Introduction

This past summer, on Tuesday, August 19, left-wing groups, labor organizations, and commentators made statements commemorating the anniversary of the publication of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Little Red Songbook. First published in 1909 and legendary in its own time, the IWW’s songbook is, without doubt, the best-known piece of musical literature ever produced by the US labor movement. The commemoration of its publication anniversary would be welcome, if not for an unfortunate fact: the first edition of the Little Red Songbook was not published on August 19, 1909, but in early January of that year. I felt it was necessary to point out this historical inaccuracy, not merely because it is simply false, but because I believe it to be a good point of departure for discussing a particularly underdeveloped aspect of contemporary socialist strategy: aesthetics and artistic organizing.^[1]

These are mutually constitutive. One cannot engage in artistic organizing without an aesthetic theory and vice versa, but a robust instance of aesthetic theory remains elusive in contemporary socialism, and attempts at artistic organizing remain scant. This is the result of a series of overdetermining strategic orientations and theoretical assumptions within the contemporary socialist Left: a fundamentally ahistorical attitude toward the artistic history of the socialist movement, a quietist orientation towards artistic organizing, and a theoretically idealist approach to aesthetics.^[2] These are co-determined by the continuing influence of two concurrent moments in the history of mid-century socialist artist-intellectuals: their engagement with folk revivalism and their debates over realism.

If the reader will allow me, however, I will return to the initial issue—the historically inaccurate commemorations of the IWW’s Little Red Songbook—and use this as a point of departure. My broader argument will extrapolate from this as a manifestation of the issues elaborated above.

A Historical Inaccuracy

Taken in isolation, the inaccurate commemoration of the Little Red Songbook’s publication is an innocent mistake. And, of course, even in the most low-stakes framing of the issue, there are degrees of culpability. A simple commemorative social media post by an individual is, on its own, a negligible offense. Inaccurate statements by organizations nominally engaged in historical scholarship, such as Working Class History, a popular UK-based, online archive of left-wing history with a significant international readership, and the Labor Heritage Foundation, a US-based labor history institute with a focus on working-class artistic activity, are more worrying. That Working Class History went so far as to produce a short podcast on the Little Red Songbook that claimed August 19 as its publication anniversary prompted my decision to respond to this historical error and use it as a starting point for a broader discussion of the socialist Left’s approach to artistic organizing and aesthetics.

The claim that the Little Red Songbook was first published on August 19, 1909 seems to have originated in a 2015 editorial statement of People’s World, the official publication of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). The statement claimed to be adapted from entries in Paul Buhle, Mary Jo Buhle, and Dan Georgakis’ massive Encyclopedia of the American Left (EOTAL), Wikipedia, and “other sources.” However, I can find no mention of this date in EOTAL or on Wikipedia pages that mention the songbook. Two hours after People’s World published their editorial statement, the official Twitter account of the United Auto Workers (UAW) also posted a commemoration of the songbook with the same inaccurate date.

The “other sources” mentioned by the editors at People’s World are likely a single source: a strange comment made by labor folklorist Archie Green in his co-edited IWW song anthology, The Big Red Songbook. In his chronology of IWW musical literature, Green briefly mentions that the first extant advertisement for the Little Red Songbook was in the August 19, 1909 issue of the IWW’s flagship newspaper, Industrial Worker.^[3] Indeed, the advertisement in question does exist and states “I.W.W. [sic] Song Books Now Ready.”^[4] This, however, was meant to advertise a second printing of the first edition, proven by the fact that numerous references to the already-published songbook can be found in issues of the Industrial Worker as early as April 1909.^[5]

