In Defense of AOC

The Politics and Art of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & A Manifesto on Art and Consciousness

Who will defend Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by running to her left in a potential presidential primary in 2028. Sound ridiculous? Running a candidate to the left of Bernie was probably the only thing that progressives could have done to secure Bernie’s nomination in 2020 over Biden — as I urged over six years ago, thinking it might well be necessary, as it turned out to be. You need allies who can both best position you and coalesce with you when the inevitable gang of right-wing Democrats team up to suffocate you.

Ocasio-Cortez might be strong enough that she will not need to be positioned anywhere but on the edge to win — like Trump but on the populist left edge rather than right. Bernie Sanders might have been strong enough to win standing alone on the left edge if Elizabeth Warren had not fractured the left vote by drifting solitary to nowhere, divisive and aloof, when all the right-wing Democrats conjoined at Obama’s bidding to overwhelm Sanders. It seems highly unlikely that Warren or a Warren-equivalent would dare not align with Ocasio-Cortez in 2028 — for a variety of reasons, not least that the bogus identity politics smears systematically launched at Bernie and progressive populism would not fool people if thrown at AOC.

In the meantime, much as with Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez continues to be willfully underrated, misunderstood, and mendaciously attacked — by the plutocrat establishment and also by some of the so-called left. The rich establishment pretends that AOC is a Socialist Devil and fears that she is too powerful, while some on the left cry that she does not act with enough power and socialist principle. All the while and so far, her progressive populist principles steer her through, as best she can.

A few points:

1. AOC has not failed in many of the ways that some on the left think she has.

2. That said, there is one brief moment in particular that she should explain — a non-credible statement about Kamala Harris.

3. Regardless, AOC is the clear popular leader of progressive populists, and powerfully assisted in this by Bernie Sanders.

4. AOC is the pre-eminent candidate for the 2028 American presidency.

5. Her potential presidential campaign should prove to be far more powerful than even Bernie Sanders’ campaigns.

6. Nevertheless, someone — or some real force — should run to her left.

Can you imagine it? A serious and savvy candidate running to AOC’s left in the Democratic primary? I’ve tried to create the equivalent — in the big story form of the novel. That’s a lot of what Most Revolutionary attempts — popular left power and consciousness writ large — to build the reality and scope of progressive consciousness — to shift the spectrum of consciousness and action to the populist and socialist left — both to and through progressive populism.

Who or what will run to AOC’s left? This point may be the most missed and misunderstood reality in American politics. The vast fraud and violence of official American society is well known to any who wish to know, and to even those who do not, but the need for a bigger and better popular left consciousness that goes beyond both Social Democrat and Democratic Socialist in America seems to remain completely out of consideration in everyday realms. For no good or necessary reason. Too many people are far too brainwashed and politically brain dead in this regard — a condition of mental rot and dead wood that allows for endless personal and social and ecological disease and fires, which by now consume planet Earth itself.

A popular and strong “far” left candidate, a true socialist — or something socialist — a general strike or a takeover of a notable space with radical demands — someone or something needs to better threaten the predatory and mercenary capitalist establishment with a demand for outright socialism — in part to make progressive populists appear to be exactly what they are — modest and reasonable mainstream figures of the day, absolutely nothing extreme. Let the true socialists bear most of the plutarchy’s demonization this time, or the anarchists or other revolutionaries, the better to help progressive populists and progressive populism gain evermore widespread support and power for the people, and to better advance by being put in more real perspective, by the left. It can only be done by the left, as with so many things.

People want some sort of revolutionary change anyway, even if many are wildly confused about what that can be and should be or how best to get there. So the potential for popular farther left candidates and actions and realities exists. The widespread consciousness remains missing, so create it. Beginning ten years ago, the campaigns of Bernie Sanders basically supersized Occupy Wall Street five years after the fact. I don’t recall that anyone envisioned that particular phenomena in advance. Surely now it’s time for a more advanced Occupy — even more advanced nationwide actions before each campaign season to pair with actual socialist candidates who then vie for power in the Democratic primary campaigns, and who subsequently bolster the progressive populist who has the best chance to win.

I wonder how many votes someone like Nina Turner would get if she ran for President in 2028 to the left of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promising to issue an executive order mandating universal health care nationwide on Day One. More than a few I think.

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Meanwhile, AOC should probably keep on being AOC.

To defend her efforts generally from left criticism is not done out of some sort of kindness — as I touched on in Notes recently, slightly modified and expanded here:

Things are not always clear. But what should be obvious by now is that establishment politicians are professional liars — Joe Biden, Con Don Trump, and the many other politicians funded by the plutarchy. They are paid to lie in the interest of big finance, against the interests of everyone else. They lie to the people and otherwise act in bad faith or they believe their own fake news so that they are not technically lying. They are falsifying and demonizing and are completely wrong but not lying if they believe it. AOC is none of that. It seems clear that she makes decisions based on principle — sometimes strategically, in which case it might look compromised. The same is typically true of Bernie Sanders, the expanded “Squad,” and some other progressive populists.

The reality of consciousness can be confusing because rather than being outright liars, the politicians and officials of the plutocrat establishment may be deluded or mistaken, even basically brainwashed, so that they are not lying and acting in bad faith but have a bad, false, toxic, and pathological view of reality — often because they are bought, or otherwise duped into it. This is true all through society and needs to be exposed and clarified, in a way that cultural criticism and novels can make unusually clear, especially since novels are stories of consciousness (and lack thereof) acting in the world.

