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Hi! Please enjoy this longish read in which -- after an adroit and keyed-up wind-up about "social revolution" and art -- I announce that I'm running for Chair of the Revolutionary Committee of the Socialist Freedom Party for Dec-Jan.

It's not too long to read. Really.

If you think it is, then you may be suffering from enslavement to the Man's concept of time. But don't worry. There is a remedy that I heard about through the grapevine! Simply take the whole day off from work, school, eRep, whatever. And then savor these lines slowly, sipping them drolly like a fine whine...



And for those who just can't afford to break the chains of mental slavery yet, I'll put out a shorter piece in the next few days, 'kay? Promise. Really.




THINKING BACK


During a meditative session, sitting on a rock facing Cape Cod Bay, on a cold December morning, some fleeting homespun moments from my undone e-life as "Phoenix Quinn" percolated into consciousness. In a dream-like trance, an exurberant chat of some significance bubbled up. In a sober and somber mood, PQ'd done a long take some ten years back with rascally rake and relaxed international e-socialist, brother Vincent Nolan, on the elegiac topic of far left media in eRepublik.

The words appeared to me like a thunder crack, as if hacked in electricity upon a cloud of memory.

When his avatar'd passed beyond this plane, Comrade Nolan'd been sent off to Socialist Valhalla with a genuine red-viking funeral, as they do in e-Norway. Was he now reaching across the rainbow bridge from Midgard ciphering me this crackling verbiage? Or, full disclosure, could it've been that I'd put a touch overmuch Ancho chile on my breakfast tacos? I suppose.





In any case, here're the enticing snippets of advice that Comrade Vincent'd proposed...

"Public Opinion is the main battlefield for the far-leftist movement in eRepublik. After all, eRepublik is a game that brings a perspective of the real into the virtual. In order to create a successful social revolution, one must compete effectively for the minds of society."


...and...


"Response to opposition should be conducted intelligently and objectively without resorting to juvenile tactics such as name calling and pointless back and forth. Arguments should be topical and relevant to the discussion at hand. Not everyone will be responsive. Some will never change their point of view. But there are those that will notice and, if nothing else, come to respect the author or the commentators for behaving in sound and clear-headed manner."

"It is a matter of engaging with people and not just speaking to them."


...and...


"The institutions created by the capitalist construct" (ed. - that is far-leftie-speak referring to the default game as designed by Admin and their ilk) "will ultimately be redefined after the implementation of a new economic reality. What these new institutions will be can only be speculated upon."






TALKING BACK or IN VINO VERITAS

Comrade Nolan and other SFPers of that rosy era were transfixed by a politics that looked to transform the game through economic means combined, especially in the case of players like PQ, Vincent Nolan, and Fred Engels, with prolix expostulations of their purpose.

Along with similarly-oriented creatives internationally, they experimented with communes, super-communes, co-operatives, mutual aid schemes, and other opportune forms of social solidarity, workers parties, international collaborations, red balloons and Socialist New Moon education initiatives.

Having utility to a degree, sometimes happily or not, within the constraints of an unflaggingly unforgiving capitalist-imperialist ludic model, none of these lovingly-crafted schemes and efforts ever succeeded in transforming the institutions of the game in the all-round way that Vincent Nolan and Osmany Ramon and others had wantonly and perhaps even waywardly envisioned.






Recently, brother-professor-revolutionary-friend Wilhelm Rontgen proposed -- and helped to successfully implement -- a program for producers cooperatives. Rather than seeking to perform acts of economic solidary in the context of e-internationalist marxian-oriented democratic socialism, as Nolan had proposed, Rontgen's radical melodies harmonize more closely to the kind of autonomist-communist eRepublikan tone that'd been espoused even earlier in our collective virtual song cycles by Freedom-Socialist singers like Osmany Ramon, who was a real dreamer, and, to some extent, Civil Anarchy, who was more of a pragmatist as well as a protagonist. Both were dreamy.


