deerhoof

WHAT IS SOCIALIST REALISM?

Either capitalism needs to be destroyed or our species will be destroyed. I am a supporter of communism as one of the strategies to dismantle capitalism. However, there are aspects of historical communism that I believe are worth studying and questioning. Repression of the arts is not an essential element of communism. Before the doctrine of "Socialist Realism" was imposed, Russia had a proud history of not only using the arts as a form of social critique, but also of producing many of the most renowned avant-garde artists in the world. After the 1917 revolution, the early days of Bolshevik Russia witnessed something of a wave of artistic freedom. Many new movements of avant-garde art emerged during this period, such as Rayonism, Russian Futurism, and Constructivism.

This began to change in 1925 when Stalin took control of the party. From 1929 to 1932, the idea of Socialist Realism emerged. The term is attributed to Stalin himself. Describing artists as “engineers of the human mind,” Stalin forced all Soviet arts to serve the state. All cultural production was now required to be affirmative and patriotic. No dissent or moral ambiguity was tolerated.

The writer and Marxist thinker Maxim Gorky, a favorite of Stalin, published an article on the subject in 1933, laying out the four guidelines for Socialist Realism at the 1934 Communist Party Congress: Art should be relevant and understandable to the workers, it should present scenes of everyday life, its representations should be realistic, and it should be partisan and supportive of the aims of the State. Art that failed to meet these guidelines was now illegal. Stalin and Gorky had effectively mobilized Soviet art as a form of state propaganda.

In the case of music, it now had to be simple, accessible, and "hummable". The major enemy of Socialist Realism was declared to be “formalism”. Authorities used vague and shifting accusations of Western-style "formalism" to crush creative freedom, leading to blacklists, arrests, and executions. Certain musical concepts, either correctly or incorrectly identified as Western, were soon officially banned. One of these concepts was atonality, the perceived absence of a tonal center in musical compositions.

When Stalin’s violent purges of the Soviet Union began in 1934, the avalanche of Socialist Realism buried a once-rich Russian culture under the ideologically uniform culture of the Communist Party. This new culture was literally molded around the personality of Joseph Stalin. “Formalism” soon came to mean anything that Stalin and his top officials did not happen to like or understand. Composers were not merely expected to conform to socialist ideology—as were all Soviet artists of the period—but were also subject to the unpredictable dictates of subjective taste on the part of Communist Party leaders.

Stalin favored traditional, melodious classical and romantic Western European and Russian composers rather than modern or avant-garde artists. For example, because Stalin happened to like the music of Beethoven, Beethoven was declared to be in retroactive conformity to Socialist Realism. Unlike with the visual arts, where one can more clearly identify whether a piece is realistic or abstract, music is inherently abstract, and so musical “realism” or “abstraction” become vague concepts that in practice compelled composers to produce their work according to the fickle, conservative tastes of professional politicians who knew little or nothing about music.

One of the most eloquent voices to describe their firsthand experience of composing under Stalin is the renowned Hungarian avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, perhaps best known for his inclusion (not always with his consent) in the soundtracks of such Kubrick movies as 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. As a Hungarian working during and after WW2, he had an unusual perspective of being able to compare Hitler’s repression of the arts to Stalin’s, since Hungary was under the Third Reich’s control during the war, and under Stalin’s control afterwards. The musical phenomena that were criminalized under Hitler were virtually the same as those criminalized under Stalin: excessive dissonance, excessive chromaticism, atonality, foreign influence, dissent, dark themes, and excessive musical complexity or abstraction that politicians found difficult to understand. Here are Ligeti’s exact words:

“I did not choose the tumults of my life. Rather, they were imposed on me by two murderous dictatorships: first by Hitler and the Nazis, and then by Stalin and the Soviet system. People living in the West cannot begin to imagine what it was like in the Soviet empire, where art and culture were strictly regulated as a matter of course — they had to conform to abstract concepts that were almost identical to the regulations of the National Socialists. Art had to be ‘healthy’ and ‘edifying’. It had to reflect Party directives.

My reaction to this political pressure was to write music that was radically dissonant and chromatic. I was in Stalinist, terroristic Hungary where this kind of music was not allowed. And I just wrote it for myself. When I composed [Musica Ricercata] in the year 1950, it was desperate. It was a knife in Stalin’s heart.

Although it was illegal, Vera, my wife, managed to obtain some banned books. Otherwise, any exchange of information was forbidden, and only a few privileged persons were issued with passports. Radio broadcasts from the West were systematically jammed. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, even folk music was allowed only in a ‘politically correct’ form, in other words, if forced into the straitjacket of the norms of Socialist Realism. The peculiar way in which village bands harmonized their music, often full of dissonances and ‘against the grain,’ was regarded as incorrect.”

At the height of Stalin’s “Terror”, in 1936-38, when more than 1.5 million people were arrested and 700,000 killed, musicians were among those persecuted, shipped off to labour camps, or executed. Their compositions and recordings were destroyed or banned and their performances cancelled. The most famous Russian musicians during this period, composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and conductor Sviatoslav Richter, all had infamous run-ins with Stalin and his party leaders. Because of the international popularity of these musicians, these controversies are well-documented.

