The Revolution will be Appropriated

[Lyanna Stark]

Datepalm,

Don't give up on "Kraken". It's a bit bewildering and slow moving in the middle, but picks up pace at the end.

I totally agree with you on the beret wearing organic tea drinking type of commie revolutionaries as I ran into a LOT of these when I went to University. (In fact, I lived next door to the most infamous lefty place they had there.)

Had something more extremely important to say, but got too many phone calls to remember what I was going to write. :o

[sologdin]

Pirates&communists-Thats sounds AWESOME

not really much of fantasy in the concept--check out this one.

No, the problem is that this draws its sense of cool from being elite. Our heroes, by dint of their leftwingism, are true, thrilling individuals leading passionate and significant lives fighting for the revolution, in direct contrast to all those unenlightened bourgeoisoplebs.

are you suggesting that there is in fact an elitism to being a party cadre, or merely that the narration of these books focuses exclusively on a single set of characters, excluding the mass movement from the narration, producing an apparent elitism thereby?

one criticism that i've made in the past of seven samurai tropes in SFF is that such narration unrealistically grants perspectival access to a more or less continuous stream of world historical events by means of a single set of characters, often from humble shire-roots; i guess we could designate this type of narration to be perspectival elitism. a more egalitarian approach would doubtlessly be to split the narration into many perspectives, which equally doubtless creates some problems for the writer.

[Datepalm]

are you suggesting that there is in fact an elitism to being a party cadre, or merely that the narration of these books focuses exclusively on a single set of characters, excluding the mass movement from the narration, producing an apparent elitism thereby?

Neither, though both might be issues in their own right. I'm annoyed at a phenomenon where to 'spice up' the characterization, the author tosses in a bit of leftwing ideology only slightly more considerately than they might purple eyes, strategically located scars or magic connections to animals. The problem, to my mind, is that the reason leftwing ideology fulfills that purpose the way its written, is because it being used a marker of (elitist) distinction. Our heroes are cool > the brainwashed capitalist masses are boring and conformist > by definition, they are not socialists > they are not cool > Our heroes are > they are better than the masses > To show this, lets make them socialists!

[pat5150]

Socialists are cool!!!???!!! :shocked:

Patrick

[Richard]

Rebels are cool.

For much of the twentieth century, being a socialist got you a membership to that particular club (albeit with an increasingly high membership number, thus inversely decreasing the level of cool involved). Thus Che Guevara on T-shirts, thus Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in movies by Oliver Stone.

Problem is - as soon as socialists start getting into positions of power, their rebel status begins to desert them, and so too does their cool. So often does their political value - the great failing of Leftism being that it is way better as a tool for fighting oppression than it is as a tool for governing. Functional socialism, as you point out, Datepalm, is often actually very dull - one reason why it may not have taken well in the US, where popular culture is more or less terminally addicted to gross sensation. And of course this is also one reason why fiction concerning socialists is most likely to focus on the sexy rebel element of the equation.

But to be fair, Datepalm, the dynamics that are pissing you off in fiction were always massively in evidence in the real world. Soviet Socialism was always built on a bunch of self-serving self-aggrandising hero myths, and the closest the masses got to actual representation was in those blocky comic-book figures so beloved of revolutionary propaganda art - massively muscular steel workers and eternally Earth-motherish wheat-gathering women with all the human affect of Frank Miller's Sin City characters. And you may see that Che T-shirt thing as crass and shallow appropriation in a capitalist context (because it is!), but that's nothing to the songs and general hagiography visited upon the man in Cuba by actual peasants and workers who bought into his myth as well.

btw - thanks for the kind words re Market Forces; nice to know there's somebody out there who likes it.

Also kind of curious to see it classed as proselytising - I'd love someone to tell me what it's proselytising for.

@ Pat btw:

Come November, things might be different in the States, however. . .

