Hippity Hobbity Ho

Documentaries on a Modern Myth

With apologies to Joseph Campbell, myths are always being created.  You don’t have to go back to ancient India, Egypt, China, the Middle East, Rome, Greece, Gilgamesh or the Bible. If you are still doing that, you are missing a boat. This article is about the most popular literary myth of the 20^th Century in ‘the west.’  It’s an equivalent to the Mediterranean Mare– a sea in the ‘middle of the land’ in Latin.  It is about the other middle, Middle Earth, the world created by J.R. Tolkien.  This world actually led J.R.R. Martin to creating Game of Thrones, an even more recent myth-making event.

Two somewhat odd documentaries shed light on the geography and mythical origins of the stories in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (LotR).  They are “The Real Middle Earth” (2003) and “Looking for the Hobbit” (2014), both on Amazon.  

PLACES

The Real Middle Earth identifies the Shire from the obvious – the various county ‘shires’ in the Midlands of England where Tolkien grew up, had family and lived - Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire and the rest.  As a child Tolkien explored a rural area near Birmingham called Sarehole Mill, christening various hostile personages as ogres.  The huge rolling downs west of Oxford became Rohan, with White Horse Hill at the center.  Old Oxford itself, a city he taught in for 40 years, is theorized to be part of the model for the fortress city of Minas Tirith.  You could consider the "Eagle and Child" pub in Oxford as the real Prancing Pony.  The odd Anglo-Saxon names of towns and villages in this area inspired his naming of places like Bree in The Shire. 

Tolkien, as a too-young man in high-school, maintained that the ancient kingdom of Mercia located in this area should reject the Norman conquest of 1066, evidently preferring Anglo-Saxon settlers to Norman ones.  Saxons and Angles both migrated to Britain from Germany after the Roman’s left.  Their languages formed much of the basis of Old English and this was perhaps his attraction. 

The documentaries do not identify the woods that make appearances in the books, but Tolkien was a nature fan who rode bicycles and walked in rural areas on a regular basis. There are still forests scattered across the counties, and in the pre-WWII era there were more. He loved trees, as can be seen in his creation of the anti-industrial Ents who opposed the destruction of forests by Saruman for the making of weapons and armor. Castles in the area like Broughton and Warwick would also have been familiar.    

Tolkien actually didn’t travel much, except in his philology and in his imagination. He was first a philologist – a linguistic collector of words and etymologies.  He created the Elvish language out of a combination of Finnish and Welsh – two close-by but absolutely foreign languages to him.  He also deeply explored Old Norse.  But most importantly, he ‘traveled’ to Europe in his 20s to fight in WW1.  His experience on the bloody Somme in France as a young man made him turn to writing, trying poetry first.  He explicitly said that the Dead Marshes were from his experience in that war.  Mordor, with its foul odors, smoky air, violence and general desolation is sourced to the broken battlefields of the Somme too. Above all, the Lord of the Rings is a war story inspired by the rejection of power, which is the goal of inter-imperialist and inter-capitalist wars like WWI and WWII.  The ring of power must be destroyed... and who is tasked with destroying it?  Who can we trust?

The Hobbiton set still exists in New Zealand

The HOBBITS

In the search for influences on Tolkien’s writing and stories, the Looking for the Hobbit documentary cannot find any references to the ‘halflings’ – to the small but big-footed rural people, to little heroes like Frodo or Bilbo, to anything like the Hobbits.   They are nowhere in the noble myths that Tolkien was familiar with and studied.  These myths are the Arthurian legends; the heroic German epic the Nebelungenlied; Icelandic and Nordic Sagas; common fairy tales; the Finnish epic poem Kalevala; the old English epic poem Beowulf.  From these he drew dragons, the city of Midgard, trolls, dwarfs, Mount Doom and more.  He was inspired by Siegfried to create Aragon II; Grendal perhaps became Gollum; Merlin inspired Gandalf; the dragon in the Nibelungen was a model for Smaug, the Fellowship was a borrowing from the Round Table.  These books have been translated into 80 languages by the way, so the resonance of these little people goes far beyond Europe.  LotR are some of the best-selling books in history which is why this is significant. 

