For Any Leftist Who Has Spent Too Much Time in Meetings…
…You aren’t alone!
This was the utopian conclusion to visionary Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1922 poem “All Meetinged Out.”
It’s early morning;
I greet the dawn with a dream:
“Oh, how about
just
one more meeting
regarding the eradication of all meetings!”
Lenin was not a fan of the experimental Mayakovsky (Stalin, on the other hand, would later write that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”) Even so, Lenin valued “All Meetinged Out” for its anti-bureaucratic sentiment.
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4 Comments
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Oleg Litvin
I see you Googled Mayakovsky. Finish reading the article.
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Sometime in the late 1980s, I stopped going to meetings of almost every group I was involved with. I continued doing organizing work, but dropped out of “deciding” things.
It was such a rush! I had so much more energy, more time, more fun.
I felt like a fool not to thought of it sooner.
Yes, I backslid a bit after that. But you’d be surprised at how little.
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Of course, the Stalin sentence on Mayakovsky that follows the one you quoted is as follows: “Indifference to his work and memory is a crime.”
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This poem pairs sort of well with Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism would take too many evenings. Not an exact match, but what the heck…