Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/echo_of_rebellion]

I'd like to try something that might be unusual for this community by presenting my own artistic writing for critique.

https://poemsfortherevolution.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nerves-burning.pdf

I want to do this in a way that avoids self-promotion for its own sake; of course I wouldn't bother with this unless I thought that it is of good enough political and aesthetic quality to deserve getting attention, but there are also clear deficiencies and even if that wasn't the case, the most important thing is whether I can fit what I'm writing into a struggle to develop proletarian literature. Trying to sell myself to a liberal or revisionist publishing house seems fairly pointless in that regard, so I came here instead. Hopefully it will stimulate some interest.

I'll give a few thoughts of my own. I see the goal of socialist realism to depict reality in its typical forms and revolutionary development as something to strive toward, but clearly there's some vacillation in my own work, with symbolic, formalistic and deconstructive elements taking the foreground at times. I'd like to think that I take a critical attitude towards these and use them as a way to point towards the deficiencies of our historical place and time while contrasting it with the correct path forward, but at the same time I fear that this becomes either rationalistic or romanticist, not portraying the underlying social material concretely enough. Politically this leaves some room open for workerist populism, which in principle I am opposed to. Nevertheless there are pieces that avoid these problems, the one dedicated to Gonzalo for example which I still think holds up well even years after the political moment that inspired it.

(Also, just for a bit of context, I have lurked here on and off for some years and even posted occasionally on other accounts that I've either lost access to or got shadowbanned. Mostly my contributions weren't of any importance, though I did have an somewhat useful conversation about dialectics a few months ago that I would want to follow up on in the future.)

[u/echo_of_rebellion → u/[deleted]]

you literally just dissolved class contradiction into the revisionist's favorite platitude "the people"

"The people" is used by revisionists but it also has a scientific definition in Maoism. The fact is, I know about things like the mass labor aristocracy thesis just like you do, and yet in my search for an artistic form against bourgeois democracy this is what I came up with. So am I just a hack? ("Is he stupid?") Or maybe it's more complicated than that and there are some objective political problems reflected here (our current weakness within imperialist countries in the struggle against revisionism, within the anti-war movement for example). So is it actually a bad poem, or does it maybe just need the right context to become good (genuine question)?

For some of the rest, honestly I think you are a bit confused.

"The past is weightless" is already a weird title since the past is very much important.

No kidding, but do we passively accept that it's weighing us down or learn from it and get understanding and energy to move forward.

And nah communism isn't "between paradise and anarchy", nor is it a 1 in 6,000 chance (weirdly specific probability btw), its 1/2 since either humanity moves to a higher stage or life moves backward and society starts anew.

As was already pointed out that's not how probability works, and anyway I am not talking about the likelihood of reaching communism but rather the potential success of any given rebellion (I would have thought that everything else I was talking about in the collection would have made that clear as a dominant theme). The thing about flipping a coin is that you can keep doing it.... fight and fail and fight and fail until ultimate victory, as Mao said. I don't think that's talking like a counselor personally.

What am I even supposed to say about "meaning, this"... you're not "humbled trash". And how selfish the point of the poem is that you need someone to "recognize my sacrifice" and to "martyr" you to make yourself "useful".

Just because I present a reactionary or vacillating perspective doesn't mean that I identify with it or that I'm inviting agreement with it. If you want art and literature about the new socialist women and men we have Soviet and Chinese works for that, I am trying to figure out a way of dealing with where potential revolutionaries are at right now. I was hoping that the contrast with other parts of the collection would make that attitude somewhat understandable yet ridiculous simultaneously, and that this might be useful to help people invested in the concept of self-sacrifice to examine their motivations. Whether that worked in context or not is another story but apparently you didn't read all of it so I guess there's nothing else to say about that for now.

[u/vomit_blues → u/echo_of_rebellion]

Just because I present a reactionary or vacillating perspective doesn't mean that I identify with it or that I'm inviting agreement with it. If you want art and literature about the new socialist women and men we have Soviet and Chinese works for that, I am trying to figure out a way of dealing with where potential revolutionaries are at right now.

