Electrical Banana

I'm offering a political poem for the 5th.

Year of the Pig

The New Deal

Between 1968 & 1981

the leading Marxists:
Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bernstein
stirred wooly masses more
through malice than conscience.

The blistered Left produced

the golden age of social thought,
or so it was announced, but then
multilingual Central Europeans
spread Christian heresies, &
almost everything else, culminating
in a Polish October as early as 54.
Even the phones rang Hilferding.

This new, idealized intellectual

trajectory brought by ideological fugees
to their various adoptive countries
unexpectedly weakened the proletarian
impulses of the Marx/Engles crowd.
Bluntly stated, the Soviet Marxism
institutionalized by Stalin, aside
Trotsky’s ineffectual theorizing, created
an antiquarian cult of personality
more in line with modern Fascism
than in lock (goose?) step with labor.

Meanwhile, Mao’s wake & CIA

interference in Latin experiments,
suppression developed as a prototypal
doctrine of order & historical necessity.
After the Bay of Pigs, pompous leaders
like Castro denounced, manufactured
charges, jailed & murdered all but
the worshipful, ideologically faithful,
& how safe were they, really?
Progressive disdain for non-patronizing
elements elicited little reform in the satellites.
As evidenced by Dubcek’s Prague Spring disaster,
paranoia & cold war tyranny reigned.
Yet the end neared.
After several Latin American successes,
the US, in the 80s, instigated a massive
global arms race & buildup that broke
several moribund Eastern Block economies, &,
on the heels of a poorly conceived Afghanistan
adventure, destroyed the Soviet system, too.
In short: Gorby dropped the wall,
Yeltsin dropped a fifth,
but nobody dropped The Bomb.