Green’s throwaway comment, buried deep in the appendices of a massive anthology, does not excuse organizations like Working Class History or the Labor Heritage Foundation, because the actual publication of the Little Red Songbook in January of 1909 is well-documented. Richard Brazier, a longtime leader in the IWW who served on the editorial committee of the Little Red Songbook’s first edition from 1908 to 1909, produced an article-length history of the committee’s early activities for Labor History in 1968. Brazier made clear that the songbook’s production occurred in late 1908 and publication in the early days of January.^[6] Brazier’s account is a key text for studies of the early IWW’s musical activity and is well-known among scholars who work on this topic. My own work on the musical activity of the early IWW regularly mentions the January 1909 publication of the Little Red Songbook as a turning point in the Union’s history.^[7]

The Historical Reality of the Little Red Songbook’s First Edition

The actual date of the Little Red Songbook’s publication is fundamental to understanding the internal political dynamics of the IWW in late 1908. The songbook project was spearheaded by Spokane, WA-based, IWW National Organizer J.H. Walsh. Walsh had experimented with different methods of incorporating musical performance and music publishing into the organizing strategy of the IWW’s West Coast chapters since 1907. However, Walsh is best-known today for leading the legendary “Overall Brigade,” a loose faction of West Coast IWW delegates, to the fourth IWW convention in Chicago in September 1908.^[8] Once there, the Brigade allied with another faction led by Vincent St. John and ousted Socialist Labor Party (SLP) leader Daniel De Leon from the convention on a technicality.^[9] This affront led the SLP, one of the key organizations in the IWW’s 1905 foundation, to withdraw support for the Union.

Walsh’s tactical experiments with musical performance and publication were a key point of contention between SLP- and non–SLP-affiliated IWW members. Walsh and others were viciously attacked by SLP-affiliated delegates for their tactical mobilization of musical activity during the 1908 convention. The SLP-affiliated faction’s defeat, then, was taken by Walsh as a mandate for the expansion of his musical tactics. He immediately set about establishing a songbook editorial committee upon his return to Spokane in October.

Walsh’s political victory at the 1908 convention had enormous consequences for the IWW’s organizing strategy, especially its approach to recruitment. By 1911, public musical performance was a regular feature of the Union’s public-facing events and, more importantly, the production, publication, and sale of musical literature had become central to the Union’s propaganda, recruitment, and funding. The increasingly prominent place of musical activity in IWW recruitment and retention, as well as the growth, centralization, and routinization of its music publishing infrastructure, instigated a subtle but significant social development within the Union: it allowed for the emergence of an artist-intellectual stratum, the Little Red Songbook’s songwriter-contributors. This approach differed from that of the IWW’s main rivals, who also engaged in musical performance and publication but did so sporadically. It was the routinization and centralization of this activity, more than anything else, that was responsible for the musico-artistic dynamism for which the IWW is so legendary.

The “Song Method” Debate

The growing intellectual and financial importance of musical performance and publishing within the Union incited a series of struggles for editorial oversight of the Little Red Songbook’s content and financial control of the resources its success produced, which continued until the Union’s repression by the US federal government beginning on September 5, 1917. Leadership and rank-and-file members engaged in fierce debate over the Union’s musical activity within the pages of the IWW’s press, as well as at meetings and conventions. Some of those involved in what was contemporaneously called the “song method” debate,^[10] such as Vincent St. John, William Z. Foster, and Walker C. Smith, remain well-known figures. Others, like James Wilson, Ralph Chervinski, and Fred Isler, are only remembered by historians of the IWW.

The crux of the “song method” debate was the IWW songs’ pedagogical value. This, of course, was primarily a question of what affect the IWW was trying to produce in listeners and what musico-lyrical content could achieve that affective goal. No one in the debate questioned the value of musical activity in the abstract, but many were suspicious of the Little Red Songbook’s efficacy in producing a critical affect in working class audiences and resisted the increasingly central role the songbook was playing in recruitment and retention. Many of the most popular pieces in the songbook were ironic parodies of Protestant hymnody and Tin Pan Alley popular song. Pro-“song method” IWW members argued that the lyrical sarcasm of these songs was an effective delivery system for the IWW’s political education. Others, however, believed the songbook’s emphasis on lyrical sarcasm produced a smug, sectarian cadre who interpreted IWW political education as a revolutionary dogma, rather than a critical but flexible approach to revolutionary trade unionism.^[11]

