International Socialists

Socialist Review aims to provide a clear analysis of why things are the way they are, and realistic answers about how we can bring about change. But we also realise that for most of us the world is not a very friendly or welcoming place. This issue we are launching Red Words, a regular section of the magazine featuring classic and new poetry, short stories and reviews, as well as taking a look at the lives of well known figures in the cultural world through a fresh lens. These are Red Words - to inspire and console us - to give us hope to fight for a better world.

 

In the first instalment of Red Words we feature a new translation of poetry by German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht; New Zealander David Parkyn, and a different reading of graffiti.

We encourage all readers to send their own contributions to Red Words.

 

 

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I  W A S  R A I S E D  O N  T H E  B A T T L E F I E L D

In 1980 David Parkyn brought together a collection of his poems - Children of the storm - published by Tin Drum Publications. In these poems he does something that most published poets in New Zealand today do not - he provides a strong political critique of a capitalist society that is riddled with inequality. Here we present a few short excerpts from his classic poem.

 

 

I was raised on the battlefield between Kelburn and Highbury
in the city of Wellington in the country called New Zealand
A peaceful scene you would say, if you skimmed the surface
Missing the trenches, the dugouts, the advances and retreats
the dead and the wounded of embryonic class war

And the bus pulled out and headed for the hills
Past the home of the bishop confusing justice with silence and silence with peace
past the home of the investor who shares this belief
Past the accountant's only son who thinks he made it on his own
Past the homes of all the good people who never throw stones
Glass house people! Melted from the burned down potentials
of millions of toiling grains of sand who have sweated to make this country
a land of hope and of plenty, a land of milk and honey
A land turning sour, going rancid from the droppings of its financier drones
Parasites! In masks of economic necessity
Parasites! In masks of purchased respectability
And all the while our primeval paradise rots before our eyes
as, surrounded by their servants Unemployment and Surplus Value
a privileged caste of colonials arise like phantom rats on a pilgrim ship
Like ghosts of highwaymen buried on the hightide of world war and boomtime wool prices
uncovered 'neath the gravestone of postwar depression

And set in the middle the great mass of people
pulled this way and that way in a crossfire of deception
blaming their misfortunes on themselves or each other
Unsure and uncertain where to cast the first stone

We are raised on the battlefield, between Intuition and Reason
In cities of hopefulness in a country called New Zealand
sited at the border of Independence and Treason, Armageddon and Eden

We're soldiers conscripted in embryonic class war

 

 

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"The Writing on the Wall" - A Different Reading of Graffiti

Presented as "vandalism" and "anti-social" by the mainstream media, graffiti is associated with clichéd ideas about social decay, troubled teens and general "immorality."

Slaven Kljucanin presents a different reading of graffiti, recognising it as at once the most visible expression of alienation as well as the most democratic form of artistic expression possible.

 

 

The art of graffiti is present and visible everywhere, and has been since ancient times. Although often omitted from mainstream histories of art, graffiti is, in many ways, the first human social gesture to lie outside of a pure concern for survival. The first drawings archaeologists have discovered are found in the caves of France and Spain and date from the Stone Age. In later periods the invention and development of writing has of course had an enormous influence on the historical development of graffiti. Written examples of graffiti have been found in the ruins of Athens and Pompeii, indicating the widespread appeal this form of expression had across both literate and illiterate class groups.

 

Today, the most important factor influencing the production of graffiti is that its creators - the modern graffiti artists - are conscious of the wall as a medium. The public street is arguably the most democratic of forums. It is one that is open as a media tool for all the groups oppressed and marginalised by capitalist society. As one Melbourne graffiti artist put it, "The streets are public places. Graffiti is an expression of the experiences and ideas of people who live on those streets but don't own them or the houses or the businesses. Graffiti creates solidarity between all those people. It isn't academic; it's immediate and doesn't require money."