So who are the hobbits?  As both documentaries point out, Tolkien called himself a ‘hobbit.’  They are his greatest creation - THE central figures in this modern myth of the 20^th Century.  They are quite clearly English rural people visually grounded by their ‘big feet,’ but by extension ordinary people trying to go about their lives, not lusting for power, money, wealth, fame and the rest. They are somewhat dumb and ridiculous, enjoy comfort, but also capable of feats of intelligence, kindness, morality and bravery. This populism was injected by Tolkien into stories that are normally the province of heroes and heroines, of kings and queens, of princes and princesses, of warriors and devils, of monsters and dragons, of dictators and Caesars.  The hobbits bring us back to modern reality, back to the people. 

Which is, by the way, the impact of the disputed ending of Game of Thrones too. That ‘game’ was not going to end well if anyone thought about the title for a second.  The result, unexpected by clueless viewers still searching for traditional heroes and leaders, was instead filled with a dead megalomaniac, her absent dragon, the rule of a mute cripple and the departure to join the anti-authoritarian Wildlings by the key player, Jon Snow.  The ‘ring of power’ and the ‘game of thrones’ are the same.  In contrast to Tolkien who he criticized about this, Martin has a modern, very dim view of kings and queens. 

Abuse of Hobbits by tall Reactionary

Right-Wing Attempts

Tolkien’s writings lean to the left, though this point is missed by some.  Giorgia Meloni, right-wing president of Italy, loved LotR as a young ‘reenactor’ and calls it a ‘sacred text.’ She posted as the “Little Dragon of the Internet” thus confusing the issue of dragons like Smaug. She endorses its rural, anti-industrial angle and its’ reliance on myth and fantasy as a method. As if fantasy has no connection to reality.  This while she presides with her ring of power over an Italian economy not just marked by grapes, wheat and olives, but by high-end fashion, high-end autos and motorcycles, high-end glass and high-end industrial and textile equipment.  She ran with the help of large Italian capitalists and landlords, who are the Saurons of Italy, along with the ogres of proto-fascism in the Brothers of Italy and the archaic backing of the corrupt right-wingers in the Vatican.  Is Meloni a great figure in the battle against global warming and deforestation, beloved of Ents?  No.  She attempts to be a right-wing populist instead, muddying any water still left.  The Po, the longest river in Italy, is running dry.  

By the way, that great nationalist Italy that she promotes was on the side of Adolf in WWII, whom Tolkien called “that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf H....."  Here is Tolkien’s full quote written during WWII: “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf  H.....”(for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”   (Blogger will not let me write the full last name.)

Demonic!  While infused by an ethnic angle, he was an anti-fascist.  He refused to work with Nazi publishers for German translations of his books.  He called Jews a ‘gifted people’ in one letter with these publishers.  He wrote LotR between 1937 and 1949 over the whole course of the Nazi period and WWII, a barbarity which did not escape him.  It gave to him day-to-day proof of the horrors of power and war. Hitler, Mussolini and Sauron are triplets in Tolkien’s world, but evidently not in Meloni’s. Power in these cases was the function of an alien ruling class, not the people.  Peter Jackson, who made 6 films out of LotR and The Hobbit, is not some kind of right-winger either.

According to YouTuber Adam Something, a Hungarian leftist, urbanist and engineer, Meloni is not alone.  Adam has translated a large number of propaganda comics put out by the Russian government publishing house, and in some of them heroic Russia is depicted as actually backing Sauron and Mordor. Perhaps they missed the fact that the volcano in Mordor is called Mt. Doom.  You can’t make this shite up. Post-modern reactionary confusionism is rampant – up is down, left is right, war is peace, red is brown, nothing is as it seems. Even Hitler becomes an anti-fascist in some of these Russian comics. (The definition of fascism in these comics is anything against Russia.)  Ideological gibberish is the method of authoritarianism and fascism, which is why Meloni can twist it into any shape she wants.

Like any contested text or film (The Matrix anyone?) the duty of Left cultural criticism is to bring out proletarian, anti-war, anti-capitalist and pro-environmental messages in works that are not otherwise explicit about such things.

See Adam Something’s podcast on the comics’ issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI6es9G0oo&t=135s    

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Lord of the Rings / LotR,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Matrix,” “Tokien,” “myth,” “fantasy,” “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “English history.”  

