On Proletarian Poetry — KM Cascia
On Proletarian Poetry — KM Cascia
The proletariat, as Marx frequently stressed, is not a philosophical concept or a general category. It is a social class, made up of real people. We take real action at definite historical moments. Such as now, when a few hundred us who write poetry have begun to organize ourselves.
While this is not new, it is noteworthy, given that our predecessors, the proletarian writers of the 1930s, were repressed by capital and its agent, the state. Blacklists and bans, police harassment, show trials, character assassinations, betrayal by “comrades”. They went into exile, they went to prison, died of suicide or drink. Some quietly retired and kept their head down, afraid of losing what little they'd been left.
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie seized total control of the means of literary production. Modes of criticism were built to invalidate the proletarian, elevate the bourgeois. A system of “professionalization” by way of academia was introduced. Those who pass through it are handed off to a publishing industry controlled by corporate capital at its heights, heavily subsidized by the state and private foundations at the bottom. This was intended to make the development of future proletarian literary movements impossible. Literature was to become a mirror in which the ruling class contemplated its own beauty forever, a walled garden full of abstractly beautiful flowers. And so it was.
Then we showed up with a hammer, and a sickle.
No one was more surprised than we were, at first. Each of us had been working in isolation, or with one or two comrades. Connections were made, conversations begun. Rich poets and foundations got called out. New journals and presses got started. Editors were overwhelmed by the amount of poems coming in. We started doing readings. And started to attract notice. So, it seems, now is the time to pause, to lay out some of the ideas behind the poets and the poetry, take a closer look at the who, what and how, remind ourselves of the why and start to talk about where we go from here.
2. We Do Not Live Quietly
The most important thing is to define the word “proletariat”.
This is especially true in the context of US literary (sub)culture. Not only do US writers share the country's general confusion on class, they live in a world made almost entirely of bourgeois class power. We see this when they dismiss us as not “real” writers, when they look down their noses at our ways of publishing, and in how they respond to our critiques. For now, they try to deny us any validity at all. But in time, if we continue to build the kind of movement that's now possible, even a monument to bourgeois ideology like Ilya Kaminsky will be claiming to be proletarian.
There are, in fact, already people with troubling relationships to class power scratching around, looking for a way in. Unopposed, they will take the movement over, destroy it, then retreat back into their class privilege. This will leave the rest of us, the proletariat, worse off than if we'd never met. Our best defense is a clear understanding of the politics, in theory and practice.
The problem starts with a misreading of the theory, which produces a misleading definition of “proletariat” as “those who sell their labor power”. This isn't entirely wrong, but it is incomplete, like defining “sky” as “that which is above one's head”. The sky is above one's head, in most cases. But so are birds and airplanes and trees and buildings and a few astronauts who are above the sky. Of course, there is no real reason to define “sky” so broadly. The bourgeoisie, though, has an obvious reason to muddle the definition of “proletariat”: if we cannot even name ourselves accurately, we cannot organize. And if we cannot organize, we cannot act.
Usually, all it takes to do better than the above partial definition is to read the rest of the paragraph in whatever book. Knowing the dynamics of social class under capital can take us further. And an understanding of the proletariat's historical role provides the rest.
In every text where class is defined, Marx and Engels' definition of “proletarian” goes further than “person who has a job”, adding important things to the concept that can't be tossed aside or overlooked. One is that a proletarian's only economic means is the sale of labor power, which means things like rental income, stock dividends or inheritance place a person in the other class. Another is that use of labor power has to expand capital. This puts people whose wages are paid out of state coffers or other large reserves of inert capital in the other class.
These distinctions are not arbitrary. They follow from Marx's observation that material conditions produce consciousness and they make a clear division between those who have value extracted from them (the proletariat), and those who do the extracting (the bourgeoisie). Those, at the end of the day, are the classes. Haves and have nots; makers and takers. Understanding this makes it possible for the proletariat to organize ourselves independently of, and against, those who live on our labor.
This is a threat to capital, so it counterattacks. It attempts to drive a wedge into the proletariat, pulling some of us up and pushing others down through the use of two tactics.
The first of these tactics is mystification, which serves to muddy the distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Weaponizing status anxiety, individualism and greed, it tries to siphon off a portion of the proletariat and turn it to bourgeois ends in the form of the petty bourgeoisie.
