Siegfried reads Brecht

In this episode of Back in the USSR (FULL SHOW), Siegfried performs the classic anti-fascist poem "To Those Born After" by Bertolt Brecht (note that the linked version is not the same translation that I used on the show, but very similar), Peter Barnes' one-act play "The Preacher" about Jacques Roux, one of the most radical figures of the French Revolution and an early socialist, as well as some of his own poetry and the stories behind it.

Writing Radical Fiction Part 2

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried.  And welcome comrades and friends to our second episode about writing radical fiction.  Last week I talked about my own experience being a communist and a fiction writer in the fantasy genre and a bit about how challenging that is, given how conservative a genre fantasy has historically been and in many ways continues to be with regard to contemporary examples like Game of Thrones.  I talked about how fantasy traditionally concerns itself with the restoration of an idealized past, the “return of king”, the revival of an idealized feudal order where everything is in its right place, a convention that even more radical fantasy writers like Ursula Le Guin and Michael Moorcock had difficulty getting beyond.  And I also talked about the inspiration that I got from the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, and how audiences can be made more receptive to radical ideas when they are expressed in a way that breaks people out of their immersion in every day realities and forces them to think critically about what they are reading or viewing.  But, most importantly, I talked about the need to place working class and oppressed people, rather than aristocrats and elites, at the center of fantasy and science-fiction stories.  And I want to talk a little more about why that’s important and why I come at writing in this way.

First, I want to stress the importance of history and of historical memory in the present moment.  On Friday I attended the Guelph Climate Strike event, I marched with students from the University of Guelph down to city hall and witnessed this extraordinary coming together around the issue of climate change.  Over five hundred people showed up, there were banners, megaphones and speeches.  People seemed to recognize that capitalism was the problem and the real force behind climate change and the global environmental crisis that we’re now in.  But I couldn’t help but notice the literally night and day distinctions between the speeches made about climate change by indigenous people on one hand and white settlers on the other.  Those speakers who were white talked overwhelmingly about the future and the need to save future generations from the effects of climate change.  They didn’t talk about the past, history, their ancestors or historical experience.  Indigenous people did.  The indigenous people who spoke, including a good friend of mine, drew a clear line between the past and the present and the future.  They connected the struggles of their ancestors against residential schools and colonial genocide with the present struggles against pipelines and with the well-being of future generations.  And because they understood and were connected with their past, their understanding of the future was a whole lot clearer than that of the white speakers, many of whom were engaging in activism for the very first time and who were inspired to become activists, not by the example of indigenous land defenders who have been fighting to protect the very survival of their people, but by this Swedish girl Greta Thundberg whose been all over the news lately.  Their hearts are definitely in the right place and I’m glad they’re becoming activists now, but they still have a lot to learn.

Class struggles and struggles against injustice and oppression never spring from nowhere.  They always have a history in previous struggles that shape the conditions in which new struggles emerge.  And people identify with past struggles based on their own lived experience, material conditions of their lives, and their connection with previous generations.  Indigenous people have that connection, black people have that connection, Latino people have that connection, so do people in the formerly colonized countries of Africa and Asia, and even European peoples like the Irish have that connection that runs deep within their culture.  But white North Americans typically do not.  White North Americans who paid “the price of the ticket” as James Baldwin said, and who gave up their roots what is now called Europe in order to become “white”, to be granted a privileged position in a colonial society and to bind up their fate with the settler-colonial project based on genocide and slavery.  Effectively they went from being people rooted in a time and place to being rootless tools and weapons of empire.  White people are an artificial, manufactured creation of empire rather than an organic society and culture, and it shows.  I would recommend people read Theodore W. Allen’s brilliant book “The Invention of the White Race” if they want to understand more about how and why this took place: how impoverished emigres from numerous European countries were transformed into footsoldiers in a genocidal war to make the North American continent “safe for capitalism” from sea to shining sea.  That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a history and tradition of class struggle in North America among people of European descent, of course there has, but it’s much easier to convince a rootless white person, who has been taught to blame non-white people for all their problems, to forget about that history than it is to convince an Irish person living on their own ancestral land in a country that’s still partially colonized by Britain.  This is especially true if said white person leads a cushy life in a suburb built on stolen native land on the outskirts of Guelph Ontario, having reaped the benefits of the post-war boom that allowed them to believe that capitalism was good and humane, and who haven’t known real hardship or struggle since their grandparents’ generation in the 30s and 40s…and they’re probably not all that familiar with that history either.

