CAPITALISM AND ENVIRONMENT

Capitalism and the Environment

Written by Mick Brooks

Monday, 21 August 2006 

Global warming and other environmental issues are always in the news. The Green Party in the UK claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions. This is poppycock. The environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.

Global warming – the ‘population time bomb’ – nuclear energy – pollution – environmental issues are always in the news. There is even a party – the Green Party – that claims to put the environment at the centre of its concerns. The Green Party claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions.

This is poppycock. Environmental issues are vitally important to us inhabitants of the planet earth. But the environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.

Anyone who has read a standard account of the problem of global warming, for instance, will realise that it is possible, apparently through carelessness, to wipe out human life on earth. Hold on, and take a deep breath! Don’t capitalists also live on the planet? Is it in their interests that human life, including not just their profits but even their very existence, should be extinguished?

Of course it’s not in their interests. But things that happen under capitalism don’t just reflect the interests of the individual capitalist. Events follow the logic of the system.

This is how Marxism explains environmental degradation, “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account…What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character.” (Engels – Part played by labour in the transition from ape to man).

We know the Greek islands supported a much bigger population in antiquity than they do know. We know they were once covered in trees that prevented soil erosion. “We have seen how the goats prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece” (Engels op. cit.) The people who cut down the trees and introduced grazing animals were not stupid. They cut the trees down to make ships or just burned them to clear the land. They introduced goats because that was an easier way to make a living on their thin soils than ploughing the land. Short-term ‘rational’ decisions produced environmental disaster in the longer term.

We have seen that environmental degradation is not confined to capitalism. Marx explained why. In a letter to Engels discussing a book by Fraas, he observes, “The whole conclusion is that cultivation … when it progresses in a primitive way and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois of course he does not arrive at this) leaves deserts behind it – Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. Here again another socialist tendency!” (Marx letter to Engels 25th March 1868) The problem is that there is no planning on and no concern for environmental issues in an unplanned economy. The difference is that now capitalist anarchy produces environmental disaster on a much bigger scale than that of antiquity.

Environmental problems are usually presented as a clash between humans and nature. The greens argue that growth is bad because it always harms the environment, and the basic problem is to stop people from plundering the environment that they ultimately depend upon. Actually growth isn’t always ‘dirty’, it doesn’t always use up more resources. For instance over ten years Japan increased its output by 46%, but used 6% less energy to do so. (Boyd and Ardill – The greenhouse effect, New English Library, 1989)

The greens have actually missed a vital link in the chain of causation. The problem is not people versus the environment as if we are all isolated Robinson Crusoes. People interact with the environment by way of a specific mode of production, the way they organise themselves to get their daily bread. The capitalist mode of production is unplanned. Environmental degradation is quite simply off the balance sheet for the individual capitalist. Yet the sum total of individual ‘rational’ calculations can threaten human life on earth with environmental disaster.

“Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step is conditioned by their physical organisation.” (i.e. the mode of production – MB) “By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.” (Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Collected Works Vol. 5 pp. 31-32) By progressively mastering nature in the labour process rather than passively adapting to it humans can alter nature and therefore harm the earth in doing so. But this is the only home we shall ever have! Economists talk about externalities. Externalities are things that don’t affect the balance sheet and therefore firms don’t worry about. The firm produces iron and steel. It gets paid for these outputs. It also produces smoke. It’s a nuisance, but the firm is not charged, so it doesn’t bother how much smoke it belches out. Who pays? We pay. We pay through lung and chest diseases. The National Health Service pays in treating us, so we pay twice. But the firm doesn’t pay.That is why the idea that the market treats the environment ‘efficiently’ is ridiculous. Firms minimise costs because that is the best way to make money. But they don’t minimise costs that others have to pay – externalities. Why bother? But these are real costs, just like pig iron and coking coal. They are just costs that have to be born by the rest of us.

So what if human life on earth expires in a welter of its own waste products? That would be quite an ‘externality’!

Global warming

Let’s get specific. Probably the biggest danger facing the world today is global warming This is better called climate change since, according to the predictions, not all parts of the globe will become universally warmer. There is a consensus among scientists that climate change is happening. This consensus is overwhelming.

It is true that if you google in “global warming” you may get a contrary impression. Prominent among the hits is www.globalwarming.org, which rubbishes the notion of climate change. It is promoted by the Cooler Heads Coalition and updated by the Competitive Enterprises Institute. We know where they’re coming from! The carbon fuel industries are spending vast sums of money to muddy the water on this issue. They just buy scientists like you might buy a KitKat. And their influence extends to the White House, inhabited by a man who made his fortune from oil and who instructs his understrappers to ignore or falsify the scientific evidence.

Back to the facts. First the earth as a whole is getting warmer. Secondly, this is partly because of human action – we don’t know how much. OK, the earth has always gone through hotter and colder periods (ice ages), but more and more greenhouse gases (the most important of which is CO2 (carbon dioxide) are being pumped out into the upper atmosphere. These operate like a greenhouse or blanket in that they let warmth from the sun in, but then trap it in the atmosphere. So the earth gets hotter. The science is complex. As the critics say, if all the warmth escaped from the earth no life would be possible. But, particularly since the 1980s, the earth has been warming up at a faster rate than ever before. And emissions from us, in the form of burning fossil fuels that give off greenhouse gases, are to blame.

The US National Academy of Sciences has issued a report, ‘Climate change science: an analysis of some key questions’ which concludes, “the changes observed over the last several decades are most likely due to human activities.” The earth as a whole is now warmer than it has been for the past 400,000 years. It is an observable fact that glaciers and polar ice are melting. This has a knock-on effect in that the ‘dark water’ of the ice caps is melted and no longer traps heat. The permafrost on the tundra melts and no longer locks in CO2.

Other human activity makes the situation worse. At present capitalists are gnawing away at the Amazon rain forest, burning it away just like the Spanish planters in Cuba but on a much larger scale. The aim once again is short-term gain in the form of soya crops, logging or cattle ranching. Already some of the denuded land has become exhausted. The Amazon rain forest is home to an estimated half of the world’s species. And biodiversity is a good thing in itself. How many unknown medicinal plants have we already exterminated? On top of that the forest is a ‘sink’, as the trees hold CO2. As they are cut down or burned off that CO2 adds to climate change.