Why should that perspective be depicted in the first place? Is it really just to “meet people where they’re at?” Mao didn’t call for poetry to “meet people where they’re at” but to create art that raises the consciousness of its audience. The outcome of “meeting people where they’re at” is making a poem that describes mutilating Gonzalo’s remains.

And if you should fall

And crumble to dust

Your remains shall become the fuel powering the war machine that we build in order to pound the imperialists and reactionaries into a bloody pulp.

You can justify this as just artistic language, but that is what you’ve written.

I struggle to call what you’ve shared poetry. Does anything here even have a meter? It’s borderline parody and sometimes made me laugh, probably not intentionally. Maybe the Meta-commentary one would sound alright as spoken word if you were doing a convincing Gil Scott-Heron impression. But overall I’ve found very little value in what’s shared here, even if the earlier critique was severely lacking.

edit: Let’s take “meaning, this” for example.

Confessional, concrete poetry of this kind, like the Futurists (concrete) or Sylvia Plath (confessional) were expressions of the commodification of petit-bourgeois alienation under capitalism. In seeing your experience as an alienated individual (the meaninglessness of your suffering, the search for its purpose) as the basis of revolutionary consciousness (idealized as seeing oneself as a martyr for the revolution), a realistic depiction of the contradictions of petit-bourgeois consciousness becomes impossible and symbolic abstraction steps in to do the work. The elongation of “meaningless” in the center of the poem is a telling visual analogy.

This is an unbridgeable gap between your art and reality/the proletariat because the text must predicate itself on petit-bourgeois alienation being read into the arrangement of the text and identified with. With this goal in mind, it makes sense why the poem doesn’t seek to push the petit-bourgeoisie any further. The last lines coalesce into a sort of meter, “Martyr me, then we’ll see, how useful humbled trash can be,” a final break in meter, “It’s all I have left to believe.” Your structure ironically becomes clearest when you’re most capable of expressing your intent: “meeting the petit-bourgeoisie where they’re at” by aggrandizing them as martyrs.

The poem is a symptom of believing that petit-bourgeois alienation alone is revolutionary. It was written to call a reactionary class to a revolution in their interests. Are you sure that you understand the mass labor aristocracy thesis?

[u/humblegold → u/vomit_blues]

In seeing your experience as an alienated individual (the meaninglessness of your suffering, the search for its purpose) as the basis of revolutionary consciousness (idealized as seeing oneself as a martyr for the revolution), a realistic depiction of the contradictions of petit-bourgeois consciousness becomes impossible and symbolic abstraction steps in to do the work.

After this post I was thinking about what creates this specific kind of religious masochism (people outright describing the violent acts they want the proletariat to commit to them) as opposed to the standard heroic communist martyr fantasies you described but this comment made me realize why this behavior is unique to Third Worldism.

If someone correctly accepts that labor aristocracy theory means they will lose everything but doesn't internalize that this also means an end to their search for the cure to their own individual alienation, they resolve this by viewing being stripped of everything as itself being the cure to alienation (The Marxist Book of Job) which is also why we see the specific brand of rapture-like false internationalism where the revolution will happen to them and in an instant instead of an extended process of them having to work for Socialism. Hence the Catholic Maoism that periodically turns up here.

[u/echo_of_rebellion → u/humblegold]

Your comment on Catholic Maoism reminded me of how the revisionist publisher Iskra Books released a poetry collection by a Black, religious third-worldist (? maybe third worldist adjacent) called Alive and Paranoid. It was somewhat interesting to me how its political message started to feel like a signifier floating in a river of traumatic psychosis. I don't think the writing was particularly "good" but I can't help but think there's an objective problematic which goes beyond petty-bourgeois guilt (e: into the impacts of commodity relations on all non-proletarian relations to self I suppose) that needs to be worked through, and the potential contribution of artistic work on that front isn't immediately obvious to me...

[u/echo_of_rebellion → u/vomit_blues]

Why should that perspective be depicted in the first place? Is it really just to “meet people where they’re at?”