 

One of the consequences of the revolutionary upheaval in France in 1968 was the rapid increase in the popularity of graffiti and its occurrence. A Marxist theorist at the time cited graffiti as being the true revolutionary medium to express "the spirit of 68." It is this revolutionary aspect to modern graffiti as an artistic and expressive form that can help us understand why authorities are so opposed to it. The reason for this is very simple. Graffiti is extremely difficult to censor, police or control and is therefore one of the most honest of media, unpolluted by the standard contingencies of capitalism: funding, markets, state approval and the like. Graffiti as a form recognises no constraints, is free from both censorship and authorial control. Once it has been created graffiti can easily be added to or destroyed by other artists. Its fundamentally basic and flexible nature ensures its popularity amongst the oppressed groups - particularly working class youth - in the stifling environment of capitalism. Graffiti artists constantly develop new ways of informing (annoying) the whitewashed walls of capitalist establishment.

 

Graffiti is a very simple and easily understood response to the alienation caused by an existence living in a system arranged around profit instead of human needs and desires. It is a cry against the cultural manipulation, economic absurdity and environmental decay which dominate modern life.

In the words of one Melbourne artist, "Graffiti cheers me up. I've often laughed at it and felt that I'm not alone, and that's important for our emotional survival." The ideologies of capitalism are the real vandilist assaults on the human spirit, not the graffiti which notes their own cruel nonsense and absurdity. Please, think twice before accepting their distinction and look again at those statements which can truly be called "our" art.

 

 

 

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KING DREAMS

"KING DREAMS" was performed by Marvin Hubbard at this year's May Day celebration held at the Gresham Hotel in Dunedin. Marvin played an active role in the American civil rights' movement of the 1960s, as well as the student occupations of the time.

 

 

The Supreme Court Declares

that Black Children are human

Rosa Parks sits at the

front of the bus

King dreams

dreams of the end of the night

King dreams

dreams of the Montgomery Bus boycott

of ending the back of the bus

for black people

King dreams a nightmare

his home is bombed

with his wife and children

in the next room

King prays

I Am I Am tells him I can't

protect you but I will be there

with you always

Birmingham Sunday

Black Children are blown

into the night

King marches marches

in Selma Alabama and Mississippi

for the right to vote

King dreams

dreams of economic equality

of social democracy

King dreams of a poor people's March

on Washington

King frightens

frightens capitalism

King marches

in Memphis Tennessee

for rubbish collectors

King frightens capitalism

King dies in Memphis

But King's dream

remains alive

where ever

people dream

dream of equality

 

 

 

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Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is a well known American novelist and poet who is described in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English as a "Marxist, feminist and activist." In her novel - Braided Lives (p. 403) - she makes an interesting observation:

I was taught to distance myself from my work. To write with a tiny part of my intellectual and emotional equipment. I was taught to see poems as complicated intellectual constructions full of carefully layered ambiguities, ironies and ironically treated myths, alluding in a complex web to other similar works. But you can write about fucking, you can write about supermarkets, you can write about the Bomb. You can write your politics. You can actually write poems that say what you feel and THINK.

 

 

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"From Prison"

Karl Liebknecht was a comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, and was instrumental in founding with her the German Communist Party (KPD) and leading the second wave of the German revolution. He was one of the only Social Democratic parliamentarians to vote against the First World War, and spent much of it in jail for sedition. This poem was composed while he was in jail during June 1916.

New translation from the German by Dougal McNeill

 

 

You've stolen my earth but you can't steal the skies -

they're just a small shaft up above, where my eyes

can catch the light -

between bars

          pressed by heavy walls.

But it's enough,

seeing just that blessed, blissful blue

which the day dawns through to me,

sending down with it - sometimes -

lost bird song.

But it's enough

for me - this jackdaw, black & happily blithering

(O true friend of these jail days) -

to see him in flight, free

amongst the changing pictures of travelling clouds.

 

And it's just a small shaft - from darkest night

appears the brightest stars in this confinement.

The brightest star of the firmament appears

and shines from the vast distance of space.

 

The world own light - brighter, hotter,

better - fills from this shaft my cell

just as it shines on you outside -

and it is red-hot rejection he hurls back.

 

You've stolen my earth but you can't steal the

skies,

they're just a small shaft up above, narrow,

between bars,          

          pressed by heavy walls.

The sky! My body's sense is soaring

skyward with a spirit free, far more free

than you who wait outside, wait foolishly

for these frail shackles, this prison

to destroy me.