Using the terminology of the RL Owenite co-operativist movement plus elements of the left-Jesuit program that created, right in the face of Francoist fascism, the salutary worker-run and -managed Mondragon cooperative enterprises in the Spanish Basque Country, the Producers Coop approach -- while very much in the autonomen school of thinking -- also dove-tails with Nolan's vision in the sense that it looks for a way to go around the "official" e-institutions and markets, and thereby foment the social revolution by means of an economic lever.






Like Saint-Comrade Vincent's proletary solidarity projects, the producers' co-ops got off to a bopping good start. They've helped individual players hop more quickly through the economic-sweatshop rewards offered by the game cops. But there's -- so far -- still been no larger-scale e-social transformation resulting from such mutual aid workshops, as far as I can see.

Time will tell. Or it won't. Could it be we're on an e-carousel that simply will not allow for revolutionary change?




THE REVENGE OF RED STAR HAMLET

I was about to take Zhang He's excellent advice from long ago, "Embrace Chillin' and Be Happy", and settle into a slow descent, a spaced-out washout marked by longer and longer periods of not-logging-in and low-activity. The classic two-clicker copout. A chillaxin' ride out the door. Ya filming?

Then I happened to read Part 3 of Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber's epic take-down of the art industry in e-flux magazine: "Another Art World", part three being almost a reversal of their previous critiques based on having internalized the lessons of the global Black Lives Matter movmement: "Policing and Symbolic Order".

The title alone, with its clear reference to Lacan, already had me hard. Oh boy, a psychologically-astute critique of the art world! And then I got to the end of the very interesting piece and nearly came in my pants when they started going on and on about none other than Mighty, Mighty Bogdanovism!





An aside on Bogdanov, a co-founder of the Bolshevik Party, for the uninitiated...

Here is my piece published on Day 4024 on this topic: "SOFT SUBVERSIONS 2. On Bogdonovism".

It is a recollection of PQ's fascination with the author of "Red Star". Dude, if you think I am long-winded, ha. Wait 'til you see this one. Holy Cow!

Skip down about half-way to find the materials on Bogdanov. PQ starts into it after a cheeky critique of vulgar Hegelianism, philosophical idealism and bone-headed Stalinism.

Then he goes into another tirade, this time rudely tit-tweaking Lenin's criticisms of Bogdanov. Which he systematically wrecks as udder garbage. At about the 3/4 mark of the symphonic piece, PQ begins to describe Bogdanov's accomplishments. He mentions his spirited embellishments on the revolutionary project, with their strong insistence on art, science, technology and culture as the keys to revolutionary change, noting his famous statement on art, which became a slogan of the enormously popular Proletkult movement he initiated...

"For the sake of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, will destroy the museums. Our Art tramples the flowers."



That statement has been wildly distorted by various critics. More importantly, its revolutionary kernel was badly hacked by Leninist and Stalinist critics of Bogdanov. Of course when the Talking Heads sang something like that, everybody got the irony. But hey. Different times, right?

As it turned out, the critics of Bogdanov certainly did not destroy any museums. Just the opposite. The Hermitage still stands, of course, untouched by revolutionary change. St. Petersburg is chock-full of Raphael-esque monuments. The authoritarians booted-up the trend of "socialist realism" in art which, sorta like Disney's icons, had some salutary moments but eventually descended into banal advertising for state capitalism, you know, of the "Girl Falls in Love with Tractor" variety, differing little in essence from the madmen of the west.

Bogdanov refused to rejoin the Bolshevik Party after the seizure of power, preferring to work on fomenting cultural change from below and openly criticial of its authoritarian turn.

Alexander was a radical feminist, whose scientific work was supported by Lenin's sister Maria Ulianova. His sci-fi works -- written in the 1920's -- include transexual and gender-neutral characters, and depict the normalization of sexual freedom for women.

He was instrumental in founding the first blood transfusion clinics in Russia, was a pioneer in the area of systems analysis, and was one of the first people in history to warn of the dangers of nuclear war.




So. Yeah...


Imagine my surprise when I saw a very serious and impassioned write-up about Bogdanov in what is probably the most widely-read and provacative (and collectively-managed and non-commercial) journal on art and art performance you are likely to find these days in English!