This debate over aesthetics largely worked backwards from a strategic goal that all involved agreed was necessary: producing a critical attitude towards both capitalism and the contemporaneous state of US trade unionism among recruits, as well as the successful delivery of the fundamentals of the IWW’s revolutionary approach to industrial unionism. In other words, aesthetics were a tactical question with regard to a broader strategic objective. The struggle over the Little Red Songbook’s content, which was identical to the struggle over control of the songbook itself, shaped it as a tactical element of the IWW’s broader revolutionary strategy.

The Socialist Arts as Window Dressing

The historically inaccurate commemorations of the Little Red Songbook strip it of this profound historical quality as an object shaped by struggle. Indeed, a Little Red Songbook first published on August 19, 1909 could not exist, the circumstances necessary to its production having passed. The real result of the historical inaccuracy exhibited by these commemorations is ahistoricism, for this is how the Little Red Songbook appears to the reader of such statements: the songbook came from nowhere, was beloved by all, and remains so. The above-recounted history, of course, proves such sentimental nonsense wrong. The Little Red Songbook was the result of conscious tactical experimentation, itself contested, and it became an intellectual object of intense political struggle between factions of the early IWW. It was beloved, but not by all, not even all IWW members, and remains beloved only in certain ways, by certain people.

This approach to the artistic activity of the labor and socialist movements, which dehistoricizes objects like the Little Red Songbook out of sentimental historical disinterest, is rampant within the contemporary socialist Left. It is a leftover result of the worst parts of mid-century folk revivalism. Although the discourse of folk revivalism is no longer an active and explicit part of contemporary socialist theory, its continuing influence can still be felt, especially within the United States and United Kingdom, where the mid-century artistic organizing of both the CPUSA and Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was heavily influenced by folk-revivalist ideas.

One of the implicit postulates of mid-century folk revivalism was that music, art, and literature are only “positive” if they emerge organically among an idealized demographic.^[12] This quietist approach to artistic organizing work is anathema to the conscious activity required by socialist strategy. Although communist folk revivalists themselves did not subscribe to this quietism,^[13] the broader folk revival never fully abandoned spontaneism nor the artistic quietism it engenders. The contemporary socialist Left has clearly inherited the quietism of the broader, non-communist folk revival. Few contemporary socialists are interested in the theory, practice, or history of communist folk revivalism and have simply accepted the folk-revivalist common sense of the more loosely left-wing topical song movement of the 1960s. Rather than consciously developing artistic projects, the contemporary socialist Left waits patiently for this activity to emerge spontaneously and accepts whatever occurs when it does. This can be seen in the general lack of support for artistic activity to scale within left-wing organizations and the lack of critical engagement with what activity does exist.

I have written elsewhere on the negative effect that vulgar, folk-revivalist sentimentality has had on historical analysis of the artistic activity of labor and socialist organizations, particularly that of the IWW.^[14] I am convinced that until a more systematic effort to grasp the interconnections between folk revivalism and the communist movement during the Popular Front is made, historical analysis of the artistic history of our movement will remain bogged down by the ahistorical sentimentalism that was the lowest common denominator of that moment. The product of this sentimentalism is a fundamental disinterest in objects like the Little Red Songbook, as well as in artistic activity in general, outside their use as saccharine window dressing.

Aesthetics as Tactics

Folk revivalism has little to say about tactics, at least for socialists. The emphasis folk revivalism places on traditionality, authenticity, and spontaneity is, in fact, a shackle on any broader tactical aesthetic thinking. For folk revivalism, tactical effectiveness has a mutually constitutive relationship with the seemingly automatic: a piece of music, art, or literature is good if it is imagined as having been produced unconsciously and spontaneously, usually by an idealized population of workers or peasants located somewhere geographically (or psycho-geographically) distant from the perspective of the folk revivalist. This is quietism: art, if it happens, will be made somewhere else, and we must wait for it.

