Yesterday I made the mistake of watching random comedians on youtube. One guy I saw had an audience of thousands of people in Australia, and he told nothing except painfully racist anti-China jokes. (Yes, it might have been the algorithm being like: "You like China? Well, howabout a comedian advocating genocide on China?") Everyone on hexbear knows that this is typical for comedians because the audiences at comedy shows tend to be drunk bourgeois scum, etc., etc.
But it's not just comedy. How many movies have you seen or books have you read where any of the characters, at any point, says something incredibly basic like: "capitalism bad, communism good." I'm not even sure Soviet or Chinese movies go that far (with the notable exception of Eisenstein's films...which were made before 1945). Plenty of works of art might imply that there is something corrupt about the military, police, or the powers-that-be, but they will never say that the system is the problem and that a better system exists. One very rare exception I can think of is The Battle of Algiers.
Also think about the dogshit novels Americans have to read in school: Animal Farm or To Kill A Mockingbird. The moral of both stories is basically: "Opposing the system is futile. Accept the system." Nabokov is hailed as the greatest novelist of the latter half of the 20th century, but he's basically a highbrow version of Ayn Rand, and repeatedly condemns communism by name in his books. We also know that the CIA had (and has) its fingers in every pie, and that the PMC also knows that it's not allowed to "get political," i.e., provide context. Even when it comes to classical Russian literature, Dostoevsky is probably the most popular in the USA, and the guy is a reactionary Christian monarchist who recycles the openings to his novels and is apparently nowhere near as popular in Russia.
I've just also been thinking about the greatest works of Statesian literature, how they are few and far between, how they were all written before 1945, and how they rarely were recognized for their greatness until long after their authors were dead. Steinbeck is one exception. The Grapes of Wrath is great (it was also written before 1945), but doesn't advocate for a better system. Poe and Melville are as good as the best writers from any other country, and Melville specifically inveighs against colonialism in his earlier novels, but both of these dudes were dead before they were recognized as titans. (Melville enjoyed some early success but then faded into obscurity long before he finished Moby Dick.) Are any post-1945 Statesian writers as good as Poe or Melville? Maybe just Octavia Butler, who was dead before she was a household name AFAIK. She advocates for communism in Parable of the Sower, but has to hide it behind mystical language ("God is change"). Sorry To Bother You is one possible cinematic exception, but it never goes beyond saying that the system sucks.
I'm wrapping up a trilogy of novels at the moment, and they are blatantly pro-communist, and I'm just preparing myself for the fact that they are almost certainly not going to be a success, not just because of the numbers involved (millions of books published every year), but because of the passionate anti-communism in western countries. These books don't have people saying "capitalism bad, communism good." But they do have workers and peasants forming Soviets (even though they aren't called Soviets), and I know from experience that even if as a writer you never turn to the camera and say "capitalism bad, communism good," readers will still pick up on the fact that something is wrong, from a capitalist perspective—that workers aren't capable of doing anything on our own, we need guidance from our enlightened masters, "human nature" is futile to oppose. I think there's just a dialectical materialist style of writing that liberals and fascists pick up on without necessarily knowing that they're picking up on it (because they spend their entire lives asleep).
Also I thought about this because I just saw and liked Trumbo, even though I was like: the blacklist never ended lol, where is my biopic about Paul Robeson, a Black colossus who never backed down from praising Stalin? Even if your job is dog shit picker upper (which I have done), you’ll lose that job if you praise Stalin.
And yes, this is a Arby's.
Grapes of Wrath namedrops Marx and Lenin and one of the characters not only finds his own purpose as a union organizer, but becomes this Christlike figure who inspires and leads his community. How exactly does it not advocate a better system? It's a work of fiction, it's not going to lay out the nuts and bolts of an American gosplan or something.
I read it a long time ago. Maybe I should check it out again.
Edit: except CIApedia says he volunteered to help the CIA
I think it's definitely worth a retread.