The statistics don’t seem so extreme – an overall increase in temperature of 0.6-7% in the twentieth century. But over half of this increase has happened in the past thirty years and is in part attributable to human activity. Already it has led to droughts, extinctions of species and rising sea levels leading to localised flooding. It’s going to get worse.

Overfishing

“Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa. This fantastical assemblage, like something from a Mad Max movie, would scoop up everything in its way: predators, such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores, such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthog and wild dog. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along, with only the smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh….There are no markets for about a third of the animals they have caught because they don’t taste too good, or because they are simply too small or too squashed. The pile of corpses is dumped on the plain to be consumed by carrion. This efficient but highly unselective way of killing animals is known as trawling.” (Charles Clover – The end of the line: how overfishing is changing the world and what we eat, Ebury Press, 2005).

It shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s happening. When the Grand Banks fishery off Newfoundland was discovered it was said (with just a little exaggeration) that you could walk across the water on the backs of the fish without getting your feet wet. Now the Grand Banks are closed and Atlantic cod is an endangered species. It’s happened to the blue marlin. It’s happening to the bluefish tuna. And dragnets destroy the whole food chain at the bottom of the sea. So the Grand Banks, closed in 1992, have never recovered as a fishery. Overfishing is a prime example of how capitalist greed confronts us with environmental disaster.

Clover is a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, so don’t expect a socialist analysis. But he’s spot on when he tells how European countries subsidise the building of trawlers to make the overfishing worse; how the fishing industry begs for handouts because of the crisis in fish stocks which is of its own making; and how, having raped our own fisheries these trawlers sail to the coast of Africa to repeat the whole sorry business of overfishing. In the process they destroy the livelihood of local fishermen who have fished sustainably off their coasts for generations.

Where do we go from here?

Does the green analysis and programme help us to deal with environmental issues? Though the greens don’t have a unified body of ideas, (some would regard themselves as socialists) two common threads in their propaganda come up over and over:

"There are too many people on the planet."

"There are not enough resources."

These ideas come from a reactionary economist called Thomas Malthus who wrote at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wrote of nature providing us a feast, which was spoiled when too many people turned up to ruin the party. Malthus thought that Britain was overpopulated. At the time he was writing there were probably less than ten million people living in this country. Half of those were engaged in agriculture and related activities. Now the island supports sixty million and less than 5% are needed to grow our food. OK, we don’t actually grow all our own food. But we export manufactured goods and, increasingly, financial and other services to pay for food, and other countries do the reverse as part of an international division of labour. The basic variable Malthus was missing out was productivity. That means the earth can support a growing population of humans over time. Malthus’ ideas were widely discredited with the steady improvement in working class living standards in the second half of the nineteenth century (which his theory suggested was impossible). Productivity rose and, through class struggle, the working class gained some benefit form the increased wealth they were producing.

Malthus’ basic theory on population still gets wheeled out again by doomsayers every so often.

Note what else Malthus was doing. As a representative of the landlord class, he was deliberately ignoring the fact that society is divided into classes and some people get a much bigger share of resources than others. He was blaming the poor for their poverty.

But isn’t it true that resources are finite? Of course it is. But we don’t know what they are. Take the case of oil. It’s not even clear what the reserves owned by the big oil companies are. BP ‘wrote down’ a large chunk of its reserves a while back. In other words it declared that oil, which people thought had been in the ground for the last 300 million years, did not really exist! Did this mean the world’s potential supply of crude had really shrunk? BP shareholders regarded the write down as just financial shenanigans. Certainly share prices were hit. But assessing global resources, whether owned or just lying in the ground waiting to be tapped, is much harder than adding up oil companies’ guesses at reserves. Nobody can agree a figure as to what the world’s resources are.

Here’s the reason. If the price of oil doubles to $77 a barrel (which it is at the time of writing), a whole lot of oil reserves suddenly become economically viable – profitable – to exploit. At half the price (oil was $35 a barrel not so long ago) they are not reserves at all. That’s capitalism for you! For decades scientists have known how to extract oil from bituminous shale. But under capitalism it’s not economic to extract it.

Even if we accept the argument that we are up against limited resources now, what should be our response? Malthus, as an apologist for the rich, cleverly eliminated the inequalities in our society from his analysis. Surely the first thing we should do is to eliminate the luxury spending of the rich, which gobbles up a disproportionate amount of earth’s resources? The second thing we should do is run a worldwide inventory to establish exactly how much we have of all these resources.

Then we should look into producing and adopting alternatives. We need to sit down and think very hard about the alternatives to burning fossil fuels as an energy source. We can’t do this under capitalism, partly because of the vested interests, such as the hydrocarbon capitalist in the White House, that dominate decision-making in most capitalist states. Dominant sections of the capitalist class are actually CO2-burning junkies. The other problem is that wind and wave power and other sustainable energy sources are not taken seriously by capitalists who can’t find a way of making money out of them. Therefore not enough research has been done on their viability. Finally, if absolutely necessary, we should implement a fair system of rationing until the alternatives come on stream.

How can we do this under capitalism? We can’t. The price mechanism praised by economists is essentially reactive. When the price of petrol goes up, people will buy more fuel-efficient cars. But the fact that oil prices have gone up is actually a signal that capitalism has been squandering the earth’s resources. Our action plan on the environment is really a plan for world socialism.

Won’t world capitalism do something about the mess it has created in the meantime? Even the imperialists under siege in Mafeking introduced rationing (communism in consumption) for the duration in order to survive.

They might. But the example of overfishing shows the problems. The capitalist state is captive to capitalist vested interests: the shipbuilding industry and the fishing industry cry out for subsidies. Competition, which involves the weakest going to the wall, is fine in the textbooks, but it’s not for the likes of them. Capitalist countries fight each other more viciously as resources become more difficult to grab. African countries have little muscle against the European Union’s trawling fleet.

Outside the flat-earthers in the White House, there is a consensus that global warming is a big problem – actually the biggest environmental problem the world faces by far. The capitalist powers met at Kyoto and came to an agreement. The USA opted out. But America, with less than 5% of the world’s population, is responsible for a quarter of all carbon emissions. So that makes the Accord pretty much meaningless. But a lot of those countries that agreed to the Kyoto targets to cut the increase in emissions (not cut emissions) have failed to meet them. It is actually quite difficult for a capitalist state to control the activities of tens of thousands of capitalist firms who are responsible for giving off CO2. And everybody agrees that Kyoto will not solve the problem. It is usually described as a ‘first step’, and that first step has never really been taken.