….because then - you presumably mean - Congress will be back in the hands of the party that gave America a pointless seven year war in Iraq, a deficit the likes of which the world has never seen, and tax cuts for the rich so shameless that a group of American billionaires formed an action group to give the money back.

And this will help the ordinary man/woman in their daily struggle..........how, exactly?

[pat5150]

W was a clown and his two terms were a disaster for the country. He will likely be remembered as the worst American president in history, and deservedly so.

Obama was supposed to usher in a new era. His campaign set him up at the savior, as a messiah figure, and he did nothing to dispel this image no man could ever hope to live up to. Nearly two years later, with pretty much nothing to show for the current administration, with the country still going down the crapper with a bad economy and rampant unemplyment rate, Obama has accomplished close to nothing. His own Democrats are turning against him, the healthcare reform being a case in point.

This was the administration which was supposed to put the USA back on track. The audacity of hope and change we can believe in and all that shit.

I'm not sure the Democrats will lose the Senate, though Obama supporting the Ground Zero Mosque project might hurt them more than they ever thought, but the House of Representatives is pretty much lost. Losing one or the other or both will rendre Obama's administration obsolete, pretty much like the first Clinton administration, turning Obama into little more than the chief of diplomacy.

Is this is a good or a bad thing? Only time will tell. . . But the soft-Left had its chance (Obama is not a southern Democrat like Clinton was) and it has nothing to show for it. That the American citizens are angry and feel cheated is quite understandable. The cocktail party intellectuals might beg to differ, but the sad truth is that Obama hasn't done shit for the people who have voted for him.

Which is why the Democrats are now in the position they are in. Is there time to salvage the situation? I doubt it. But politics is always full of unexpected twists and turns, so you never know. . .:)

It will be an interesting fall political campaign, to say the least. If Obama doesn't find yet another way to shoot his party in the foot and basically hand the election to the Republicans on a silver platter, that is.

Patrick

[Datepalm]

Rebels are cool.

Which is a fine and reasonable storytelling convention. I will gladly read any amount of rag tag exiled space smugglers and freedom fighting elf pirates or whatever anyone can come up with, so long as they keep the politics fictional. Once they start getting real, I demand some respect to what they're using, or at the very least consistency. Though I acknowledge this may be an unreasonable demand, i'm free to complain, right?

Soviet Socialism was always built on a bunch of self-serving self-aggrandising hero myths,

...

the songs and general hagiography visited upon the man in Cuba by actual peasants and workers who bought into his myth as well.

Well, personality cults were never exactly socialisms finest moments, and despite the ocasional ironic CCCP shirt spotted lately in the mean streets of south Tel Aviv, I don't think those aspects of 20th century history have much sex appeal right now. To the point, they're not what writers are drawing upon when they use socialism as a trope.

I certainly agree that theres nothing there to be proud of and contemporary SF books are not exactly whats going to eternally sully the otherwise pristinely good name of the history of socialism, but like I said at some point upthread, I don't think they're conciously staking out some kind of vanguardist political position (that I can sort of respect) - rather, they're taking an essentialy capitalist position, where ideology is a perfectly neutral personal choice to be preformed/consumed as a component of self fulfilling individialization, rather than a moral duty of social responsibilty or silly nonsense like that.

(I don't think this is some new "oh, kids today" thing though - I'm pretty certain people were waving red flags to annoy their parents in 1910 as well, but that dosen't say much about the actual ideology. )

btw - thanks for the kind words re Market Forces; nice to know there's somebody out there who likes it.

Also kind of curious to see it classed as proselytising - I'd love someone to tell me what it's proselytising for.

If it helps, I loved it. It was one of those books I read while walking down the street, banging into things, becuase I couldn't put it down.

I don't know if proselytising is the right word, but in my reading at least it was extremely effective illustration of various socialist principles. A guy has a job thats destroying his life - health, marriage, happiness, personal morality - but is incapable of quitting it becuase his self worth - money, status - is too strongly tied to it. ie, people internalize stuff society tells them and then freely act on it to their own detriment: its like false conciousness in a nutshell. :dunno:

[Richard]

@ Pat

Ah - right.

