Red Rhymes (2007)

Book Review from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bob Dixon: Make Capitalism History: Poems and Other Communications, Artery Publications £4.50. (available from 38 Pembroke Road, Bromley, Kent, BR1 2RU)

Socialists have made rather little use of poetry as a way of putting our ideas over, so a book of poems (and a few prose pieces) with such a title is at least eye-catching. Dixon is in fact an old hand at political poetry, and one of his previous books was reviewed in the Socialist Standard for May 2000.

The present volume contains some decent stuff: ‘War is of widows, of woe and of weeping . . . war is not glory, not  glinting gold medals.’ A nice deceit depicts ‘colladeral’ as a disease which originated in a US military establishment. A poem titled ‘Demockracy’ contrasts anti-war demonstrators with the lack of those with banners saying ‘WE WANT WAR!’ or ‘POLLUTION IS FUN!’.

Yet there are a couple of problems. One may be gleaned from the title: there is no vision at all of what to replace capitalism with. Another is a tendency to apportion blame in the wrong quarters. The final poem in the book is called ‘To the parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq’, castigating them for not stopping their children from enlisting, and concluding, ‘I cannot extend my sympathy to you.’ This is misplaced — British generals, politicians and rulers more generally should be criticised, not the victims and their relatives.

Paul Bennett