I grew up in a suburb like that on the western edge of Guelph.  I was far-removed from the ills of the world as a kid.  And, apart from some difficulties fitting in at school, I had a pretty amazing childhood.  I had to learn about the true state of the world from other people.  People like Mrs Baker, my 8^th grade homeroom teacher, who got in a lot of trouble when she taught my class about sweatshop labor and Third World poverty.  People like Mr Walker, an aboriginal Mohawk man, and a Marxist, who unapologetically taught the real colonial history of Canada and of European imperialism in my high school history and civics classes.  Or Professor Eidlin, my thesis advisor in university, who taught me to question established narratives and to always ask “why”.  Those people and many more besides brought me to the point where I could become a communist in an anti-communist society, where I could become an ally of indigenous peoples in the context of settler-colonialism, and where I could come to grips with the cruel realities of capitalism and imperialism.

So when I write fantasy novels.  When I write this literature.  It’s coming from that lived experience and from those people who influenced me.  The same holds true for any writer, but I think I can safely say that my experience differs from that of many fantasy writers who are content to churn out stories that glorify kings and empires.  I’m more interested in the history and experience of those who fight against kings and empires, whether in a fictional world or in the real world.  I want to tell their stories and have that mean something.  For me it’s part of a broader struggle for justice worldwide, not a hobby.  It’s something that I choose to do.  For the same reason that I choose to teach my Chinese students about the real history of settler-colonialism and genocide in Canada.  Given what I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced, writing for me cannot be a diversion or an escape, unlike some of the fantasy writers I recently encountered at the Eden Mills Writer’s Festival.  And writing can’t just be about warning people and painting gruesome pictures of dystopian futures and lamenting at how bad everything is.  Writings is a part of the fight for liberation, for justice and emancipation.  It’s about confronting and exposing the destructive forces of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism – even in a fictional format.  It’s about expressing solidarity with those who fight against these forces all over the world.  And it’s about showing that those forces can be defeated and that something better, regardless of its imperfections, can be built. 

I believe it is my responsibility, given my situation at this crisis point in human history, to express the class struggle through whatever medium I can.  Including the fantasy genre.  Like I said, it’s hard for people who come from a background like mine to understand the way the world really works, how horrific it is, and why so many risk their lives every day fighting for a livable future along with justice for their ancestors.  Maybe by setting these kinds of struggles in a fictional setting, by setting my stories just far enough beyond the real world to make readers let down their guard for me but still close enough to drive the message home, however uncomfortable it might be, I can make it easier for them to open their eyes.

Handsome Furs - Serve the People

So I’m working on a novel right now that I intend to make into a trilogy.  This trilogy will explore the revolutionary birth of a new nation, a republic, out of the ashes of an ancient and oppressive empire.  The setting of this trilogy is a region known as the Thousand Cities, which, like Medieval Italy and Germany, is divided into many petty warring states, principalities, duchies, areas ruled by the Church and so on.  This land was once the heart of the Empire of the Five Seals, a theocratic empire ruled by a powerful Church and an emperor claiming divine right, before it’s collapse amid civil war almost two centuries before the events of the trilogy take place.  Since then the land has been divided between rival lords, while the Church is trying to reassert itself through a bloody Inquisition, and foreign empires compete for influence and resources.  The protagonists of the trilogy will thus have to face the brutalities of feudalism and capitalism alike in order to create a new society that will give the people of this land a future.  These heroes will not be perfect.  They will not be lost messiahs or chosen ones.  They will have all the hang-ups that come from growing up in a highly oppressive and exploitative society.  Thus some revolutionaries will have trouble treating women as equals, or respecting those who come from a lower class background, or from a marginalized or oppressed nationality or a persecuted religious group.  It is only through hard experience in the face of terrible enemies that they will learn to walk a new path.  And many of them will not survive the journey.  So, yes, main characters will die in my books, no question.  I mean read Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China” if you want to know how dangerous trying to build a new society is in the face of imperialism and entrenched class hierarchies.  Read about the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution and how few of the rebel fighters who traveled with Fidel Castro on the Granma lived to see the revolution succeed in 1959.  Spartacus’s slave rebellion against Ancient Rome.  There is nothing easy about making real change in an oppressive society that has become unlivable for so many of its people.  People fight and sacrifice against immense odds because the situation has become intolerable and they succeed when they have the organization and vision to succeed – and that doesn’t emerge overnight.  Successful revolutions only come about after a long series of failed attempts, failed organizations, failed ideas.  They only come about after a history of struggle that then builds to a point where the continuity of history is broken and something new and radical can emerge.  That’s the truth of the matter, and I’ve never seen it explored in a single fantasy genre story, not even once.  Science-fiction comes closer, but even there I haven’t seen a story that would do justice to how revolutions actually happen and how people actually liberate themselves.

