It's been a very busy day at work and I can take only a short break. I've been trying to write some more about what I want this blog to be, what I think about when I think about literature and the class struggle. But the sentences keep coming out all sort of puffed up and pompous. Which is crazy, and isn't me (crazy though I may be). So I'm trying again.
Sheesh. It's no brilliant new insight to say that under capitalism art is a commodity industry. Everybody knows it. Hell, every week brings a new article decrying the demise of the genteel old-school houses (which may or may not have been any better for working-class or class-conscious writers) and the ascendance of the corporate megamonopoly that is destroying publishing.
But what is rarely if ever acknowledged is how thoroughly all of literary culture--in particular what gets published, what gets marketed, what gets reviewed, who reviews and what the reviews convey--is imbued with bourgeois ideology. It could not be otherwise. As Karl Marx long ago pointed out, the culture of any country is determined by its ruling class. But it does seem to me that bourgeois ideology has a stronger chokehold in this country than anywhere else. I'll no doubt do some ranting about why I think this is so and what I think it means in practice for readers and writers who would like to break free.
For now, for a start, I'll just note the absurd dictum that art and politics are inimical to each other. That in fact there is no such thing as political literature. That if it's political it can't be literature, it can only be cant. Nowhere else would this be taken seriously. In this country it's recited like the lord's prayer. When in fact precisely the opposite is true: all literature is political. All writing takes sides.
I hunger to read, and write, books that take the side of the workers and oppressed. I don't think I'm alone.