Many destructive actors know exactly what they are doing. As officials, they are a corrupt class — corrupting the people. The officials have resources and much of the population has access to resources, so there is increasingly no excuse to not know the error and terror of their ways. Only the sheer blunt force of propaganda and false consciousness can sustain the massive levels of toxicity and systemic violence that kill and immiserate so many.

Meanwhile, progressive populists like AOC act largely outside the deceit and brainwashing of the plutocracy because they are not funded by high finance but by the people, unlike the establishment politicians. Their real base and real commitments are different.

And yet there is a lot of criticism of progressive populists from some of the so-called left — some of it quite batshit criticism — much of it baseless, or arbitrary, though not all. This baseless criticism functions to obscure the stark qualitative difference between the socially conscious progressive populist politics of today and the future, and the high finance and corporate funded politics of the corrupt past and present.

Unlike the establishment Democrats who backed Biden to the end, Bernie and AOC (who also backed Biden's re-election campaign to the end) gained concrete policy concessions from Biden for their continued support that would have benefitted the people, as they had done with Biden previously. Right or wrong, the view of Bernie and AOC was that there was no better candidate to throw against Trump, so they took the opportunity to move Biden to the left — as they had done years earlier. Kamala Harris then got the nomination and immediately began making moves to the right, and proved to be in no way electable. No one has every shown that Bernie and AOC were acting in bad faith in this, or against progressive principles, quite the opposite — though Bernie has been bad, on certain matters of war and international relations in particular, more than AOC has been terrible on anything that I'm aware of.

The train strike decision that AOC was involved in was a tough judgment call, right or wrong, no unprincipled capitulation. And in my view she made a mistake in not trying to force a vote on universal health care, or to leverage other concessions. But otherwise she did leverage concessions along with the other strong progressives. And these are principled and strategic judgment calls, rather than any attempt to appease rich donors like the unprincipled establishment politicians who are basically public profiteers for finance instead of public representatives for the people.

The one thing that AOC should answer for — because so evidently at odds with reality — is saying that Kamala Harris was doing all she could to stop the genocide of Palestinians. There was never any evidence for this in regard to Harris or Biden. Harris was not in position to make final decisions as Vice President, so this gave Harris so-called plausible deniability (or credibility), and she surely had incentive to lie to AOC and others. If Harris did lie directly or indirectly to AOC, or to anyone else, no one should have believed her — it was not credible then or now — and it's hard to see how it could have been credible in AOC's view. Plausibly believable or not, these were desperate electoral times, and things may have been genuinely confusing to AOC, or the moment simply could have been overwhelming.

So Ocasio-Cortez should explain that moment in time. She sounded desperate when she made the claim. It seems fairly easy to address: she can simply say that she believed something she should not have believed. Maybe she was desperate to believe it — many people in that position would be. All the Democrats were desperate at that point to beat Trump and get Harris elected, and AOC surely knew far more than her establishment colleagues how problematic, how outrageous, the issue was for many voters. So she probably felt a responsibility — you could psycho-analyze this to death. Regardless, it was convenient for AOC to believe, and to say, to try to help get Harris elected over Trump, which is obviously what she was trying to do. It was a mistake, and should be pointed out as such.

It was a human mistake, it appears. Or if it was a bad-faith political calculation — consider the vast context in which it was made and how weighty it actually is. Seriously, someone should do that analysis and compare it to every other politician. AOC's place in the spectrum remains remarkable. We're lucky to have her, as is said — she's brave, smart, principled, effective. Not above criticism or flaw, as no one is.

AOC is not working to line the pockets of credit card companies and the munitions profiteers, and so on, which is what Biden and the politicians of the plutarchy in both parties do their whole careers, including Con Don Trump, the vile and pillaging infernal landlord of the world, as he intends to be. Talk about unprincipled, corrupt, and deceitful.

Meanwhile Biden and the establishment Democrats are a slightly more genteel and sometimes less destructive version of Trump and all the Republicans. If Big Energy and Big Tech, Wall Street and Blackwater, the notorious mercenary contractor, along with the Ku Klux Klan and Evangelicals were to form an official political party, it would be Trump and the Republican Party of today. Lose the Evangelicals and half the Ku Klux Klan and you’ve got the establishment Democrats of today. They facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians before the Republicans did. None of that forms the base of progressive populists, far from it.

Progressive populists compared to establishment politicians (plutocratic, pillaging, profiteering) are vastly different orders of political creatures. There's such a huge difference between progressive populist politics and establishment politics no matter whether Democrat plutocrat or right-wing billionaire “populist.” By and large, Bernie and AOC and the "Squad" and the closely related other progressive populists are the future, if there is to be one. Nothing should be more clear than that, despite the wailing and the deceit of the establishment, and the mistakes of left critics. But this reality is far from having reached full and widespread consciousness.

Very much, though not all, of the criticism that Bernie and the expanded Squad receive from the left is not only missing the forest for the trees but sometimes too utterly mistaking the trees. It doesn't help that the profiteering plutocratic algorithms help drive and exacerbate this kind of seemingly populist but actually anti-populist and often unwitting fake news. There's precious little kindness involved in any of this. But if people are going to be kind to someone, it should not be to the pillaging profiteers and their ilk — not in their careerist official capacities. Beyond that, it's a judgment call.