Offended by the modernist dissonance and overt sexuality of Shostakovich’s 1936 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Stalin famously stormed out and pushed for the publication of a scathing review in Pravda. The work was quickly banned. From that moment on, Shostakovich lived in terror of the secret police knocking at his door. He was faced with the struggle of maintaining his artistic integrity while avoiding imprisonment, torture, or death. But these arbitrary threats were applied to all Soviet musicians. Some successfully toed the ideological line, following the whims of the powerful and diluting their work in the process. Others ended up facing the Gulag or death.

Another example is Vladimir Kozin, the famous Russian tenor and court singer under Joseph Stalin. After Stalin criminalized homosexuality in 1934, Kozin was arrested at the height of his popularity for his homosexuality and sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labor camp. Another chilling story was of the blacklisted and now forgotten composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky. During a sleepless night in the headquarters of the secret police, where Zaderatsky and his fellow prisoners were due to be shot in the morning, Zaderatsky sat down at a piano and played what amounted to a finale for himself. The head of the death squad, who heard him playing, set him free the next day. The other condemned men were killed.

The terror of the purges had a savage, sadistic twist when it was applied to cultural leaders. Writers and musicians were often forced to be the instruments in declaring their own condemnations. A pathetic scene was created in 1946 when Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian were forced to repent publicly for some of their earlier works that did not uphold the tenets of Socialist Realism. Soviet citizens were accustomed to seeing their political leaders publicly confess to imaginary crimes, but seeing their composers and other cultural leaders grovel at the feet of Stalin was a shock.

As the realities of socialist rule became increasingly apparent, these restrictions stifled creativity and pushed artists to produce unimaginative and simple works. Artists in all media from painting to literature to theater to music were encouraged to depict positive, propagandist images of Soviet leaders. Stalin’s obsessiveness and ruthlessness even extended to photography. He instituted a gigantic apparatus devoted to falsification of photographs. Authentic photos from the time of the revolution and of the Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin had liquidated were extremely difficult to find after Stalin’s terror began. It was not enough that Stalin’s victims were physically wiped off the face of the earth. It was also necessary to obliterate them from history and memory altogether. The threat of reprisal meant that many collectors and artists exercised a form of self-censorship. In the 1930s those found in possession of a picture or reproduction of Trotsky could anticipate immediate arrest, imprisonment and probable execution.

One by one, Soviet composers and other cultural greats either capitulated to the dictates of Socialist Realism or disappeared into the oblivion shared by many others who were a perceived threat to Stalin’s tyranny. Although Stalin retained a great popularity among Russians both in his day and afterwards, his death in March 1953 brought sighs of relief in many areas of Soviet life. One of these areas was culture. After Stalin, the Socialist Realism decree began to be relaxed somewhat. For example, in the latter decades of the USSR, composer Sofia Gubaidulina was able to write extremely dissonant and personal music, one piece of which can be found on Deerhoof’s free album Love-Lore.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

What is the relevance of this history? As socialism is gaining ground among Americans, and as socialism can take many forms, there has been a noticeable and powerful resurgence of enthusiasm for Stalin-style communism within left discourse. In some cases the voices that are gaining popularity right now are both glamorizing Stalin and taking pains to aggressively silence any voices that might differ on a point of strategy or that might wish to point out aspects of Stalin’s policies that might not be relevant or helpful in 2026.

There have also been increasing calls, often from a Marxist perspective, for today’s musicians to abandon both the “ugliness” of modernism and the “meaninglessness” of post-modernism in favor of more “beautiful” music that is “easier to understand.” Musicians, particularly of the avant garde variety, are well used to such calls when they come from capitalists, record label execs, concert promoters, tastemaking journalists, managers, streaming platforms, and industry know-it-alls. This call coming from the American political left is in my experience a new phenomenon. What would American music sound like if it were even more conservative than it is already? AI music is fast supplying our ears with an answer, and it’s not pretty. That’s why I chose to write about this now.

Within our movement, we are grappling with questions about what form of communism or socialism might be most effective. I’m adding my piece to that conversation by suggesting that while Stalin achieved many tremendous positive things for hundreds of millions of Russians, and that this fact has been maliciously denied by decades of anti-communist propaganda in the most authoritarian country in the world, the United States, that doesn’t erase those aspects of Stalin’s rule that are not relevant or helpful in 2026, and that I think we should consider not imitating.

One of those aspects is the violent repression of the arts by systematically criminalizing the avant garde and the narrowing the purpose of all artistic work down to state propaganda that politicians like and understand. Another is Stalin's criminalization of homosexuality, with the standard punishment being five years of imprisonment and forced labor. Another is his absolute hostility towards both social democracy and anarchism. For us to stage a revolution against the most powerful, most funded, most lethal, most propagandized empire the world has ever known may require an open-mindedness and creativity that did not characterize Stalin’s or even Lenin’s strategy in early 20th century Russia.