I agree with most of what you say about Obama. But I do think he was faced with a pretty impossible task set - fix everything, really fast, without upsetting anyone - and most of the same cultural blocks that made it so easy for W's administration to plunder the country the way they did. He's been like a late and very half-hearted dose of chemo for a nation with virulent recurrent leukaemia - all it's done is make the patient feel even sicker, for very questionable long term benefit.

But on the other hand, I look at the Tea party guys, I look at the Palin camp, at Fox TV, Beck, Limbaugh, all the usual suspects - and I wonder what would have happened if Obama had really tried to reform healthcare, say on a European model. And I'm talking grassy knolls and Smedley Butler here, not just plummeting approval ratings.....

I think the real value of electing Obama is pretty much all in the long term cultural box - apart from the fact that anything, the Cthulu/Satanic Alliance included, would have been better than the alternative. And for Americans to swing right again now looks to me like the act of a man who's bought a dog that won't heel particularly well - and so trades it in at the pet shop for a man-eating tiger......

[Richard]

@ Datepalm

......where ideology is a perfectly neutral personal choice to be preformed/consumed as a component of self fulfilling individialization, rather than a moral duty of social responsibilty or silly nonsense like that.

Hmm - the problem is that's probably a pretty accurate description of ideology in biochemical and anthropological terms. Science has spiked us here - as we learn more about what makes us tick, both socially and genetically, the awful truth that's starting to emerge is that all our impulses, even those we see as noble and socially valuable, are actually governed by a pretty mucky set of survivability dynamics. To put it brutally, guys like Guevara get with the revolution because it conflates a status-enhancing (it'll get you laid) strategy with a mammalian young-rearing impulse of empathy for the weak. That decision is an individualising one, for all that its impact may end up being felt on a broader scale. And eventually of course, if enough of these individualising acts align, you have a Movement, a Party, a Revolution.

The feminists nailed this one early - the personal is the political. A personal act is the same as a political act, it's just done (or perceived) on a different scale. And we are all victims of impulses we know very little about, and even less about how to control. Which is why revolutions almost invariably go bad.

Wherefore, my read on the fictional end of all this is that writers who write "cool" Socialist characters are only duplicating (albeit perhaps unwittingly, albeit despite - Mieville? - their own convictions) an unfortunate and unpalatable human truth about what really drives ideological struggle.......

Regarding MF:

it was extremely effective illustration of various socialist principles

.

Well, I'll take the extremely effective twice before meals and once before bed for my ego - thank you.

But my sense of it (and I'm as much an unwitting victim of my own drives as anybody else, so that's not definitive) is that what MF really did was (as with so much Leftist thought) provide an effective human critique of the self-serving and incoherent obscenity that is neo-liberal political thought. But (also as with so much Leftist thought), the book didn't offer much in the way of useful political principles or solutions, except to say let's not do this, let's not go down this road... That's because I think that lasting political solutions can only be found at the personal level. If you lose Chris as an individual (as Carla does), then you've also lost any hope of a world that isn't run by men like the one he ultimately becomes. For a real world example, reference my comments to Pat above, you can't force free universal healthcare on America until you've convinced enough individual Americans that it's a good idea. And that may well take as long as it's taken the Civil Rights movement to put a black man in the White House. Very slow, very wearying, very unattractive to hot-headed young men (and, sometimes, women). And you certainly couldn't write a dynamic novel around it. You wouldn't get on a T-shirt doing it.

its like false conciousness in a nutshell

.