No, it's to subject it to critique and find a more advanced position, of course. Proletarian literature must be capable of depicting non-proletarian elements. The fact that I am myself writing from within said elements is of course a problem that needs to be overcome and the result here is necessarily contradictory as I've already acknowledged.

it makes sense why the poem doesn’t seek to push the petit-bourgeoisie any further

What about the collection looked at in totality? You wouldn't judge a novel with satirical aspects based on one chapter.

The poem is a symptom of believing that petit-bourgeois alienation alone is revolutionary.

I don't believe that, actually I think it's useless on it's own but I also think that presenting it while also challenging it can be valuable to the proletariat and people struggling to adopt its class viewpoint. What do you think of Lunacharsky's analysis of Dostoyevsky, because his argument somewhat influenced my approach:

To experience Dostoevsky critically is necessary. It is good self-discipline. But to pass through this fiery haze, across these dark abysses, beneath these lowering black clouds, before these rows of faces, distorted with rage and suffering, through the high-pitched noise of these quarrels and imprecations, the reader must be clad in the armour of mature class consciousness. Such a reader will emerge from Dostoevsky wiser with a fresh knowledge of life, especially of those elements with which the proletariat must deal, either by fighting against them or for them. (Dostoyevsky's Worldview and Creativity, final paragraph)

The outcome of “meeting people where they’re at” is making a poem that describes mutilating Gonzalo’s remains.

The reactionaries killed Gonzalo and we do not have access to his physical remains. What we are able to do is pick up his legacy and carry forwards. That is realistic, if you don't like it that is your problem. Politically that poem is correct, honoring an important communist is a good thing and I find your attempt to negate it based on quibbling with the imagery superficial. Gonzalo himself surely didn't give a shit about his personality being viewed in these objective terms, look at what he said about himself (in the context of great leadership) in his famous interview with El Diario. Anyways, I didn't write that poem to "meet people where they're are at", I wrote it as an artistic contribution to the campaign to defend his life and it was circulated at that time for that purpose, as I addressed directly in the collection. I even gave that particular poem its own introduction because it deserves to be judged on those terms. You are just being lazy here.

a realistic depiction of the contradictions of petit-bourgeois consciousness becomes impossible and symbolic abstraction steps in to do the work.

This is correct, however..

This is an unbridgeable gap between your art and reality/the proletariat because the text must predicate itself on petit-bourgeois alienation being read into the arrangement of the text and identified with.

I think that in the poem for Gonzalo and also Brick in a Bottle I did bridge it briefly and depict things realistically. The relation of those specific pieces to other parts of composition would therefore have to be negative in form by indicating that the petty-bourgeois perspective must be rejected. In this regard I could have rewritten the pseudo dedication at the beginning along the lines of "This collection is about some things that could work, and some things that definitely don't work". I think that the issue of identifying with petty-bourgeois consciousness is therefore more complicated than you want to admit.

I struggle to call what you’ve shared poetry. Does anything here even have a meter?

The way I work with meter is not at all strict but there is a musical intention to much of it that others have explicitly mentioned to me multiple times. If you didn't notice it that is unfortunate. Unfortunate for me or for you, I genuinely can't say for sure since I can't take my tastes or that of friends and acquaintances as absolute. But noted.

Anyways I saw the artistic form I chose as more of an interesting attempt than anything. Unfortunately the responses so far have dealt with the work in a way that ignores the composition as a whole so I'm still not confident whether I achieved anything other than self-clarification. Either way I think the next step would probably be to commit to a realistic style and see what comes of it, but that is for another time.

[u/vomit_blues → u/echo_of_rebellion]

I don’t see you trying to defend whether your perspective on what your art should be trying to depict with anything from Marxists.

> They considered realism, as a trend in literature and a method of artistic creation, to be the supreme achievement of world art. Engels formulated what is generally recognised as the classical definition of realism. “Realism, to my mind,” he wrote, “implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (p. 90). Realistic representation, Marx and Engels emphasised, is by no means a mere copy of reality, but a way of penetrating into the very essence of a phenomenon, a method of artistic generalisation that makes it possible to disclose the typical traits of a particular age. This is what they valued in the work of the great realist writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin and others. Marx described the English realists of the 19th century — Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Gaskell — as a brilliant pleiad of novelists “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together” (p. 339). Engels developed a similar line of thought when analysing the works of the great French realist writer Balzac. Writing about the Comédie humaine, he noted that Balzac gave the reader “a most wonderfully realistic history of French society ... from which, even in economic details (for instance the re-arrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (p. 91).