A lot of Americans, due to infinite propaganda to the contrary, have a hard time recognizing that they live in a white supremacist thug nation founded as a genocidal "Manifest Destiny" empire, and always have. It's official policy, and law. If you don’t get that, you can’t see or think. You can however go blind and crazy and vote for genocidal operators like Trump and Biden.

It’s a matter of what you are conscious of. And not. Of what you know and tolerate. Of whether you’re flaming ignorant and heartless to the point of Evil — as in the US-Israeli bombing and starvation of Gaza, and the plutocrat obliteration of much other life at home and abroad. Or whether you resist all that and support what is much more humane.

Progressive populists are highly conscious of all this. They work to stop the horror and regenerate society, and it seems a miracle even now that we can count AOC and the great Rashida Tlaib and a still small but growing number of elected and genuinely populist representatives among us. Their views are popular for good reason, not for bad or fake reasons as with Trump and establishment Democrats.

Progressive populist views are popular despite all the blood-money and deceit and smears thrown against them from the right and from some of the left. And those views and understandings need to be deepened. The consciousness of at least half the country doesn’t even get the basics. They’ve had their consciousness purposefully warped and destroyed.

The novel and other forms of imaginative story, especially big imaginative story, can and do play huge and decisive roles in growing, sustaining, and determining both personal and public consciousness.

It's a great fight against empire and a great fight for something more than the mind. It’s a fight for the heart and gut, for the mind and body — a fight that the plutocracy started and wages relentless against the people, trying to divide everyone, pitting everyone against everyone else at every turn — to misrepresent and defend their financial tyranny and bloody pillaging.

The plutarchy’s predatory attempts, their attacks that monetize the people against themselves and brainwash people likewise — to gut their consciousness — are often highly effective, crazy-making, and endlessly destructive. All in a day's pillaging and profiteering in the Incorporated Estates of America! The great need of the people is to keep building not only a people’s government but a people’s culture and consciousness to resist the wholesale destruction — and to recreate the world.

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Vital parts of building that culture, ultimately a revolutionary culture, can be found in the political and aesthetic worlds, and in the analytical and informational worlds — all of which are omnipresent.

The elite and political religious institutions know this well, as do the elite political rich — how else to protect their especially fragile realms? — the one make-believe and divisive, the other tyrannical and lethal. Thus the constant need to distort reality, which explains why the elites of religion and the elites of wealth are so politically obsessed — and so often tightly aligned — they need each other. The political religious and the political rich are by far the most fanatical of the fanatics, with their constant ideological and class wars, because they are the most fraudulent and therefore the most objectively vulnerable. Elite religion and wealth both use the diseased weapon of racism as supremacist sword — along with lethal bullets and deadly dollars, controlling technologies and brutal laws, pernicious art, fake information, and toxic ideas. The struggle to create countervailing progressive and revolutionary consciousness must battle all of this, not easy — as much art as science.

What culture and art, what politics, what understanding and scope of consciousness, what kind of people’s society can defend itself from the predations of finance, tyranny, supremacy, and deceit?

A libertarian socialist society. That is, real democracy — not the plutocrat bought-and-sold fakery of the day. A real democracy, like the one currently budding as progressive populist, hand-in-hand with much anti-fascist, anti-thug resistance, which might be better thought of by now as anti-plutocrat resistance, anti-plutarchy, the anti-plutarchs, or whatever the word is for rich thuggery. The banker-gangsters? The banksters? Banksterism. Oligarchy. Plutarchy.

Without financial tyranny, racism and many other forms of oppression lose their teeth, because much of racism and other oppressions both manifest as financial tyranny and are manifestations of it. That’s the fundamental point and origin of so many types of oppression — to get the money, to have the power to control consciousness and the world.

Too much of the oppressions and the origins of oppression remain disguised in our language, our stories, our consciousness from what they actually are — various forms of financial tyranny, or in the service of financial tyranny. It should be easy to see that capitalism is financial tyranny, but so is racism and sexism, and anti-intellectualism, fascism, and much of establishment religion, and the rejection of human rights and democracy, and all the worst forms of discrimination, along with the destruction of Earth. Some of the oppressions seem sheer madness and irrationality but can typically be traced back to an elite imposition of financial and resource supremacy.

How to be conscious of the way of the world given all the oppressive forces and propaganda working to destroy a full sense of reality and consciousness?

You need to fight destructive fire with defensive fire — you need to fight destructive conscious with defensive conscious.

Only a very active and strong consciousness that is aware of both liberations and oppressions can generate a vital culture and politics.

And what is the great human innovation that most powerfully represents, engenders, and foments consciousness? The novel — and other novelistic long story forms.

So what have progressives and revolutionaries done with the novel and the like? What do they do with it? Not nearly as much as need be.

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My novel Most Revolutionary — plotted with a progressive/revolutionary figure as American President like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but well to her left, and even stronger grassroots figures — is an attempt to help normalize progressive and revolutionary perspective, reality, and consciousness in the public. It’s an attempt to grow the badly needed guts, minds, and hearts that can enable and compel badly needed change. It’s an attempt to create a political force to the left of AOC and the other progressive populists.

Currently, Bernie and AOC and closely related progressive populists in America are barely as left as conventional European Social Democrats — in other words, barely left, not far enough to create full democracy, or to necessarily even save the country and the planet from much of its misery and massacres. This consciousness and its effects are too limited, even though every other widespread consciousness is worse.