PQ saw Bogdanov as the model for the SFP: focus on art, science, technology, and culture "from below" if you want to see a social transformation. And I agree (obviously).

Dubrovsky and Graeber noted that

"In 1920, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had roughly 150,000 members. Proletkult had 400,000, and was growing when the CPSU was actually shrinking"

And they go on to describe its influence and practice:

"The movement was self-organized—artistic production concentrated above all on theater (since theater brought together visual art, design, poetry, and music—effectively all branches of art in a single collective product), and participation was so widespread that even a relatively small city might have dozens of different theatrical collectives operating at a given time. There was also, critically, an active educational component to the movement, which attempted to collapse the boundaries between academia, popular education, science, and the arts."


...and...


"Bogdanov and his comrades also imagined and began to build a new infrastructure for the reproduction of knowledge, one that aimed to destroy the traditional hierarchies between students and teachers, and supplant them with horizontal networks in which anyone could find themselves in every role in a different situation: readers become writers, spectators become artists, producers, consumers, and so on. For Bogdanov, at least, the realization of a world where everyone could become an artist was communism. This destruction of hierarchies was precisely the end that the Revolution aimed to achieve."




I mentioned museums earlier.

Lenin (and Stalin even more so) criticized the creative core of Proletkult, insisting that the proletariat needed, instead, to be "enriched by classical culture". The Hermitage was reproduced in miniature in many places. The focus shifted to "official" art and ballet.

While the authoritarian response to Proletkult emphasized national pride, the projects of Proletkult emphasized localism combined with internationalism through immediate horizontal networks of artistic solidarity around the world. There was no talk of creating a national culture, but rather, an art of the oppressed, or a proletarian culture.







THINKING AHEAD



In his essay on "Proletarian Poetry", Bogdanov asked...
"Is not the poet the organiser of his class?"



After seeing the article in e-flux, it's like some kind of kismet carousel that can't be walked away from, like life meets art meets art meets life meets art again...

What with the global pandemic and being retired and all, I am at home a lot and have time on my hands. I have quite a number of creative projects going on in RL. BUt I'm totally free to decide which projects I want to work on.

Like. I've been working on my own sci-fi epic. But have gotten a little stuck lately. So a diversion would prolly be good for a while. Also, I finally bought a copy of Clement Wood's "The Complete Rhyming Dictionary", so, as you can see, sistern and brothern and in-betweeners, I am ready to flow!




So. To wit. Herewith and wherefore and howsoever and forthwithly...
My goals as chair of the revolutionary committee will be the following:


- To launch a Proletkulty movement, backed by the SFP and its friends and allies, aimed at encouraging and enabling every kind of creative endeavor within eRepublik.


- To personally write and publish an epic poem that includes the names of every member of the SFP. So Join the SFP -- and be memorialized in poetry!!


- To encourage each member of the Revolutionary Committee, and of the Party, and all of our friends, enemies and frenemies to break out of the museum of e-boredom and to bring something fun and original to the dance.


- To continue supporting and encouraging the extension of all existing mutual aid and co-op programs.


- To continue and encourage more of the kind of outreach started by Chairman Flashback, to gather opinions and ideas from the membership.


- To, you know, get Shiloh or somebody to make sure I push all the right buttons for that election crap and stuff.


- To carry on with this kind of craziness as long as it is fun and I don't get, you know, crucified by the members for being too weird and stuff.


So.

Get on the Revolutionary Bus, y'all!

VOTE FOR RF WILLIAMS for PREZ of the SFP!!


Remember...

"Believing is Achieving!"

"Perceiving is Receiving!"

"And Stuff!"






Thanks for checking out this edition of "Radio Free Dixie"! Please support my campaign and share your ideas on how it can rock and roll.

In-game: Use the handy comment section below, or send a message RF Williams, or chat me up on the Socialist Freedom Party feed, which is where trouble-makers like me lurk, constantly looking for cleverly obscure rhymes.