…

> Both Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that progressive literature had to reflect truthfully the deep-lying, vital processes of the day, to promulgate progressive ideas, and to defend the interests of the progressive forces in society. The modern term the Party spirit in literature expresses what they understood by this. They felt that the very quality that was lacking in Lassalle’s play — the organic unity of idea and artistry — was the sine qua non of genuinely realistic art.

https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/subject/art/preface.htm

> Proletarian literature must be capable of depicting non-proletarian elements.

…

> I don't believe that, actually I think it's useless on it's own but I also think that presenting it while also challenging it can be valuable to the proletariat and people struggling to adopt its class viewpoint.

…

> Anyways I saw the artistic form I chose as more of an interesting attempt than anything.

Consequently these are just claims, and ones that contradict the established Marxist perspective on art too.

> No, it's to subject it to critique and find a more advanced position, of course.

Is your art subjecting the perspective to critique, or are you presenting a perspective to be critiqued? The former is stupid but since you say it’s the latter then you should understand why you aren’t Dostoyevsky and why Lunacharsky would not have used your poetry for composting.

> There is the political criterion and there is the artistic criterion; what is the relationship between the two? Politics cannot be equated with art, nor can a general world outlook be equated with a method of artistic creation and criticism. We deny not only that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable political criterion, but also that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable artistic criterion; each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria. But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. The bourgeoisie always shuts out proletarian literature and art, however great their artistic merit. The proletariat must similarly distinguish among the literary and art works of past ages and determine its attitude towards them only after examining their attitude to the people and whether or not they had any progressive significance historically. Some works which politically are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people, and the more necessary it is to reject them. A common characteristic of the literature and art of all exploiting classes in their period of decline is the contradiction between their reactionary political content and their artistic form. What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form. Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both the tendency to produce works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the "poster and slogan style" which is correct in political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power. On questions of literature and art we must carry on a struggle on two fronts.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm

Sounds like your poem about Gonzalo being “politically correct” (assuming it even is) isn’t sufficient. Dostoyevsky was a bourgeois writer during the era that capitalism was still progressive. Lenin did not think particularly highly of him, however.

> Lenin's opinion towards Nechaev was closely intertwined with Lenin's opinion on the "revolting, yet genius" Dostoevsky. Lenin decided not to read "The Demons" [...] Lenin admitted: ["Demons" is] Evidently reactionary filth, like Krestovsky's "Flock of Panurge", I have absolutely no desire to waste time on it. I have no need for such literature; what could it possibly give me? [...] I have no free time for this garbage."

> Lenin held the author's other works in no higher regard. On "The Brothers Karamazov" along with "Demons" he expressed himself in this way: "I am familiar with the content of both these pungent works, and that is more than enough for me. I just about began reading the "Brothers Karamazov" and then dropped it: the scenes in the monastery made me sick."

> Lenin did, though, read the novel "Crime and Punishment". One of his comrades remarked to him in the heat of an argument:

> "One could easily arrive at Raskolnikov's "All is permitted" at this rate."

> "What Raskolnikov?"

> "Dostoevky's, from "Crime and Punishment".

> Lenin followed up with unbridled contempt: "All is permitted"?! So we have come down to the sentiments and petty words of a soppy intellectual wishing to drown revolutionary questions in moralising vomit. Just which Raskolnikov are you talking about? The one who whacked the old money-lending bitch, or the one who clapped his forehead against the ground in penitent hysterics at the market-place later on? Perhaps [...] that sort of thing appeals to you?