So world socialism really is the only way we can protect the environment, in other words our home, the planet earth

Death of Kishenjee, who had been one of the legend communist fighter, is unfortunate to the proletarians of India, it is highly and hearty tribute to him.

Anna Hazarey and puiblic

I respect to Anna hazarey , I appreciate with  his though, principle, I support his issue that fight against the corruption, to be implement strong Lokpal Bill. It is remeberable thing  to all people that whoever want to corruption free society, should have make clear and free corruption themselves. Wanting changes is good idea, but do we have try to change to ourselves? We the middle class people are always in illegal way, to be occupy slum area, to make home illegally on the roadside, to be park vehicle wherever, throwing wastage on the path, etc.  we do better for only selfness but not for society, we are the enemy for ourselves, whatever going on in India, are not only the resposnsible of leaders and other beurocrasts, we are also little participeint .  Nothing will changes and bring better if we will not change to ourselves, even lokpal bill passed.  This is the way of reform but we need revolution, not in quality but in quantity.

Storm has begun

AN Interview With Arundhati Roy,

This article redirected from frontline revolution, I think this appreciatable.

Arundhati Roy, transcript of Q and A at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 11/9/2011

By Sarahana, Impose Magazine

arundhati roy speaking at CUNY graduate center[Arundhati Roy at CUNY Graduate Center. All photos by Sarahana]

14 years ago, Indian author Arundhati Roy made her debut with The God of Small Things, a novel that won the Booker prize and went on to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide. But the world of fiction was quickly abandoned when she turned to full time activism, churning out fiery political essays, and generally getting into trouble with the Indian government and religious fundamentalists.

Most recently, she spent time with Indian Maoist insurgents — at their invitation — in the jungles from which they operate. The essay she’s brought back has been published as Walking with the Comrades, from which she read a few excerpts at an event hosted at City University of New York’s Graduate Center (despite the center’s further slashed, and quickly depleting, funds).

This is a transcript of the Q&A that followed the reading.

Some redundancies have been removed and friendly titles have been added.

—– TRANSCRIPT OF Q&A —–

(Love Makes Our Battle Ferocious)

Ruth Gilmore (CUNY): Thank you Arundhati for that amazing reading and the thoughts that you brought to my mind and all of our minds as you described this war against the forest people. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot having read some of your work over the years and listening to you read now is how much beauty you put into a story [..?] and I think all the time about how you help people to think about the worst things that are happening in the world so that we can do something about it. And I wonder if you would talk, if you’d be interested in talking, a little bit about the sort of political project and the aesthetic project and finding all of the beauty in moments of the greatest hurt[?].

Arundhati Roy: Well I don’t actively look for it because it’s there. You know if you read the rest of the essay that I read from, actually we spent so much of our time just laughing, you know, inside [the forest], because I always sense that when you’re outside the immediate area of resistance, it’s much easier to feel despair because you have that choice. You can always say, “Okay, doesn’t matter, I won’t study politics, I’ll do interior design” or something whereas people who are in there, they don’t have a choice, you know. Even despair is not a choice because whether you’re a pessimist or whether you’re an optimist, no one is asking you, like you have to fight that battle some way or the other and there’s a sort of clarity there. And a lot of beauty, and a lot of hope.

I think for me it’s not a strategy, the way I write. It’s just the way I write. Or it’s just the way I think. I mean 10, 20, 30 years ago when I began to write about these things, this was at a time when the elite of India was so optimistic about the project of free market and they would say “this woman needs to be sent to have her head examined”, you know, “she’s crazy” and so on. Whether we win or lose or whatever it is, this is the side we’re on. And the truth is if you live in India, or in Kashmir, you will know that there’s so much to be said, there’s so much wilderness, there’s so much imagination that hasn’t been enclosed, and that I think is what makes our battle so ferocious; because there is so much that we love. It’s not that we have to retrieve it, we have it. And it hasn’t been destroyed yet, though the project is on. It hasn’t been destroyed yet. And so I think we only fight if there’s something we love that we have to save, otherwise what’s the point.

(Not the Voice of the Voiceless, Or Any Nonsense Like That)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): One of the things we do at the center  is we have a year-long seminar with faculty fellows and graduate student fellows and coincidentally today we were discussing your work. One of the questions was about audience because I think it surprised many of us reading this work just how little of the state of affairs is actually being discussed within the transnational media conglomerates. And so I guess my question is about whether you see your primary role as bringing these stories, this reporting, as it were, to the world. Or do you see the primary apex of your activism actually within what is extant in the Indian state?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my role in that I think a lot of what I do is not necessarily aimed at trying to persuade people to my point of view or anything. It’s more about… how can I say it. For example, about 2 or 3 months ago, I got a message from the forest. And it said, “Didi, aap ke likhne ke baad, jungle mey khushi ki laher pheilithi,” which means, “After you wrote, a wave of happiness went through the forest.” And for me, that’s why I write, to be part of the resistance because I don’t necessarily see the transnational media or the idea of having to build bridges of solidarity — I did, at one time; I used to say that India’s best export is dissent. But now I feel very much that people really have to fight their own battles. You know, we can’t spend all our energy trying to build transnational solidarities because those are very fragile. If they come, it’s great, but I never… I mean, let’s say when I wrote Walking with the Comrades, a 20,000-word piece, I had no idea who the hell would want to publish it. But you just have to write it. I wrote it, and then it was published in a big magazine, and it really did in some ways change the nature of the discourse because otherwise these were just faceless terrorists and so on.

But I think I always see it as an act of solidarity with the people whose struggle I’m a part of. I never see myself as representing somebody or being the voice of the voiceless or any nonsense like that, you know. I am very much part of the whole thing. I’m just doing my part in it.

(The Paradox of China)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): Speaking of solidarity, you mentioned in the piece that you read about the export of ore to China. It must be one of the paradoxes of history, right, that as part of the operation against Maoists in India, ore is going to the Maoists in China.