The Cultural Marxist / September 15, 2024

The Heart of Colonial Darkness

 “Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts – Colonial Exploitation in the Congo” by Jules Marchal, 2008

Remember Lever Bros. soap?  It was made by a British company mostly out of palm oil, initially using Congolese forced labor and much more.  Lord Leverhulme was its ‘CEO.’  The company that made it is now called Unilever.  This is the story behind that apparently innocent commodity in the period 1911 to about 1960.  It is certainly the most extraordinarily detailed study of colonialism in Africa ever written.  It took Marchal 20 years to go through documents from the Lever firm, Belgian Colonial office, law courts, colonial administration, the Catholic Church, journalism, the Belgian government and independent reports written by observers to get at the various facts about how the palm oil industry worked in what is now the ‘Democratic’ Republic of the Congo.

It is common knowledge about the cruel rule of Belgian King Leopold II prior to this, who instituted coerced slavery on the peoples of that area for the production of rubber.  Leopold actually personally owned the land he exploited.  The ‘explorer’ Henry Stanley was one of the factotums and constructors of Leopold’s brutal colonial regime, which lasted from 1884 to 1908 and killed millions.  Prior to Leopold the area was a hunting ground for European and Arab slavers, aided by local chiefs.  The Congo is rich in natural resources to this day, and is fed by a huge network of rivers that flow to the ocean, providing a means of transport for ivory, rubber, timber, palm oil and now coltan, cobalt, uranium, diamonds and other rare earths.  The pattern set by Leopold continues, as the present capitalist Congo is affected by war and war lords, debt and virtual labor slavery, corruption and exploitation of natural resources even under its own 'independent' government. 

THE HCB

Back to Lord Leverhulme.  As a British capitalist, his company Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) got a concession from the Belgian Colonial office to use 750,000 Congolese hectares for palm oil production and harvesting, which is about 2.5 acres per hectare, or about 1.875 million acres. Belgium was the colonial ruler at the time, with the colonial government in Kinshasa. Surveyors could never actually measure the land blocks conceded and didn’t really want to as it would give ‘legal’ status to local land claims. What is interesting about the colonial situation in the Congo is that it mirrored what had already happened in Britain in several ways with the advent of capitalism:  1) the famous private enclosure of the common land; 2) forbidding tribal people from using the forests; 3) forcing them into grueling and badly paid labor in palm oil mills and groves; 4) the state playing a role in enforcing all this.  

One note on the author.  Marchal is not a full-throated anti-colonialist, as he several times makes the remark that if the pay had been better, and the conditions better, forced labor would not have been needed.  He praises the next-door operations of the British palm oil industry in Nigeria, which avoided many of the criminal practices of the Belgian Congo.  Nor is there a mention of deforestation, which is the result of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia.  (China is now the biggest importer of palm oil.  Try not to buy products with palm oil, which is ubiquitous in U.S. products too, as deforestation is the result.)  The biggest missing facts in the book are those of HCB profit rates, share price rises, exploitation rates, executive pay, Lever’s own wealth and other financial details.  This would show what kind of money was being made out of colonial exploitation. After all, this was not just a function of cruelty or racism, there was a basic money motive underlying the whole operation.

Climbing for palm nuts

This book is so detailed in references, names and geography as to be almost unreadable except as source material for a diligent researcher or someone with vast knowledge of the Congo, which I am not.  So I’m going to highlight some key points, a summary so to speak, which might miss the wholesale cruelty of the whole operation, the forest for the trees:

      1.    Local chiefs were paid or bribed to provide or coerce labor from their villages.

      2.   The Belgian Colonial government in the Congo and back in Brussels flip-flopped over how to treat the indigenous people, but always backed HCB and others in the end.  They ignored 4 key critical reports and the ‘laws’ in place.

      3.   HCB wanted a monopoly on palm nut procurement, so edged out Portuguese traders in Bumba who were buying directly from locals.  They also forbade locals from selling palm nuts themselves.

4.   Lever tried to paint himself as a philanthropist and good capitalist, talking about eliminating sleeping sickness, encouraging Catholic missions, healthcare and building brick huts in ‘model villages.’  All this was P.R. and humanitarian-washing.

5.   The wages paid in the Congo were the lowest in Africa according to Marchal.  With the consistent devaluation of the Belgian franc, the tiny wages of around 25 centimes a day or the piece rates for crates of nuts remained the same, losing value every year.