For revolution to be possible, the normal cycle of oppression in society has to be broken.  Medieval peasants rose up in rebellion more than we were ever taught in school, but their struggles rarely developed coherent alternatives to the existing state of things in a society where feudal lords lived on the backs of multitudes of serfs.  Fatalistic attitudes were common in a society where many peasants would never see their thirtieth birthday and such attitudes were promoted by elites in Church and State who wanted the peasants to “know their place” and accept their misery as being part of some divine plan.  I mean listen to this song by the doom metal band Khemmis, “A Conversation with Death”.  It’s a metal version of an old Appalachian dirge which shares a lot of features, themes and imagery with medieval English songs.  And the people of Appalachia, along with the people of Quebec and Acadia are about the only white people in North America with real traditions of resistance as marginalized and oppressed nations.  So the “Hillbillys” of Appalachia still sing English peasant songs from the 1300s.  Just listen to the lyrics here:

Khemmis – A Conversation with Death

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Appalachia, the mountainous region of what is now the eastern U.S. that produced those lyrics, has a unique history.  Not only did early poor white settlers flee there when the lowlands of the southern U.S. were taken over by cotton plantations, but escaped black slaves fled there and founded whole Maroon communities in the back country.  There was also a lot of intermarriage with local indigenous peoples like the Cherokee.  Deserters from the Confederate Army even fled there during the American Civil War.  And the resulting marginalized rural peasant communities in Appalachia fought back when the land speculators, railroad barons and coal mining barons moved into the hill country in the 19^th Century and that resistance continues to the present in places like West Virginia, where they even stood up against the US Army.  All this produced quite a unique culture that has often been denigrated as “in-bred” and slandered in many of the same ways that America has historical denigrated indigenous people as backward savages, and even as cannibals.  There are multiple horror stories and even Hollywood movies portraying “hillbillys” as cannibals and that goes back to the days when Appalachians were attacked as having “gone indian” because of their way of life – which didn’t fit into the way people of European descent were “supposed” to behave.  So when poor Appalachians came to Chicago in the 1960s seeking work, it’s really no surprise that they were the mainstay of white support for the Black Panthers and for Fred Hampton’s “Rainbow Coalition”, even forming radical groups like the “Young Patriots” that stood in solidarity with the African-American freedom struggle and made common cause with them against the capitalist state in America.  And that’s the point I really want to make here.  These historically marginalized and oppressed people, with a real experience of resisting established authority in the name of survival, even if they also have fatalistic attitudes toward the world around them, can embrace revolutionary ideas when they see the potential for real change, and that’s a very powerful thing.  People understand where they are now, they see where they want to go, and they develop the tools and the organizational means to get there together. 