The petty bourgeoisie exists only to defend and serve capital. It consists mainly of proletarian elements who, in exchange for their service, are rewarded by the bourgeoisie with certain small privileges: business ownership, small scale landlordism, participation in the stock market or intellectual careers. They become managers, of both capital and its ideology. They are the consumers of lies like meritocracy, class mobility and the undeserving poor because these seem to justify their possession of what they have. Of course, any and all of these privileges remain revocable at any time. Should their loyalty slip or their management prove ineffective, they find themselves de-classed, pushed back into the proletariat and treated as such, usually to their amusing horror.
In the meantime, they occupy a fake gray area “between” the classes. They discipline and exploit labor for capital, and defend themselves by arguing, against the clear facts, that they do no such thing. So we find the owner of a restaurant who lives on the value extracted from 25 or 30 human beings defending themselves by saying they used to be a bartender. Or an academic who refines and spreads bourgeois ideology, arguing that actually they're proletarian because their parents were construction workers.
When the proletariat begins to organize ourselves successfully, the petty bourgeoisie invariably arrives in the form of opportunists. Citing their credentials (which are nothing but a receipt for the privileges they have from the bourgeoisie) as their qualification, not only do they infiltrate the proletarian movement, they try to take it over. Under the cover of terms like “reasonable” “realistic” “possible” and “fair”, they steer us as far from proletarian goals as possible. Usually this means just leading us around in circles until we lose our momentum and cohesion altogether. At which point the “backwardness” of the proletariat is blamed for the failure.
5. Pedagogy of the Depressed
The second tactic the bourgeoisie uses against us is violence.
For the proletariat, life under capitalism consists almost entirely of violence. Highly varied, it takes on more forms than can be counted. Each of the isms and phobias with their particular targets. So-called “social ills” like drug addiction, alcoholism and houselessness. The predatory nature of the prison and healthcare systems. Finance with its weapons of credit and debt, de-skilling and unemployment. All of these work together, intersecting and interlocking, to break the proletariat as a class, as groups within that class, and as individuals. The result is the creation of what Marx called the lumpen-proletariat, the underclass of people who capital can no longer exploit efficiently, who it discards accordingly. All an individual proletarian has to do to wind up lumpen is live long enough, and millions of us are pushed there long before.
This serves capital in two ways. The lumpen acts an abyss into which proletarians may fall at any time, which has a disciplining effect. And those in the lumpen are often so burdened with surviving or dying that they cannot organize. A heroin addict with an addiction to feed, a person abandoned to mental illness, a houseless person constantly forced to flee harassment and search out food and shelter.
Marx and many of his early interpreters tended to write the lumpen off. They saw it as a politically unviable element, likely to be reactionary if it could be politicized all. Their focus was on the industrial proletariat and those elements of the petty bourgeoisie who could be won over, especially philosophers and cultural workers. However, 20th century Marxist formations like the Black Panther Party found that significant numbers of people who'd been passed over by more traditional parties responded very well to organization and political education. Especially when helped by poverty alleviation programs, they made very able cadre, and their parties were able to do considerably more than would have been possible without them.
There's a restaurant, which is open 5 nights a week. It has 1 boss, and 10 employees, each of whom makes $50 dollars a night. Each night, it feeds 60 customers, each of whom spends $25, plus 5 more people who eat out of the restaurant's garbage because they have no money.
So on a given night, the labor cost is $500, and the money made is $1,500. The boss's take is $1,000 or twice the total earned by the workers altogether, each of whom individually makes 5% of what the boss does. That the workers do all the work it takes to make the restaurant function is obvious. The boss, of course, does nothing. If he's like most restaurant owners, he sits at the bar and drinks. If, at some point, the workers drive the boss away and begin to divide his take equally between them, even if nothing else changes, then each worker takes home $150 a night, triple what they used to make.
But things besides who makes how much would change if the boss was gone. For one thing, absent the boss doling out abuse and giving irrational orders simply because he's the boss, the workers, who because they do the work know how to do it best, could work more efficiently. This saves the restaurant money, which in turn enables the workers to invite the 5 people who have been eating out of the garbage inside for a proper meal, something the boss would have never allowed.
The thing is this: only the workers can do this. The customers cannot take the restaurant over and run it better than the boss, and neither can the people who eat out of the dumpster. If one of the workers decides they should be the new boss, it doesn't work. If they decide they want to drink like the boss used to, it doesn't work. If they decide to go off in 10 different directions and do whatever, or they burn the restaurant down, everyone starves. But if the workers are united, if they have a plan and the group discipline to see it through, then with the restaurant in their hands the situation improves for everyone, a little bit for the customers, a lot for the workers, and a great deal for the former garbage eaters.
Drastically simplified as it is, this example illustrates Marx's theory of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, which can get rid of the boss and bring about a situation in his absence which improves things for everyone.