In the end, I don't much like the term false consciousness. That's at least partly because most of the mouths I've watched it come out of have belonged to people I really wanted to punch (ungoverned impulses, see!). But more coherently, it's because it implies the existence of a true consciousness which just happens to be a perfect fit for the ideology the speaker in question is trying to sell you. It's a short circuit designed to help that person ignore inconvenient human opposition to the principles they espouse. The only true consciousness I think you can really make any case for is a purely scientific, purely material view of existence, and - assuming it's actually possible for a human being to hold such a view in their head for more than a couple of a minutes at a time - that consciousness is such a chilly and terrifying thing that most of us (myself included) would run screaming from it if we ever had to face it.

But actually, there's a more immediate problem here, which I like to think MF tries to address; to wit, that there actually isn't anything very false about Chris's consciousness. I mean, by the end of the book, he has power, wealth, immunity from the law, desirable sexual partners, respect from surrounding males, a job he's alarmingly good at and - last but not least - a real kick-ass car. So what's not to like? For most young males (and probably most of the older ones too), that's pretty much every box on the wish-list ticked. And this is the heart of the book's critique - not that capitalism foists a false consciousness on its citizens, but actually that it delivers for sufficient of them (especially the males among us) and in a sufficiently supercharged fashion that it is lethally seductive. Those who do well out of it can't help but love it. Those who don't can still dream that they'll become the ones who do one day. In other words, it's a very good fit for the human psyche. And it will take a judo lock a lot smarter and more complex than anything Erik Nyquist can come up with to defeat that dynamic......

[Happy Ent]

Thanks for starting this thread, Datepalm. I still don’t quite get the core of your rant, but it’s been an entertaining thread so far.

I’m sorry to hear bad words about Kraken. Reading Mieville normally allows me so update my personal self-image as a suave lefty, and thinking of cephalopods make me obsessively reload MZ Myer’s knee-jerk atheist Pharyngula blog. The premise is so full of win, and I was really looking forward to reading it. (I still will.) I’ll put Market Forces on the pile, since there are already two people on this thread who actually liked it—I found the understanding of these concepts expressed by some characters in Steel Remains inappropriate, but maybe they work in another context.

I found Iron Council very impressive, especially how it handled the faux-socialist community. In particular, it did acknowledge all the frustration, boredom, futility, and betrayal that Datepalm solicits in her opening post. I never really liked IC (I think it has other problem), but that part was handled well.

If you want a book that may really annoy you, try Hal Duncan’s Vellum. I forget his name, but there’s an Oirish rebel in there who makes V look like Doran Martell or Tintin.

—

But why are no other recognisable political subgroups visible in SFF? Where are vegan Earth-worshipping tree-huggers? (Not that I mind…) The white-shirted, neat young conservative proto-fascists? (They make a very brief appearance in Iron Council, if I remember correctly—breaking up some theatre performance?) Where is the identity-politics, victimised, Dark Elf Power movement? Or am I just reading the wrong books?

[Datepalm]

In other words, it's a very good fit for the human psyche.

OTOH, correct me if i'm wrong, I didn't think Chris' was a story of a victory - Its not exactly a happy ending. Chris gets everything he wants, maybe he's even happy, but looking at him from outside its hard to cheer him on and think 'yay, me next!'. I take the point that from a cold evolutionary perspective all that totally rocks, but in practice I think blaming science is a bit reductionist, since no matter how many underlying causes for maximizing breeding potential we can explain every behaviour with, on a day to day basis, in terms of our personal perspective we do make choices, change behaviours, show empathy, give up things, feel a sense of wrong and right, display responsibility, (act on whims, be stupid, go astray) etc. Even evolutionarily, we're extremely social, so I don't see any reason to be cynical about this stuff.

I see the issue with 'false conciousness' - to be honest, i'm translating from a hebrew term and this is the english term that comes closest, but the original dosen't have connotations of a 'correct' conciousness, so no argument from me there. I just mean the way enviorment influences peoples desires and ambitions, and hence course of action. The shallowest example is usually advertising. "The American Dream" might be a more subtle expression.