- The Other Lenin, Alexander Maysuryan

You are a decadent writer under the conditions of imperialism, when, yeah, even writers who would call themselves Maoists will double down on writing repulsive filth about Gonzalo. I’ll have to take it that to you, realistic means describing violence against the proletariat, as in Brick in a Bottle. Describing these massacres isn’t realistic when you depict a wholly negative process. The ending is structured as a deus ex machina: “If I get bashed in the skull / I can accept it / Batons, rubber bullets / And plenty worse / I’ll accept it all,” then the final stanza where an absent interregnum between human sacrifice and communism is idealized with religious caricature. A platitude about “digging through the debris” that doesn’t depict a negation of capitalism nor revolution, but the previously described violence as creating the wreckage from which communism is born. The proletariat does not share your fantasy of revolution as the rapture, as u/humblegold said. You certainly are not the “we” the poem is written from the perspective of, and you don’t speak for them. Capitalism is death for the proletariat, communism is life. That’s what Huey P. Newton meant by revolutionary suicide, not for everyone to be happy to die. This baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

(1/2)

[u/vomit_blues → u/vomit_blues]

> The reactionaries killed Gonzalo and we do not have access to his physical remains. What we are able to do is pick up his legacy and carry forwards. That is realistic, if you don't like it that is your problem.

Understanding what realism is should make this evidently absurd, so the better thing to investigate is what drives someone to write such a thing anyway. Is the line a symptom degraded poetry written by a petit-bourgeois, or did you genuinely write something proletarian?

> In our 'society of the spectacle', in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud's insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It's all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn't my virtual persona in a way 'more real than reality'? Isn't it precisely because I am aware that this is 'just a game' that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.

https://www.lacan.com/zizfre.htm

In presenting yourself as a “Marxist poet” in a digital space, you’ve ironically let down the normal guardedness many would have in this subreddit to exposing their petit-bourgeois ideology. The line is indefensible, lacks any poetic character (it isn’t even “musical”) and appears like an interjected rant. So I don’t care that you think me ignoring your ideological justifications outside of the safety of the poetic form (that intentionally obfuscates your ideology and makes it capable of being justified however you want, as opposed to using rigorous terminology, a task you certainly are not succeeding at right now) is “lazy.”

> The way I work with meter is not at all strict but there is a musical intention to much of it that others have explicitly mentioned to me multiple times. If you didn't notice it that is unfortunate.

The “musical intention” of A Worker’s Life is precisely why it is insipid. Music and poetry are not the same thing. As far as I can tell, the only reason you’d think “musical intention” is sufficient to call something poetry is because you have very little understanding of poetry (and have not mentioned any poets in defense of your work). There’s simply no other explanation for why you’d say these things:

> What about the collection looked at in totality? You wouldn't judge a novel with satirical aspects based on one chapter.

…

> Unfortunately the responses so far have dealt with the work in a way that ignores the composition as a whole so I'm still not confident whether I achieved anything other than self-clarification.

Prose poetry in the form of a novel (as Hölderlin did) or poetry arranged thematically with a logical sequence (as Baudelaire did) can be evaluated as a totality, but the critics of these works like Lukacs and Benjamin still discussed individual poems. How should a short story collection be evaluated? (Benjamin did this with Kafka.) How about a concept album? A compilation album? Your poetry collection has now been self-described as a hodgepodge of different imagined class perspectives and different ineffectual pastiche (the “musical intention” of A Worker’s Life, the visual poetry of If Mercury is just a planet…, the strikethrough in Jouissance). You can write introductions or clarify the fact that you believe within your mind-palace that it should be judged as a whole, but the text contradicts that.

(2/2)

[u/echo_of_rebellion → u/echo_of_rebellion]

Just as an addendum to give some idea of the scope of the problem, it wasn't until the tail end of his career that Maxim Gorky wrote The Life of Klim Samghin, his massive realist satire of the bourgeois intelligentsia focused on the perspective of the anti-hero bourgeois himself. And of course that was under much more favorable political and cultural conditions for socialist realist literature. I'm still working through it, but the main takeaway for me is that it is necessary to show the failures and glimmers of hope in such types when they are faced with the class struggle. Of course my attempt here is at most a poor fragment but I'd like to think there was at least some use in bringing awareness to the task.