So that’s what needs to be improved upon to help change culture, politics, society. Consciousness must be revolutionized in many ways, in some cases seemingly every way, no way around it.

There’s no reason not to be dissident and progressive and revolutionary in fiction and other art and media. And every reason to be so. Tamara Pearson’s great novel of the people against empire, The Eyes of the Earth, as reviewed in most detail at The Republic of Letters is a wonderful and bracing example. Among others. And Pearson is extraordinarily insightful about the value of fiction and the novel, in multiple forums.

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Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the expanded "Squad" are basically an order of magnitude better than what existed in Congress before. They remain a small minority, so that needs to grow, and they need to continue to move farther left, as half measures only go so far.

No one is always going to agree with the judgment calls of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or anyone else. The decisions are often confusing to make, and mistakes will be made. No escaping that. We can try to improve upon imaginatively in fiction and other art, in order to help advance reality. It can be done though it's not necessarily easy to do there either. Mistakes will be made. It’s part science and part art — the cultivation of greater and more powerful and effective consciousness, perspective, decision-making.

The novel and imaginative story in general create their own real life, and something much more. Compelling and cohering story has a unique and potent impact on consciousness, society, and the world.

Ever greater AOC figures and ever greater progressive or revolutionary events — to the exponential degree — are needed to affect consciousness and culture, conditioning and conditions. Such figures and events — both real and imagined — affect so much. This is why the right trembles at AOC’s mere shadow. This is why Bernie was attacked and wildly distorted by the entire establishment, Democrat and Republican. Unfortunately there was not sufficiently great and widespread consciousness to repel such attacks. And the means of propagating and distributing such consciousness were insufficient, and are still far from maxed out.

Why are today’s progressive journals and newsletters not serializing social impact novels, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized to spectacular effect in the weekly abolitionist newspaper, The National Era?

Why let Hollywood go so unchallenged in bombarding our imaginative consciousness, along with corporate capitalist TV? Why not fight story with story?

When did we willfully and enthusiastically sign up for capitalist story in TV and the movies? Progressive and revolutionary production of culture remains largely a study of roadkill.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the unprecedented and foremost publishing phenomenon of the entire world, of its own century and beyond, with wide social and political impact.

The attempt at least should be made today to reproduce such great effect of culture and consciousness, of politics and revolution.

Uncle Tom's Cabin could only be published in a weekly abolitionist newspaper, as no establishment publisher would touch it. The situation today remains very similar — amazingly enough.

A number of progressive online publications currently, probably dozens in America itself, have the platform needed to make the attempt — the attempts — to expand consciousness in this distinct and vital way. The vast majority of these activist platforms and initiatives were launched by individuals who themselves were launched by other institutions, organizations, and platforms with great resources. In this way, needed power may grow more needed power.

Such platforms could start to better grow and spread left consciousness by serializing the hard-hitting and highly conscious social intervention of a people’s novel that is The Eyes of the Earth, by international activist and reporter, Tamara Pearson (if all parties involved are willing).

Pearson notes what makes such story important at ZNet’s seminar “Resisting Empire And Injustice With Fiction And Stories,” in an intense talk on the value of imaginative story:

Our heads and our hearts need to understand what we are going through. And we need new symbols and narratives and words and heroes to counter those that are used by the destructive system of capitalism and empire, racism, sexism, deliberately manufactured poverty, climate destruction. We need the inspiration that fiction provides as it manages to imagine what we sometimes cannot when we're inundated by consumerism, misinformation, violence, and stress, and exhaustion....

Crises and suffering and deliberate billionaire-made catastrophes can turn us inward. People are more prone to self-absorption in times of misery or hardship, but books, novels, and stories can take us and our imagination beyond all that, remind us of the big world that we are part of. Fiction develops imagination which strengthens our critical thought and the nurturing of possibilities. Stories can disturb the false harmonies of violent economies, rock with soft persistence the punctuated arc of rigged elitism and celebrated plunder.

The way a new and gentle world is born will be ... through intricate construction and imagination ... fiction has the unique power to crumble certainties of the apparent infallible nature of empire and invasions, where economic systems revolve around ridiculous and harmful levels of consumerism. It's hard work to go beyond all that but fiction can. And we need to be in that state of mind to embrace the task of creating a better future.... Read bold fearless writing that stands up to the status quo and that the capitalist publishing industry overlooks. Read excluded people because they really get it, and their perspective is vital and their insights intelligent and real. Read coherency, writers that are down to their bones what they write. And strike, speak up, organize because that's how you go on and where you get hope.

Also see Most Revolutionary — an explicit progressive issue novel of revolutionary consciousness, in which I feature and dramatize grassroots activists modeled on real life water protectors and anti-fascists, as well as similarly modeled politicians and other government officials, including an AOC-figure to the left of AOC — dramatically featured as a revolutionary Acting President of America — the ultimate progressive populist counter to Trump and Republicans and to do-nothing establishment Democrats.

Sometimes to push the curve, you need to get ahead of it.

Progressives, no less, are too often too cautious and self-censoring, unfortunately. You don’t need to go exclusively to the establishment to find that.

The potential for the growth of consciousness via novelistic-type imaginative storytelling is immense. The establishment knows this and does all it can to choke it out — to immense and terrible effect.