The point is, its inescapable - no matter how strong an individual you are, the life you live does change you, and not in neutral, random ways. Working a job that demands violence and callousness will make you a violent, callous person and you will behave that way. Chris can't go around murdering people at work and then come home and turn that off and still be the guy Carla fell in love with.

Which is where the books punch is, imo - the way Chris changes, which might be an example of a wider social process, blah, etc, but is really his tragedy: The political is also personal. Which is the points - if this stuff didn't lead to personal tragedy, we wouldn't need to change it - which is what a social movement needs to remember: that the only reason the we're acting is becuase the 'opressed faceless consumerist mass' * is made up of individuals, and to get way way back to my original point, the flattening of the mass required to raise 'the rebels' above it, is therefore antithetical to (my) socialism.

So the point of the revolution is to acknowledge that, not to try and strip everything away to find the 'real conciousness' (or, in right wing speak - FREEEEEEEDOM!!!!), which dosen't exist. Humans without a social enviorment are shambling animals without fur that suck at hunting, and I don't think anyone wants that. We need to acknowledge that and manage to create a society that isn't essentially destroying the lives of most people for the power of a few, thats all. (Any day now.)

*We're all part of the mass, of course. I can blather on about praxis all I like, but in practice I have an alienated workplace and relashionships ruled by money and subsume my interests for what I think will be competetive in the workplace, etc. And it has, is and will further change me as a person. Yes, activism is selfish: it gives me, now and then, a different enviorment and allows me to have a conciousness that dosen't make me narrower and more miserable.

[Lupigis]

I’m sorry to hear bad words about Kraken.

SNIP

I found Iron Council very impressive, especially how it handled the faux-socialist community.

I note that you don't mention The City and the City. Have you read it? If not, do! I'm not sure it fits terribly well in this thread, because it's not really a book about revolution, but it's certainly a very good book about oppression (using a broad definition of that term).

[Datepalm]

Where is the identity-politics, victimised, Dark Elf Power movement?

Jon Snow

:leaving:

My favorite IC bit is when the kid with the rebels in the city finds out what was actually driving the rebellion, which I thought was a really smart insight into motivation and purpose and the very precarious moral line anyone has to walk to have the ability to actually get up and trust their own actions that they know How It Should Be. (Even more relevant for teachers than for communists, IMO.)

I read Vellum...and have forgotten it. Um. Wasn't he Scottish though? Are there no communists in England, for heavens sake?

[Happy Ent]

I note that you don't mention The City and the City. Have you read it? If not, do!

OK, on the pile as well, then. (Too much to read now.)

I read Vellum...and have forgotten it. Um. Wasn't he Scottish though? Are there no communists in England, for heavens sake?

I have forgotten Vellum as well. Anytime a memory bubbles up, I chastise myself by indulging in form-over-substance until I vomit. That includes listening to Tony Blair speeches, reading Cosmo and pomo philosophers, and redecorating the house in Arts and Crafts wallpaper. (How could William Morris be both as socialist thinker and designer of nice textile patterns?)

But yeah, maybe he was Scottish. ’e did ’ave some koind of accent, though.

[Galactus]

Tigana had a identity politics, no?

[williamjm]

But why are no other recognisable political subgroups visible in SFF? Where are vegan Earth-worshipping tree-huggers? (Not that I mind…) The white-shirted, neat young conservative proto-fascists? (They make a very brief appearance in Iron Council, if I remember correctly—breaking up some theatre performance?) Where is the identity-politics, victimised, Dark Elf Power movement? Or am I just reading the wrong books?

Ken Macleod does have a wide range of different political subgroups in his various novels. He is fond of including assorted socialists/communists, but almost as fond of libertarians and some of his books do feature significant groups of fanatical environmentalists or religious fundamentalists.

[Happy Ent]

Ken Macleod [...]