Real heroes are made when people wake up like this.  But they’re never alone.  Real heroes are never alone, they’re always part of something greater than themselves, always part of a real movement of people that carries them along and propels them to do the things that they do.  That’s why Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers was such a hero.  He moved with the people.  That’s why Fidel Castro was such a hero.  That’s why Thomas Sankara, who led a revolution in West Africa in 1983 that took a former French colony and re-named it Burkina Faso “The Land of Upright Men”, was such a hero.  That’s the kind of hero I want to see in the novels I read.  Including fantasy and sci-fi novels.  And I’m just not seeing it.  That has to change.  I want heroes that serve the people.  And I think, just like philosophers, the job of writers of fiction in this day and age is to interpret the world as a means of transforming it.  Just as Marx said.  Fantasy genre writers are not removed from that.  They too need to play a progressive role in history.  They too need to stand upright.

Marcel Cartier – Standing Upright

Writing Radical Fiction Part 1

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Welcome to Back in the USSR, comrades and friends, this is Siegfried and thank you for joining me here on CFRU, so very late on this Monday evening.  This episode of the show is going to be a little different.  Last week, in my first show in this new time slot (11 PM Monday nights), I talked about Marxism-Leninism, self-determination and how essential it is for anyone who calls themselves a socialist or communist to stand in solidarity with the anti-colonial struggles of indigenous people – whether in the struggle against the Muskrat Falls dam project here in Canada, which threatens to destroy an entire way of life, or against the Mauna Kea super-telescope in Hawaii or anywhere in the world – and how struggles for self-determination intersect with struggles around the environment and with class struggle itself.  Communists and socialists fight against capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, the forces that oppress and exploit working class and downtrodden peoples the world over, and standing with indigenous people defending their ancestral lands from colonial takeover and capitalist plunder is a massive part of that, especially in a settler-colonial country like Canada where genocide is an ongoing reality.  We stand against the same enemies all over the world and are ultimately part of the same global struggle for liberation.

Now, that understanding of the world forms a major part of who I am, otherwise I wouldn’t be here doing this show.  And naturally it’s going to affect the different aspects of my life: the people I associate with, the organizations I’m part of, the interests I have, the books I read, and especially what I choose to write.  I am a writer.  I am currently working on my first novel and, although it may come as a surprise to some of you, that novel is dark fantasy and I write mainly within the fantasy genre.  The reason that might come as a surprise is because the broad categories of revolutionary and fantasy nerd have been rarely known to mix.  But, nevertheless, I’m living proof that it can and does happen.

Another reason why people might be surprised that a guy like me would write fantasy is that fantasy has traditionally been a very conservative genre.  It effectively originated in the European fairy tales and romantic fiction of the early 19^th Century which explicitly rejected the societal upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and painted an idealized, pastoral picture of a pre-modern medieval world in which everyone was happy, everyone knew their place, kings and queens were benevolent, the lines between good and evil were clearly defined and everything was, in a word, “simpler”.  Does any of that sound familiar? Right-wing political rhetoric has remained remarkably consistent in many ways over the past few hundred years.  Of course there’s no room in J.R.R. Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis, or Lord Dunsany, or Arthur Machin for the downtrodden peasant, or the exploited worker, or the slave fighting for freedom, or the colonized person fighting for liberation, or the woman fighting for control of her own body, or anyone who is gay, queer, lesbian, trans etc. And frankly there’s also no room for the real history of medieval Europe in the extremely Eurocentric fantasy worlds created by these authors.  In short, fantasy emerged as a kind of right-wing literary backlash against progressive change.

Of course fantasy hasn’t stayed the same.  21^st Century fantasy is far more diverse and less confined than it was in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but a lot of the central themes remain.  You’ll notice that Game of Thrones is not about revolutionary change or the creation of a new society in the place of a thoroughly oppressive and rotten feudal order that is tearing itself apart and threatening to take everyone down with it.  No, it’s ultimately about restoring the “rightful” rulers of Westeros, House Targaryen, to the Iron Throne in King’s Landing.  Just as in Tolkien's “The Return of the King”, the “true king” is going to come back and restore order and make everything right again.  A very conservative message, even if Dany Targaryen, “the mother of dragons”, is a woman, unlike Aragorn.  Even when progressive writers, who really want to push the envelope, write fantasy they can fall into a similar pattern.  I mean Ursula La Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, even though she does things like make the main inhabitants of her world black and tries to move away from certain Eurocentric themes, is ultimately about the restoration of a monarchy through the efforts of the exceptional young wizard, Ged.

