Re: Failure of socialist revolution in the West fault of Kremlin/art and beauty

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 7/30/2004 3:04:47 AM Central Standard Time, lookoverhere1@xxxxxxxxx writes:

 

>Actually there was experimental art in the Soviet Union. It was just not exhibited in public places. I know some of the people involved. They exhibited in their apartments. Just because something was not officially sponsored does not mean that it did not exist.

 

People in the West really, really exaggerate the repressiveness of the Soviet Union, in my opinion. I don't know who is worse on this, the conservatives, the Trotskyists or the anarchists. They all needed an Evil Empire to compare themselves too.<

 

Comment

 

I am reminded of an art exhibit I attended while residing in Atlanta Georgia back in 1982 featuring Tom Fielding. Black artists of all kinds have moved in very narrow circles from roughly Emancipation (1865) up until roughly the Crosby Show in the 1980s. The viewing was sponsored by what we called a member of the Mulatto aristocracy in Atlanta . . . very bourgeois . . . very wealthy . . . very accomplished . . . with roots going back to Freeman under slavery. At the time I was editor of the Southern Advocate and moved amongst various layers of society and had enough "juice" to get invited to the inner social circles of the "higher ups."

 

In other words my "wife to be" knew everyone and got us invited to everything.

 

With several cameras slung over shoulders and wife in toll . .  . She was tolling me . . . I settled by the rather large indoor swimming pool and had a couple of drinks and causally observed the various painting. Everyone was ever so polite and several folks asked if I wanted a drink or something to eat and would say, "I just Love your little paper."

 

I would smile and offer a thanks and ask for money and say "throw me like you owe me." Checks were written and a hardy thanks was repeated . . . "this will help to keep the news from behind the Cotton Curtain coming." When I had become Editor . . . the Banner and mast of the paper was changed to read in bold type . . . about 48 point "Southern Advocate" and below it in 18 point type "News From Behind The Cotton Curtain" . . . a slogan stolen from an article in the Communist Party USA journal Political Affairs from around 1946.

 

(I can disagree with the historic politics of the CPUSA without being disagreeable in real life or having an urge to repudiate my collective history.)

 

Passing from one room to the next I stumbled upon a photo on the wall of the host hugging President Richard Nixon and I broke out laughing and said "What kind of mutherfucker is hugging Richard Nixon" and laughed until tears came from my eyes. Everyone in the room looked and me and politely left me standing alone. The host pulled me to the side wrote a check for the paper and explained that he was from a family line that had been Republican since Lincoln.

 

My wife to be said something like "does he have a marvelous sense of humor . . . very industrial . . . very proletarian." Everyone smiled and politely laughed and about eight years later I got the joke. It was me and class instincts, feelings and perception of shapes, forms and texture.

 

There are always bodies of art outside the official market for display and class instinct and perspective is material. There is also a certain brooding and melancholy of various layers of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie called art and my own personal preference has made me a loyal followers of that great photographer Roland Freeman.

 

It is characteristic of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectual and their perpetual attempt to impose on the masses their conception of what should constitute official art . . . democracy and freedom of _expression_. Art in a free market acquires its reproduction dynamic and scale based on who can purchase works of art. Art is not a class phenomenon but is reproduced or subject to the law of reproduction based on buying and selling.

 

Under conditions where the law of value is suppressed . . . the law of value cannot be abolished by politics or political will . . . what is reproduced as art in all fields is subject to political expedience on the basis of suppression of economic factors. Under our own bourgeois art is subject to political expediency based of buying and selling.

 

The idea that the failure of socialists revolution in America is directly attributable to the Kremlin . . . 1920s is designed to obscure and hide the fact of what has paraded itself as the communist and Marxist Movement in American history.

 

The idea and statement . . . that the failure of socialist revolution in America has something to do with various art forms not offered on the open market in the Soviet Union and Gay Rights in the Soviet Union ... democratic tendencies within the Soviet working class being suppressed ... is a monstrous accusation. It is monstrous because it means that the Soviet workers or Kremlin has been the master of the fate of the working class in the American Union and this is unacceptable. We revolutionaries in American are not the adjunct of a foreign state or freaking spies hatching some kind of conspiracy.