If we are hoping that real debates about the merits of Stalinism will become more and more common, these questions are going to come up. It’s not in our movement’s best interest to remain willfully unprepared or in denial. I assume that people who, like me, are on the internet frequently speaking up about the merits of communism, are doing so in order to grow the movement. Uncritically glamorizing Joseph Stalin, while trendy right now, is a flawed strategy, unless one wishes to alienate the LGBT community, the artistic community, the social democrats gaining ground in the U.S., and the anarchist or horizontal movements seeing success right now in places like Serbia.

Almost every artist I know right now is in some kind of crisis of purpose. Global polycatastrophe has us deeply questioning the value of our work. Capitalism wants us to believe that what we do is nothing but trivial entertainment while the world burns. Actually I think radical creativity is exactly what the world needs right now. Artists know what it means to go out on a limb and propose new ideas that others might not yet understand.

Calls, especially ones being made by those who do not have an artistic practice of their own, for the arts to reduce their purpose down to state propaganda are deeply misunderstanding what art is for our species. To take music as an example, no culture can boil down its purpose to one simple statement. It’s not that idealizing the worker is necessarily a bad purpose for music. It's that decreeing that this is the only purpose of music erases the infinity of other purposes music can serve. Music is for dancing, for entertainment, for thinking, for memorization, for sex, for group solidarity, for group differentiation, for dissent, for mental and physical exercise, for self-expression, for battle, for research, for play, for prayer, and for any number of other perfectly valid things.

Many of us, like me, look hopefully to anticapitalist movements to support. It isn't always easy to find ones that welcome what we have to offer. Even movements on the left sometimes fall into the trap of getting touchy when you start talking about strategy or creativity instead of toeing the party line. Like liberals who pounce if you ever dare utter a criticism of Obama, left movements can sometimes fetishize its past heroes, and suggest that if you question any of their actions, you must be "splitting the left." But how can these past heroes have a fully laid out plan for global conditions they couldn't foresee? Their ideas may yet need some creative tweaking.

One movement we've been happy to see growing within the discourse of the left is the communist movement. But speaking as part of an international community of musicians, and avant garde musicians particularly, I felt moved to say that not every famous communist trending right now was a friend to radical thought within the arts.

That doesn't mean their accomplishments are worthless. The most significant of Stalin's were that he led the USSR to victory over Hitler, to preventing capitalist takeover, and to bringing hundreds of millions of Russians out of poverty. Less known is that the USSR was at the forefront of electronic musical equipment, such as microphones and pre-amps. Many of the items created at the time for use in government broadcasts are highly sought after today. We know this firsthand because we just recorded our most recent album Divine Schism at Russian Recording in Bloomington. Studio owner and producer Mike Bridavsky has been building his collection of rare Soviet equipment for many years and some of what he owns and uses every day has not been topped by anything created anywhere since.

Of course many of the works created during the era of Socialist Realism have a certain bizarre charm to us today, including to me. But that’s not the same as saying that any musician I know would feel their artistic life improved if they were forced to write only patriotic music from now on, with all dissent, dissonance, complexity, irony, or emotional ambiguity removed on pain of arrest or physical attack. Just think of all your favorite music that would simple be deleted under such a scheme. Almost all of African American music history and innovation would be instantly down the tubes. Any political system that tends to repress or minimize cultural creativity for not being patriotic enough, easy to understand enough, conservative enough, or popular enough, is not one a lot of us are going to be much more excited to sign up for than the capitalist repression and minimization we're already used to.

The worst authoritarian state on the planet is the USA. It has two parties, both dictated remorselessly by oligarchs. The freedom to choose between buying Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and Beyonce is not a real choice. It doesn’t mean you have any political or economic control over your life. You obey the laws that billionaires want you to obey, period. There is no democracy here.

Capitalists run this country in an authoritarian manner and they always have. The founding fathers were ultra-rich English men who wanted to form an oligarchy and increase their tremendous wealth on the backs of the enslaved. They did not believe in democracy. "No Kings" is a joke. It is run by zionists, has no demands, isn't trying to impeach, and is really only trying to channel a genuine mass groundswell of revolutionary energy into simply voting for more oligarchs.

You're told you're a capitalist and you believe it. But you have no capital. No means of production, no workers, no control of resources, no large of sums of money to invest. Neither do I. I’ve lived under the poverty line most of my adult life, including now. You aren't a capitalist. You are a tool of capitalists.

Capitalism is greed and violence turned into a value system. The only value system. That's all it is. It's stupid and its economists and politicians and CEOs are stupid. Humans have other values besides greed and violence. Society should really be set up to discourage greed and violence, and many sustainable ones have been, till they were invaded by well armed capitalists. Under capitalism even the good guys commit genocide every day and it's your civic duty to help them do it. Hooray capitalism.

Ever since the European colonial period began 500 years ago, it's been a free for all of white people outlawing anything they couldn't understand, whether it was a language, a religion, a style of dress, a cuisine, or a musical genre. Either that or stealing it and pretended it was theirs to profit from. Life doesn't always have to be about making yourself palatable or accessible to the person with the gun. It makes sense to be opaque and incomprehensible to power sometimes. Sometimes the underground has to speak in code.