This conservative theme of restoration and the idealization of feudalism, which to give George R.R. Martin credit he does at least expose some of feudalism’s brutalities, is what the British fantasy-writer Michael Moorcock challenged in the 1960s, identifying it with Tory-style politics.  Of course Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were British Tories as well as hardcore Christians, and, like Lord Dunsany before them, were supporters of the British Empire.  But Moorcock’s response to this, and authors like Neil Gaiman have largely followed his lead on this, was existential experience rather than class struggle.  His fantasy worlds are far more morally ambiguous, his heroes are more dynamic and they’re more like social critics as they move through the flawed, imperfect and even horrific societies they inhabit, which includes the UK under Margaret Thatcher by the way.  But, while Moorcock isn’t interested in restoration or indulging in conservative fantasies about an idealized past that never was, he also doesn’t allow room for radical change.  I’ve read quite a lot of his work recently, especially his short stories, and they’re all about the experience of a central character.  There’s no collective action, no mobilization of oppressed people to change their circumstances, the people don’t organize to fight back against elites and exploiters.  The stories are all very individualistic and personal.  And that to me is the notable characteristic of fantasy writers that have challenged the dominant narrative in the genre, they challenge the conservative grand narratives about “the return of the king”, not by building new narratives but by retreating into individual personal experience.  That’s not enough.  And I think this clip from the beginning of Michael Parenti’s talk “Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes” about Hollywood propaganda is enough to explain why Moorcock’s position is inadequate:

Michael Parenti – “Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes”

Everything Michael Parenti talks about there is present in the literary world as well, and needs to be challenged just as forcefully.  I grew up on Tolkien, “The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings”, even “The Silmarillion”.  I even have a copy of “The Atlas of Middle Earth”.  I was into fantasy long before I became a communist.  But now that I am a communist and a budding fantasy writer, I had to decide what my approach would be to this traditionally conservative literary genre.  How to I deal with the conventions of the genre while remaining true to myself and the socialist ideological and moral framework that I’ve committed myself to? It was something I really had think hard about, even before I started writing my current novel back in 2016.  I ended up taking a lot of inspiration from the German communist poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht and came to understand that a lot of his ideas about plays could be applied to writing fantasy – albeit in different ways.  I ended up writing an essay to myself, entitled “Take the Fight to Them”, in an effort to clarify my position on being a radical fantasy writer and what that means.

It starts out with a quote from George Habash, the founder of the Marxist-Leninist organization The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has long struggled for the self-determination of the Palestinian people against the settler-colonial state of Israel.

“In today’s world no one is innocent, no one a neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. He who takes no interest in politics gives his blessing to the prevailing order, that of the ruling classes and exploiting forces.”

This, in a nutshell, is the approach I take to writing fantasy novels.  Even in the most gaudy fantasy world or far-future society, dialectics remain and the battle between exploiters and exploited continues.  Fantasy must not be about escapism.  No small imaginary world or idealistic mental playground can protect you from the reality of class struggle, and the philosophy of “Take the fight to them” aims to demolish all of these escapist cul-de-sacs fostered by advanced capitalism in this digital age of endless diversions and neverending barrages of propaganda.  Literature should inspire people to confront harsh and oppressive realities together rather than retreat from them alone.  Only in this way can the crippling atomization of life under advanced capitalism be overcome and solidarity and collective empowerment constructed upon strong foundations that the capitalist state cannot destroy.  Therefore the class struggle must be brought into every medium of expression, every venue, every genre of literature, music, film, theatre, even video games.  The audience must be linked with real world struggles and not cut off from them, and this was and remains central to the radical literary theory of “Alienation” developed by Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht did not seek to immerse his audience in make-believe.  He wanted them to see the bigger picture and the real issues at play without being side-tracked by the plot or fixated on the problems of individual characters.  The focus was on the systemic issues and structures which ruled the character’s worlds and shaped their every action. 

