In a recent post of mine, and in particular other ones that may be scattered around this blog, I vocalized support for the uprisings in Iran. Some may call it opportunism or political immaturity, but let’s face it: dialectics teaches us that nothing ever stops changing and that conflict and contradiction is inherent in matter and essential for life as we know it.
At the time, I thought it might bring about a revolutionary situation in Iran by which socialism might take power, manifested by the Communist Parties in Iran. This was nothing more than a severe error and ultra-leftism on my part.
After careful study of those who support the protests—John McCain, the Tea-Baggers, the Trotskyites such as the SWP and ISO and other counterrevolutionaries—plus a recent reading of mine revealing the true comprador nature of the RIM puppet Communist Party of Iran (Maoist), I came to the obvious conclusion that is not a revolution, but a counter-revolution. More specifically, it is a counterrevolution aimed at bringing back the days of the Shah of Iran and liquidating the gains of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The Communist Party of Iran (Maoist) makes their intentions crystal clear in the document published by the RCP’s Revolution newspaper:
“It is clear that the people’s struggle should be focused against the main enemy, the IRI. As long as the IRI is in power, there cannot be any talk of aiming the struggle against the US and the regime equally” (1).
In line with this, I must announce that I do not support the reactionary, CIA-backed Color Revolution in Iran, and have not for many months now. It is a bourgeois, reactionary revolution made up of petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and well-to-do students in opposition to the Islamic Republic. It is a comprador, pro- Moussavi the commie-killer protest designed to take power for Moussavi through Zionist and American tanks.
I call upon all revolutionaries to ignore the television and oppose these protests. When police beat down anti-Iraqi-occupation protestors here, the television is silent. When the police beat down pro-US protestors overseas, it is treated as the worst horror ever portrayed on humanity.
I fully admit it: I was resolutely, absolutely, 100% wrong and I take back my former position. For those of you who I admonished for calling out the protests and the Color Revolution for what they were at the time, I sincerely apologize for any epitaphs I might have hurled at you.
I call on all Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries to support the anti-imperialist government of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic of Iran against CIA-backed coups.
For my Party’s position, follow this link:
http://theredphoenix.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/on-the-iranian-uprising-rebellion/
Sources:
1) http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/countries/iran/iranspyweed2.txt
Kipling, Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson all address the colonial experience through a hermetically sealed bubble of subjective, individual unreality. Alex Garland in The Beach, Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho all explore the emptiness of bourgeois ideology in modern urban man within this same bubble, frequently arriving at the most reactionary and hedonistic of places. Why are they reactionary?
Let’s take a novel as an example. Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction consists entirely of stream-of-consciousness rantings from a revolving door of different narrators. As might be expected, each narrator has his/her own voice and subjective take on things. The characters themselves are all incredibly empty and tainted by what can only be called “selfishness,” and they all find solace in hedonism through drug abuse and promiscuous sex. Do I even need to say all of them are secretly depressed and feel hollow, corrupted and lost?
What does this plot mean? Either this is supposed to be a representation of the state humanity under bourgeois ideology finds itself in (which would be a progressive work), or, more likely, it is meant to be a moralistic social critique of the state of young people today with the idea that they should “correct themselves” by falling back into the places alloted for them by the dominant social order.
Fight Club fares even worse. It starts off as an idealist “liberal” critique of consumerism, which then evolves into a promotion of primitivism and secular humanism, and then of course takes its petty-bourgeoisie ideas to their logical conclusion at the end, where it becomes an essentially fascist and militarist work.
Most entertainment today does this sort of thing—showing a world that has no meaning with all the class interests and prejudices that entails. What does this mean?
Never have intellectuals and artists displayed the hubris they show here, attributing to themselves the power to arbitrate all meaning. In the postmodernist movement, their celebration of complexity and ambiguity becomes a form of boundless egoism. Richness of meaning, which sounds good to most of us, cannot take the form of no limits on meaning, which would amount to meaninglessness.
For more information, see: Samuel Beckett. (Yes, ANY of his works.)
As Marx said, the dominant ideas of any era are the ideas of its ruling class. What does this culture say about the class nature of our society and what class interests does this movement represent? It is a petty-bourgeoisie, or small landowner or producer, way of thinking.