Arundhati Roy:  I was in China some time ago and at some meeting, we were talking about the three gorgeous dams, and I said, you know, if you object to a dam or [?] project in China, then what do you do? They said you write a letter to the Letters & Petitions department, after when you get arrested. I said, “Well clearly you need some Indian Maoists now”.

But China’s interesting isn’t it? That in some ways it’s becoming like a capitalistic economy run by a Communist state. So in India they look to China with a great deal of envy, thinking, you know, “Why are we sagging with this democracy, however tattered it is?”; because you can’t, in India, actually you cannot push through this free market project without militarizing. And yet in order to be the favored finance destination, you have to pretend to be a democracy. So all that is going on.

But, just, since you mentioned China, I recently read Kissinger’s book on China, and there’s a delightful part in it, where he talks about how after Tiananmen Square, the Chinese couldn’t understand the cooling off of the relations with the United States. They couldn’t understand how a country could place human rights at the center of its foreign policy [laughs]. That’s Kissinger’s idea of U.S. foreign policy: human rights at the center.

(Anna Harazre and the Middle Class’ War Against the Poor)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): On that question of how this situation appears in the foreign press, recently, somebody like Anna Hazare has seen a lot more press than the economic and political crisis in Central India. Do you have an explanation for that?

Arundhati Roy: Anna Hazare [laughs]. I suppose the closest explanation to that movement is the Tea Party here. It’s really very interesting what happened in India. Basically, just before that movement sort of bubbled up to the surface, the government and the corporations and the media were reeling under a scandal, which was known as 2G, which was basically the selling of spectrum for mobile phones, and basically corporations, media lobbyists, the Information Minister, and all the way up to the Prime Minister, people were involved in selling billions of dollars worth of this spectrum to private corporations at very cheap rates, and then they resold them and made huge profits; and a whole lot of phone conversations had been taped; and big media journalists, the major corporations in India, and all these people were involved.

Suddenly, for the first time, the whole gloss of, “Corporates are honest and efficient” fell apart; it was shattered. And suddenly this anti-corruption movement came up, supported by the — surreptitiously supported by the — extreme right, by the fascists, by the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or National Patriotic Organization]; but not really showing their hand. And they only spoke about government corruption and their movement was supported by the corporate media, 24/7. There was not one, single, minor slogan against any corporation. It was all just about… not just even government, but just about the ruling party, which is the Congress, because, you know, there was so much of the right wing behind it.

And this bill itself, which they are trying to pass, very few people have read it, but I have, and it’s crazy; because it basically suggests that there should be a panel of people who are pure and virtuous and picked in quite complicated ways, but they should run a kind of super cop, where there are 40,000 policemen overseeing corruption; how these 40,000 people are not going to be corrupt themselves you don’t know.

And actually eventually what happens in India is that we have a country where it isn’t possible for people to be legal. You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people living in slums, you have roadside vendors, you have everybody who’s just being preyed upon by the state because they are illegal; I mean they are living in illegal places, they are pavement dwellers; and you suddenly have the middle class turning on them and saying “It’s corrupt politicians that are allowing these dirty slums there and these filthy people selling samosas on carts, and everybody should be moved into the malls or moved out of the cities.” Any anti-corruption movement has to be nailed to an accepted legality, and that accepted legality is going to belong to the middle class, and there’s a huge support of the middle class for this anti-corruption movement for this reason.

So you have exactly the opposite of Occupy Wall Street, you know? So you have a huge middle class support of people who are saying that it’s corruption that’s preventing us from becoming a super power, you know? It’s the poor that are getting in the way.

(Gandhi, Get Your Gun!)

Ruth Gilmore (CUNY): I have a follow-up question to something you said earlier that gets to a question folks here in the audience have put to you. You said earlier in response to what I asked you about that you were maybe skeptical about building bridges and solidarity. And yet the notion of what their [?] means [?] all these different qualities to it, so in some ways they’re going to be a battle of that people in that particular forest [?]. But there’s of course a raid against the hugest global forces imaginable; and while I certainly don’t think that we should put on our green fatigues and run there since there are all these battles to fight here, I’m just curious about how you hope things might turn out in the end if all the battles are [?]. So let me follow with a question here: “Dear Arundhati,” writes one of your admirers, “There was a part in Walking with the Comrades where you cite Gandhi’s ideas on stewardship, which is basically a defense of private property. How does or should the Indian public square away the moral imperatives of non-violence and property when there’s so much violence and dispossession waged in the very name of ‘security’ and ‘development’?” — our writer likes the quotation marks.

Arundhati Roy: Well, I actually got into quite a lot of trouble and quite a few arguments because there’s a part in the essay where I talk about the fact that, just in terms of consumption, the guerilla army is more Gandhian than any Gandhian. And, that one day I should write a play called “Gandhi, get your gun” because, as you can imagine, non-violence, or the idea of non-violence has been co-opted by the elite in ways that suit them. So my question is, to people who — you know, if it’s Anna Hazare who’s on a fast supported by the corporate media and supported by the middle class, that’s fine; but non-violence is a form of political theatre that can be extremely effective provided you have a sympathetic audience; but if you’re deep in the forest, surrounded by 1,000 policemen who are burning your village, I mean you can hardly go on a hunger strike, right?

And, I ask: Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Can people who have no money boycott goods when they don’t have any goods or any money at all? And Gandhi believed in this idea of trusteeship that rich people should be allowed to hold on to what they have and be persuaded to be nice about it, you know? And obviously I don’t believe in that.

I… to come back to the question you were asking about solidarity: see, what I meant was, I didn’t mean that there shouldn’t be solidarity, but I think that those solidarities will happen when people understand what are these battles, what is the connection between Wall St. occupation and the people fighting in the jungle? Right now that might be a little muddled because are we really clear about what we’re asking for, what we’re fighting for? You know, even in the last essay in this book, which I’ll read a part out at the end; the last essay is called “The Trickle-Down Revolution”, in which I say, yes, right now the Maoists are fighting against the corporate takeover, but will they leave the bauxite in the mountain? Do they have a different way of looking at the world? A different development model; because the western world, and particularly the United States, has managed to brainwash everyone into believing that this is progress, this is civilization, this is paradise, you know?; whereas what I’m saying is that really what we’re asking for, and what this battle in the forest is about, is a different idea of happiness, a different idea of fulfillment, a different idea of civilization; and we mustn’t be frightened to articulate our demands, our dreams, our need for change very clearly.

