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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