Why is this? Generally speaking, the petty-bourgeoisie, when tackling a problem, thinks in a subjective and one-sided way. He does not practice Marxist dialectics, which analyzes things concretely and rationally from every possible angle in order to get an objective and complete picture of reality, but instead starts from his own wishes, preconceived notions and subjective desires about how actual conditions should be. People who live in imperialist countries, intellectuals or more privileged strata of society (wealthier people, whites, petty-bourgeois) who are detached from the concrete conditions of reality often think in this way, because they have only book smarts and lack practical knowledge.
What the idealists, the postmodernists and the “free speech” advocates fail to understand is that a man’s mind is not his own. Who would deny that in each society throughout history man has operated in personal relations independent of their own will?
One of the chief discoveries of the science of Marxism, and materialism in general, is: it is not consciousness that determines reality, it is reality that determines consciousness. To imagine that the mind alone, in this case the individual mind, and the will, in this case that treasured idealist concept of the “free will,” can change reality based only on its own individual wishes is the most vulgar form of bourgeois and capitalist ideology.
How is this inherently capitalist ideology? Since subjectivism and relativism (“nothing is true, it’s all just in your mind”) is the logical ideology of late industrial capitalism, where individualism has taken its toll and everything becomes dependent on what you think, rather than what exists. This sort of thinking is also beneficial to capitalism, since it fuels the “I can make the world my own” attitude of the small producer.
This is reflected especially in the idea that scientific and materialist minds are somehow “intolerant” or “imposing” by subjecting others’ beliefs to the scientific method. This view ignores the fact that it doesn’t matter at all what one thinks of reality; what matters is what is objectively true and what is not.
The argument is frequently made that if the individual believes it hard enough or passionately enough, then it must be true. Hence, “religion is objectively true for religious people.”
Putting aside the fact that this so-called “objective truth” is therefore neither objective nor truth, this whole capitalist and postmodernist way of thinking digs its own grave.
To expand on this, here are a few key points to consider, that MUST be conceded:
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Reality functions and exists outside man’s own individual mind. This must be a given, since if one individual dies, reality does not cease to exist. Therefore reality is separate from the individual.
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Reality is not changed by the individual mind alone. If someone is falling from a cliff, wishing it is not so does not make it stop. Similarly, no matter how hard you wish it, you cannot push your hand through a solid wood table. You can imagine it, but the fact remains that your molecules repel the molecules of the wood. Even if you got two people together, one who admitted he could not pass through walls, and one who was absolutely convinced he could, the fact could still be shown objectively that both of them were incapable of it. The man who believed he could pass through walls would not be able, materially, to cross into the next room.
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If reality is separate from the individual mind, and is not affected by it, we must then admit that the two can disagree and be completely parallel.
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If we admit that the two can disagree, then there must be such a thing as concrete objective truth and mere fantasy. If the desires of the mind were the same as reality, then they could never be separate.
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Therefore, what is true and existing can only be measured not in wishes, but in matter.
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Finally, if all of the above is true, then we must say that not everything the individual mind believes is true, and that in order to be proved true it must pass the scientific method.
From these points, we can see that there are perceptions that are correct, right and actually existing, and there are those that are incorrect and not actually existing.
Logically, if something cannot be weighed or measured, it does not exist. Otherwise the very concept of “not existing” becomes moot, since the sole definition of “not existing” hinges on not being able to prove that it DOES exist.
Why? Because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is impossible for me to prove that something can’t be done. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that something does not exist. So the only definition that there can be for not existing is the absence of proof that it does exist.
For example, it would be impossible for me to prove that there are not pink dragons flying everywhere, except for me to point out the absence of material evidence: no sight of them, no feeling of wind from their wings.
Conclusion: the capitalist ideas of relativism and postmodernism are bankrupt. Reality exists outside the individual mind, and there are right ideas and wrong ideas, as well as true and false ideas.
Filed under: Art & Culture, Class Struggle, Imperialist War, Literary Criticism | Tags: Eliot, literature, Love Song of J. Alfred Pufrock, Marxist, Marxist criticism, Marxist literary theory, T.S. Eliot
A modernist exercise in capitalist angst, T.S. Eliot’s famous masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at once exposes the crumbling of bourgeoisie society and the utter disintegration of its culture as a meaningful epoch. Considered by many to be the first modernist poem, its verses certainly carve out a splendid picture of the isolation and contempt for the status quo that marks modernist and postmodernist literature. More than that, it illustrates the emptiness and superficiality of class society through the middle-class male persona of the narrator, who is kept nameless but is presumably Eliot himself speaking through a fictional character.
