#socialist literature

[bleuetfane]

happy birthday to oscar wilde, irish writer, poet and critic, born on this day in 1854

excerpt from the soul of man under socialism, 1891

[atissi]

kras mazov lookin ass

[ruger35mm]

the look all the blue haired communist give you when they try their “i’m a non-abled intersex trans woman suffering from a plethora of diseases” excuse to get out of labour :

Why are these people, those who do no or refuse hard or meaningful labour, the face of these economic revolutionary parties?

[defleftist]

I only ever want books for Xmas so what are some good leftist/feminist/queer book recs? Any recs involving history, philosophy, psychology, and politics are especially appreciated.

[jackkal]

itll really be bitches whod rather die than walk their ass down to a food bank or soup kitchen to volunteer that will yell at YOU to organize a violent revolution... bitch how about you so much as buy a gun. you want a violent revolution from the back seat, you have no idea what a revolution would look like, let alone a violent one, no idea what youd do before during or after, but you wanna tell everyone else to do it. these motherfuckers would rather antagonize liberals over fringe politics than actually do anything about it, and all the while they sit on their ass and reblog gofundme's they dont donate to. you have to laugh

[ceciliavaldes]

Once home was a far way off, a place I had never been to but knew well out of my mother's mouth. She breathed exuded hummed the fruit smell of Noel's Hill morning fresh and noon hot, and I spun visions of sapadilla and mango as a net over my Harlem tenement cot in the snoring darkness rank with nightmare sweat. Made bearable because it was not all. This now, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, then someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by poet Audre Lorde

[desdemonas-intellectual-nonsense]

intro post!

I’m Desdemona, a 21 year old English lit student and I have been on tumblr for a long time.

She/they, queer

I’m passionate about literature, the environment, plants, & music

Looking for fresh space to restart a blog and some lovely mutuals! Anything in this post or tagged is something I would love to converse on!

My personal tag on my blog is Desdemona Writes :)

That is where you’ll find my writings, thoughts, and other random blurbs.

Main/ original blog mostly fandom stuff is @british-n-things

[therambleandrumble]

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

— Karl Marx, from Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property, 1844

[ravenkings]

tbh i think a lot of the criticism towards “art for art’s sake” is actually more of a criticism of nihilism than the stated idea itself

[communistfeminist]

Normal People, Sally Rooney

[snakesarefuckingcute]

But also the middle class is mainly a hindrance in actual socialist discussions. It's more value to speak of the working class and the capitalist class, in my opinion at least. There is more common ground between the working class, or middle and lower class, than there is between the capitalist class and literally anyone else.

Besides, the lower- middle- and upperclass divide makes being a capitalist sound as though it's something one should strive for when it most definitely is not. There should be no capitalist class.

Ive noticed recently that my generation has... no concept of what the various economic classes actually are anymore. I talk to my friends and they genuinely say things like "at least i can afford a middle class lifestyle with this job because i dont need a roommate for my one bedroom apartment" and its like... oughh

You guys, middle class doesnt mean "a stable enough rented roof over your head," it means "a house you bought, a nice car or two, the ability to support a family, and take days off and vacations every year with income to spare for retirement savings and rainy days." If all you have is a rented apartment without a roommate and a used car, you're lower class. That's lower class.

And i cant help but wonder if this is why you get kids on tumblr lumping in doctors and actors into their "eat the rich" rhetoric: economic amnesia has blinded you to what the class divides actually are. The real middle class lifestyle has become so unattainable within a system that relies upon its existence that theyve convinced you that those who can still reach it are the elites while your extreme couponing to afford your groceries is the new normal.

[bocceclub]

ALSO he quoted James Connolly at one point and I could feel the crowd's confusion

[tenth-sentence]

In the thirties, they came to focus on positive eugenics, which to them meant the biological fostering of aptitudes and faculties that might aid in the creation of the socialist order, and forms of talent and intelligence essential to literary, artistic, and scientific achievement.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[petermariavolkhardrt]

THE SLEEPING SAUCER OF NEUSTADT

3/3 english

After the completion of a glass sphere adjacent to the one made of concrete, the executives of the enterprise with their horizontal organization were faced with the challenge of finding new investors for their plans. Following a long and unsuccessful process, they finally found a business willing to invest, it also being a newly founded operation within botanics. The investors guaranteed complete financing of the maintenance expenses, as long as they on their part were guaranteed the usage of 60 percent of the area to grow their semi-medicinal, CBD-containing cannabis plants. Over the cause of the next six years, both operations were bought in, leading to the shutdown of the center for plant research and cannabis growing in Neustadt. From now on, the saucer was empty again, apart from a few left-behind roots of cannabis plants that had regressed to industrial hemps and found home in the cracks in the concrete. Now, the

building was not used by the youth to undress in, as no one visited Neustadt Lake for a swim anymore. Finally, the glass sphere replacing the upper of the two saucers stacked on top of each other, gave way and cracked completely, filling the inside of the of the lower saucer with dust, roots and small puddles over the years. Right in the middle of the opened saucer lay the remains of the antiquated, once modern and freshly ennobled, chandelier, which once hung in the cafeteria of the botanics business. Today, the wind sometime beats around the southern side of the building’s ruins, of which only three and a half of originally six columns protrude from the earth; the concrete cube has in some way become part of the Neustadt Seenhügel’s slope, which originally got its name from the artificially excavated and water-filled Neustadt Lake. When the south wind begins to circulate in the saucer and blows through the metal tubes of the chandelier, which then begin to vibrate, a constant screeching overtone can be heard throughout the area around the saucer.

[defleftist]

Absurdity is doing a project on Grapes of Wrath in 12th grade AP Lit and playing the song Ghost of Tom Joad during it (a great Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello version) and then getting a lesser grade because your conservative radio listening teacher apparently hates Tom Morello lol.