For example, where is the flood of The Big Short like explicit anti-Empire takedowns of the pillaging and predatory economics, culture, and politics of the day?

And where are the explicit revolutionary stories that far surpass this level of critique and consciousness?

It’s as if both some theoretical and practical dead-end has been hit.

These novels and shows are as rare as explicit anti Iraq war novels, like my Homefront.

Where is the great anti genocide novel of the present day? Where are the great novels of contemporary political change that actually intervene in the moment and the day?

Where can such political and cultural powerhouses of consciousness be serialized to wide reach?

We know where not.

Typical culturally critical stories, novels, shows, and movies avoid taking the foremost issues of the day head-on, and consequently are as weak as they are indirect. Even the badly needed Don’t Look Up was indirect. It could have been much stronger. Progressive consciousness in art and in general is not as wide and as strong as it should be, as it needs to be.

It made great sense for Uncle Tom's Cabin to be published in the The National Era weekly newspaper — not least given its 1847 Prospectus:

While due attention will be paid to Current Events, Congressional Proceedings, General Politics and Literature, the great aim of the paper will be a complete discussion of the Question of Slavery, and an exhibition of the Duties of the Citizen in relation to it; especially will it explain and advocate the leading Principles and Measures of the Liberty Party, seeking to do this, not in the spirit of the Party, but in the love of Truth—not for the triumph of Party, but for the establishment of Truth.

A “complete discussion” of the “Question of [Progress,] and an exhibition of the Duties of the Citizen in relation to it” — that’s Most Revolutionary. Also, The Eyes of the Earth. So why not widely distribute? Neither novel may be the next Uncle Tom’s Cabin in practical effect, but they may both be in the line needed to get to that point, via an individual work or a collective group.

If such works are launched from nationwide or worldwide platforms to foster and quicken wholesale, ever-advancing expressions of human consciousness, then that should unleash major new revolutionary phenomena and momentum into the world. The impact could be and should be global.

Just as it once was. Naomi Kanakia is well worth quoting at length on the global phenomena and impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

Uncle Tom's Cabin was certainly the most widely-read novel of the nineteenth century. It was a huge bestseller in America, to a degree unprecedented before or since, selling 350,000 copies within a few years of publication—whereas The Scarlet Letter perhaps sold around 10,000 and Moby-Dick under 2,000. Thirty years later, Huckleberry Finn would be considered a moderate success with around 50,000 copies sold. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also a bestseller in the UK, reportedly selling a million copies within a few years of publication. In serial form, Dickens would have maybe 50,000 subscribers for his books. Uncle Tom’s Cabin dwarfed even Dickens in popularity. The book was also the best-selling novel of the 19th-century in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Latin America, and in France was second only to Les Miserables.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin had an impact on people far in excess of the impact produced by most novels. And that's an impact that you can feel even today! Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, you understand, on a deep level, that there is no goodness which is possible under slavery. That's a result of Harriet Beecher Stowe's art. She depicts a number of slave-owners who try to be good, but they fail, because this system itself is pernicious and dehumanizes people.

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If we want to know about both the best and worst side of our country, we should read Uncle Tom's Cabin. We are a country that practiced slavery and also a country that abhorred it.

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The book is full of speeches, but no more so than Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice. It also contains a few passages where the narrator breaks through in outraged passion, but War and Peace equally abounds in such intrusions. The book is a passionate book, brimming over with life.

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[The author] has a moral authority that Dickens only occasionally achieved. […] ultimately what Dickens wanted was for the world to just be a little better, a little kinder to the unfortunate.

Stowe is animated by quite a different vision. She believes slavery is wrong. […] There is no goodness possible under slavery.

And she demonstrates this by showing what happens to goodness.

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It’s such an awe-inspiring, powerful book, full of both artistry and moral fervor. There is no other novel like it in the English language: it is like the child of Dickens and Tolstoy, but it was written before Tolstoy’s great novels came out!

In fact, this book was an influence on Tolstoy (he said it was better than Shakespeare). Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an influence on every single person who published a book after 1852.

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If you read a novel during the latter half of the 19th-century, odds are good that this novel was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was the book of the century! There are no other books that even compare! Its impact was so out-sized that there’s no template for even thinking about it. The book was too big for literature. It was the Napoleon of books.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not lesser or worse than other great 19th-century novels, if anything it’s better-structured than Huckleberry Finn, more heartfelt than Dickens, and more humane than Dostoevsky. And, yes, not incidentally, it’s the best-selling and most-influential novel published in the 19th-century, and its first London edition was quite literally subtitled “The Great American Novel.”

And this mega hit only saw the light of day thanks to a partisan, activist, weekly newspaper!

In book form, millions of copies were then sold worldwide, and it was translated into more than twenty languages.

America’s most nationally and globally great and impactful work of imagination, about a desperate time and a terrible institution, was a work of principled progressive consciousness, written by a progressive activist, and published in an activist newspaper. Imagine that. Imagine that buried literary history and destroyed consciousness. Imagine if things were different now in the publishing world, and long since — where we might be today already.