The sense of being lost begins with the quotation at the beginning of the poem. Translated, it reads: “If I thought my answer were to one who could ever return to the world, this flame would move no more; but since no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer you.” The quote, which comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, is originally spoken by a lost soul in hell. This gives quite a first impression of the emotions to come from the main body of the poem.
In the first stanza, when the narrator asks a person, presumably a woman, to accompany him on a stroll through the streets of downtown, already the man’s thoughts have drifted to the decay of class society. He describes “half-deserted streets,” “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” and “streets that follow like a tedious argument/ of insidious intent.” This continues throughout-everything around him seems to be molding, rotting and rusting. Most revealing is his description of “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells,” a contrast between the perceived “low-class” imagery of sawdust on the floors of a restaurant and the “high-class” imagery of the oysters on a half-shell. The narrator hates the upper-crust and empty society of London. This is significant, since in real life Eliot tried to escape such a culture, but his greedy wife lured him back in by insisting he get a “real” job other than writing.
The couplet, “In the room the women come and go/ talking of Michelangelo,” is repeated over and over at various stages in the poem, showing the two-fold mindset of wanting attention from women and fearing to get it, and criticizing the pretentiousness of the refined. The narrator realizes throughout that bourgeoisie capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the dominant class, expressed these days through advertising and television, is vapid, hollow and worth nothing. Even the aristocrat women of such a culture are worthless to him, which he reveal when he says, “And I have known the arms already, known them all/ arms that are braceleted and white and bare/ [but in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]” He notices the flaws of these shallow women, in this case the arm hair, which become symbolic for the larger imperfections of the social order they represent. He is even hesitant to participate in the classy activity of “taking toast and tea,” and in fact seems to find it reprehensive.
Not only does our narrator criticize the culture of the society itself, and the people which make up that society, but he also condemns the unsavory pillars which uphold that society. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” can be interpreted to be either (or both) mustard gas and sickening smog. In another time-honored modernist tool, Eliot seemingly parodies the insanity of imperialist war and capitalist pollution with these images, two things which have helped give rise to the society he so hates.
Nevertheless, he saves his most biting criticisms for himself. He imagines himself as a foolish and aging old man, unable to command even the small amount of respect from women he has already: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair/ [they will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!']” He speaks in subtle code about his lost sexual performance as an old man when he asks himself, “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices/ have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” It is in this section of the poem that his pack of insecurities comes to a head with him claiming to have, “seen the moment of my greatness flicker” and to have “seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.” The eternal Footman in this context is probably death, personified by the grim reaper, handing him his coat-an activity normally reserved for when one is about to depart-in order that he may “depart” from his life.
His anxiety peaks with the famous statement, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” from which the poem switches moods. The narrator’s fears become free-floating and ever sharper, as he questions whether it is worth it to be bold or if life itself is pointless. He asks himself if it “would be worth it” if he should end up having to say: “that is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” He fears mistakes he will make and anticipates the ways in which the woman he desires will misunderstand him. His insecurity, which in itself is a social construct of the system he despises, knows no bounds. “No!” he claims, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be/ am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two/ advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool/ deferential, glad to be of use/ politic, cautious, and meticulous/ full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse/ at times, indeed, almost ridiculous- almost, at times, the Fool.” He feels he is not good enough or brave enough to be the hero character of fable, the knight in shining armor. This shows betrays a patriarchal mindset in which he, the male lead role, is the virtuous hero of the story who is the center of attention and praise, another social construct which is programmed into men as being the most ideal by bourgeoisie culture.
Finally, the world the poem has constructed so far abruptly collapses. There is suddenly no more talk of the city, or of culture, or of the narrator himself taking a walk with the woman he is with. He bemoans his fate of aging one last time with the line, “I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” this time talking in present tense, as if all hope is already lost. The scene changes to a fantasy of the narrator’s where he is walking along a peaceful beach with singing mermaids. Yet, even in this beautiful imaginary setting, our storyteller has no control over his own life or his surroundings. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” he says, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Even in fantasy, he is marked with hopelessness and loneliness.
Finally, wading into the ocean of his pretend world, he says, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ till human voices wake us, and we drown.” He realizes real human voices must eventually awaken him from this dream world, and once again he feels lost. The poem ends with the disturbing imagery of drowning, which has the symbolic meaning of the narrator drowning in his raging insecurities about everyday life, aging, and of his sexual advances towards women being turned down, even in dreams. Eliot’s poem leaks cynicism, wit and anxiety in its carefully crafted stanzas.