I thought he did singularity stuff? I once had an ambitious plan to read up on technological singularity SF, because there is a certain intersection with what I do professionally. (Im a computer scientist.) I made it a few chapters into Stross and gave up. SF is not for me.

[Richard]

@ Datepalm

correct me if i'm wrong, I didn't think Chris' was a story of a victory

No, you're absolutely right - it's a deliberate tragedy, with a careful-what-you-wish-for ending. But the point is that it can be seen as a victory if you're a sufficiently assholic American Business Model neoliberal male (or - let's be fair - an honorary female member of that same subset). The kind of world the book envisages (which is IMHO about an inch off the world we're actually living in) would consider Chris's outcome a victory - and of course therein lies the problem. The finer traits of humanity that get crucified in this context simply aren't valued highly enough by nearly enough people.

to get way way back to my original point, the flattening of the mass required to raise 'the rebels' above it, is therefore antithetical to (my) socialism.

To which I'll cheerfully raise a glass. But, to get back to my original rejoinder, the biological human realities are always going to defeat you here. Genetic hard-wiring will ensure that this flattening-and-raising process always takes place - in the real world, and then in fiction as its mirror. We (humans) like leaders; we like having charismatic figures to tell us what to do; we like to put a stern-eyed (and frequently bearded) countenance on the face of our struggles towards ultimately rather abstract models of justice. Revolutionary movements are as addicted to this as religions or vapid affluent pop cultures - in biological/anthropological terms, the difference between Guevara, Bin Laden, Christ and Shakira/Madonna/Lady Gaga/Princess Diana is negligible. You can of course work consciously against this - education, redistribution of wealth, egalitarian systems of law and governance etc - and maybe even partway defeat it sometimes - but only in the same way that shaving "defeats" facial hair or aircraft 'defeat" gravity.

[williamjm]

I thought he did singularity stuff? I once had an ambitious plan to read up on technological singularity SF, because there is a certain intersection with what I do professionally. (Im a computer scientist.) I made it a few chapters into Stross and gave up. SF is not for me.

His early books did often feature Singularity as one of the main plot devices. He seems to have got bored of it in recent years, since it hasn't been mentioned in his last few books (as far as I can remember).

When I read Stross' Singularity Sky I did feel it was a bit like a Ken Macleod novel, except not as well written. There is definitely a similarity, Stross even appears as a cameo in Macleod's Cosmonaut Keep, but I'd say Macleod's a better writer of Science Fiction (admittedly, I haven't read all of Stross' books so he might have improved).

[slim da reaper]

....the biological human realities are always going to defeat you here. Genetic hard-wiring will ensure that this flattening-and-raising process always takes place - in the real world, and then in fiction as its mirror. We (humans) like leaders; we like having charismatic figures to tell us what to do; we like to put a stern-eyed (and frequently bearded) countenance on the face of our struggles towards ultimately rather abstract models of justice. Revolutionary movements are as addicted to this as religions or vapid affluent pop cultures - in biological/anthropological terms, the difference between Guevara, Bin Laden, Christ and Shakira/Madonna/Lady Gaga/Princess Diana is negligible. You can of course work consciously against this - education, redistribution of wealth, egalitarian systems of law and governance etc - and maybe even partway defeat it sometimes - but only in the same way that shaving "defeats" facial hair or aircraft 'defeat" gravity.

If you're going to use reductionism to a genetic basis for the reason why we humans hero-worship and vicarious live their lives, then by the same token consciously working against such can be just as much a genetic drive and a basis. Both influences are equally true, they work in differing flavours and strengths amongst individuals.

We are all homo sapiens, but we are also new branches in the evolutionary tree, any talk of ordinary people, living ordinary lives is conservative.

Yep we can have people who try to break from a mainstream they think exists, but because they're so narrow minded in thinking there is a mainstream to break from their attempts will be selfcentred until the realisation the mainstream does not exist is acknowledged. Anyone clinging to ideas of a mainstream dies a stagnant death.