The novel was met with outrage in the South, banned in eight states, destroyed in the mail, burned publicly, sermonized against, denounced as propaganda and libel, and called criminal and insulting. Booksellers with the novel were threatened and boycotted. Laws were passed against owning and distributing the book. Many pro-slavery novels were written against it, while the novel energized and spread the abolitionist movement. It wakened and shifted public opinion, including internationally.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the Great American Novel

Surely it’s not difficult to think of how such novels or shows or movies and other imaginative works that directly and explicitly intervene in the present moment could be written and distributed similarly in this mercenary and terminal capitalist world. Neoliberal? Today’s age of slavery, I mean capitalism, might better be called an age of neo-slavery and old-time genocide. Biblical even — as the biblical involvement is similar to the age of slavery in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was outsold in books only by The Bible.

Eric Meisfjord notes that eight years after the serialization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

During the 1860 presidential election campaign, Lincoln's party bought and distributed another 100,000 copies as a way to gather abolitionist support for his run. It was Abraham Lincoln, now president of a nation fighting against itself in the Civil War, who met Stowe and allegedly told her, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" It was also Lincoln who observed, very aptly, "He" (or, in this case, she) "who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes."

Harriet Beech-Stowe wrote the novel in 1852, prompted in part by the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which made habeas corpus irrelevant and forced northern officials to enforce slavery by arresting escaped slaves — refugees — and criminalized any northern (or southern) person who assisted those fleeing slavery with heavy fines and prison sentences.

The book sold even more copies in Great Britain than in the United States. This had an immeasurable appeal in swaying British public opinion. Many members of the British Parliament relished the idea of a divided United States. Ten years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the British people made it difficult for its government to support the Confederacy, even though there were strong economic ties to the South.

Where is the great lacerating novel of Con Don Trump and every last one of his destructive tyrants and sycophants, of JD Vance and the whole fraudulent and exploitative right-wing "populist" circus and cesspool?

Any ambitious novelist who wants to explore straight white male masculinity, identity, and related themes would be crazy not to start there — in any part of that — and could probably continue forever without end — or until revolution. JD Vance might have been a nice little boy, once upon a time, but he became a first-class lethal jackass. He can apologize later, I guess. Tell that story and how it implicates the public and damns the plutocracy and blows apart nice little boys and girls in Palestine. All the while gutting America. And the rest of the world. What kind of monsters are we, that we vote for the Bidens and the Trumps? What kind of monstrous consciousness must we carry in our heads, hearts, and guts?

No Gods anywhere will help us. We help us. No God yet proclaimed actually exists — as far as anyone can know. What kind of consciousness pretends — lies — otherwise? The consciousness of a bunch of crazy and conniving men, mainly, and then women. In religion we see the power and impact, good and bad, of the make-believe. No one should lie about it and call it real. Call it a story, which is was it is — an imaginative experience of potentially great power.

Otherwise you trap people in deceit and false consciousness, as you train them to accept the wholly irrational, making them prey to the next nutty liar who comes along and is thus able to justify anything irrationally — fraud and exploitation, violence and misery, genocide. The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in the canon. Anyone know when this was first pointed out and why? What great consciousness is that? Talk about a need to repent.

The left needs to be ever more open, honest, and upfront about the world we live in. If those on the left won’t do it, no one will. And we need to go far beyond the elevation of consciousness offered in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by now. If that isn’t obvious, nothing is, as critic Edmund Wilson noted in 1940:

The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered….

Leftists or novelists of any variety who are looking closely at expressive ways forward — the libs, the cons, you name it — they would do well to note Wilson’s 1931 insights also:

I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers, who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920-30, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve us as guides. …the private imagination in isolation from the life of society seems to have been exploited and explored as far as for the present is possible. Who can imagine this sort of thing being carried further than Valéry and Proust have done? And who hereafter will be content to inhabit a corner, though fitted out with some choice things of one’s own, in the shuttered house of one of these writers—where we find ourselves, also, becoming conscious of a lack of ventilation?

The reaction against nineteenth-century naturalism which Symbolism originally represented has probably now run its full course, and the oscillation which for at least three centuries has been taking place between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity may return toward objectivity again: we may live to see Valéry, Eliot and Proust displaced and treated with as much intolerance as those writers—Wells, France and Shaw—whom they have themselves displaced. Yet as surely as Ibsen and Flaubert brought to their Naturalistic plays and novels the sensibility and language of Romanticism, the writers of a new reaction in the direction of the study of man in his relation to his neighbor and to society will profit by the new intelligence and technique of Symbolism. Or—what would be preferable and is perhaps more likely—this oscillation may finally cease. Our conceptions of objective and subjective have unquestionably been based on false dualisms; our materialisms and idealisms alike have been derived from mistaken conceptions of what the researches of science implied—Classicism and Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism are, in reality, therefore false alternatives. …our ideas about the “logic” of language are likely to be very superficial. The relation of words to what they convey—that is, to the processes behind them and the processes to which they give rise in those who listen to or read them—is still a very mysterious one. We tend to assume that being convinced of things is something quite different from having them suggested to us; but the suggestive language of the Symbolist poet is really performing the same sort of function as the reasonable language of the realistic novelist or even the severe technical languages of science.

“Being convinced of things” is complex and multi-faceted and we had better employ all powerful resources at hand to meet the ever-intensifying gravity of the crises we face, as indicated not least by the Doomsday Clock.

There's more than one great novel to be written about the lethal cesspools of the day. No slight thing. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first and in many ways the greatest Great American Novel, even if the first-time novelist, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, sketched some of the opening chapters awkwardly, as Kanakia notes. Not that it mattered at the time.

