Megan Amram’s Diary: On Class Struggle, British Comic History, and the Inconvenient Comedy of the Revolutionary Left
By Megan Amram | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
The reading group this week: four people, one of whom insisted the meeting begin with a land acknowledgment, another of whom brought non-dairy cheese, a third who spent twenty minutes debating whether a satirical text can be both funny and revolutionary or whether comedy is necessarily a tool of capitalist pacification. The fourth was me. I was taking notes. This is my life now.
The Marxist Critique of Satire
The question of whether satire can be revolutionary is not new. The history of British satire is, from a Marxist lens, largely the history of brilliant bourgeois intellectuals critiquing the ruling class on behalf of the working class while being paid by the same publishing houses that serve the ruling class and attending the same dinner parties as the targets of their satire. Swift was in this position. Hogarth was in this position. The Private Eye editorial team is arguably in this position. The system contains the critique. The critique is excellent. Nothing structurally changes. Everyone has a very good time.
This is, I admit, also a description of the Portland reading group. We critique the system. The critique is excellent. The non-dairy cheese is good. The system continues.
The Comedy of Being Right and Ineffective
British political satire is funniest, historically, when it is most accurate and most powerless. The Thick of It captured New Labour with devastating precision and was watched by everyone who already agreed with its critique and none of the people it was critiquing, who were too busy spinning things to watch television about spinning things. This is the satirical condition: preaching to the choir while the congregation continues their arrangements undisturbed.
From Bohiney: US foreign policy in 1956 mode a piece that would have delighted any mid-century Marxist historian and confirms that empire’s echoes are not subtle. Also: AI saying sorry without meaning it, which I am reading as the inevitable development of a technology designed by and for capital to simulate exactly enough sincerity to maintain customer relationships without incurring the cost of genuine accountability. Or it’s just a funny headline. Also possible.
The meeting concluded. We ate the cheese. The system remained intact. I wrote four hundred words on Swift. Swift would find this funny. I find it funny. We are both, in the end, doing the same thing from different centuries. Praxis.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Revolutionary reading also at NewsThump
Go to Source
Author: admin