Also read some Kurt Vonnegut. A self-described socialist and all his works are post-war.
who cares they're literally dead and lived in a time where access to all the information we have access to was hard to come by
you seem obsessed with ideological purity and taking the moral highground over everything rather than just enjoying a piece of art
The Grapes of Wrath is not CIA propaganda. It was written in 1939 before the CIA was established. Hope this helps
I'm aware. You don't think that the author later volunteering to assist the CIA maybe calls his leftist credentials into question?
I think by the time he assisted the CIA he had definitely become a lib, probably because he got rich. Specifically with regards to The Grapes of Wrath, though, I challenge you to point out any anticommunism in it. It was banned in some places as soon as it was released because landowners were worried it could radicalize farmworkers
i'd say his most damaging thing was how he was a hawk for American intervention into Vietnam. He got invited over to Vietnam to stay at an American base and still thought it was good
no
many are supported because of their anti communism but i don't believe most are loved due to it.
bicycle thieves is regularly held up as one of the greatest films of all time and is super blatantly commie. all kinds of widely acclaimed films and books are at worst not commenting on capitalism, which is not the same thing as being anticommunist, and many of them are in fact very clearly anticapitalist. to pick one i watched recently, there will be blood is so blatantly about the evil at the core of american capitalism, the way it uses the church as a cudgel to beat workers into shape, the way it makes everyone miserable and consumes them. and that's one of the most well loved films of the 21st century
you have a weird view of what makes art good. 'let people enjoy things' is a facile thing to say, but i hope there are books or movies out there that you actually enjoy and don't just appreciate the ideological purity of
No, I enjoy all kinds of art, even lib art. I love Bicycle Thieves. But all it does is complain. It never advocates for something better.
bycicle thieves does in fact advocate for unionizing by showing the union as the one organization that actually tries to help him
and you have 2 separate complaints, one which is blatantly untrue (the western canon is all anticommunist cia ops that are only popular because of that) and one of which is entirely subjective (the exceptions to the above are insufficiently rigorous in their leftist preaching) so it's no wonder everyone focused on the former
edit: i just reread this and i think i'm coming off as more hostile than i meant to, so i'll recommend a legitimately revolutionary work or two. obviously these aren't too mainstream, though i think friends at the table might have gotten a shoutout on npr or something and it's got a pretty successful patreon
unjust depths is a free web novel about the aftermath of revolution. it takes place in a postapocalyptic underwater setting 20 years after a collection of colonies revolt from the empire that founded them and form an explicitly communist state. it's about a mix between the generation that fought in the revolution and the generation that inherited it, fighting to secure the liberation of the people oppressed within the empire they escaped. it's incredible, and in addition to all that it's very gay. not yet complete
friends at the table is an actual play podcast, which might mean you don't like it that much, but it's very good. i haven't gotten to the more explicitly finding a better future seasons yet (i'm 2/3rds of the way through counter/weight which is very cool mecha cyberpunk about the ways things are bad) but apparently one of the later seasons is about how imperialism is a cosmic horror and when it leaves a place the place is ravaged but the people there can build something better. which sounds sick and i trust these people (and the people i know who like it, including on this site) enough that i believe it's well done
Good post. Yeah I am just vibing and will check out your recommendations. I haven't seen Bicycle Thieves in awhile and recognize that I could be wrong there.
i hope you do! i'm very sympathetic to the complaint that most art doesn't advocate for a better future in any meaningfully leftist way, which is why things like unjust depths appeal to me so much
i'm a nitpicker at heart so i focused on the stuff that bugged me but i do think the broader point stands. art doesn't need to be about people forming a workers state or whatever to be good, but i sure wish there were more works that did. i think to kill a mockingbird is a good depiction of a young child realizing how shitty the world is, but there are a lot of those stories and very few end with the kid truly radicalizing. the trend is bad even if the specifics aren't necessarily
dogs hit novels like To Kill A Mockingbird
Man, what is it with this site?
The moral of [To Kill A Mockingbird] is basically: "Opposing the system is futile. Accept the system.”
I think maybe you need to reconsider your interpretation of To Kill A Mockingbird.
