Grapes of Wrath namedrops Marx and Lenin and one of the characters not only finds his own purpose as a union organizer, but becomes this Christlike figure who inspires and leads his community. How exactly does it not advocate a better system? It’s a work of fiction, it’s not going to lay out the nuts and bolts of an American gosplan or something.

no

many are supported because of their anti communism but i don’t believe most are loved due to it.

bicycle thieves is regularly held up as one of the greatest films of all time and is super blatantly commie. all kinds of widely acclaimed films and books are at worst not commenting on capitalism, which is not the same thing as being anticommunist, and many of them are in fact very clearly anticapitalist. to pick one i watched recently, there will be blood is so blatantly about the evil at the core of american capitalism, the way it uses the church as a cudgel to beat workers into shape, the way it makes everyone miserable and consumes them. and that’s one of the most well loved films of the 21st century

you have a weird view of what makes art good. ‘let people enjoy things’ is a facile thing to say, but i hope there are books or movies out there that you actually enjoy and don’t just appreciate the ideological purity of

dogs hit novels like To Kill A Mockingbird

Man, what is it with this site?

How many movies have you seen or books have you read where any of the characters, at any point, says something incredibly basic like: “capitalism bad, communism good.”

Also think about the dogshit novels Americans have to read in school

We read The Jungle, the only American school book that actually does say “capitalism bad, socialism good”

Sorry To Bother You is one possible cinematic exception, but it never goes beyond saying that the system sucks

this situation seems so severe to you because apparently you miss overt messaging in media. lmfao dude “JOIN A UNION TO FIGHT CAPITALISM” isn’t direct enough of a call to action?

The CIA funded the NEA and all US culture during the cold war, sometimes as direct cash payments to artists. This goes across genres from music to painting. If you were an artist who was not straight up black listed and were anti establishment how were you ever going to compete for eyeballs and shows against people being literally subsidized.

The biggest piece of social leverage the Soviet Union has was that it was part of a historical movement that was embedded in the actual cultures of Europe and Asia. A big accusation against the Americans is that they are cultural barbarians and just looking to establish a business empire. To counter this the CIA spent billions on culture to say "What do you mean no culture? We’re the avant garde with people like Jackson Pollock and Rock and Roll music "

There’s plenty of western art that’s critical of capitalism, but I don’t know how prominent I’d call it. I was gonna say Steinbeck is very prominent, but he’s not post 1945. Ursula K. Le Guin is up there. Kim Stanley Robinson’s books are very explicitly socialist, although it’s often more of the milquetoast democratic socialism variety. I should also mention that many prominent socialist artists have their fangs filed down over time, like what Lenin says happens. Picasso for instance. It’s common for someone to know who he is, but less common to know he was sympathetic to communism worldwide.

Cyberpunk literature was critical of capitalism, but that kind of fell apart because many of its authors didn’t have an alternative. They got stuck in liberalism, which is what often happens in scifi.

Ken Loach’s movies are very, very socialist. They’re a rarity among western cinema as well because they’re sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

The Iowa Writer’s Workshop was a CIA op.

i think most aspects about american popular culture are either heavily influenced by or completely fabricated by the CIA. the full extent to which they are is unknown, but i have a feeling that most of american culture post-war is just anti-communism and fascist ideology.

Is your idea of good artistically successful or leftist, or or these the same thing in your mind?

Either way this is an incredibly blinkered view

This is why you’ll often find me ranting about the need for leftist to get better at propaganda and astroturfing. The only way we’re ever going be able to introduce an alternative to the Cultural Hegemony is by exploiting the algorithms at every possibility. The fact that so many leftists have taken a Luddite approach to AI, a massive force multiplier in a world where we’re so clearly overpowered, is especially depressing. We need more mass produced leftist slop to appeal to a variety of demographics. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, it just has to resemble liberal media enough that we can slip propaganda in there and normalize revolution and liberation concepts so that the quality communist media doesn’t seem farfetched.

I think they were adored because they were mostly good art, in whatever sense that means. And I think there’s much better criteria to judge a book than it’s overt political ideology.

Check out Engels’s letter to the socialist writer Margaret Harkness, who critiques her work for its lack of realism and praises the conservative writer Balzac

I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a “Tendenzroman” [social-problem novel. DM], as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the authors. This is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author’s opinions. Let me refer to an example. Balzac, whom I consider a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et a venir [past, present and future], in “La Comédie humaine” gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, especially of le monde parisien [the Parisian social world], describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la viellie politesse française [French refinement]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac. (emphasis added)

Not only the arts. Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism

BBC: Was modern art a weapon of the CIA?

Wikipedia: CIA and the Cultural Cold War

An excerpt from Iain M. Banks’ essay A Few Notes on the Culture, about the philosophy behind his excellent Culture series of novels:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.