[bimboficationblues]

so the thing about "read theory" as a mantra: in the social media sphere there is a consistent downplaying of what that kind of commitment actually entails, plus a consistent obfuscation of what exactly the commitment is necessary for.

let's say that you're interested in learning more about specifically "Marxist theory." This, I think, also raises a bunch of questions about what we mean by theory - works of political philosophy, texts on revolutionary and military strategy, political speeches, journalistic or sociological analysis, historiography - these varying things with very different discursive norms and standards of evidence or logic often get rolled into one singular object called "theory." but let's set that aside for now.

you want to learn this for maybe an assortment of reasons, here's a few (non-exhaustive) good ones:

Marxism has been a substantial historical force that has probably had a notable impact on the world around you in some way.

Learning about Marx/ism might offer some level of insight into your current social world that other things are unable to offer.

Many texts - Capital, The Wretched of the Earth, The Second Sex, The State and Revolution - are also world-historical forms of political literature, which is interesting.

Follow-up to 2 - maybe having some level of familiarity with these things will give you the ability to better articulate yourself and participate in social and political movements around you.

generally speaking the Social Media Marxist approach is to tell you to go read off a list of texts of whatever writers the author personally agrees with or whatever works she happens to have read. so you decide to start with the big guy Marx, who is at the top of the list. totally reasonable decision.

however, there are a few contextual questions that might reasonably come up when doing so.

first, it will be clear that Marx did not pop out of an intellectual vacuum; Lenin has a rather popular identification of the "three sources of Marxism" - post-Hegelian German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. from my perspective, these are more like three of his main objects of ire (and so in some sense are both influences and also breakages - but not strictly speaking a synthesis), but I digress. so, frequently, in order to grasp what Marx is talking about or responding to, you are going to need some level of familiarity with a lot of additional people: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mill, Sismondi. suddenly you are not just learning about the works of one guy, but his attitude towards all the people he relies on for support or aims his criticisms at. and each of those different intellectual relationships is going to be different. sometimes at different times!

second, and relatedly, Marx is not always the most charitable to the people he's criticizing, who were often rival socialists (so there were pretty notable political and personal stakes at work in proving them wrong or diminishing their influence over the movement). the introductory materials to the new translation of Capital also observe that Marx's approach to scholarship is, shall we say, haphazard; often he makes quotes or citations that are not actually representative of what he's citing. finally, many of the people he's criticizing have sort of been rendered obsolete historically *in no small part* due to the success of Marxism as a political orientation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. so to determine whether Marx is being fair to the people he is basing his critique on, we will have to do some level of intellectual work to check. so now we're not just evaluating Marx's relationship to different thinkers but also the substantial content of each of those thinkers themselves.

third, Marx did not pop out of a social vacuum. all of these different writers didn't just crop up from nowhere but wrote within particular sociohistorical contexts, some of which were rather divorced from the European revolutionary wave, first worldwide financial crisis, and the shifting character of the United States in the wake of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery - some of the historical events that Marx was more explicitly engaging with. and the radical liberals, republicans, and socialists Marx criticized all also had their own intellectual and social histories. so now we're getting a little far afield from the initial notion, which was just to read some guy, and getting into the realm of social history, and trying to understand the relationship between world history and the ideas produced within it.

fourth, you are a subject in the world, which is to say YOU did not pop out of a social or intellectual vacuum. you likely bring predispositions, assumptions, biases, and cognitive distortions to what you read; we all do. working through those and trying to note where they're happening - where they might be fine and where they might be problematic - will require a certain willingness to reflect, to write, to take notes, to analyze and self-scrutinize, and to be critical of both yourself as a reader and of the text you are reading. (a nested problem is that we have a truly staggering amount of material from Marx and Engels, and you might have to make certain determinations as to which material is important or worthwhile or more useful, and identify the standards by which you think that - all of which requires a certain reflection on your status as a political thinker).

okay, so consider all that. we started with "I wanna read this one guy," we end with "to really grasp the work of this one guy it's also important to know both preceding and contemporaneous world history, his intellectual influences, and the gaps or silences or errors in his work.” now consider that, if you really want to be able to speak on them with some level of confidence and intellectual honesty, you have to apply approximately the same level of rigor to every other writer on the Social Media Marxist approved list - Lenin, Fanon, Che, Kollontai, Cabral, Mao, Luxemburg, whoever. not to mention their critics, both direct and indirect!

Marx developed his work through an incredibly sustained engagement with enormous volumes of different material; we have entire notebooks of him poring over Max Stirner, or Spinoza, or the political economists, or the empirical observations of English factory inspectors. I'm not saying that you have to do that, or even that one strictly *has* to go down any or all of the first three rabbitholes I identified. Marx was in the somewhat unique position of sustaining himself through the support of Engels and his journalistic work, as a product of being in perpetual exile. that's not the kind of position that most of us are typically in.

the point is not "commit yourself to being a perfect monastic scholar in order to reach perfect truth" - such a thing is probably a fantasy, even if we wish otherwise. the point is that if you think "theory" is worth taking seriously, well, you have to actually take it seriously. if you don’t think it has stakes or utility, that’s fine; different people find different things useful. I think “theory” is not a set of dead letters by canonical authors but produced through social life. but if “reading theory” is a way to clarify and assert yourself as a political subject and agent, to claim some intellectual autonomy and acquire some understanding that you can put into practice in your life, then that’s demanding. it’s not impossible, but it does take real effort and a commitment to study and a certain level of resistance to being dogmatic. otherwise you are just letting yourself be rhetorically persuaded by whatever is in front of you or whatever affirms your biases.

as Marx says in the preface to Capital, Volume I, "I am of course assuming that my readers will want to learn something new, and so are ready to think for themselves."