The book is specifically about the exact opposite: Scout learns over and over that The System (the prevailing culture in America) is shit, and learns to look outside of it. She learns the "creepy weirdo" who lives next door is actually just a mentally ill man who was forced into being a hermit by the culture around her. She regularly hangs out with the ex-slave community in her town and treats them better than the adults do. She watches her father fight for the rights of a falsely accused black man.
Like no, it's not a revolutionary book by any means. Atticus doesn't go full John Brown on the jail to break Tom out, and yes the Finches do have a black housekeeper - shit ain't perfect by any means. But it isn't a book about how we must all accept the system.
Why on Earth would you think a novel about a Black man being wrongfully convicted and ultimately killed is an endorsement of passivity within the system, rather than a damning indictment of that system?
It’s a white savior novel, and the white savior doesn’t even succeed. It seems more like a medieval Christian folk tale with a martyrdom complex to me.
It’s a white savior novel, and the white savior doesn’t even succeed.
That doesn't make any sense. At this point I'm starting to think you're just determined to hate it for some reason.
The white savior attempts to save the helpless Black man, and fails, and we're still supposed to cheer for that, because Atticus followed the rules and was polite and still failed. I also just think the book is super suspicious because it's one of the few books most Americans have read (I believe), only because all of us are forced to read it in school.
we're still supposed to cheer for that, because Atticus followed the rules and was polite and still failed.
That's the whole point.
That's why the inhumanly competent Atticus lost, but the prison guards shot Tom in the back anyway; nothing that Atticus or Tom could do within the confines of the system was ever capable of changing the outcome.
So the book is afro-pessismist but from a white perspective, that's actaully hilarious
lmao no wonder I disliked the book so much when I read it in high school
But can you not see how lib that is? Where is the character who says "oh yeah, this happened because amerikkka is built on slavery and genocide, we should all therefore band together to destroy it." CPUSA was active in Alabama at the time the novel takes place (according to Hammer and Hoe) but you'd never know it from reading To Kill A Mockingbird.
No, I don't see how lib a books whose main point is "working within lib institutions is futile because their rules are just a pretext to for the oppressing class to wield power against the oppressed class" is.
Yes, looking directly into the camera and telling the reader to destroy capitalism would be funny, for actual propaganda value, it's best left to let the reader draw that conclusion themselves.
Except readers never draw that conclusion unless it is explicitly spelt out for them. As a liberal I was exposed to all kinds of left works of art, and I didn’t understand them. At all.
I don't know anything about you so I'm just going to ask: were you lucky enough to always be an anarchist or communist, or did you radicalize later on? If you radicalized, was your radicalization mostly due to a change in circumstances, or because you saw a leftist work of art that changed your mind?
The white savior attempts to save the helpless Black man, and fails, and we're still supposed to cheer for that, because Atticus followed the rules and was polite and still failed.
The lawyer defended his client, and did a really good job of it, but his client was convicted and killed anyway because of how horribly racist the system is. The whole story is about people suffering injustice due to the broken society of the depression era south. Atticus is present as trying to behave nobly in the face of this system but ultimately is unable to change it.
Man, the book is set in a realistic 1920s Alabama. The entire point of Atticus and the entire trial is that Tom Robinson was falsely accused of miscegenation and SA, and that the whole town is too racist to care, except for a lawyer willing to defend a client the town is willing to lynch. It exists both to show Scout that racism is bad (not a common idea in fucking early 1900s Alabama, let alone 1960 when the book was published), and to be a frank depiction of how godawful America was in the 20s, published when America was equally awful (60s).
I don't even recall the book having Atticus use white saviour language regarding the case. He takes it because he sincerely believes in what would pass for equality in that era. What the fuck were you looking for, him to start going John Wick on the town for being racist? Is any white lawyer who works for a black client a white saviour?
What the fuck were you looking for, him to start going John Wick on the town for being racist?
yes lol the book would have been so much better then.
But that's not what happened and the book is meant to be autobiographical, a reflection of the authors actual lived experience. Yes a alt-history story where Atticus becomes a communist guerrilla may have been cooler but Harper was trying to paint an accurate picture of what life in the depression south was like.
But as I said, it’s not even accurate. Whenever liberals write books, they act as though communists either don’t exist or are Nazis.