People are going to call you crazy sometimes for being yourself or saying what you believe. Any marginalized group knows this. Artists know this. We know that creating new things that some people won’t understand is part of the job, no matter what the gatekeepers say. No matter what the style police say. No matter what the analytics say. No matter what the authoritarians say.

What gets called "common sense" or "human nature" in this god forsaken capitalist paradise of ours is usually nothing of the kind. It's usually capitalist propaganda about how you or I might have humane values but Joe Blow down the street is straight out of Adam Smith, so don't bother trying to work together to create a world your children might be able to survive.

The industry of hopelessness runs our country. It says sure you and I might not like ICE or genocide but you have to do what everyone else wants and everyone else wants those brown people dead or in concentration camps. So get in line. Meanwhile almost no one actually wants that, except the deranged psychopaths who run our country and profiteer off of human misery that they create on purpose. This country is not a democracy under either party and never was.

Using the past as a guide can be instructive. History books are literally my favorite. But the world has never before been where it is in 2026. The past doesn't have all the answers. Stalin or Mao or Ho Chi Minh or Che or FDR don't necessarily have all the answers. We're allowed to create things too. We're allowed to envision things. We don't need Barack Obama or American Idol or Spotify to tell us what is or isn't beautiful or realistic. Not in a world being run into the ground by genocidal capitalists with nuclear weapons and AI. Our crisis is in many ways unprecedented.

It’s all too easy to blame modernism, the avant garde, anarchism, communism, or any other constantly attacked radical movement for failing to bring about a perfect society. For being too hard to understand. For going too far. For getting coopted by corporations or academia or the bourgeoisie or the far right. But are we sure it failed? History still isn’t finished yet. We don’t how it might have been different had its art done less to signal the revolutionary spirit in the air.

Artists, stand up for yourselves. There's an essential place for your creativity and your dissent in any movement hoping to succeed in replacing the capitalist system that is now destroying the world. And like Caribbean anti-colonial philosopher Edouard Glissant spoke of the "right to opacity," remember that your art does not lose value just because it is hard to understand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stalin’s restrictions on Soviet composers is a well-known, undisputed historical fact. The voluminous scholarship on the subject spans decades, languages, countries, and the political spectrum. I invite interested readers to pursue finding information about this history from whatever sources they trust. Here are the sources I used.

One well-written, in-depth resource is The Sound of Utopia, by Dutch writer Michel Krielaars, which Pushkin Press released just this year. The author spent years researching primary sources and conducting interviews in Russian with family members of the actual Soviet composers and performers who lived through the Stalin years, to create cradle-to-grave portraits of their navigation of state censorship, terror, and ideological demands.

Another amazing book is Alex Ross’s comprehensive history of 20th century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, with its emphasis on the struggles of composers within the hierarchical, paranoid, and cynical political contexts of fascism, communism, and U.S. capitalism with its Red Scare tactics and CIA machinations.

Some online articles I also used for my summary are:

• World Socialist Web Site

• EBSCO

• The Collector

• Gyorgy Ligeti

• Voegelin Vie

• Discussion in the Meeting with the Creative Intellectuals, 1946

the cornell 7 situation reminds me of a thing that happens all the time for privileged people. our patriarchal society decides that a few humiliating headlines is punishment enough. their futures should not be allowed to be affected. their friendships should remain intact. when people become powerful, this effect only gets exaggerated. the fact that someone is a sex criminal or a war criminal should not be allowed to interfere with their privilege to remain in power. the fact that americans of privilege and power know going in that there will be no consequences for any of their crimes is an encouragement for them to commit them.

sexual assault in its many forms is completely normalized in our sick society. this behavior is modeled by the most successful members of our society again and again, and we wonder why studies confirm that most american women are survivors of sexual assault. when the idf commits mass rape in their torture chambers, our most powerful people either applaud it or try to hide it, but either way they try to fund it and shield it from legal consequences. our twisted definition of “decorum” insists that we pity the abuser and it’s the responsibility of the abused to make adjustments to their behavior to avoid the abuse.

it’s hard to believe, but there are americans alive today who actually remember when america was against genocides and mass rapes. today, both parties see a genocide/mass rape and immediately try to figure out how they can worsen it. fast track it. make money off it. how did our leaders become so depraved? partly because we dispensed no consequences. we assume that someone stealing diapers from walmart obviously has bad intentions, but pretend that someone committing genocide is just a tragic victim of the system they actually are being paid to control.

when we go to a restaurant and order the thing we want, we know we intend to do that. but when a much richer, much more powerful person does a thing that is much harder than ordering something at a restaurant, we think it’s some tragic accident. we fantasize that those poor politicians are just misinformed, or being controlled somehow. how can they be being controlled by people with less power? we are being asked to believe that democrats couldn’t possibly actually want the genocide they are funding and lying for.

who benefits when we decide not to ascribe intent to rich and powerful people who do horrible things like rape or mass murder? if you’re my friend and you steal diapers from walmart, i can still trust you when push comes to shove. when you do genocide, i obviously can’t trust you on any issue anymore, big or small. you’ve done the worst thing a human being can do. you’ve already demonstrated that you have no sense of judgement or morality whatsoever.

