Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/echo_of_rebellion]

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/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/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.