Do we know if communists were active in the specific town Harper Lee grew up in? Also the story is told from the perspective of a child, even if they were she may have not been exposed to them.
No, but there is literally a book called Hammer and Hoe which is about CPUSA activity in Alabama during the period in which To Kill A Mockingbird takes place.
Cool, you can read that book and To Kill a Mockingbird. Should give you a good perspective on life in the depression era south from two different perspectives.
Historical and social perspective of adult activists trying to improve society Vs the personal and subjective perspective of a child having their naive view of the world shattered by witnessing the gross injustice of society.
Except her view wasn't shattered at all because even after To Kill A Mockingbird's success she continued to live quietly as a lib.
I haven't read Go and Set a Watchman so idk what canonically happens to Scout after, the book itself doesn't really say what happens to the character of Scout after. As for Harper Lee, yeah she doesn't become a communist, but that doesn't mean nothing meaningful can't be gleaned from her life experiences. Nobody in 100 Years of Solitude becomes a communist but it still has a lot to say about Latin American history.
Nobody in 100 Years of Solitude becomes a communist but it still has a lot to say about Latin American history.
Isn’t Colonel Aureliano Buendia a communist revolutionary?
He literally fights for a group called The Liberals.
Also by the end of the story he's not really much of anything anymore, just a shell of a man.
I love how all the responses you're getting boil down to "don't you know this book was radical in 1920"
It's like, ok and? Today it's a shitty book that let's white people think their smart for figuring out racism is bad
I thought the book was lackluster and defeatist when I read it in high school because I'm not white and easily impressed by every racism bad take made 75 years ago
lmao I still remember how bummed our white high school English teacher got because nobody in a majority non-white class in the year 2012 was super electrified for a book about a little white girl figuring out racism is bad
I love how all the responses you're getting boil down to "don't you know this book was radical in 1920"
This whole dumb mini-struggle session seems to revolve around the idea that a story has to be a piece of radical propaganda to be good. To Kill a Mocking Bird isn't meant to be a political manifesto, it's meant to be a portrayal of life in the depression era south, both good and bad. That doesn't mean it can't say anything about society or inspire people, it just does so through a different means, it's not a manifesto but a story.
If the book want to use vicious racism as a literary vehicle than it needs to do more than center the story around a little white girl discovering racism exists, why the fuck would anyone find that remotely interesting, entertaining, enlightening or any other adjective we use to describe "good literature"
Cause I'm telling you nobody in my class thought it was interesting and in fact quite a few were peeved at the random way racism was used when the plot needed to be advanced
It's just a boring banal book
than it needs to do more than center the story around a little white girl discovering racism exists
I mean I think it does do more than that personally.
If it didn't connect with you that's fine, and what you've made here is a far more substantive criticism than most of the discourse going on it elsewhere in this thread. I just found a lot of the lazier dismals grating.
what a mistake they made thinking a post about "post-1945" media was actually about how progressive media was in 2023 specifically. what a bunch of buffoons
Not really a matter about how progressive or not-progressive a work happens to be at any given time
It's about who the audience the book is intended for, and I assure you it was not intended for a classroom of non-white Americans in the year 2012 to say the least lmao
Atticus isn't a savior, in fact the book makes it pretty clear he's just doing his job. He's just really good at his job. He does have noble attributes but he's not on a crusade to save the lowly Blackman, he was assigned to defend his client and he did his job.
Harper Lee only wrote one book (well okay two kinda, but, eh) so I don't see many people stanning her as an author, the work should be considered divorced from the author regardless.
to really upset them bring up the "sequel" (first draft) that got published via elderly abuse
Written before her only other published novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again.
Not all us hexbears are white, so autobiographical books about little white girls discovering racism is bad just doesn't hit as hard
lmao that was a mistake my old English teacher made when she made a class of literally only black and hispanic kids read it, everyone including me, really did not fuck with that book
This is valid, and nobody’s saying OP has to like the book. But the main reason people are arguing with OP in the comments below is because he was incorrect about the themes and intent of the book, which is not the same thing as just disliking it
How many movies have you seen or books have you read where any of the characters, at any point, says something incredibly basic like: "capitalism bad, communism good."