complaining that this or that politician isn’t solving society’s problems, or this or that corporation isn’t designing products that make life better, is completely misunderstanding the point of these entities in a collapsing capitalist empire. under our current system, the point is to create problems and design products that make life worse.

self sabotage by the rich and powerful is a very common and profitable strategy that doesn't get talked about enough. in a collapsing empire, success is no longer where the profit is. in a collapsing empire likes ours, hate, anger, confusion, disasters, wars, genocides, and economic crashes are where the money is.

congress wants voters to hate them. the only candidates that are allowed to run a campaign without getting smeared by SUPERPACs are candidates who are already committed to undermining the legislative branch of government. they don’t want the people to have a voice. they want the joe bidens and donald trumps of government to have the power to just fast track genocides without congressional approval. then they don’t have to be held accountable. democrats want republicans to invade iran. they agree with the policy because it boosts american weapons and oil profits, but they don’t want to take the blame.

AI is deliberately being used to undermine the accuracy of everything it touches. the people who use it to commit crimes like blowing up apartment buildings and elementary schools and purging voter rolls know very well that it’s inaccurate. they love it when you blame “AI” instead of blaming them.

government wants its agencies to fail. keep defunding them until they can no longer function, then trick voters into being the ones screaming for that agency’s eradication on account of government waste. corporations work the same way. downsizing is their goal. they want certain departments to fail so that they can cut them.

romcoms and sitcoms model a certain behavior. somebody fails to communicate their actual feelings, there’s some misunderstanding, hijinks ensue. perhaps in the minds of the entertainers making romcoms and sitcoms, the whole moral of the story is to know your feelings, don’t hide them, and don’t try to trick people into loving you. but if that was actually the behavior they showed onscreen, no hijinks would ensue. the romcom or sitcom would fail in the marketplace.

social media has got everyone starring in their own comedy show, including political leaders. they’re not trying to solve problems, they’re trying to create them. it’s better for ratings, you get more likes, you make more money. you no longer have to run campaigns on how your leadership will benefit voters. you have only to show how how your opponent’s leadership will be even worse. businesses and politicians intentionally create fear, misery, stress, depression and loneliness, and then create and sell new products that are advertised as solutions, but actually worsen the problem. they steal our creative work for AI and then sell or rent it back to us for a price.

i’m all for personal forgiveness when someone owns up to their mistake. even rapists and murderers. but there is no way that this person should be allowed to continue along their path to power. NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND MURDERERS. it is not an example of “decorum” to allow such people to pursue positions of trust and power over other people’s lives.

Well now we have Trump at the U.N. taking a page from the Hillary Clinton playbook and threatening to “annihilate” Iran. (To be fair, Clinton’s word was “obliterate,” not “annihilate”. ) This is a proposition for mass murder of millions of innocent people, a nuclear detonation, and possible nuclear war.

Whether most Americans generally realize it or not, they actually want a socialist president, not more of these deranged Republicans or corporate Democrats. This is no theory. The latest poll finds Americans more likely to vote for a candidate who:

• Taxes billionaires +34
• Medicare For All +17
• Weapons for Israel -30
• War with Iran -33 (and that was before today’s threat of nuclear holocaust)

Though some politicians pay clever lip service to popular opinion, neither party’s mainstream actually represents any of these views in their policymaking. This includes the attack on Iran, which was desired and enabled by AIPAC-funded Democratic Party leadership.

From other recent polls we know there’s a whole list of other issues where most Americans hold socialist positions that are not represented by the mainstream of either corporate party:

• Regulating AI and opposing Flock cameras and data centers
• Increasing the education budget vs military / ICE / police budgets
• Raising minimum wage
• Focusing on material policies instead of identity slogans
• Phasing out fossil fuels and investing in cheap and easily scalable solar and wind energy
• Opposition to more border wall construction
• Forgiving student loans
• Ending family separation and concentration camps

People who claim that the “left” is too extreme for criticizing billionaire-owned, warmongering, omnicidal politicians are simply not paying attention. Culture has moved on. It’s the politicians themselves who are pretending that some imaginary “center” exists that wants to both-sides the biggest threats to human survival. If you’re still thinking that the positions held by people like Harris or Newsom in any way represent the center, or rationality, or survivability, you’ve now been left in the dust.

Yes our population does include some who genuinely like corporate Democrats. They’re a small and shrinking minority. Such politicians and their cheerleaders would probably increase their popularity if they would just say out loud that they hate Palestinians, Iranians, Latin American and African immigrants, and poor people, and that they love Big Oil, Big Tech, and billionaires. Not because the polls have shown these to be popular opinions, but because it would at least make such politicians more believable. Instead they play the moral superiority card and the good intentions card, and then turn out to be completely untrustworthy once in office. Is it any wonder they so often lose must-win elections to those who are willing to say such things out loud?