(Capists & Liddites)

The time really has come for that, and if you think of a society in which 400 people own more than half of all of Americans, clearly, you don’t have to be a philosopher or a huge intellectual to say this has to stop, and that today I think that we have to say that no individual, no corporation can have unlimited amounts of money. There has to be a cap on it, there has to be a lid on it; so we call ourselves capists and liddites, if you like.

But, like for example, in India, there’s a mining company that owns steel plants, it does iron ore mining, it makes millions from it, called the Jindals. And there’s a resistance to their projects all over the place; so when you’re mining iron ore, you just pay a small royalty to the government, and you make all those millions. With all those millions, all these mining companies, they can buy judges, they can buy journalists, they can buy TV stations, they can buy everything. The CEO is a member of the parliament, he’s won the right to fly the national flag on his house with the Chairman of the Flag Foundation. They have a law school — like this beautiful campus in the heart of some kind of squalor outside Delhi — where the faculty comes from all over the world because they are paid so well, and they teach environment law, all kinds of other kindnesses. And, they recently even ran a protest workshop. They had all the activists and poets and singers coming and talking about protest and music. So these guys own everything. They own universities, they own protests, they fund activists, they have the mines, they are in parliament, they have the flag; they have everything. The Tata’s [Indian multinational conglomerate] have mines, they have foundations, they fund filmmakers, they make salt, they make trucks, they make internet cables. You can’t get away from them, and they’re not accountable. So, other than being capists and liddites, we demand that no corporation can have this sort of cross ownership. If you have a mine, stick with the mine, you can’t own a television company and the flag and be in parliament and run the universities, you can’t, you know? So, we need regulations like this, otherwise you end up like Italy where Berlusconi owns 99% of the TV outlets.

Someone in audience: In New York, Mayor Bloomberg.

Arundhati Roy: So there are some pretty simple things. Frankly, I also believe that children shouldn’t inherit their parents’ wealth. There has to be a way of limiting what people can have because we can’t depend on people’s saintliness. [?] Nice people, and eat organic vegetables. It doesn’t work.

(When Animals Begin to Lose Their Mind)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): I’ll try to follow that up by combining two questions. Given, again, the situation that you just described, is it possible for this insurgency to win without some form of transformation at the level of government in India as a whole? In other words, can there be a compromise of some sort, or can they only win with a different government?

Arundhati Roy: No, first of all, I think it would be foolhardy to believe that anybody can actually win a military victory against the Indian army. At the same time, we remember that in Kashmir there are 700,000 soldiers who’ve been posted there to deal with what they [?] something like 300 militias. Once a whole population is against you, you can’t hold down, so if 12 million people in Kashmir need 700,000 soldiers, then what do, you know, 600 million need? The math doesn’t work out. In fact, nobody can win that, then there’s just devastation.

I think that is not a question of the government transforming. I think it’s a question of other movements and people in India realizing that it is for their own good that they better stand up for this battle; because, eventually, even in the terms of the free market, even in their own terms, earning a 5% royalty and selling of your mountains, rivers and forests; you’re really paying for other people’s economies with your ecology; it’s only when animals begin to lose their mind do they soil their own nests. So, there is no logic to say that this is good for the country; not even the logic of the free market.

(Trading in Every Feeling for a Silver Coin)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): One of the questions that you’ve filled in many times obviously is that The God of Small Things sold 6 million copies around the world. And then you embark upon a non fiction career of criticizing the government that can imprison you. So, the question basically — I know that you’re not into that kind of careerism which says you must write for the dollar — but do you ever feel that pull, that you could write fiction again? Are you writing fiction?

Arundhati Roy: First you have to rephrase your question, and remove and separate the talk about money from the talk about literature.

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): I’m a professor at CUNY, I have to.

Arundhati Roy: No, to be honest, I really… I’m even speaking for myself when I say people should not have unlimited amounts of money. I so often have said that it took me 4 years to write The God of Small Things and by the time I finished writing it, I had no idea what I had done; you know, whether it would make any sense to anybody or whatever; and suddenly it became this big success, and I used to feel like every feeling in The God of Small Things had been traded in for a silver coin. It was, you know there’s something ugly about being rewarded in that way. I mean a little bit was okay but it was really too much.

To answer your question about fiction, yes, today I really do feel now that I’ve said, in some urgent sense — there was a sense of urgency about my non fiction; and there’s absolutely no sense of urgency when I write fiction; I just like to really take my time over it. And I feel that I’ve said all I’ve needed to say directly. So I do feel like returning to that other place where I can tell it as a story, you know? But because I’m not a careerist and I’m not particularly ambitious and I’m not going anywhere, I find it difficult, especially if you live in India now, there’s such a lot of horrendous things happening all the time, and I just keep getting sort of dragged into it; and as I’ve said before, fiction is such a delicate thing, such a ambiguous thing; and to do that, to kind of build a sort of steel wall around a very ambiguous thing, is difficult. But I hope it happens.

.

Marxist film theory - Definition

Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory.

Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s used Marxism as justification for film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage.

While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of Hollywood filmmaking. They believed, as many Marxists since have believed, that Hollywood cinema is designed to draw you into believing in the capitalist propaganda. Shot reverse shot is nothing more than a device to make you align yourself with this unhealthy ideology.

Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.

Eisenstein himself, however, was accused by the Soviet authorities of "formalist error," of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.

German Marxist film makers had, however, been behind the development of subjective point of view camera angles, and they believed that it was possible to discomfit bourgeoise audiences with the very tools of bourgeoise illusionism. Hence, F. W. Murnau, among others, would use Expressionist techniques to force viewers into seeing through the eyes of working class figures ("The Last Laugh"). Fritz Lang, though not a Marxist, would tell a sympathetic tale of a child murderer in "M."

French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.

Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The society of the spectacle, began his film In girimus imus nocte et consimuur igitur [Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire] with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his dispossesed dayly life.

Some later Marxist critics saw the very cinematic apparatus to be infused in the capitalistic ideology which no film can escape.