In any case, Beecher-Stowe was a highly skilled and very talented writer, having previously published fiction, essays, and articles for nearly two decades in literary magazines and religious journals, including a published book of short fiction — fertile literary productivity. Somewhat similarly, there are very capable author-activists writing in literary-activist veins today — their work largely de-platformed, and not only by the establishment. Culturally and institutionally blocked.

So much could be said — especially since the left’s use of story, literature, and culture remains incredibly weak both for reasons that are forced upon it and for reasons that are unintentionally self-inflicted, mistaken, and negligent. Not a total bust but very badly hobbled. The progressive and revolutionary left should be deeply engaged in far more than scathing critiques of capitalist art and story. And the left should be able to achieve far more than the production of polite, indirect, or handwringing works that are little more than modified laments akin to establishment art.

Time to bump up our consciousness — in our own way, based on our explicit principles and direct actions in story and by story. The novel and the news both need be vitally new. Each in their own way, at their best, build new consciousness and new life, new awareness and new relations to the particulars of the world that we live in, and the world that we might and must create.

More than eight decades ago, writer and critic Mary McCarthy noted that key elements of the novel form are made up of facts and news:

The distinctive mark of the novel [as compared to other forms of fiction] is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics … a deep love of fact, of the empiric element in experience. I am not interested in making a formal definition of the novel…but in finding its quidditas or whatness, the essence or binder that distinguishes it from other species of prose fiction: the tale, the fable, the romance. The staple ingredient present in all novels in various mixtures and proportions but always in fairly heavy dosage is fact.

McCarthy traces the early history of the novel, 'the birthmarks':

The word novel goes back to the word "new," and in the plural it used to mean news — the news of the day or year…. Many of the great novelists were newspaper reporters or journalists [and "students" of criminals and prisons] "confirmed prison-visitors"…Defoe…Dickens…Dostoevsky…and Victor Hugo …Tolstoy…. Coming to the twentieth century, you meet the American novelist as newspaperman: Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, O'Hara, Faulkner himself…. Novels carried the news — of crime, high society, politics, industry, finance, and low life…. The epic, I might put in here, is the form of all literary forms closest to the novel; it has the "boiler plate" ["durable informative matter"], the lists and catalogues, the circumstantiality, the concern with numbers and dimensions. The epic geography, like that of the novel, can be mapped, in both the physical and social sense….

The fact-based essence of novel consciousness — or of any novelistic long story — can create great awareness, impetus, and new possibilities of profound and compelling scope that McCarthy herself, though talented, never seemed to approach at much magnitude — as is true of the vast majority of novels, the much vaunted liberal novel not least.

Not that these novels are unaccomplished, but they are typically very limited, frequently distorted, and often focused on small or private consciousness rather than on large public consciousness. Let alone the partisan. How dare they! It wouldn’t do! Can’t offend the plutarchy and the plutocrat capitalist mindset that controls culture and consciousness! How dare the novel strive for Uncle Tom’s Cabin size impact and effect. How dare the authors go there. And of course they don’t. The publishing industry won’t allow it and denigrates those who write freely anyway or attempt to.

Victor Francis Calverton — born George Goetz, a Johns Hopkins grad and author of The Liberation of American Literature and 17 other books, plus editor of a Black American literature anthology, and founder and editor of the Modern Quarterly for 17 years until his early death in 1940 — he was an independent left literary figure who has been marginalized out of existence. He noted that

the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

…

Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing … writers believe in revolt in life. … [They] are opposed to the society in which we live and aim to devote their literature to its transformation. [They] are more interested in social revolt rather than in literary revolt. As a group they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life....

[Such] writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody … a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.

More precisely, replacement of the destructive with the constructive should happen all at once, ideally. And oftentimes the constructive new must be build up alongside the destructive old before any greater change is possible.

Regardless, there needs to be an outlet for great society-rocking consciousness in some paper somewhere, some platform, by now, online. Even merely one such outlet would be a start — that’s how bad the situation currently is. I think we can fairly say that this situation too is appalling, as the missed opportunities seem monumental. If ever a time needed a flood of heightened novelistic consciousness — revolutionary consciousness — the time is now. The left artists are practiced, skilled, and mature.

There is no single overarching problematic institution today that is destroying the world and blocking change if not financial tyranny — militarized capitalism — which is its own form of fascism. So many things need to change all at once for so many people. Big actions to transform society to progressive and revolutionary ends can achieve this. That’s the consciousness that needs to be explored, grown, and spread today.

Even if “consciousness” were the wholly private matter that the individualistic tradition in philosophy supposes it to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects, not of itself.

That’s America’s great progressive philosopher John Dewey exactly a century ago. You need to know what you’re doing. You need to look outward at the facts to know your own self and the larger public both. Artists need to be conscious of the public and private facts that make up the personal to expand and advance consciousness and to make a public impact, not only a private one.

The novel and similar long story forms — like movies and especially so-called “prestige” TV series — create powerful and motivating consciousness — by way of facts and information imagined in ways that connect the often confusing and distorted dots of reality into sweeping and very particular portraits that are distinct and unmatched in other forms of communication, expression, and knowledge. These human-loaded renderings of consciousness of what is and what might be and what must be change us and the way we are willing to move through the world.