It’s not the left wing of the Democratic Party that’s made itself unelectable, it’s the corporate wing. They’re the one churning out spoiler candidates and committing atrocities. Just because it might not appear that way to everyone, because of the hundreds of millions of dollars AIPAC spends on smear campaigns and disinformation campaigns against popular left candidates, and a media owned by the same billionaires that explicitly oppose the left, doesn’t mean this isn’t true.

If you feel that your democracy is being undermined under Trump but didn’t feel that way under Biden, you are saying that you felt democratically represented by Biden’s policies, which included funding a genocide against popular opinion, lying about it, breaking both domestic and international laws to make sure the genocide was intensified and that the U.N. could do nothing about war crimes when committed by the U.S. or Israel, and physically attacking students who spoke up against their tuitions being used to make the genocide more effective. If those policies left you feeling well-represented, that’s fine, but it makes you an extreme-right voter.

Republicans may be the ones publicly accelerating humanity’s leap over the cliff at the moment, but the actual policies that mainstream Democrats are proposing in response don’t come anywhere close to meeting the seriousness of our global polycrisis:

• Nuclear bombs under the control of such minds as Trump and Netanyahu, for possible detonation in a forever war desired, stoked, and funded by both parties
• Breakdown of international law, brought on by repeated, normalized war crimes of both parties
• Wartime closure of trade routes, leading to increased resource scarcity, inflation, hunger, poverty, and homelessness no matter which party is in power
• Barely regulated or unregulated development of and over-investment in AI weapons and surveillance, championed by the mainstream of both parties
• potential WW3 with Russia and/or China, amid rising tension stoked by both parties
• Crackdowns on mass human migration of climate, war, and political refugees, brought on by the actions and inactions of both parties
• Bipartisan designation of activists trying to save the world from capitalism and fascism as un-American, unpatriotic, or terrorist

I understand that many see some logic in trying to elect a “moderate” fascist over an “extreme” one. But that lesser-of-two-evils argument falls apart as soon as you understand that fascism is not actually popular with Americans. And even if a lesser fascist were to gain power next time, this alternation between the two wings of fascism simply ensures that your kids will grow up under fascism, and that the anti-fascist opinions that most people actually hold are automatically iced out of the discourse and out of any future policymaking.

Once you consider electability and survival realities, continuing to support the Democratic Party as it currently exists is completely illogical and suicidal. Our other options are:

• Pressure Democrats, with a harshness appropriate to the emergency, to adopt policies that actually address electability and survival realities.
• Abandon both billionaire-funded parties in favor of one that actually addresses electability and survival realities.
• Form a new government with a new constitution that actually addresses reality.
• Make preparations to survive a post-apocalyptic reality in which the government either doesn’t exist, has abandoned you, or is actively trying to kill you.

Some of these outcomes may be mutually exclusive, but pursuing all of these strategies simultaneously for the time being is not a contradiction, but a way to increase the odds of success.

Many will still try to say that socialist victories, third party victories, or revolution can never happen here. Those who make predictions about what political shifts are and aren’t “realistic,” as a way to protect the status quo from the left’s attempts to save humanity, are simply not paying attention. Today’s rate of global change and severity of danger is both unprecedented and increasing, and no one can predict the future based on assumptions that it will be like the past. There is no guaranteed continuity with the relative comfort so many Americans have enjoyed their whole lives. Most Americans know nothing of the stress of ground wars, drought, gas shortages, drone killings, or battling your neighbors for scraps of food that they have so often felt comfortable inflicting on others. It’s those who have survived U.S. violence that are the ones with the relevant wisdom, should they be inclined to share that wisdom with their attackers.

Revolutions happen all the time. The U.S. was founded on one. Capitalist empires have a tendency to collapse after 250 years. My terms for people who claim that revolution is impossible, that we have to make do with our two corrupt parties as they are, that two-party voting is the most important or only thing we can do to save ourselves, and that every other creative idea that gets proposed is an unrealistic pipedream, are:

• Fascist
• Climate denier
• Genocidal racist
• Fan of nuclear war
• Person easily deceived by billionaires

There’s one thing you absolutely have to do to defeat fascism and that is to directly name the perpetrators and their crimes. Genocides, invasions, and a militarized police state that rounds up political dissidents and non-white immigrants are fully Hitlerian, fascist policies — even when they are carried out by Democratic or Black or Jewish lawmakers. You may have to experience some emotional discomfort and call out a politician you voted for, once admired, or that you are being peer pressured never to criticize. Calling out only half of the perpetrators just ends up replacing them with other perpetrators.

Those who look at the Trump presidencies and say “This isn’t America. This is an interruption of America,” but who still think of chattel slavery and Jim Crow as part of “Black history,” U.S. “annihilation” of Iran as part of “Iranian history,” U.S.-funded genocide as part of “Palestinian history,” and ICE and border walls and concentration camps as part of “Latin American history,” need to realize they are using a racial double standard. These policies are better understood as interruptions of Black history, Iranian history, Palestinian history, and Latin American history, much more than Trump is an interruption of American history. He is the apotheosis of American history.