This alienation, the distancing of the audience from the world of the characters so as to allow for critical thought and analysis about real world issues, works perfectly with the themes of science-fiction and fantasy.  Fantasy in particular is ideal because the setting is so far removed from the world as we know it that the audience is capable of opening its mind to ideas that it might otherwise resist and to embrace a deeper point and message.  The readers of fantasy are distanced from what is going on in the story, they are not immersed in it that environment in their daily lives, so therefore it becomes possible to make statements about the real world, contemporary politics and contemporary conflicts and struggle that are much more subversive, provocative and powerful than if they are made directly through political literature or some other medium of non-fiction.

The rampant escapism and illusion that we see in the environment of late capitalist society can only be combated by a continuous infusion of reality into fantasy; smashing the barriers that the escapist tries to erect around them like a battering ram against a castle gate.  Reality is radical amid this sea of lies and must be relentless enough to smash through all attempts to block it out.  It follows that even the most outlandish science-fiction and fantasy visions must take a strong political stance about events and issues in the real world if they are to have any purpose and value beyond serving as safety valves for the status quo.

In these genres, radical realism expresses itself through satire; boldly turning convention on its head.  A traditional fantasy writer glorifies the monarch and the aristocrat and encourages the proletarian to dream riding alongside these gallant highborn heroes or fantasize about standing in their finely-made riding boots knowing their power, glory, and adventure, all of which contrasts so grandly with their mundane lives and struggles.  The radical realist shatters these illusions by again and again exposing these feudal potentates for the monsters that they are, along with their brutal contempt for the common people that they live off like parasites.  The radical realist does not allow the proletarian to dream of anything but his or her own emancipation as a proletarian, along with the true heroism that is inherent in that struggle for liberation and in those who fight to see it realized.  It is proletarian literature with proletarian heroes, who, though low-born, are more heroic and far more interesting than the grandest prince, king, or emperor.

Brecht himself was a master satirist of the capitalist society in which he lived, along with its literature.  In his famous anti-war play “Mother Courage and her Children”, he makes the point that if ordinary people can only get by and survive through extraordinary virtues, it means that something is wrong with how society is organized and with the forces and people that control it.  This is very familiar to us who live under the rubric of late capitalism in the dying embers of the post-war boom: if you have to go crazy marketing yourself, presenting yourself, selling yourself, being a “go getter” and a “hustler”, and displaying tremendous amounts of entrepreneurial talent just to get a steady job that pays the bills and provides for your family than there is a serious problem with society.  In the context of 21st Century late capitalism, ordinary is no longer enough, revealing a social order that is rotten to the core.

It follows that the criticism that Brecht would no doubt make of a series like Game of Thrones is that it draws the reader to become emotionally attached to and invested in the fates of specific aristocratic characters that are competing for power or struggling to survive the power struggle they are caught up in as unwilling participants.  Readers are encouraged to lose themselves in the vividly developed characters rather than critically examining and questioning the socio-political parameters of the world of Westeros as defined in deeply conservative terms by George R.R. Martin.  Readers are ruled by their emotions and driven by their sub-conscious, immersing themselves in the story rather than standing back and critically analyzing its implications.  Thus they do not ask questions like why do the ordinary people of Westeros put up with the aristocratic feuds that are destroying their livelihoods and tearing their land apart? Why do they tolerate this parasitical feudal order which is so clearly built upon exploitation and abuse? Why do the “low-born” not rise up and become active agents of their own destiny? Why are there no peasant revolts, urban uprisings or township rebellions (common features of feudal societies the world over)?

George R.R. Martin’s decision to keep the common people in his novels passive and atomized almost reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is “no such thing as society, there are only individuals and their families”.  Indeed, much of Game of Thrones reads almost like a celebrity gossip column in essence: who is sleeping with who, and who is so and so’s child.  I am not surprised that modern day consumers of Hollywood/celebrity/royal soap operas and tabloids find George R.R. Martin’s work to very juicy indeed.  It is a grotesque caricature, and yet another feature that firmly places Martin in the literary landscape of late capitalism, where reality is distorted beyond recognition in service of the profit motive.  The common people in his stories are effectively at the mercy of the aristocrats and are given no agency or collective interests at all.  Historical examples of the common people taking their destiny into their own hands, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt, the Hussite Rebellion, the German Peasants War, and similar popular uprisings by the “lower orders” have no place in the world of Westeros, where non-aristocrats are quite openly reduced to the status of pawns and onlookers.  This is hardly a progressive literary vision, and yet Martin’s working class readers have not yet learned to ask questions. 