Marxist - Example Usage

SOCIALIST REALISM

The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century was the period when capitalism, as Lenin demonstrated, entered ‘the last and highest phase of its development’, the stage of ‘moribund capitalism’, the stage of imperialism. In the various capitalist countries of Europe the further concentration of capital took place. As a result, the proletariat also became concentrated and grew ever larger, its struggle became more organized, more conscious, more on a mass scale. The antagonistic contradictions between capital and labour, between the exploiting and the exploited classes, became ever sharper and deeper. The proletariat came finally on to the arena of history as the most powerful class, the vanguard class, of society, the class which would deprive the bourgeoisie not only of its economic rights, but also of its political rights.

At this time Marxism, the philosophical thought of the working class, elaborated by Marx and Engels, was spreading rapidly. It overran Europe, America, Asia, and penetrated Russia. In the working class movement of several countries it became the guiding banner. The struggle of the working class, illuminated by Marxist science, by the theory of class struggle, demonstrated that the antagonistic contradictions within the capitalist system could only accentuate and could only be resolved in revolution. Russia, which at the beginning of the 20th century found itself in the stage of capitalist industrialization, also felt the strength of the working class movement. At this time Russia was one of the most backward countries of Europe, contradictions were acute, where exploitation of the new capitalist type intertwined with the most savage forms of feudal exploitation. In such conditions, the struggle of the working class found in Russia the favourable terrain to develop and to deliver powerful revolutionary blows. Thus, the new economic and political conditions which were created, together with the spread of Marxism, brought about within a short time (between 1905 and 1917) three revolutions in Russia. Their aim was the overthrow of the reactionary exploiting classes: the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The centre of the world revolutionary movement had now passed to Russia. In the first and second decades of the 20th century, Russia was the country where the struggle for the destruction of the feudal-bourgeois system of exploitation gained important successes. This revolutionary movement was not spontaneous; at its core stood the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party founded and directed by Lenin. The epoch of imperialism determined clearly who would be the gravedigger of the old oppression and exploitation; it brought into the open the historic role of the working class, its great destructive and constructive role. This new class, now equipped with a new political way of thinking, and this powerful revolutionary movement, could not but exert an influence also in the field of literature. In various countries of the world works began to appear which attempted to reflect the life and historic role of the working class. But at the same time the degeneration of the capitalist system found expression in literature through a series of decadent currents.

The best writers and artists tried not to fall prey to these currents, while there were also talented writers and artists in whose creativity the influence of these decadent currents appeared, but who, under the influence of the revolutionary movement of the working class and of Marxist-Leninist ideas, threw themselves unreservedly in their creations into the reflection of the life of the working class, of its revolutionary movement. The well-known American writer Jack London attempted to portray in art the strength of the working class in his work ‘The Iron Heel’. But, while reflecting in a realist manner the ‘iron heel’ of capital upon the working class, Jack London did not manage to present correctly the social revolution of the future; he drew this revolution in anarcho-individualist colours, because he could not break away from the influence of the bourgeois philosophy of the time, which oversimplified human life into a biological struggle for existence and raised a hymn to individualism, to the ‘superman’ detached from society. Later, the French writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, Bertolt Brecht in Germany, etc., made the great events of the time and the working class the subject of their works. Among those who particularly embraced, and orientated themselves upon, the fundamental principles of socialist realism was Brecht. But despite these successes, the majority of them did not manage to analyse in depth the strength and vitality of the working class. Nevertheless, these authors advanced the reflection of the antagonistic contradictions between the working class and capitalism further than their predecessors, the other writers of critical realism.

In Russia the writer who succeeded in reflecting truthfully the historic role of the working class, of the Marxist-Leninist party, in their struggle for liberation from the class yoke, was Maxim Gorky. He, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, managed to analyse the antagonistic class contradictions, basing himself upon Marxist-Leninist theory, and showed the road of victory for the revolution by means of the struggle of the working class in alliance with the peasantry, led by the Marxist-Leninist party. In his novel ‘The Mother’, which appeared in 1906, he laid the foundations of the new proletarian literature, the literature of socialist realism. The formation of Gorky as proletarian writer, as founder of the literature of socialist realism was linked with — apart from the above factors, the struggle of the proletariat and the spread of Marxism—the earlier literary heritage and contemporary literary experience. But in the first place, as the favourable literary terrain on which the creativity of Gorky was nourished, was the Russian literature of critical realism: the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Nekrasov and many other writers.

In his works, and in a special way in the novel ‘The Mother’, Gorky reflected the first assaults of the Russian proletariat, the rising struggle led by Lenin and by the Party founded by him.

With the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the economico-political conditions changed completely. Now power passed into the hands of the working class and the peasantry. The literature of socialist realism now developed further. Many works reflected the Great October Revolution and its victories. The literature of socialist realism was transformed, after the October Revolution, into a world current, the influence of which now became inescapable.

After the death of Lenin, Stalin led the country along the road of the further construction of socialism. The development of industry, the elevation of cultural life, this whole important historic revolutionary period, were reflected also in literature. Mayakovsky, Furmanov, Ostrovsky, Fadeyev, developed socialist realism further. They portrayed in their works the struggle of the Soviet peoples for the triumph of the October Revolution and for the defence of its victories from external and internal enemies, the heroic work for industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. The works ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’, ‘All Right!’ ‘Chapayev’, ‘How the Steel Was Tempered’, ‘The Rout’, ‘The Last of the Udegs’, etc., became the conductors of the ideas and policy of the Party.

Meanwhile, the leap forward taken after the October Revolution by the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples gave an impetus to the birth of the new literature in other countries. In Europe, America, Asia, revolutionary writers, closely linked with the struggle of the workers and peasants, absorbing the Marxist-Leninist world outlook, set out on the road of socialist realism. But, in a special way, the strength of socialist realism was felt after the Second World War; when in many countries of Europe and Asia the revolution was victorious and people’s power was established, the literature of socialist realism took a great leap forward. This literature was inspired by the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, by the great economico-political changes which occurred in the socialist countries. Now the influence of socialist realism and its authority grew markedly.

During this time, socialist realism in the Soviet Union was characterized by communist partisanship, by Marxist-Leninist ideology, by dialectical reflection of socialist reality. All this caused this literature to occupy an important place in world culture. But when the revisionist clique came to head the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, everything changed. Deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism brought about changes also in literature. Soviet literature changed direction. It drew away from the principles of revolutionary communist partisanship, from class analysis of the phenomena of life.