6.   HCB built villages along the rivers near their factories and groves, which were mostly crowded grass huts.  HCB wanted to force villagers to leave their original homes in the ‘chefferies’ and settle in new places near the palm groves, thus displacing thousands, separating families and emptying villages.  This displacement led to a huge drop in babies born.  These new villages were on HCB land and not owned by the people themselves.  It was a company ‘town’ situation, so villagers were dispossessed from their land again.

7.   Cutting palm fruit involves shimmying up a tall palm using a rope around your waist to a thicker back rest, with your feet on the trunk.  Dangerous and difficult to whip the rope up, then walk upwards.  I’ve tried to do this once in trying out for a city park board job and couldn’t get more than a few feet up the trunk! 

8.   The mortality rates were in the 9-10% range.  Healthcare was rudimentary to non-existent, in spite of exaggerated claims.  Recruits were not given blankets or adequate clothes.  Sick people sometimes fled the camps so accurate mortality numbers were difficult to acquire.

9.   Payments of food in kind were sporadic.  Hunger was endemic in the labor camps.

10.       Women and children were used as sorters and porters, many unpaid.  This was part of the forced ‘proletarianization’ of the Congolese.

11.       Legally workers signed contracts for 3 months up to 3 years, committing them to harvesting ‘X’ amount of palm nuts per month or working in a nut-crushing mill.  If they reneged on the contract by not showing up or picking less, they were put in jail for months and whipped with a ‘chicotte,’ a razor-sharp whip made of hippopotamus hide, the same weapon used by Portuguese slavers.

12.       A rebellion of the Penda people broke out in 1931, which was ‘cured’ by a massacre using machine-guns. An HCB employee had raped a village woman and stolen items, but this was only a last straw.  This set off a ‘religious’ rebellion called ‘satana’ opposing all Europeans, their jobs, their money, their religion. their taxes.  A similar rebellion was based on the lukusu sect who refused to work for the Europeans, pay taxes or fix roads.  The locals had bows and arrows, with few having guns. 550 died in the Penda rebellion. Oddly they did not use guerilla warfare, only frontal assaults.  A pity.

13.       Africans were expected to pay a head-tax to the Belgian colonial authorities.  At one point almost 50% stopped paying.  It is unclear what the Africans got in return for their tax payments, but it looks like almost nothing.

14.        The local state authorities vacillated between backing HCB ‘recruiting’ drives for labor and not doing so.  But they usually sent local government representatives with HCB recruiters, which implied military support for HCB to the unwilling villagers.

15.       When ‘recruiters’ showed up, some whole villages ran into the forest to hide.  Desertion from fruit cutting and HCB work was high even after being impressed.

16.        HCB later required locals to plant palm oil trees and work the plots for the firm, though allowing the farmers to grow vegetables between the palms for their own use.  This was pictured as an ‘educational’ act.  This form of share-cropping was permitted by the colonial government but never took off in a big way due to its coercive nature.

17.        HCB was not the only firm allowed to plunder the Congo, with some Portuguese ones like the Compagnie du Kasai (CK) also involved.  The CK was if anything even worse than the HCB, but smaller.

18.       The ‘rent’ paid by HCB to Belgium for their land was minuscule, a few centimes a hectare, sort of like U.S. grazing fees to millionaire cattle barons or fees for logging companies and mining concerns.

19.        One of the most desperate tribes, the Luba, provided many laborers and were later attacked in 1959-1961 by other tribes. 

20.       The HCB cried bankruptcy when the government suggested they treat the workers better.

21.       The legal basis for the concession throughout its life was a ‘tripartite agreement’ consisting of A) The company could choose the land it wanted in each ‘territoire’; B) the State would manage the blocks of land under joint ownership with ‘native communities,’ with control by the Colony; C) the HCB had exclusive right to the palm fruit in these land areas. Re B, no one actually consulted the Africans.

22.       The piece rates for fruit were not adjusted for seasons all the time, which made it almost impossible to meet goals during those periods.

23.       Catholic missions supported the goals of the Belgian colonists, though some priests were critical of the treatment of the Congolese. 

24.       The State became a major shareholder in the companies doing business in the Congo, including HCB and CK.  So they had a financial interest in the profit-rate too.

25.       During World War II, with Belgium’s occupation by the Third Reich, the colonial Congo administration made a deal with Britain to supply palm oil and increased demands on impressed workers for even more production.

