Feb 17, 2025
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I’ve read a few takes which view Izzy through a Marxist lens and paint him as a working class* hero. The premise being that this proletarian warrior is unfairly usurped in the affections of Ed by some upper class, monied, artsy type; and to not root for the grassroots character makes you somehow a bourgeois prick.
Izzy is never in Ed’s affections romantically. Ever. So the premise falls at the first hurdle.
But for the sake of argument…
If you’re truly going to view the show as a Marxist allegory, in which an individual overcomes horrendous class obstacles, then that character is Ed Teach.
Ed rises from extreme poverty to become the most successful and infamous pirate in history. It’s a rags-to-riches story.
The takes I’ve read on this completely ignore the fact that Ed is also ‘working class’. And the only conclusion I can reach is that Ed is ‘the wrong kind of working class’. Because what these interpretations do is separate the idea of the working classes into a ‘deserving’, romanticised, white, ‘salt-of-the-earth’ type, and non-deserving groups not worthy of recognition, usually representing people of colour.
And so we’re back to race. The Marxist lens as I’ve seen it applied here defines the white working class man as having had his toy stolen by the white bourgeois man. Ed is a just an object. And when Ed’s handed back rightfully to Izzy by the British Crown as payment, he is literally chattel returned to the correct owner.
A large part of the show is Ed’s fightback against an ownership narrative in order to claim his identity for himself. That to be with Stede is his choice; and Stede’s initial obliviousness is an extremely important part of that narrative. The agency has to lie with Ed first, and the writers clearly understand this. Else we might be setting up a power struggle over ‘who owns the brown man’.
Stede never lays claim to Ed because there is no claim to lay. He instinctively and intuitively falls into a reciprocal friendship with Ed, which eventually grows into an equal love and natural affection. Stede always sees Ed’s personhood. And it’s really important that Stede views Ed, at the very least, as an equal in terms of human worth. Societally they are not equal due to white patriarchy; however, Stede’s giving up of his wealth, his bourgeois status, is another step towards a truer equality between the two.
Meanwhile, Izzy views Ed as a valuable asset to be utilised for a certain masculine glory and riches. Izzy might not be bourgeois, but his worldview is certainly bent that way. He will willingly and violently take possession of another human being as an interpretation of owning the means of production - that isn’t exactly proletarian. It’s participatory enslavement and a bourgeois act.
We know nothing of Izzy’s past. We can presume he’s from a working class background because Occam’s razor would suggest as much. But we are never explicitly shown Izzy’s class in the way we are Ed’s, because Izzy’s class isn’t overly important to the story unless it serves the narrative of Ed and Stede. It has no independent meaning. He’s an antagonist. And let’s face it: he cosies up to Chauncey and the British establishment pretty easily when it suits him.
If you must apply a Marxist lens to this story, your working class hero is Ed. And if not, why not?
*I’m using ‘working class’ as a Marxist term. I realise in 1717, it was not widely used
Ed Teach, finally co-owning property and a potential business. It’s not a fairytale ending entirely, but it is an important practical ending to a lifelong journey from nothing. And Ed might never have to go hungry again.
sell nothing & spread joy
I apologize for hijacking your inbox but I want to yell about Plastic Ono Band and I feel like the conceptual, would-like-to-be metaphysical and speculative nature of my thoughts won’t be completely out of place here.
I wanted to react to your brilliant answer to the ask regarding the “I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul” and talk about the whole concept of Plastic Ono Band which is essentially about the crisis of faith and disillusion (if love is real and whether being loved by the person we love is what makes us worth), obligatory *in my humble opinion* - I do not have the patent to interpret The Beatles or John Lennon.
> God was struck together from three songs, almost…
Imagine a triangle - one vertex is Mother, another vertex is Working Class Hero and the last one is Love. God is inside of this triangle.
God, Mother and Working Class Hero have something in common - hero worship. Mother/parent is being hero worshipped by the children in exchange of providing love and care, Working Class Hero is being hero worshipped by the working class people (imo, WCH is a celebrity as a concept and the working class people are fans but it can also apply to leaders of political movements for example) in exchange for being an idol to them, speaking for them or caring about them, loving them (if one is parasocial enough to believe that) and God is being worshipped by religious followers based on the belief that God loves them (simply put).