Furthermore, folk-revivalist aesthetics are ready-made, itself a historical phenomenon: folk revivalism is a modular strategy produced in the crucible of manifold nationalisms. It is no wonder that folk revivalism was adopted by the communist movement at its most nationalistic. But it is not necessarily its nationalist origins that make folk revivalism such a fetter on tactical aesthetic thinking within the contemporary socialist Left. Rather, it is that ready-made quality itself: what is considered aesthetically positive within the folk-revivalist framework is already given. This restricts the tactical flexibility needed to answer aesthetic questions and, as described above, can even suppress active engagement in artistic activity in the name of spontaneity. Indeed, folk revivalism’s framework necessarily engenders a historical disinterest in the tactical value of aesthetics outside questions of authenticity and tradition.

This ahistorical approach undermines our ability to grasp how socialists in the past have understood aesthetics tactically. For IWW members, the question of aesthetics was obviously a question of tactics. The “progressive” or “reactionary” character of their musical activity turned on the question of whether their songs produced desired effects in new recruits. This tactical approach to aesthetics, while common sense in the marketing departments of contemporary capitalist firms, is almost entirely missing from the few aesthetic debates occurring within the socialist Left. In fact, the arguments tend to go in the opposite direction, in which a piece of art, music, literature, or cinema is posited as strategically necessary because it is “progressive” on its own terms. The term “progressive” effectively becomes an empty signifier into which the aesthetic predilections of an individual can be slotted.

This tendency to slot one’s own aesthetic preferences into empty, absolute terminology is a form of theoretical idealism,^[15] and it remains common within the socialist Left. For example, in her review of Marxist artist Adam Turl’s recent work of art theory, Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted From Earth and Heaven, Patricia Manos takes Turl to task for believing there to be aesthetic choices that are objectively “more correct” on their own terms.^[16] As Manos correctly points out, Turl’s subjective, negative reaction to Soviet official art is the real measure of what they believe to be “correct,” rather than any concrete strategic objective outlined for socialist artists today. Lawrence Parker, historian of CPGB, recently argued something similar concerning the standard approach to aesthetics within the British Left, where “comrades [have] focused on their own subjective reactions to art and, in classic Kantian fashion, turned this over into abstract universals.”^[17]

The tendency towards theoretical idealism within socialist aesthetics can be traced directly to the few historical aesthetic debates among socialists that are well-known within the contemporary socialist Left. A case in point is the debate over realism between mid-century German socialist intellectuals. Left-wing publisher New Left Books produced an anthology of this debate in 1977 titled Aesthetics and Politics.^[18] NLB’s successor, Verso Books, has published numerous editions of this collection, which remains a key text for socialists interested in aesthetic questions. The jacket copy of the most recent edition loudly proclaims that “no other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare” with that which occurred during this period.^[19] This is quite silly. The level of debate contained in Aesthetics and Politics is incredibly low. The majority of interlocutors, which included socialist intellectual luminaries such as György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch, engage in the theoretical idealism outlined above. Each ties themselves into pretzels to slot their own aesthetic predilections into the empty space represented by either the term “realist” or “progressive,” rather than deriving an aesthetic approach from a strategic goal.

Only Bertolt Brecht cuts through this miasma with an acerbic critique of theoretical idealism and an aggressive exposition of his tactical approach to aesthetics. Responding to Lukács in particular, Brecht correctly points out that Lukács’ tendency to slot his own aesthetic preoccupations into an empty, absolute understanding of “realism” reveals that “what concerns [Lukács] is enjoyment rather than struggle.”^[20] Brecht proceeds to demolish Lukács' idealist theory of realism by transforming it into a theory of aesthetic strategy:

Now we come to the concept of realism. This concept, too, must first be cleansed before use, for it is an old concept, much used by many people and for many ends. This is necessary because the people can only take over their cultural heritage by an act of expropriation. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories; literary forms of expression cannot be taken over like patents. Even the realistic mode of writing, of which literature provides many very different examples, bears the stamp of the way it was employed, when and by which class, down to its smallest details. With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not cling to 'tried' rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not derive realism as such from particular existing works, but we shall use every means, old and new, tried and untried, derived from art and derived from other sources, to render reality to men in a form they can master. We shall take care not to describe one particular, historical form of novel of a particular epoch as realistic—say that of Balzac or Tolstoy—and thereby erect merely formal, literary criteria for realism. We shall not speak of a realistic manner of writing only when, for example, we can smell, taste and feel everything, when there is 'atmosphere' and when plots are so contrived that they lead to psychological analysis of character. Our concept of realism must be wide and political, sovereign over all conventions.

Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.^[21]

If the concept of realism is going to stand in as a term used to describe a successful socialist aesthetics, then Brecht proposes that what is realist is what successfully accomplishes the movement's pedagogical goals. What is realist is what works.

It is well-known that Lukács, Adorno, and Bloch all found Brecht’s “instrumentalist” approach to aesthetics, i.e., his tactical orientation towards aesthetic questions, disturbing and destabilizing. Walter Benjamin, who was friendly with Brecht, was even chastised by Adorno for his interest in Brecht’s aesthetic ideas. This distaste, of course, was a result of Brecht’s system: its tactical focus on achieving strategic outcomes. In fact, Brecht was no more “instrumentalist” than Lukács, Adorno, or Bloch, but while their theory turned on the subjective instrumentalism of individual enjoyment, his firmly centered the instrumentalism of tactical effectivity. Aesthetic choices, for Brecht, had no political quality in the abstract; they were “progressive” if they were effective at accomplishing the concrete objectives of the socialist movement, “reactionary” if they were not.

While instrumentalism tends to be associated with stale, monist aesthetics, Brecht successfully makes the case that this is not a feature of instrumentalism writ large, but specifically the subjective instrumentalism of his interlocutors. The historical contingency of Brecht’s own instrumentalism, that of tactical effectivity, is the foundation for his aesthetic pluralism. If aesthetics are tactical, then they must be adaptable, and socialist artists must be allowed to “use every means, old and new, tried and untried, derived from art and derived from other sources” in the service of the movement’s strategic goals. What works in one place and time may not work in another. Therefore, according to Brecht, a genuine pursuit of strategic objectives by socialist artists necessarily produces a dynamic, pluralist aesthetic theory.

The Little Red Songbook and Socialist Aesthetic Theory

Here we return to the Little Red Songbook and the detrimental effects of approaching its initial publication ahistorically. The “song method” debate was significantly more developed than those contained in Aesthetics and Politics for the simple reason that most IWW members recognized the immediate tactical nature of both what they were doing when they created the songbook and what they were discussing when debating its content. They, like Brecht, were interested in the tactical effectiveness of their songs and maintained the strategic questions that framed the songs’ tactical quality as the motivating force behind their aesthetic debate and artistic practice. Yet, one would never know this, since the contemporary socialist Left seems fundamentally disinterested in this history.

The socialist Left’s artistic ahistoricism, artistic quietism, and theoretical idealism all combine to discourage any interest in producing a tactical aesthetic theory. The movement remains unconcerned with socialist debates over aesthetics outside those that left-wing publishers have canonized; it implicitly discourages intentional attempts at artistic organizing to scale; and it promotes a-tactical, idealist approaches to aesthetics in the few discussions that do exist.

Contemporary socialists must overcome two tendencies to develop a more effective approach to aesthetics. First is the spontaneism of folk revivalism, which engenders a disinterest in the concrete history of aesthetic debates within the socialist movement and a quietist, mechanical understanding of how artistic organizing work occurs. Any successful artistic activity will be the result of a concerted, intentional effort on the part of socialists, one that is routinized and to scale. Second is the tendency towards theoretical idealism in those few instances when aesthetics are discussed. Aesthetic decisions only have political quality in concrete situations. All discussions of aesthetics, therefore, must first posit a strategic goal: who is our audience, what affect are we trying to produce, and what is our pedagogical objective? It is only after answering these questions that the tactical quality of aesthetics can be meaningfully addressed.