Only we can do both, but it takes a fight. But, if we don't fight, we die under the heel of capital. If we fight and lose, we die at the hands of capital. But if we fight and win, we free everyone from capital. Those are the stakes. And that’s why it matters that we know who is with us and who is not. We have to know who the enemy is and we can't afford unreliable comrades. But before any of this is possible we have to know who we are and become aware of what we can do. We have to first get to class consciousness and then make the leap to revolutionary consciousness.
This is where proletarian poetry has a potentially decisive role to play.
7. Not Your Uncle Joe's Proles
There is a stereotype, rooted in retrograde Soviet-era culture policy and spread by bourgeois propaganda, that proletarian art must necessarily conform to the tenets of so-called “socialist realism” or otherwise be less than bourgeois art. Less complex, less aesthetic, less interesting. This is classist and false.
Maybe the most basic idea in Marxism is what's known as the Labor Theory of Value. This was something Marx took directly from the early capitalist, aka “classical”, economists before him, specifically Adam Smith and his student David Ricardo. The short version is that economic value can only be produced by human labor. Simple idea, enormous implications, well summed up by the old slogan: labor is entitled to all it creates. Which is, in a word, everything.
So the factories and machines are ours, along with what they make. And so are the cultural equivalent, up to and including those forms and modes that exist only because leisure time and capital accumulations made of our blood and sweat made them possible. Symphonies and cinema. All of it. Even opera. Once it's in our hands, anything we can't use will be destroyed. This goes as much for nuclear missiles as it does for the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, but that in no way equates to a system of reductive aesthetic dogmas in the present.
Such dogmas are kind of workerist tailism, which calls everything the workers are doing good and follows behind, inventing reasons why that is so. Or worse: blames our supposed “simplicity” or “practicality” or even “stupidity” for what is actually an alienation inflicted on us. This is an abdication of the proletarian artist's role: taking a vanguard position, leading by example, educating and helping the masses to an awareness of who we are and what we can do. This can't be done with bureaucrats, cops or aesthetic dogmas, all of which have been tried. The only thing that can do this is struggle by us, led by us in our interests.
The best vehicles for that struggle in the past have been political parties, revolutionary unions, and the social and military formations that grow out of them. We had all those things in the US 100 years ago. What's left after 70 years of reactionary attacks are much reduced in functionality and much too small in membership to be effective at a mass scale.
There is a new class consciousness emerging, however fragile. It's been brought about by the inevitable predations of capitalism and has mostly taken shape in space opened up by the failures of electoral politics. But this is always a limited tool, at best, for proletarian movements, a road taken in the absence of revolutionary consciousness that would lead away from a battlefield chosen by our enemies because the terrain very much favors them.
It is true that the proletarian movement is in the best position we've occupied in decades. It is equally true that our position is yet very weak, little more than a very tentative (re)beginning. Which brings us to the old question: What is to be done?
Spread class consciousness, grow into revolutionary consciousness, write about and through that process, find comrades, build proletarian culture and fight the class enemy.
It doesn't matter where you are in your political development. If capitalism still stands there's more to do. So study, talk and think things through, take action. Then bring that to your poems. The things you write will push you forward in your own development. They'll bring you comrades. They'll make new comrades, giving rise to class consciousness in people who before were merely dissatisfied, or who knew something was wrong but lacked words for their feelings before they heard you say them. There are things poetry cannot do, such as substitute for study, but it can be a vital aid to all we have to do, the spark that can jump across the gaps between concepts and people. And who can know that it might not, in the end, make all the difference?
Our mere existence, at this point, represents a significant defeat for our enemy. So it's time to take the next steps, solidify our position and extend our activities beyond the current circle of comrades. Publishing one another's work, doing readings and articulating our positions are important, and will continue, but we have to do more.
Some comrades are printing broadsides and posters and stickers; a logical next step, especially if distributed as widely, and as publicly, as possible. Organizing ourselves at the local level and taking definite action to bring as many people as possible into contact with what we're doing makes sense. Building on that local structure toward a broader coalition logically follows. Anything else I could say now would be too general to be of use to comrades I haven't met, whose specific political conditions I cannot guess. So I will end with the following propositions:
That where possible we form groups of comrades on the loose model of the John Reed Clubs.
That those groups take specific action where they are to advance the proletarian cause.
That a means of linking these groups for the purposes of coordinating actions and exchanging information be set up.
That we hold a Proletarian Writers Council no later than summer 2021.
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KM Cascia can be found on twitter and they’ve got two books of poetry available in pdf form here.
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