This book, because of its obsessive detail, is an eye-opener.  For any study of colonialism on the African continent, it is essential.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Not a Nation of Immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “The Red Deal,” “Land Grabbing,” “The Convert,” “Guns, Germans and Steel” (Diamond); “Silence,” “The Jester and the Sages,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Blood and Earth,” “Slave States,” “Siege of Jadotville,” “The Dream of the Celt” (MV Llosa); “Secrets of the American Empire” (Perkins); “Black Panther” or the words ‘colonialism, slavery, Congo or Africa.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 12, 2024

Cultured Marxism

 Culture, the Left and the Working Class

Nearly every Bolshevik, from Lenin on down, along with the Social-Democrats of Germany, from Bebel on down, along with most other Marxists, from Mao and Gramsci on down, uphold culture as a necessary gain for the proletariat and farmers.  And that includes ‘high’ culture and the work of bourgeois periods, at least for most leading theorists and leaders.  Lukács was famous for his support of the tradition of realistic novels from England, France, Russia and elsewhere.  Lenin, like every other Russian Marxist, read and mostly promoted the great novels produced by the Russian intelligentsia. The USSR to the very end did not just highlight folk traditions – as did many other workers’ states – but also ballet, painting, classical music, opera, sculpture, literature, experimental film and the like.

Wish It Were True!

Take a look at the U.S. Left.  Given its weak political and organizational position, there is not much to look at, but there are bits.  Most leftists who read, read non-fiction. If they listen to music, it is protest music or stuff they heard years ago.  A weird ex-CP sect, the Party of Communists USA, has robbed the title of the old CP culture magazine, the “New Masses.” This new one has almost no culture in it and when it does, it’s a reprint from the past.  Occasionally a ‘progressive’ movie will be reviewed in a Left newspaper, usually from a somewhat liberal perspective, which figures.  In journals like Monthly Review the review might be more searching, but usually never gets written anyway, and when it does, its clumsy.  Union newspapers are the same.  Cultural influences are confined to what Leftists remember from their 20-something youth.  The Left reflects the U.S. in microcosm.  

Yet proletarians and farmers in the U.S. are immersed in cultural propaganda constantly. Many don’t bother about some kinds.  Few go to museums, to plays, to art exhibits or to many concerts where ‘high’ culture might lurk.  Some never even go to a movie theater and don’t watch streaming.  If they do watch a movie, it is a romance or a super-hero slog.  Travelers flow by cultural, historical or political sites to concentrate on a beach, hotel room or a meal. This even extends to food. Visiting a Moroccan restaurant on a work trip, they find the hamburger on the menu.    

Bars are about the only space left to regularly hear roots music or forms of popular music.  Some white collar women are the most enthusiastic members of book groups, but there it is.  I’ve gone into homes where there is not one picture on the walls.  Others with no book shelf.  Some with no music. Sports fill the empty cultural space for many. Money and time are issues, but they only partly hinder cultural understanding and breadth.  Anecdotally, the more conservative a person is, the less likely they will be to engage in culture on many levels.  Parochialism and lack of sophistication are rampant here, which connects to a familiar topic – anti-intellectualism in the U.S.  This slides into opposing scientific understandings and mates with fundamentalist religion and right-wing politics.  

EDUMACATION

This extends to opposition to university education as a principal, an idea closely held by the Republican Party. This is behind their plan to eliminate the Department of Education. The enormous rise in tuition and banning of affirmative action is also part of this, barring ‘the unwashed’ from college and even trade schools.  Turning schools into direct training centers for corporations is really the goal, which explains the growing hostility to ‘the liberal arts,’ libraries and books as part of the anti-culture war.  Of course capital has a ‘culture industry’ on the internet, in Hollywood, in gaming and the rest, so I wonder where these workers will come from.  Evidently that will be the next target. It also relates to factory discipline in elementary, junior and senior high schools, along with privatization through for-profit charter schools and private education vouchers.

Literacy and reading are highest in college towns across the U.S., something hated by the new Know-Nothings.  Yet going to college is no guarantee of ‘intellectualism.’  If you’ve gone on Youtube for interviews of college students about who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, you’ll see basic thinking and knowledge is sometimes lacking even in this environment.  Most higher degrees – Ph.Ds, MBAs and JDs - create specialists in labor disciplines like medicine, law, engineering, education, business, finance, science or architecture, which is their necessary intention.  A BA might qualify one for most white-collar cube positions.  An MA is required of teachers now, but that does not necessarily mean teachers are a leading strata of philosophic depth, although in many situations they are more acquainted with logic, reason, science and research than the average BA.  Techies have been known to bypass all this, but that is increasingly rare.