Absent this development, our artistic “strategy” will continue to be defined by sentimental invocations of our artistic past; invocations unconcerned with even the most basic historical accuracy. The struggle over the Little Red Songbook is one historical moment from which socialists can learn to think through aesthetics tactically, but only if we care to know about it.

1. I use the term “artistic organizing” here in place of the more common “cultural organizing.” I believe the latter term is tautologically contradictory insofar as it categorically demarcates activity based on criteria that are common to activity across these categorizations. In other words, what is “cultural” as opposed to “non-cultural” organizing is fundamentally unclear. What distinguishes an activity as “cultural” is not a unique aspect of that activity. In fact, one is hard-pressed to find any serious attempt to define this uniqueness at all. In many cases, describing an activity as “cultural” is effectively a means of coding such activity as secondary; a problem that will be implicitly tackled in the body text of this article. However, by describing the activity I deal with here, that being the socialist mobilization of the performing, literary, and visual arts, as “artistic organizing,” I take seriously that the historically specific nature and development of the realm of human activity we call “the arts” is a recent phenomenon. “Culture” is merely one particularly awkward and vulgarly transhistorical way of trying to reckon with a division of intellectual labor that is fundamentally historical and recent in origin.

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2. My discussions of the “contemporary socialist Left” should be understood as restricted to that part of the movement within the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.

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3. Archie Green, et al., The Big Red Songbook (PM Press, 2016), 459.

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4. “I.W.W. Song Books Now Ready,” Industrial Worker 1, no. 23, August 19, 1909.

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5. For example, see: William Iolling, “Please forward to me at your earliest convenience…” Industrial Worker, 1, no. 5 April 15, 1909; E.F. Lefferts, “From Holtville, Cal.,” Industrial Worker, 1, no. 9, May 13, 1909; Albert V. Roe, “Trip of A.V. Roe,” Industrial Worker 1, no. 16, July 1, 1909.

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6. Richard Brazier, “The Story of the I.W.W.’s ‘Little Red Songbook,’” Labor History 9, no. 1 (1968), 100.

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7. For example, see: Jackson Albert Mann, “The Historical Origin of the ‘Singing Union’,” Monthly Review Online, March 8, 2024, https://mronline.org/2024/03/08/the-historical-origin-of-the-singing-union/; Mann, “Nationalism, Populism, and Internationalism in the Lyrics of the Little Red Songbook (1909-1917),” Peace, Land, and Bread, June 18, 2021, https://www.peacelandbread.org/post/nationalism-populism-and-internationalism-in-the-lyrics-of-the-little-red-songbook-1909-1917-1.

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8. J.H. Walsh, “I.W.W. ‘Red Special’ Overall Brigade,” Industrial Union Bulletin 2, no. 24, September 19, 1908.

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9. The IWW was founded on June 27, 1905 as a neutral space for industrial unionists to organize across left-wing sectarian divides. The founding coalition included a number of labor unions and socialist organizations, such the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the SLP, and factions of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). By far the most important of these was the WFM, which was the initial backbone of the IWW in terms of membership and infrastructure. By 1908, however, the WFM had withdrawn from the IWW, opening a power vacuum within the Union. The SLP, led by De Leon, acted on this opening with a concerted effort to pull the IWW into closer alignment with the Party’s own objectives, breaking the implicit neutrality agreement that had been the IWW’s raison d'être. This triggered an immediate reaction from non-SLP IWW members, who ousted De Leon and officially enshrined the IWW’s political neutrality in their now-famous revision of the IWW’s preamble. See: Paul Brissenden, “The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism,” PhD Diss., Columbia University, 1919, 40-82, 113-154.