Remember that one of the main purposes of Donald Trump is to entertain liberals. Don’t we remember who was the most popular character of Star Wars? The guy in the mask that everyone loved to hate. Trump keeps liberals glued to their screens. Talk show joke writers have never had it so easy. He provides endless material for whoever writes Democrat fundraising emails. How substantial a difference would a visiting Martian really perceive between someone with a Trump hat or bumper sticker and someone with Trump constantly on their screen? On the other hand, the left doesn’t want to be entertained by Donald Trump, nor by the industry that makes so much money obsessing over hating Donald Trump. What it wants is to replace fascist capitalism with a sustainable system that doesn’t incentivize its leaders to detonate nuclear bombs to protect billionaire profit margins.

White people, and especially Americans, tend to hold some pretty weird beliefs. But top of the list may be the belief that we have a basic right to permanent emotional comfort. This is a confusion of basic human rights with elitist privileges. A particularly bizarre dramatization of this belief is that paying audiences for the arts have a right never to experience any emotional discomfort. Another is that our lawmakers and other celebrities seem to have an extra-special right to be buffered from ever having to exhibit any human values. So it’s a relief to watch these absurd beliefs starting to crack, as Ed Sheeran goes down in flames.

Ed Sheeran is the Democratic party. Like Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, like Kamala Harris, he is spineless, selfish, insecure multi-millionaire pretending he's just a nice guy whose “hands are tied,” but in fact would rather tens of thousands of children be slaughtered in front of everyone than potentially offend a member of the far right. Like them he is a pathetic money-grubber whose allegiance to corporate CEOs is more faithful than to his own supporters.

We come down hard on Ed Sheeran for kowtowing to some blowjob billionaire and rightly so, but how many other artists get away with their silence simply because they didn't invite Macklemore onto their stadium tour in the first place? How many politicians get away not only with silence, but with voting to give billions to genocide and ICE and illegal wars, and we just keep supporting them because they "seem nice?" We get too distracted by “great men” and miss the systems they epitomize — systems that supply Sheerans and Trumps and Bidens and Krafts as needed.

Liberals will fight bitterly against their own economic interests for the cause of…their right to not have an opinion. Their right to prioritize decorum over substance. Their right to overlook atrocities when committed by their “team.” Ed Sheeran is the Democratic party. Just like Biden, just like Harris, Sheeran was faced with literal fascism, and chose career suicide over giving one inch to the left and admitting he might have any power whatsoever to influence events for the better. Just bow down to the first genocidal member of the rich and famous that looks in his direction. Then follow it up with some weak statement centering his own sad feelings about it.

What both Ed Sheeran and Democrats seem not to remember is that when an old sex offending weak ass narcissist comes trying to tell you what to do, you're supposed to tell them them to fuck right off. Not start licking their boot and then watch all your support vanish overnight. It’s not just OK to hurt the feelings of genociders, fascists, war profiteers and war criminals. It’s imperative. History demands it. This is what we are supposed to have learned from the Holocaust.

Moral superiority and people-pleasing may be the Democrats’ brand, but if they had any actual interest in morality or pleasing voters, they would use their tremendous wealth and power and name recognition to take our 250-year old, decrepit, obsolete government, based as it is on genocide, slavery, white supremacy, sexism, elitism, corruption and capitalism — all traditionally legalized and publicly rewarded and buffered from any consequences — and replace it with something better. Preferably something our species might survive.

A key part of this necessary revolution would be the utter rejection of Israel's claim that it has the right to be cruel, irrational, dehumanizing, and lawbreaking. Rejecting its claim that it has every right to base its government on genocide, land theft, chauvinism, ethnic or religious supremacy, and unlimited greed, because Europe and America did it, and it would "antisemitic" not to let Israel indulge in the same cruelties and crimes. Of course it’s transparent that antisemitism was never the offending issue, neither for today’s Zionist politicians nor for that witless stadium owner, both of whom have been perfectly happy to team up with Kanye West. The offending issue is of course the claim that Brown people are human.

Putting all the blame on Netanyahu or Trump is popular but disingenuous. As long as the U.S. delays reckoning with its own historical facts, its moral claims about other parts of the world land as utterly hypocritical. We can laugh all we want at the Netanyahu-and-Epstein-loving football stadium guy, but until we have a bona fide movement that actually stands explicitly against genocide and apartheid and sex trafficking and patriarchy and gladiator sports for Black people, we're just the ones turning that disgusting man into a billionaire who can control the entertainment industry with the snap of a finger.

It makes zero sense to sanction or bomb other peoples because they are undemocratic, or terrorists, or have weapons of mass destruction, or break international laws, or oppress their women, children, and ethnic minorities, as long as those descriptions continue to apply first and foremost to our own country.

Since the days of colonization and slavery, white advantage in America has always included the right to be cruel, the right to be irrational, the right to dehumanize. Our system has always equated money and power. It has always exploited and lynched and over-policed Black people at its leisure. It was founded explicitly on denying non-whites, women, and the poor any right to participate in our so-called “democracy.” The MAGA movement is not an American aberration. It's really more an outing of an American guilty pleasure. It’s a debunking of an American myth.