The first signs of revisionist ideas in Soviet art appeared soon after the Second World War. Their social base was that bourgeoisified, bureaucratized stratum which had turned its back on the ideas of socialism. The Central Committee of the CPSU, headed by Stalin, took a series of decisions. It sharply condemned the decadent creativity of the writers Zoshchenko and Akhmatova; similarly erroneous manifestations in music, in the repertory of the theatre, were denounced. But this struggle was not carried through to the end. After Stalin’s death, the road to revisionism opened up also in art. At the 20th Congress this was openly demonstrated. Under the pretext of struggling against the ‘cult of the individual’, the revisionists set Soviet art on the road of degeneration. They repudiated the Soviet art of Stalin’s time and all the successes of that time. They rehabilitated decadent Russian poets, whiteguard émigrés who had placed themselves at the service of imperialist intelligence services, enemies of the Soviet state and of Stalin. They opened the doors to the penetration of the most decadent bourgeois culture and art. Betraying the proletarian revolution and Marxism-Leninism, the modern revisionists abandoned the principles on which the literature of socialist realism was based. They repudiated party spirit in literature, the truthful reflection in revolutionary development of life itself; they repudiated its humanism. The modern revisionists expunged from literature healthy content, optimism, belief in socialism. They abandoned the valuable principles of socialist realism of the epoch of Lenin and Stalin. In their works Ehrenburg, Pasternak, Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, etc., blackened the glorious past of the epoch of Lenin and Stalin and raised on high the revisionist theories to make way for the penetration of bourgeois art. The revisionists work persistently today to turn literature on the anti-socialist and bourgeois path. In the countries where the revisionists rule, the theories of the independence of art from social life, of the ‘freedom of art’, are widely spread. The revisionist writers deny the educational and social character of art, and raise on high in their works bourgeois individualism and egoism, preach the abandonment of the class struggle, repudiate the contradictions which exist between capital and socialism. In their works they eulogize the idea of abstract humanism, praise the revisionist theory of ‘peaceful co-existence’, incite fear of war and spread the spirit of submission before imperialism. Indeed, the revisionist aestheticians have spread those old theories which Lenin denounced long ago in his article ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’.

The literature of socialist realism is developing today in close relation with the struggle for the construction of socialist society and for the triumph of the world proletarian revolution; it is in irreconcilable struggle with the apoliticism and moral and social degeneration which revisionist literature seeks to spread.

The Method of Socialist Realism

Socialist realism is the newest and most powerful artistic method, But it was not born out of nothing, without a basis of earlier literature. Socialist realism inherited and developed further the main principle of the realism of the 19th century, that of presenting true, faithful reflection of life. But this reflection was now made in different economic and political conditions, in new relations, in the midst of a new ideology, unknown to or unassimilated by the writers and artists of critical realism. But what do we understand by the term ‘artistic method’? It is the attitude of the writer towards reality, the fundamental principles by which a writer is led into reflecting this reality in literary works, which comprise his artistic method. Every artistic method has its own special features. The question then arises: What are the special features of socialist realism? In what ways does it resemble, and in what ways does it differ from, earlier methods of realism?

Socialist realism differs from all earlier literary currents, even from the most progressive such as revolutionary romanticism and critical realism, because, unlike these currents which reflect life either in a subjective or in an incomplete manner, it sets out from scientific, dialectical criteria in its reflection of life.

Socialist realism is based on the Marxist-Leninist world outlook, which gives writers and artists the possibility of understanding in depth and clarity the laws of the development of society, of penetrating to the core of events and of people’s characters, which arms them with a correct, scientific political and ideological outlook. As a result, it marks from the standpoint of quality a new, higher stage of realism.

Socialist realism inherits and develops further the main principle of 19th century realism: true, faithful reflection of life. Socialist realism transcends many of the boundaries of critical realism. Alongside criticism of everything old and reactionary which holds back the advance of society, socialist realism also puts forward a true and clear programme of activity for the radical transformation of society, for the liberation of the working masses from exploitation, for the construction of a new socialist society.

‘Socialist realism’, Enver Hoxha has said in speaking of our literature, ‘is the faithful reflection in all its aspects of the socialist life we are building, of the colossal material transformations which our country, our society, our people, are undertaking at revolutionary speed on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory and on the basis of the measures and decisions elaborated by our Party’

What therefore, is the essence of socialist realism?

Socialist realism reflects life with truthfulness and in its revolutionary development.

The true reflection of life in its revolutionary development seeks not only to reveal the principal processes of life, but to express what is new and revolutionary, to show its birth in struggle with the old, with the reactionary, which resists it with the utmost fury and desperation. The best works of world socialist literature show the birth of new socialist elements in social life and in the consciousness of people, the bitter struggle between the new and the old.

Thus, for example, Gorky in the novel ‘The Mother’, alongside the continuous putrefaction of the old and the vain efforts of the oppressors and exploiters of the people (the factory director, the officials of the Tsarist police and courts, who represent feudal-bourgeois society) to block its path, reflects also the birth of the new in life, the formation of new people — the representatives of the proletariat, of the working masses, to whom the future belongs (Pavel, the mother, Andrei, Rybin, etc.), and of new relations (the creation of the Party led by Lenin, the strengthening of the class consciousness of the Russian proletariat, the creation of an alliance of struggle between the proletariat and the peasantry, etc.).

Socialist realism seeks to link true reflection of life with the tasks of educating the workers. Stalin has called Marxist-Leninist writers ‘engineers of the human soul’. This means that in their works these writers accomplish a most important task. They not only communicate much knowledge about social life, they also attack the remnants of the past in the consciousness of masses of the people and educate the workers to become warriors for construction of socialist and communist society.

The revisionists furiously assail the method of socialist realism. They allege that this method was created in an ‘artificial, bureaucratic’ manner; they strive to replace it by decadent, bourgeois literary currents. However the method of socialist realism is omnipotent, because it was born in a legitimate way, was forged on the terrain of the revolutionary struggle of the masses of the people led by Marxist-Leninist parties, was nourished on the most progressive ideals in the world, on shining communist ideals. It has demonstrated its strength and superiority in an indisputable manner, has become embodied in the literature of various countries, in literary works of great ideo-artistic value. Life has proved that socialist literature can develop, advance forcefully and play its great role in the communist education of the masses only on the sure road shown by the method of socialist realism. Like every literary method, the method of socialist realism too has its own distinct features.