Also think about the dogshit novels Americans have to read in school
We read The Jungle, the only American school book that actually does say "capitalism bad, socialism good"
I see, we didn't read that one in my high school and I still haven't read it.
the jungle, so bad that upton said he aimed for america's heart and hit the stomach.
fuck the jungle, fuck making kids read that trash. I liked reading then i went to sophomore english class.
When I read it, I thought it was a bit boring and felt that the political messaging towards the end was... relevant of course but pretty ham-fisted. What would you suggest instead? Germinal?
for curriculum or propaganda?
actually, i have no idea either way. maybe Zinn's peoples' history
Sorry To Bother You is one possible cinematic exception, but it never goes beyond saying that the system sucks
this situation seems so severe to you because apparently you miss overt messaging in media. lmfao dude "JOIN A UNION TO FIGHT CAPITALISM" isn't direct enough of a call to action?
But wouldn't you agree that there's a big jump between "I hate capitalism" and "maybe the Soviet Union wasn't that bad" for example?
i hate capitalism and i am demonstrating a direct way to impact it. besides the end that also has a slave uprising. i don't fault modern authors for not litigating the USSR though, like fuck you if you slander/get ahistorical in a period piece, but the USSR is not as relevant to our current situation anymore. what would Boots Riley making the USSR look good really do for us?
Class struggle takes place everywhere, even in the ideological realm. Can you imagine the effect an accurate biopic about Paul Robeson might have on the USA?
Can you imagine the effect an accurate biopic about Paul Robeson might have on the USA?
Warren Beatty made a film about Bolshevik journalist John Reed, largely sympathetic to him and the Russian revolution, in 81. Didn't really inspire that many people to Be communists.
John Reed was white. When has a film been made about a Black communist who never denounced Stalin?
Lol who fucking told you that?
The FBI is presented a racist and corrupt organization that pressures a desperate black man into betraying his friends. Hampton is shown as a courageous leader murdered in his prime by a racist institution. It's the farthest fucking thing from Copaganda, it's probably the least copaganda film Hollywood has ever made.
Where are you getting your media take from?
Maybe I'll check it out? But I'll be pissed if it turns out to be copaganda. I will send you an angry emoji.
I really struggle to see how it could be interpreted as copaganda at all, genuinely.
Okay so I watched it and enjoyed it but it was copaganda. The story is told mostly from the traitor’s perspective and he is depicted as being conflicted about being a traitor. So many cop/war movies depict Americans this way. “We suck but at least we feel bad about it.”
I reject this framing. I think the focus on the traitor because it helps illustrate the workings of the FBI and how they sabotage movements. I think he's presented as pitiable but ultimately a coward.
It's probably also the most sympathetic I've ever seen a communist group be portrayed in western film.
You know, a police officer appears briefly in Psycho, and it’s actually one of my favorite American depictions of the police. The dude is just 100% evil and terrifying and has absolutely no qualms about hurting people for fun. This whole thing about cops/soldiers feeling bad about being mass murderers is basically one result of the US becoming an imperial superpower after WW2.
And yes, Judas might be a decent depiction of communists from American media, but the bar is very low. I want a movie about communists who win and aren’t ashamed of it. Such movies exist, but they aren’t made in America.
I think all the actual cops in the film are presented in an extremely negative light. The police informant is sometimes given sympathetic moments but that's only because he was being pressed into what he was doing, and I feel he was still ultimately condemned as a coward despite it.
And yes I get that but the film is also a historical piece, and sadly the Panther did not win.
The CIA funded the NEA and all US culture during the cold war, sometimes as direct cash payments to artists. This goes across genres from music to painting. If you were an artist who was not straight up black listed and were anti establishment how were you ever going to compete for eyeballs and shows against people being literally subsidized.