Certainly there is a class element to this, as if being ‘truly’ proletarian means not thinking too much, and not believing anything an expert says … even though everything involves thinking, trial and error and cultural understandings.  “Unskilled” work can require many skills and much knowledge, including physical skills.  It’s actually insulting to denigrate workers like this, as if being unknowing is part of a class inheritance.  In that vein right-wingers like Sarah Palin claimed education was ‘elitist,’ and so do her MAGA co-thinkers.  Capitalist bloodsuckers also want workers to be only as skilled as a job demands and no more.  Workerist Leftists agree with this nonsense to this day, donning their baseball hat and joining the company softball league even when they don’t play softball.  Some think playing dumb is attractive and means the revolution is that much nearer.  It’s not.

Is there such a class called ‘intellectuals’ now?  I do not think so, as most highly-educated people are found in the professional strata of the middle class a.k.a. petit-bourgeoisie.  They earn their livelihood mostly by labor, but can acquire property and real estate, start businesses, own large amounts of securities on the markets and otherwise use their earnings to become small owners too.  They are certainly the aristocracy of ‘labor’ at the very least. Even public intellectuals are usually tied to academe. Artists are another part of this strata, who if successful earn their livings by marketing themselves as actors, singers, composers, painters and musicians through ‘intellectual property.’  However most can never quit their ‘day job’ and remain somewhat proletarianized, as can happen to all ‘educated’ people.  Adjuncts and some lawyers are notorious for low salaries for instance.  Musicians, even middle-level ones, rarely make any money.   In the U.S. state support for the arts is falling, as are foundation grants.  Corporations really control who rises in many art fields.

LITERACY of Several Kinds

Every workers’ state from the USSR on up prioritized literacy, which opens the door to everything in society, including culture.  However the 2024 English literacy standards in the U.S. stand at about 21% for what is called ‘low literacy.’  The South, per normal, is the area of lowest literacy, though some of this is impacted by recent immigration. Low literacy by ethnicity, not by class, according to World Population Review is: 

“35% are White, 2% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 23% are Black, 3% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 34% are Hispanic, 24% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 8% are of other ethnicities. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34% of the U.S. population with low literacy skills.” 

So two-thirds of those with low literacy are not immigrants and are mostly ‘white.’  The state with the most literacy is New Hampshire with northern and mountain states filling the rest of the top 10.  Minnesota, this state, is #5.  In 2015 Time Magazine identified Minneapolis as the most literate city in the U.S. This has probably changed but it does help that May Day Books is located here.

Without financial literacy as a worker you can be duped by your employer, salesman or landlord.  Without legal literacy you can be bollixed by legal fine print or word meanings.  Without medical literacy you can be fooled into bad treatments.  Without advertising, social media and journalism literacy you are at the mercy of nonsense, lies, baseless conspiracies and half-truths.  And then there is political illiteracy... 

There is also cultural illiteracy, a-literacy and low literacy, which is perhaps what I’m talking about here.  Marxists have combated this too. Part of becoming a ‘ruling class’ is for the proletariat to have a broad range of skills, understandings and knowledge. We have to beat them at their own game across the board - or plan on doing so. Marxists have normally upheld the best of prior cultures.  Having a revolution doesn’t do away with culture, it actually should preserve and strengthen it. The contrast between the East GDR and West FRG Germanys was especially clear, with the West being the homeland of the crudest cultural artifacts – porn, cartoons, advertising, bigotry, potboilers and bad TV.  We’re not going to force everyone to attend a Shakespeare play, nor are we going to burn all of Shakespeare’s work - even if we can’t quite understand all his language or the focus on kings anymore.  But the opportunity will be there to attend his plays for more people.  Perhaps the most reactionary parts of past cultures will fade away like the omnipresent religious painting prior to the Renaissance, but something else even more beautiful will – and already has - taken its place. 

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges); “After the Fact,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “May Day Has Books!,” “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “A Marxist Education,” “The Debt Trap,” “Capitalism and Campus” (Roberts); “The Nordic Theory of Everything,” “The Value of Practical Skills.”

The Cultural Marxist / Sept. 9, 2024

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