Now of course this is interesting because in the case of John Lennon, the hero worship of a parental figure was atypical due to his being left by his parents (you had me, I never had you/I needed you, you didn’t need me), therefore from his point of view it was a one sided relationship (the reality was probably more complicated but in Mother it’s clear cut). He comments on it in “I Found Out” - “they didn’t want me, so they made me a star”. Essentially what he’s saying is that he was seeking love and care from the fans as their hero because he wasn’t loved when he was a child.
The problem is, it was once again one sided relationship - hero worship/love from the fans but he feels nothing for them, they are just faces in the crowd not an object of his love. Therefore it’s unsatisfying. One sided much like his relationship with his own mother.
> I think the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.
And then, there is God. God is a concept by which we measure our pain. It’s also a belief that God loves you and cares about you just as much as you love him, the idea of religious faith - simplified. Much like love itself which on some level is a belief, an unspoken contract that you and the other person love *each other*. Love is needing/wanting/asking to be loved. Love is you, *you and me*. Love is reaching, a touch. Love, the real love, is a mutual feeling but because it’s abstract, it’s about having *faith* that the other person, one that *you love*, feels the same about you. I hope you are getting the idea.
> But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the Godtrip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.
Real Love (mutual) is the heaven or the ideal but the *God* who doesn’t care about you is false and not worth believing in. In that light, “I’ve seen through it all - I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul” is a very pregnant, multi-layered line indeed (so is “I just believe in Yoko and me” but that’s another thing to discuss because he essentially destroyed the whole premise of the song God by including that line and it’s even more interesting that he says “and that’s reality” so bleakly when it’s actually supposed to be joyous if the line is a rejection of the concept that he doesn’t believe real, mutual love exists - he also does the same destroying of the concept at the end of WCH - if you want to be a hero just *follow* me, undermining the idea that you should kill your heroes) - it refers to, I think, both his personal relationship with Paul (I do think that John at some point in the late 60s, on some rational level, reached a conclusion that Paul doesn’t really love him, much like his *Mother* - you had me, I never had you) and The Working Class Hero concept as in The Beatles are the celebrity that is being religiously worshipped, bigger than Jesus.
(By the way, the parallel between Paul and Julia is uncanny once you take into account the idea that John felt like Paul didn’t want him and didn’t love him. From Ian Leslie’s book: “John’s mum wasn’t dead; she just lived somewhere else, with other children, and, worst of all, this was seemingly through choice. Julia reappeared intermittently, shimmeringly. When she visited Mendips she would hug him, tickle him and vanish; later on, when he started visiting her, he was made to feel at home without ever feeling truly at home. Julia was loving and magnetic and always just out of reach. It was a relationship that blurred the lines between parent, sister, friend and lover.” Perhaps Francie Schwartz wasn’t babbling with the “John smiles like an Oedipus” at Paul being his princess - Oedipus complex is a freudian idea that a man falls in love with a person who strongly resembles his mother - if only internally or based on behavioral patterns - not a concept at all unfamiliar to Arthur Janov. We know that he was upset their “songwriting” became false when they weren’t *living* together).
> I’ve got a message from above, and I’m here to tell you the message concerns our love. Do you read me, *brother*? - the opening of God demo
“I don’t believe in Beatles” is him rejecting his faith in Paul and himself and it’s also telling the fans that The Beatles are not the hero they should worship, the idea of them that they have doesn’t exist, it’s a myth - meaning both the interpretation of the interpersonal dynamic or seeing them as heroes “saving” (or loving) their fans. The Beatles hero status, much like John and Paul’s mutual love is and always has been an illusion, it wasn’t real - “you’ll just have to carry on, the dream is over”.
Needless to say that according to himself, he was the one who believed in it most at one point - he was the dream weaver who lived under the illusion that the God he worshiped cared until he “found out”.
> I don’t have friends! Friendship is a romantic illusion.