 

Now . . . anyone bold enough to present fundamental statements on "the eye of beauty" and what art a government should support in the market place ... not private or closed exhibitions . . . traps him or herself into their own self conception.  I have an opinion about symmetry that is based on the evolution of human anatomy which is the fundamental basis of shape and form.

 

I am very clear that it is my opinion . . . and not an assertion on the proletarian revolution.

 

I do not call such a monstrous accusation Trotskyism but childishness and the result of one choosing to linger in the corridors of the inner chambers of ones own mind . . . in opposition to the world taking place outside these inner chambers.

 

I of course have a different class instinct . . . and class point of view and different conception of societal repression that is not separate from who I am . . . as an experienced elected leader from the industrial working class.

 

What the middle class ideologists and basically white students from the 1960s that have matured . . . on the basis of their individual conception of participating democracy . . .  can never understand is reality of the working class movement in America.

 

How a human being can state . . . in a "matter of fact" kind of way . . . that the failure of socialist revolution in the West . . . the American Union . . . is directly attributable to the Kremlin ... circa 1920s is to cover up one of the most gruesome period in the history of America. The gruesomeness of this period of history does not arise on the basis of the Kremlin's wrong Marxists idea or something inherent to the Anglo American people but rather government policy.

 

In the wake of every large war . . . in this case World War One or the First Imperial World War . . . the soldiers return home and they have been trained to kill people and been ideologically fortified. The Red Summers of the 1920s grew out of . . . not Kremlin policy but the need to military suppressed black soldiers colliding with the barrier of segregation and this was also the case and story of the "race riots" of the late 1940s following the termination of the Second Imperial World War.

 

Then the Korean War . . . and later Vietnam reproduced this material dynamic of the class struggle. Iraq is going to reproduce this same dynamic and it is high time progressives and revolutionaries in America stop blaming others . . . the Kremlin . . . for the logic of our own history.

 

I labeled Comrade Lou a chauvinists in his political assertion concerning American history and I am not talking about any racism.  Lou is above such things . . .  but his class instinct and class perceptions . . .  that elevate experimental art to a major component of the interactive . . .  flowing class alignments and ideological maturity of the working class . . . is outrageous.

 

This Comrade is not anti-Stalin . . . he is anti-Russian. He is not ideologically a Trotskyite but a chauvinist.

 

I take him to task because I have the credentials to do such and a common sense understanding of history.

 

This is what he wrote:

 

The Great Russian chauvinism went hand in hand with hostility to gay rights, feminism, experimentalism in the arts, workers democracy and every other emancipatory impulse in the USSR. Stalin was transmitting the social pressure of Czarist officialdom, which was re-emerging in the 1920s in the vacuum created by the civil war, and a general rightward climate brought on by imperialism and the failure to make socialist revolution in the West--a failure in itself directly attributable to the Kremlin's own lack of Marxist insights.<

 

Those who seek to export the bourgeois conception of democratic America and "rights" to the social struggle on earth make a serious mistake because they forget the actual life of the slaves and their descendants.

 

Then Mr. P is fighting for market shares as moderator of MarxLine and everyone . . .  including me . . .  seeks to extend their market and brand name.

 

We can be "big boys" and deal with the real. My brand and market share is very different and I am banking . . . gambling . . . that I am more right than the other.

 

Fuck the la . . . la.  And I got some banking shit that is going to fuck you up. We fight for market shares in a value producing system.

 

Must we forever compare incarceration rates in America and that of the Soviet Union? Must we forever compare the curve of industrial development of the American Union and its bloody epitaph and that of the Soviet Union?

 

This comrade wrote and maintain that the failure of the socialist revolution in the West . . . the West part of earth . . . is directly attributable to the bad Marxist ideas of the Kremlin. Well, . . . he is the radical left wing flank of the ideologists of the Evil Empire Theory.

 

When you peel away the ideological profundity what is revealed is plain old chauvinism. Is this not spitting in the face of the workers and calling it heaven sent dew . . . American brand.

 

Enough . . . on one level this is just childishness.

 

Melvin P.