But as the 21st Century marches on, even the most escapist members of the working class are discovering that they have nowhere to run.  In this age of austerity, war and environmental catastrophe, it is clear that they must fight against their oppressors and exploiters.  Not only must they fight, they must know what it means to fight.  This is where mainstream literature has failed the proletarian.  Fantasy in particular has blinded them to reality with regard to the nature of struggle, the nature of sacrifice, the nature of heroism, the nature of victory, and, above all, the true nature of good and evil. 

To draw upon the popular example of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, if the evil forces of Middle Earth are so dangerous, if Sauron is so dangerous, if Smaug is so dangerous, and if the forces of good and righteousness are truly beset from all sides and facing destruction, than how is it that Tolkien’s heroes can hack their way through legions of Orcs, Goblins, Easterlings, Southrons, Dunlendings, and Nazgul, often without taking a single casualty? There is no historical example, from the Palestinian liberation struggle to the Cuban Revolution to Spartacus’s slave rebellion, to say nothing of the Soviet Union’s exceptionally bloody and heroic struggle against fascism, of a besieged people challenging a mighty and evil empire without paying the cost in blood.  In the real world heroes die and good guys bleed.  Evil is never defeated without the ability to sacrifice and the willingness to suffer, take casualties, and accept death. 

Hollywood, like most bourgeois cultural institutions, teaches people that it is possible for “chosen people” to win without cost and to enjoy the fruits of victory without suffering.  Thus it stands in total defiance of reality.  In fact that’s the whole point of all these superhero movies.

Real suffering and real victories are to be found in the USSR’s life and death struggle against Hitler’s legions between 1941 and 1945.  Real heroes are people like the female Soviet bomber pilot Yevgenia Zhigulenko, who flew 968 low-level night bombing missions against Nazi troops in World War II, sometimes operating 10-15 sorties per night in an open-cockpit light bomber aircraft, and was twice shot down.   Such true heroes are far more real than Tolkien’s literary and movie portrayals of Aragorn, who can wade through all the dangers of The Lord of the Rings without suffering so much as a scratch.  True heroes are not “chosen ones”, but ordinary people responding, with all their fears and imperfections, to extraordinary circumstances.

It is therefore vital that working class and oppressed people see themselves in science fiction and fantasy literature.  And for this literature to show them that real victories can be won no matter how hard the struggle might be.  Nor is it enough for this literature to criticize and satirize the status quo.  This literature must always involve the struggle for power and the seizure of power by working class and oppressed people.  As such it must include a strong sense of historical memory on the part of the oppressed; a repressed yet still burning desire for vengeance against their oppressors on behalf of present and past generations, in addition to a yearning for redemption on the part of future generations.  Self-determination and the struggle for self-determination must underpin everything.  And anyone who would write this literature must have respect for the real world struggles of those resisting capitalism, colonialism and empire.  Anything less, as George Habash rightly pointed out, would be submission to the forces of exploitation and oppression tearing the world apart.  Reality is radical.  Reality is struggle.  And this must permeate any world that an author would create, along with the hard-fought victories that can and must be won in the name of the just and livable future that we all strive for as progressive-minded people.  Writing is never non-political.

Dropkick Murphys – “Worker's Song”

Thank you for listening to Back in the USSR, brothers and sisters.  That was Truth Is, one of my favorite spoken word poets of all time, capturing a lot of the themes I’ve been talking about tonight in that wonderful poem entitled “Alone”.  This is the first of two episodes where I’ll be discussing radical fiction.  Next week I’ll focus a little more on my own writing and experience with my own work, while continuing to expand on this discussion.  Take care, comrades and friends and I hope you’ll join me this time next week for more.