At least that’s what I think he thought and meant to express at the time of writing POB. I don’t want to open the can of worms of whether I think that’s the truth (or the truth is even worse), partial truth, misunderstanding or John’s willing or unwilling fabrication. I understand it may be unpopular to even express the very idea that Paul didn’t love John in front of fans who have very strong beliefs (hah) as a hypothetical but I don’t think it matters if it’s factually correct when interpreting John’s work - it matters how he felt and I feel somewhat strongly that this was his position in 1970 (while recognizing that things aren’t as simple irl compared to when you create something by laying it down on paper and producing an artwork out of it and there is an internal fight between ratio and primal emotions one cannot truly control unless they are an emotionless creature - essentially, heart wants what it wants).
The conclusion of POB, I think, is that to be free and healthy is to recognize your pain, take off the rosy glasses and face the truth and believe and love yourself first before some mythical figure on a pedestal - be it your romantic partner, your parent, your friend, your coworker, your idol, politician or favorite celebrity, God or some other concept that should save you. Don’t idolize. But that is of course easier said than done (which I think is why the contradictory statements exist at the end of WCH and God as mentioned previously). While it all sounds pretty bleak and the album itself sounds painful and bleak, I think the message is a comforting one in the end - a self help manual for someone hurting by something they believed in not turning out to be what they thought it was in their eyes. If he, at the end of the day, followed his own advice is another matter.
(Sorry for leaving a lengthy essay, I have my reasons for why I don’t want to publish this on my blog. You can delete it or just let it sit if you are not interested in answering or reading all that).
Hi anon. There’s no need to apologize— conceptual and metaphysical speculation is always welcome here. You have definitely given me some food for thought!
The first thing I’d like to mention is your parallel between Paul and Julia bc………yes. I don’t have too much to add, but in a 1986 interview for Sound on Sound, Paul said the following:
“That’s taking off into ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran— there’s a line of his that always used to attract me and John, which was ‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you’. So it’s that kind of meaning to However Absurd.”
There’s *a lot* going on here, but if nothing else, it reinforces how often the j/p shared symbolic language bleeds across songs (across decades, even!). More significantly, I take this as effective confirmation that However Absurd is about John (more thoughts on that here if you’re interested) AND that — as the quoted Gibran line appears explicitly in John’s lyrics — Julia is at least partially addressed to Paul, and Paul knows it. (*Disclaimer!* I recognize Julia is also a song for Yoko, but, ya know— many such cases. Another fun example: John originally stylized the title of Woman as ‘Wo/Man’… which could mean nothing, of course!)
Moving on, I think your interpretation of the relationship between Mother/Working Class Hero/God/Love is really insightful. That said, I might suggest that the triangulation is actually between Mother and WCH and God, with Love at the center. In practice, I think maternal-worship, idol-worship, and God-worship function interchangeably in John’s life. And as far as the songs are concerned, it seems as though Mother and WCH are just expansions upon (or perhaps explanations for) the rejection stated so plainly in God.
But as you point out, John isn’t rejecting the concept of belief entirely. Instead, he is rejecting what he has decided are false-Gods; the trouble is, nearly everything he once held dear gets folded into the same repudiation. Within this context, if we look at Love, the message is clear but incredibly narrow: the only True Divinity is a *very specific* kind of love. He determines that “real” love must be a two-way street (a fair assertion on it’s own), but also implies that there is only room for two people on that street: “Yoko and Me”— this becomes especially poignant if a prior, less-legible love had come to feel unstable (and I do think the statement “Friendship is a romantic illusion” is directly tied up in this concept). Anyway, imo, this is probably not a healthy ideal for anyone to lean into, least of all John Lennon (Isolation, anyone?).
I think John was doing some really significant spiritual exploration on Plastic Ono Band, and I’d go so far as to suggest that such crises can often be incredibly valuable (maybe even essential) for learning about oneself. But I’m not certain I’d consider this a self-help exercise so much as a personal record of experience. The album treats disillusionment as a kind of revelation— as though the collapse of faith proves the faith itself was false. It may be honest, but I’m not sure it’s “true”. And I’m definitely not convinced that waking up from a dream means the dream was never real.
The Thing commission by cover artist/painter E.M. Gist (2022).
MacCready Fanfiction Recs (Fallout 4)
hey everybody, nobody asked for this but in the midst of writing fallout fanfic I was feeling a special kind of love for my favorite fo4 fanfics and wanted to recommend them in case you hadn't read 'em. Because they are VERY GOOD and writing fanfic is hard, so you gotta give props to those who sweat for your comfort fics.