There is the world, and then there is consciousness, which is of the world, including of other people — of realities and possibilities — and consciousness goes wanting when the world and its possibilities are falsified and ignored or not imagined in ways that are vital. Consciousness goes wanting in so many ways. And the failure to fully feed and grow our consciousness as it constantly remakes itself and the world, in endless loops, to the good or the bad depending on what we create, is our failure of imagination. Our genocidal failure, our ecocidal failure, our failure of militarized financial tyranny.

Stories can help learning and growth and vision by expanding, modeling, and maximizing consciousness, and by integrating into our beings and our institutions the most essential elements of the world and the people in it. A greater more potent consciousness, and the energy and will that this consciousness generates, effects itself in action and changes the world.

When great consciousness is not both felt and understood to be left and liberatory, popular and progressive, then debased consciousness can be imposed by the fraudulent and slick stories of the right that glorify and disguise tyranny, abuse, destruction.

Best that the stories, that the consciousness of especially those in a powerful nation — in position to do great good or the most terrible damage — be to the left and liberatory, rather than otherwise.

We can be ever more fully human or we can be monsters. Much of that — maybe all of it — depends on the qualities of our consciousness in relation to the facts, rather than simply on the facts alone. Broken consciousness benefits from the modeling of more whole and healthy consciousness, in addition to and including getting to know the facts and the world. We move and act as conscious beings not as mere arrays of data and reactive impulses.

The left may have the facts and the real news of the world and its powerful narratives about those facts and the news, but has the left created sweeping great consciousness that better spreads and activates those narratives about those facts? To what limited and often slipping extent we can see.

Does the left dominate the novel of our time, of consciousness? And if not, why not? If the left wants to be the great movement of our time — a novel movement — as must be if the planet and its peoples are to be saved — then the left needs to become more fully conscious itself, and of itself in the world.

It needs to become more popular, and spread that consciousness and appeal — based on a knowledge and assessment of the facts but also on something much more, something greater, more whole, something driven and irresistible: powerful and revolutionary forms of human consciousness that energize, transform, and forever re-order the world.

Where are today’s Uncle Tom’s Cabins, with their seismic and liberatory effects and culminations? Where are the novels that necessarily surpass this — given the times. Needed now as never before. If the constant production of truly left TV series and movies are beyond the resources of the left, the same cannot be said for the large scale serialization of left novels and similar long stories on progressive platforms. And yet — a vacuum. There is a vacuum of revolutionary consciousness — a void of more primal and full power. There is a great lack of epic consciousness. Utterly driven out by mighty plutocratic forces.

Meanwhile the right is nothing if not epic in both its wrongs and its sense of power. You need to fight epic power with epic power. Epic consciousness with epic consciousness.

“Just the facts, Ma’am” has its place, for good reason, but has become a much mocked line for good reason too. It’s a parody of the police state — blinkered and blind, ears-plugged, tone-deaf, ineffectual, and severely mistaken. It’s a trap the left sets for itself at its own peril — no matter if the facts and news presented are horrific and chaotic, or heartening and sensible.

Left reporters’ and analysts’ frequently brave and taxing work is absolutely indispensable and irreplaceable, but left energy and action needs to go beyond being a citizen cop on the beat, a watchdog with a bite, a reporter and commentator with a gift for pertinent detail. The left needs to rewrite the whole story of the Era all at once — by elevating consciousness into the stratosphere, to a commanding point where everyone at last might see and be seen, feel and be felt, for what the Hell they are actually doing and not doing to each other and to the world.

Principled, big, and powerful imaginative stories that intervene in the present day with progressive and revolutionary consciousness, with facts and feeling cohered in ways otherwise unrecognized and unavailable — these stories proceed from the principle that "Criticism, like charity, starts at home," per Wole Soyinka. Moving, reasonable, justified criticism should be brought to bear upon home — whether that be America or the left, or America and the left — with charity as due or where it can be mustered. We are responsible for our own actions first and foremost. And we must find ways to be epically responsible in these catastrophic, potentially terminal, and tectonic times.

A lot of leftists — let alone liberals — have and have always had a limited, often quaint and genteel, essentially liberal understanding of the novel, a profound misperception, drawn from nefarious roots in the establishment and mistaken roots in the left. There is far from an entirely proud history of thought in the so-called left on this, literary and artistic thought that remains skewed, especially by philosophers and cultural critics but also by artists. The result is unknowingly retrograde, yielding often merely liberal would-be left art and production. And a lack of left art in general.

If the establishment does not have the guts or integrity to publish the most vital and challenging creations, critiques, and elevations of consciousness from the left — which it does not — then writers of conscience and consciousness need to go another way. To the popular left online news platforms, it would seem — the modern day National Eras.

We need to replace the plutarchy, its oppressive norms and ways and consciousness.

Could be that someone needs to get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her co-progressive populists a phalanx of militant epic ghostwriters in the novel and other long story forms — the better to try something more and new to grow and spread consciousness to whole new levels of being and movement.

The most robust and powerful consciousness — certainly the most detailed and expansive — may be found and created in the novel and in similar kinds of big imaginative story. This is a great human innovation — one that we should not waste.

It’s far past time to feed and grow and reproduce progressive and revolutionary consciousness wholesale — in and against this big bad world. We need to rewrite consciousness in full and spread it far and wide to better recreate the universe, as we can and as we must will.

It must be done on the left where it can be done the most explicitly and the most directly. Now as in times past but newly so. The biggest and most essential, the most needed and most impactful stories of human consciousness can be made only from the left, and must be distributed from there — from the popular left especially.