The biggest piece of social leverage the Soviet Union has was that it was part of a historical movement that was embedded in the actual cultures of Europe and Asia. A big accusation against the Americans is that they are cultural barbarians and just looking to establish a business empire. To counter this the CIA spent billions on culture to say "What do you mean no culture? We're the avant garde with people like Jackson Pollock and Rock and Roll music "
There's plenty of western art that's critical of capitalism, but I don't know how prominent I'd call it. I was gonna say Steinbeck is very prominent, but he's not post 1945. Ursula K. Le Guin is up there. Kim Stanley Robinson's books are very explicitly socialist, although it's often more of the milquetoast democratic socialism variety. I should also mention that many prominent socialist artists have their fangs filed down over time, like what Lenin says happens. Picasso for instance. It's common for someone to know who he is, but less common to know he was sympathetic to communism worldwide.
Cyberpunk literature was critical of capitalism, but that kind of fell apart because many of its authors didn't have an alternative. They got stuck in liberalism, which is what often happens in scifi.
Ken Loach's movies are very, very socialist. They're a rarity among western cinema as well because they're sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
i think most aspects about american popular culture are either heavily influenced by or completely fabricated by the CIA. the full extent to which they are is unknown, but i have a feeling that most of american culture post-war is just anti-communism and fascist ideology.
Is your idea of good artistically successful or leftist, or or these the same thing in your mind?
Either way this is an incredibly blinkered view
Successful here I think is roughly equivalent to having been mass-consumed and therefore culturally influential.
I can still appreciate lib media despite myself, but it’s not easy for me to enjoy fascist entertainment.
Not only the arts. Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism
For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism.
This is such a fun paragraph as it is applicable to our contemporary pseudo-socialist intellectuals ("intellectuals in the latter for the second example below) in both the professional and amateur fields, i.e Zizek and v*ush
Gabriel Rockhill: Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek
“Lorenzo”: The Mainstream and the Margins: Noam Chomsky vs. Michael Parenti
Go figure he had an article that ties in to what he was talking about last year.
“Lorenzo” seemed to have stopped publishing around five years ago, under that pseudonym at least. All I know about him is that he’s from California and that he and his partner moved to Bulgaria. His Action Park site is still up, but his other site requires painstaking use of the Wayback Machine. If anyone knows if & where he still writes, I’d sure like to know it.
It’s perfect: An anti-communist group fighting another anti-communist group which they claim is communist, meanwhile any actual communist thought remains outside the Overton Window.
When you put it that way, it really is a perfect microcosm of American electoral politics.
This is why you'll often find me ranting about the need for leftist to get better at propaganda and astroturfing. The only way we're ever going be able to introduce an alternative to the Cultural Hegemony is by exploiting the algorithms at every possibility. The fact that so many leftists have taken a Luddite approach to AI, a massive force multiplier in a world where we're so clearly overpowered, is especially depressing. We need more mass produced leftist slop to appeal to a variety of demographics. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to resemble liberal media enough that we can slip propaganda in there and normalize revolution and liberation concepts so that the quality communist media doesn't seem farfetched.
I’m always impressed by
Adam & Nima’s skill at sneaking leftist ideology through liberals’ defenses.
Or at least I think that’s what they’re doing: I’ve never interrogated a lib about it.Yeah, they do a really good of mimicking the npr aesthetic.
I’ve tried slipping in propaganda. Even the most braindead chuds are extremely sensitive to the slightest hint that you might not think slavery is okay. Also AI is cringe.
I think they were adored because they were mostly good art, in whatever sense that means. And I think there's much better criteria to judge a book than it's overt political ideology.
Check out Engels's letter to the socialist writer Margaret Harkness, who critiques her work for its lack of realism and praises the conservative writer Balzac
I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a “Tendenzroman” [social-problem novel. DM], as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the authors. This is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author’s opinions. Let me refer to an example. Balzac, whom I consider a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et a venir [past, present and future], in “La Comédie humaine” gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, especially of le monde parisien [the Parisian social world], describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la viellie politesse française [French refinement]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac. (emphasis added)
An excerpt from Iain M. Banks' essay A Few Notes on the Culture, about the philosophy behind his excellent Culture series of novels:
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.
BBC: Was modern art a weapon of the CIA?
Wikipedia: CIA and the Cultural Cold War
