spot in our hearts being a pro-war and pro-corporation.  The electoral outcome of Republicans over Democrats or vice-versa amounts to a sibling rivalry between two incredibly similar bourgeois parties.

Some Big Victories for the Working Class and Poor

Ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage passed statewide in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, and city wide in San Francisco and Oakland.  Non-binding initiatives to increase the minimum wage passed in the state of Illinois and many Wisconsin counties.

On that same note, voters in Oregon and Washington DC chose to legalize marijuana, a blow to the decades long, racist drug war.

The Art of the Slogan: Socialism or Barbarism

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism. -- Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (The Crisis of German Social Democracy)

Socialism or Barbarism, There Is No Third Way!

This slogan, as many great radical left slogans, comes from the turmoil of the early 20th Century (1915 is the first time we see a form of it in print which is quoted at the top of this post).  With the rise of large proletarian populations in capitalist nations across Europe came the rise of revolutionary parties and the art of leftist sloganeering with them.

This slogan has proven legs, and at it has, at its heart, a very important meaning.

Ecosocialism or barbarism:  There is no third way! -- Slogan of Climate & Capitalism

 Why It Is Easy to Misunderstand

So isn't this just propaganda equating capitalists with barbarians and calling socialism the only viable alternative?

Not quite, although many radical leftists probably could sign on to such perspectives, but it means something much more interesting

Capitalism was still relatively young at this time, and already it had several recessions.  Even capitalists had a hard time seeing how capitalism could last forever, and Karl Marx had laid down what still holds as the greatest criticism of a social system by defining contradictions within the capitalist idea which would inevitably lead to its end.

10,000 strong Communist rally in Union Square, New York, 08/01/1935

While social democratic reforms helped save capitalism for a time, it is still clear that no economic situation will last forever.  The question, then, is what comes next?

The radical left made it very clear:  capitalism will collapse for good one day, but what could replace it if not socialism?  Barbarism.  Primitive accumulation (think slavery, seizure, etc.) by the strong, fascism, relapse into feudalism (more of an issue in the world of 1915 when many countries were still feudal), etc.

Profile: David Graeber

David Graeber is one of the most popular radical leftists alive today.  Through his incredibly popular work Debt:  The First 5000 Years and his fundamental role in organizing the Occupy Wall Street movement, Graeber has become a leading voice for libertarian socialist thought.  He teaches at the London School of Economics.

The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.

The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway. -- David Graeber, Debt:  The First 5000 Years

PDF's of David Graeber

• Debt:  The First 5000 Years 
• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Video of David Graeber

• On Debt: The First 5000 Years
• David Graeber on Anarchism 
• Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time 

Solidarity Against Prejudice in the Working Class (Part 2)

Solidarity Is a Process

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. -- Karl Marx, The German Ideology

When you live in a capitalist society, you can't help but internalize capitalist ideas.  Every society acts that way.  Every society must build its foundation of assumptions into the masses, or else it could not recreate itself with every generation, decade, year, month, or even day.  Some of these assumptions are changed through popular struggle.  Popular struggle can make a ruling class look so weak, so behind, that the ruling class must adapt to the change or fall to a revolution.

So each individual who is interested in liberation must find within themselves their attitudes which mirror the interest of the ruling class and eliminate these root and branch, finding the source and broken logic of the prejudice and replacing it with an attitude of liberation.  This is a process.  And you know it's a long one, requiring self-discipline and self-awareness and self-criticism.  But, as with most things, the difficulty of the process only ennobles itself and people who take on its challenges.

A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any individual, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.
[...]
Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.  -- Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

We are none of us so enlightened as to be free from this work.  You and I and everyone who wants liberation must keep vigilant, making sure we pulled every weed of division from our gardens, and making sure no more spring up.  There will be set backs and surprises as well as many victories as you come to feel more and more unity with the world's oppressed and a greater understanding of who you are and what you can become.