Communist Partisanship:

the Fundamental Principle of the Literature of Socialist Realism

The fundamental principle of the literature of socialist realism is the principle of communist partisanship. The writer, as a member of society, cannot be neutral towards events he observes in the environment which surrounds him, towards the various problems of society, towards classes and the class struggle. ‘To live in society and to be free of society is an impossibility’, Lenin has said. Marxism-Leninism has established that in a class-divided society, the various political, social, moral, artistic, etc., viewpoints of all people (and so also of writers) have a class character; in them are reflected the interests, needs, demands of this or that class. So the literary creations of writers too bear a definite class stamp; in the artistic images of literary works are embodied the ideals, the demands of this class. The phenomena, problems and characters of the people they depict are shown and evaluated by the writer from the class position which he represents. The appraisal, in literary works, of events and human actions from the viewpoint of the interests of a certain social class, is called partisanship in literature. There is bourgeois partisanship and communist partisanship, depending upon the interests of which class the writer defends.

The principle of communist partisanship demands that the writer should reflect life in his works from the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist ideology, of the revolutionary interests of the struggle carried on by the proletariat under the leadership of its Marxist-Leninist party.

This fundamental principle was elaborated by Lenin in 1905 in the article ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’. ‘Literature’, wrote Lenin in this article, ‘must become party literature. In contradistinction to bourgeois customs, to the profit-making, commercialized bourgeois press, to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, ‘aristocratic anarchism’ and drive for profit, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of party literature, must develop this principle and put it into practice as fully and completely as possible’.

‘The continuous strengthening of proletarian partisanship’, Enver Hoxha stressed at the 7th Congress of the Party, ‘must always remain a basic task for the development of our culture and arts, for their advance on the road of socialism’.

In vain do the enemies of socialism, the bourgeois ideologists and modern revisionists, charge that the principle of partisanship in literature restricts the freedom of the writer in his creativity. In fact, party spirit is for the writers of every country a powerful weapon to understand and to reflect more deeply social life and the soul of man; it creates the conditions for the full flowering of their talents. Lenin has said: ‘There is no doubt that in this direction alone can full liberty of personal initiative of individual aptitudes, be secured, can free rein be given to thought and fantasy, to form and content’. And he adds: ‘Literary work must become a component part of the social-democratic(1) work of the Party, closely linked with other parts of its work’.

The bourgeois ideologists and modern revisionists, enemies of socialism and of the people, attack the principle of partisanship in general, as well as that of communist partisanship. They deny the class character of literature. Art and literature, for them, stand outside classes. They say that literature should have nothing to do with political ideas, since these, they allege, harm literature. Without any doubt, the repudiation by the bourgeois and revisionist aestheticians of class character, of partisanship, has its motives. With their theory they attempt to distance the writer from the struggle of the working class, to disorganize the working class and disarm it of its theoretical and ideo-aesthetic weapons. On occasion, some of the revisionist aestheticians have affirmed partisanship in literature. But in this case they have not had in mind communist partisanship. For them, literature must be made the enthusiastic spokesman of the revisionist theories, as occurs today in the Soviet Union and other revisionist countries. But the efforts of the revisionists to bring about the degeneration of art, to turn it into a weapon against the masses, are being disrupted by life itself, by the development of literature itself, which rejects the baseless dicta of the revisionists. The more profoundly the writer with communist partisanship understands his time, the more profoundly he interprets this time in art from the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, the greater, the more powerful, the more real his work becomes. The more, therefore, the talented writer bases himself on the most progressive ideas of his time, on the ideals of the Communist Party, the more partisan he is in defence of the interests of the working masses, the more the inner content of his works is enriched, the higher their artistic value is raised.

Another important characteristic of the literature of socialist realism is its national form and socialist content. Every people has its language, its traditions, its cultural and psychic distinctions. ‘Every nation, whether great or small, has its qualitative distinctions, its specific features, which pertain only to it and which no other nation possesses’, Stalin has said; ‘these distinctions are the contribution which every nation puts into the general treasury of world culture and which adds to it, enriches it’. As a result, true literature, rooted deeply in a people, will bear in an inescapable manner the stamp of these distinctions in the mental and spiritual world of the people, will be born on the terrain of the best cultural traditions of the people, will express the demands, the struggle, the efforts, the dreams of the people. Such is the literature of socialist realism, which stands close to the efforts and aspirations of the people. By ‘national form,’ in literature we mean that this literature is created in the national language, that it reflects the best national traditions, the distinct psychic character of the nation, and is intelligible to the people.

The Subject Matter of the Literature of Socialist Realism

The principal source of the subject matter of works of socialist realism is made up of problems linked with life, the work, thoughts and actions of the people who are constructing socialism or who are struggling for their rights in the capitalist and revisionist countries.

The writers, in their works, show how the people, under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party, prepare for and carry through the revolution, how they defend the socialist homeland and the gains of the revolution from internal and external enemies, how they struggle to turn the homeland into a powerful and advanced socialist state, how they support the world revolutionary movement.

In the literature of socialist realism, the depiction of the people is made not from the positions of critical realism, but from quite another angle of view. Critical realism puts at the centre of its works oppressed and exploited people, people for whom we must have pity, people who rebel only as individuals, people who are incapable of changing their life, of building a new society. The literature of socialist realism, on the other hand, portrays the people as a great, organized force, as the creative and moving force of history. This literature shows, therefore, that the broad masses are those who play the decisive role in historical events. Thus, current themes, the artistic treatment of the principal current problems of socialist construction, occupy the central place in the literature of socialist realism. Speaking of the development of art in our country, Enver Hoxha stressed at the 7th Congress: ‘A better reflection of some of the major themes in our artistic creativity, such as that of the hegemonic role of the working class in our society, the revolutionary transformation of our socialist countryside, the revolutionizing force of the communists, the treatment of cardinal themes and key moments in the history of our people and particularly of the National Liberation War and the socialist revolution, are an essential requirement to make our literature and art even more revolutionary!’. Certainly, the presen