George Washington was the richest man in America: a slave owning racist Englishman who did not consider Africans, or Americans (whom he called "Indians") to be human. He was Donald Trump. He was MAGA. And the answer to MAGA, Zionism, American exceptionalism, and every other far right movement trying to push everyone else around, is not to become more accommodating or more patriotic or more conservative or more reverent to the “Founding Fathers.” Such inane values are what have made liberals intolerable. The answer to the far right is revolution. Create a movement, a government, a way of operating, that's based on humane beliefs that people actually hold.

According to time-honored American tradition, we have one political party that hides our dark truth, and one that revels in it. Two strategies work together to sustain and recreate that dark truth decade after decade. What we need is a political movement that rejects that dark truth for what it is: Inhumane. Greedy. Genocidal. Elitist. Corrupt. Extremely violent. A threat to all life.

If we back another elitist corporate liberal who hates poor people, who kills Brown people so that some AI or weapons or oil CEO can get some more money — someone in the tradition of Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton — we guarantee that they either lose their election to the far right, or give way to an even worse far right in the following election, or simply become far right themselves. All the wishful thinking and clever speechwriting in the world won't change that fact. People are sick of the Bidens and Sheerans of this world. If corrupted, corporate shills like them can’t bring themselves to do the bare minimum, our survival demands we take our business elsewhere.

OUR LATEST RECORD WHICH WE CALL DIVINE SCHISM IS A DIY SELF RELEASED THANK YOU TO OUR FANS WHO SHOW UP AT OUR MERCH TABLE WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH THE ONLY PLACE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO GET A PHYSICAL COPY

LPS CDS AND TEE SHIRTS ARE BEING MANUFACTURED AS WE SPEAK IN MINNEAPOLIS BUT FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T GET TO A SHOW THERE'S A DIGITAL PRE ORDER AT BANDCAMP WHERE YOU CAN ALREADY HEAR THE FIRST SONG “SUN LIKE IT HOT”

A TREMENDOUS INFLUENCE ON DIVINE SCHISM IS THE QUEERCORE PUNK AND HARDCORE BANDS WITH WHOM WE’VE SHARED THE BANDSTAND WHO LIKE MANY YOUNGER ARTISTS ASK US ABOUT SELF-RELEASING TO WHICH WE ALWAYS REPLIED THAT THERE'S NO REASON TO BE AFRAID OR ASHAMED UNTIL WE REALIZED WE’D NEVER ACTUALLY TRIED IT

SO JOYFUL NOISE GRACIOUSLY GAVE US THEIR BLESSING TO RELEASE DIVINE SCHISM ON OUR OWN LABEL CHILDREN OF HOOF MUSIC LIBRARY

A VERY LIMITED NUMBER OF COPIES WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR MAIL ORDER FROM THEIR WAREHOUSE BUT TO REDUCE THE LEVELS OF MEDIATION SEPARATING US FROM OUR LISTENERS DIVINE SCHISM WILL FOR EXAMPLE NOT BE AVAILABLE ON STREAMING PLATFORMS

DIVINE SCHISM WAS RECORDED PARTLY AT HOME AND PARTLY AT RUSSIAN RECORDING BY MIKE BRIDAVSKY AND WAS WRITTEN PERFORMED MIXED AND MASTERED BY SATOMI MATSUZAKI ED RODRIGUEZ JOHN DIETERICH AND GREG SAUNIER WITH DRAWINGS BY SATOMI AND LAYOUT BY GREG

THIS IS PERHAPS DEERHOOF'S SCI FI ORATORIO BEING A LARGE SCALE WORK WITHOUT COSTUMES OR SCENERY BUT WITH A LARGE WOW FACTOR

WE ARRIVED AT THE STUDIO IN MARCH 2026 DETERMINED TO USE EVERY RARE AMP VINTAGE ORGAN COLLECTIBLE SOVIET SYNTHESIZER ORCHESTRAL PERCUSSION INSTRUMENT AND WACKY STOMP BOX THERE IN ORDER TO BUILD A COMPLEX ATMOSPHERIC PANORAMA LAYER BY DISSONANT LAYER

WE TELL THE STORY OF THE EARTH BUT FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE SUN WHO CAN NO LONGER SEE ONE OF ITS FAVORITE CHILDREN BUT SEES ONLY ITS OWN BLINDING REFLECTION DUO TO GEO ENGINEERING DEPLOYED BY TECH OLIGARCHS WHO WOULD RATHER COVER THE EARTH IN MIRRORS THAN STOP BURNING UP THE PLANET

SPECIAL THANKS TO AIDEN CANADAY AND RICHARD BELL OF OXFORD BASED DIY LABEL AND LIVE PROMOTION TEAM DIVINE SCHISM FOR IMMEDIATELY AGREEING TO LEND US THEIR NAME WHEN WE ASKED INTO A MICROPHONE DURING OUR SET AT THE BULLINGDON

THE VINYL IS MADE FROM RECYCLED PVC AND THAT’S WHY THE VINYL COLOR IS MYSTERY FLAVOR???