Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 19:31:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Marxist Propaganda


On Tue, 4 Jul 2000 zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:

> DOn'f forget too the importance of the surrealists in promoting literature
> as a Marxist-revolutionary method. It is a great irony that the surrealists,
> who loved Marxism so much, were disdained by almost all other Marxists, who
> saw their work as bourgeois, while the surrealists thought their work was
> pro-Marxist and pro-revolution.

Why should this be "a great irony" rather than evidence of diversity in
marxist approaches to literature?  

 Indeed, this was simply a foreshadowing of
> things to come under Marxist governments - who worked to supress modernism
> and especially the avant-gardes in favor of socialist realism,

Why don't Marxist avante gardes get to count as Marxism too?

 which was
> really nothing more than very poor reproductions of romanticism. WHy did
> they prefer outdated romanticism to the new movements in literature?

Because they were using simple images to communicate ideas to
mostly illiterate people much in the same way that medieval art was used
to tell Bible stories and surrealism did not lend itself to that?    

 Because
> literature - and the novel in particular - do something Marxist governments
> cannot stand: they question.

Without knowing exactly what you mean by a "marxist" government, I will
say that  I don't think that "marxist" governments are the only ones which
disapprove of dissent.  

Also, I find it rather romantic to claim that "literature--and the
novel in particular" threaten so called Marxist regimes because "they
question."  All modern nation states have produced plenty of
"literature" no matter who was in power.   Also I cannot think of any
government which did not characterize approved literature as challenging
some status quo and disapproved literature as stagnant, close-minded,
dead. By the way, do you know of a Marxist government which banned the
novel?   

 And Marxists cannot be questioned (I have
> tried, and they all turn militant and close-minded to anything outside their
> ideology, insisting, as all those who have no real arguments to back them
> up, that my inability to understand why they are right is because of my
> bourgeois thinking,

They probably jumped on you for grounding great abstractions like
"literature" in self-evident distinctions between open and closed minds,
right?   They were seeing that as typical of an ideology which arose in
opposition to feudal thought which was preoccupied with the distinction 
between obedient and disobedient minds. 

 or because of bourgeois society or some such garbage -
> never explaining how they were able to get past all that while I have
> not...).

It might be that they read Marx and Marxist literary theory while you have
not.  I don't see any mystery here.


hh
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