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10. The term “song method” was first coined by IWW member Wm. Horn on December 23, 1911. See: Wm. Horn, “‘Song’ Vs. ‘Education’,” Solidarity 3, no. 1, December 23, 1911.

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11. For one example of a member voicing this concern, see: M.G.R., “Reflections of an Organizer,” Solidarity, 6, no. 265, February 6, 1915.

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12. For an explicit articulation of this standard postulate of folk revivalism from a liberal left perspective during this period, see: John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 8.

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13. For what the author considers to be the best instance of communist engagement with and adaptation of folk-revivalist ideas, see: Pete Seeger, The Incompleat Folksinger (Fireside, 1972); for historical work that covers the turn towards folk revivalism among communist artist-intellectuals in the US and UK during the Popular Front, see: Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of American Culture, 1930-1950 (University of Illinois Press, 1989); Richard and JoAnne Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (Scarecrow Press, 2000); Ben Harker, “‘Workers’ Music’: Communism and the British Folk Revival,” in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, ed. by Robert Adlington (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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14. Jackson Albert Mann, “The Foner Case: Thoughts in Response to the New Edition of 'The Case of Joe Hill',” Cosmonaut Magazine, October 4, 2022, https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/10/the-foner-case-thoughts-in-response-to-the-new-edition-of-the-case-of-joe-hill/.

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15. For a good example of theoretical idealism in the thought of some socialists, see the debate between Bolshevik Revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov and Kantian Marxists Pyotr Struve, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov, the former arguing against and the latter three for the incorporation of absolute concepts into the Marxist framework: Alexander Bogdanov, Toward a New World: Articles and Essays, 1901-1906 (Brill 2022).

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16. Patricia Manos, “Uneven and Confused Development in Left Art Criticism: A Review of Adam Turl's 'Gothic Capitalism',” Cosmonaut Magazine, September 24, 2025, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/09/uneven-and-confused-development-in-left-art-criticism/.

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17. Early in his piece, Parker describes socialist aesthetics writ large as having been divided into two approaches, a “split between the instrumentality of so-called ‘tendency’ culture: productions simply used to encapsulate a political message; and a purer appreciation of the classical music, literature, drama” that the socialist movement inherited from the approach of artist-intellectuals in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) at the turn of the twentieth century. Parker argues that both sides of this coin necessarily tend towards slotting subjective aesthetic reactions into absolute terminology. I agree with Parker’s assessment of socialist aesthetics as, in my own words, theoretically idealist. However, I maintain two issues with his framing. First, Parker elides the fact that the divide in question, that between instrumentalist and disinterested aesthetics as expressed in the SPD, was linked to two separate strategic issues: (1) why and how does the socialist movement produce art of its own and (2) why and how does it appropriate existing art? These are the strategic stakes of this divide, which I believe is a separate issue from the failure of SPD artist-intellectuals, and later socialists, to maintain these strategic questions as the motivating force of their practice. Second, Parker does not make clear that the “instrumentalism” he critiques is specifically the subjective instrumentalism of individual enjoyment and that this is a feature of both what he describes as “instrumentalist” aesthetics proper and disinterested aesthetics. I believe the answers to the above strategic questions are linked to an instrumentalization of art, but one quite different from the subjective instrumentalism which Parker finds suspicious. This is the instrumentalism of tactical effectivity. While the instrumentalization of art is often understood to be harbinger of stale aesthetic monism, the instrumentalism of tactical effectivity, if taken seriously, necessarily produces aesthetic pluralism. The failure of socialist aesthetics remains the failure to understand this, a point I will argue subsequently. See: Lawrence Parker, “How not to use popular culture,” Communist Party of Great Britain History, March 10, 2024, https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2024/03/10/how-not-to-use-popular-culture/.

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18. Theodor Adorno, et al., Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 1980).

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19. See: https://www.versobooks.com/products/1056-aesthetics-and-politics.

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20. Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 69.

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21. Ibid, 82.

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