I'm gonna recommend my top three finished fanfics, and then two more bonus fics that are being updated rn. As a clarifier, these are all Maccready fallout 4 fics. so. keep that in mind.
im tagging the authors and also anybody who wants to join and share their favorites too!
Bruce Springsteen è partito dal nulla.
Viveva in una cittadina operaia del New Jersey e hanno cambiato spesso alloggio per via delle difficoltà economiche. La prima chitarra l’ha comprata a 18 dollari, guadagnati grazie a piccoli lavoretti nel quartiere.
Sono queste radici ad averlo reso credibile come working class hero per decenni.
Nelle sue canzoni, il Boss è il portavoce degli ultimi, degli operai traditi dal sogno americano, dei reduci e delle comunità devastate dalla deindustrializzazione, perché quelle realtà le ha viste con i suoi occhi. Ci è cresciuto.
Con il dolore che aveva dentro ha scritto alcuni dei più grandi capolavori della storia della musica. Chi sostiene il contrario si incatenasse alla Leopolda e non rompesse le palle per cortesia.
Ma. C’è un ma, purtroppo. È grosso come una casa e coincide con il supporto al neoliberismo del Partito Democratico.
Nel 2012 Springsteen pubblica “Wrecking Ball”, un album di rabbia pura contro i banchieri di Wall Street, definiti "baroni rapinatori" che si sono arricchiti distruggendo i risparmi della povera gente.
Tutto giusto.
Solo che l'amministrazione Obama – che Springsteen ha sostenuto attivamente sia nel 2008, sia nel 2012 – ha gestito la crisi finanziaria approvando massicci salvataggi pubblici delle grandi banche d'affari.
Mentre i personaggi delle canzoni di Springsteen perdevano la casa e il lavoro, i democratici abbracciati dal Boss tutelavano l'élite finanziaria responsabile del disastro.
Le canzoni più dolorose di Springsteen (da “Youngstown” a “The River” fino a “Johnny 99”) raccontano la disperazione delle città manifatturiere americane della Rust Belt (la regione che un tempo era il cuore dell'industria pesante statunitense), dove le fabbriche chiudono e la classe operaia viene lasciata a morire.
Ma il Partito Democratico ha abbracciato la globalizzazione senza paracadute sociali, firmando trattati commerciali (come il NAFTA) che hanno accelerato la delocalizzazione di quelle stesse fabbriche.
Trasformandosi nel partito delle élite urbane e tecnologiche, i Dem hanno alienato proprio quella working class di cui Springsteen scrive. Non è un caso che molti dei territori cantati da Bruce abbiano poi votato in massa per Trump, sentendosi traditi dall'establishment dem.
Springsteen ha scritto album ferocemente critici contro l'imperialismo e la carneficina delle guerre statunitensi, da “Born in the U.S.A.” (Vietnam) a “Devils & Dust” (Iraq).
Peccato che l'amministrazione Obama non abbia interrotto la proiezione imperiale degli Stati Uniti, anzi: ha normalizzato ed esteso a livelli record la guerra dei droni; ha aumentato le operazioni speciali clandestine; oltre ai noti interventi in Siria, Libia, Iraq e Afghanistan, ha bombardato anche in Yemen, Somalia e Pakistan.
Sostenere Obama in modo acritico significa, per un artista dichiaratamente antimilitarista, ingoiare una declinazione semplicemente più tecnocratica della stessa macchina da guerra imperiale.
Il culmine di questa incoerenza arriva nel 2021, con il progetto “Renegades: Born in the USA”: una chiacchierata tra Obama e Springsteen nel doppio formato podcast + libro.
Due delle figure più potenti, ricche e interne all'establishment globale si autodefiniscono "renegades" (rinnegati), dialogando amabilmente di giustizia sociale dall'interno della lussuosa tenuta di Springsteen a Colts Neck.
In questo contesto, la vicinanza ai Dem non è più il supporto di un artista esterno che stimola la politica, ma la totale cooptazione dell’artista manifesto della classe operaia all'interno dell'élite dominante.
Bruce è diventato, di fatto, uno dei menestrelli di corte dell'establishment progressista.
🧐 [Testo originale di Lucia Mora] 🧐
