Thursday 7 September 2017

Show Transcript: Back in the USSR Literary Supplement, September 2, 2017

Listen to the full show at Radio4All.net



In this episode of Back in the USSR I perform Peter Barnes's one-act play "The Preacher" about the life of Jacques Roux, one of the most radical figures of the French Revolution.  I follow this up with a discussion of the class struggle to lay claim to the culture of modern society and how progressive and radical writers and artists, including me, are fighting back against capitalist monopoly control over the cultural landscape.  I also talk a bit about the fantasy novel that I'm currently working on and how it challenges the conventions of a deeply conservative literary genre.

Opening Theme

Play Billy Bragg “The Red Flag”

(Read Peter Barnes “Revolutionary Witness: The Preacher”)

Play Bruce Springsteen “Eyes on the Prize”

Greetings brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, you’re listening to Back in the USSR, once again I am Siegfried and that was me performing Peter Barnes’s one-act play entitled “The Preacher” about Jacques Roux, one of the most radical political leaders in days of the French Revolution.  And I performed that for a very important reason and that has to do with culture.  Specifically about the struggle for culture in modern capitalist society where the big media conglomerates own most outlets of creative expression and heavily influence the books, plays, movies, TV shows, web content etc. that we consume and as such control the lions share of the images that we put in our heads and the lenses with which we view the world around us.  As Michael Parenti has talked about, and I’ve played his talks about this before on the show, the mainstream media absolutely has its own agenda and its own interests, and those interests are very much class interests.  Specifically, the media reinforces the status quo and buttresses the control of the present ruling class: whether it’s cheering on the latest overseas war against some “rogue state”, trying to justify or downplay police brutality and murder of black people, or smear leftist anti-fascists as being somehow just as bad if not worse than the die-hard Nazis they’ve been successfully fighting in the streets of Charlottesville and other North American cities.  As Michael Parenti writes, “Media bias usually does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in more or less consistent directions, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent Whites over low-income minorities, officialdom over protesters, privatization and free market reforms over public-sector development, US domination of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, and conservative commentators and columnists over progressive and radical ones”.

And it’s important to emphasize that these biases don’t just apply to the news media.  Entertainment media and popular culture is also overflowing with these same biases which are mass marketed and systematically try to push out competing viewpoints.  This includes literature, where massive corporate-owned publishing houses dominate the market and decide which authors get promoted and which languish on the back shelves or whose books never even get published or see the light of day.  The same thing goes for radio and television.  Pushing back against capitalist control of culture is not an easy thing, revolutionary viewpoints rarely get a hearing, let alone a fair hearing, in today’s society and one of the reasons I created this show in the first place was to push back, in some small way, against this control. 

I’m also a writer.  And the genre of literature that I write, it has to be said, is historically one of the most conservative.  I write fantasy short stories and I’m currently working on a novel which I’ll talk a little more about later.  The fantasy genre was really created in the 19th Century as a backlash against industrialization, with politically conservative writers condemning the radical changes happening to European society and romanticizing traditional fairy stories and folk tales while really idealizing the Middle Ages and the kind of life that existed before factories and urbanization and all that stuff – you know, back when the feudal aristocracy and the Church controlled everyone’s life and there was no such thing as modern medicine, santitation or education and people were dropping dead of plague left and right.  They really thought it was a keen time to be alive, and started writing all this stuff about knights and damsels in distress and lost kings and Old Norse gods, coming up with grandiose mythologies of their own. 

This is the genre that ultimately, in the 1950s, produced J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, which is profoundly conservative series of books.  Frodo Baggins and his boys are engaged in a classic conservative quest to rescue the status quo from threatening outside forces (some of whom, like the evil Suthrons, have dark skin and are specifically labeled “Swarthy Men” in contrast with the heroic Edain peoples of Gondor who are basically white Europeans), put the rightful king on the throne, and restore the glory days of the past.  Tolkien himself was a conservative Catholic who was absolutely enraged when the Latin mass was scrapped by the Church hierarchy during all the reforms of the early 1960s.

While in recent years the conventions of fantasy have been challenged somewhat, it remains essentially politically conservative.  George R.R. Martin might not exactly idealize feudalism in his Game of Thrones novels, and his aristocrats are certainly not heroic or praiseworthy people in many cases,  he certainly provides no alternatives.  His peasants, laborers, prostitutes, townsfolk and slaves certainly don’t rise up and fight for something better, even though their land of Westeros is getting absolutely torn to shreds by aristocratic rivalries which are most certainly not in the interest of ordinary people and destroy the lives of countless thousands, he still presents the commoners as essentially passive people.  They don’t have an agency of their own and can only wait for some aristocratic savior, some “good” aristocrat, to come and save them and restore peace and order.  It’s a very conservative picture, and one that is not at all in line with the actual history of medieval Europe which was full of peasant revolts, urban uprisings, slave rebellions, labor strikes, and class struggles of all kinds.

To quote Michael Parenti’s “History as Mystery”: “Over the centuries, sporadic peasant uprisings against insufferable conditions assumed such scope and fury as to send tremors throughout aristocratic Europe.  The year 579 saw a major peasant insurrection against the Merovingian king because tax burdens.  Serious revolts occurred in 841 and 843 against feudal rule in Saxony.  Peasant rebellions in thirteenth-century northern and central Europe shook Drenter, West and East Frisia, Dithmarschen, and especially Stedingerland from 1207 to 1234.  In Germany, there were four major upheavals in the 1300s and forty in the 1400s.  Nor should be forget the Jacquerie of 1358 in France, the massive peasant insurrections throughout England in 1381 and in Flanders between 1323 and 1328, the Hussite rebellion in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century, the peasant wars in Germany during the Reformation, and the revolts of the French townships in the early 1600s.  Even this incomplete list belies the image of a placid, rustic multitude living in mutually servicable relations with their lords and bishops”.

When I started writing my first novel in the fall of 2016 I wanted to stand this on its head.  The main characters are working class or oppressed people.  They’re not fighting to restore some idealized past or restore some lost king to the throne.  Instead they’re actively fighting against the oppression they face in their society, at first simply for survival but later they begin fighting to create a whole new order of things – a society without princes, aristocrats, serfdom or slavery.  And seeing most modern societies abolished these things ages ago, I don’t think writing a book like this is all that radical, but in the context of the fantasy genre, which still has its head stuck in the Middle Ages, it’s very radical indeed.

Right now I’d like to read the prologue of my novel, and then I’ll take a short break, please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Read Prologue “Falhorne”, Play Marxman “Dark are the Days”)

Play Lee Reed “Bazooka Rap”

Play Michael Parenti “Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes”

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