Maoists on Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony

Maoists on Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony
August 3, 2007
http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/2006/01/15/14/

The Maoist theory of aesthetics looks at the aesthetic dimension of life from the standpoint of power struggle. A further development and explanation of this Maoist theory can be found here.

Beijing Review no. 9, 1974 coverThe following are passages from a Maoist essay from 1974 on the subject:

“Has Absolute Music No Class Character?” by Chao Hua. Beijing Review no. 9, March 1, 1974.

“…Absolute music in general refers to instrumental music without a descriptive title as to the theme or content and is usually designated by its music form or tempo. For example, “Symphony in F major,” “Concerto in C minor,” “Largo,” “Allegro” and so on.

Bourgeois theorists have long spouted that absolute music is a form of “pure music,” devoid of social content and class nature. They fallaciously contend that music is “simply fantasy, not reality” and that “music is music, nothing else.” The modern revisionists, while playing lip service to music’s ties with social life, actually blur the class distinction between proletarian and bourgeois music by describing absolute music as “of the people,” “realistic” and so forth. Why should both the bourgeoisie and revisionists concoct all sorts of arguments to obscure the class character of art and literature? It is because bourgeois ideology , including bourgeois art and literature, serves to prop up the capitalist system. They dare not openly acknowledge the exploiting class character of their art and literature.. Instead, to disguise the essential substance of capitalist exploitation, the pose as representatives of the whole people in order to deceive the laboring masses.

Marxist-Leninists hold that all works of music, both absolute and programme music, as a form of ideology “are products of the relation of the human brain of the life in a given society…”

Franz Schubert“Take for instance the representative work Symphony in B minor (the Unfinished Symphony) by Schubert., an Austrian bourgeois composer of the romantic school. The class feeling and social content it expresses are quiet clear., although it has no descriptive title. This symphony was composed in 1822 when Austria was a reactionary feudal bastion within the German Confederation and the reactionary Austrian authorities not only ruthlessly exploited and oppressed the workers and peasants, but also persecuted and put under surveillance intellectuals with any bourgeois democratic ideas. Petty Bourgeois intellectuals like Schubert saw no way out of the political and economic impasse, and lacking the courage to resist they gave way to melancholy, vacillation, pessimism and despair, evading reality and dreaming of freedom. This work of Schubert’s expressed these class feelings and social content. The opening phrase is somber and gloomy. The whole symphony continues and expands on this emotion, filling it with petty bourgeois despair, pessimism and solitary distress. At times the dreaming of freedom comes through, but this too, is escapist and negative.

Absolute music composed in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries are products of the European capitalist society, upholding the interests of the bourgeoisie and serving the capitalist system. The content and the ideas and feelings with which they are saturated have an unmistakably bourgeois class nature. Marx pointed out, ” Capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” And it is this blood and dirt that bourgeois music extols. Although certain compositions were to some extent progressive in the sense of being anti-feudal, they failed to mirror proletarian thoughts and feelings of their time; and they are, of course, still more incompatible with with our socialist system today under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then why dismiss their class content and extol them? Yet even today there are some who would feed our young people on these musical works uncritically and intact. Where would this lead our young people?

Some devotees of bourgeois absolute music often try to cover up its class nature by holding forth in empty terms on the contrasting, changing moods it presents. This is a reactionary viewpoint of the bourgeois theory of a common human nature transcending classes. For these moods are none other than those of delight and anger, joy and sorrow which vary, as do all men’s ideals and feelings, according to the times and society people live in and the class they belong to… “
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Maoism vs. “Just Pretty Tulips”
January 15, 2006

Maoism vs. “Just Pretty Tulips”
by Prairie Fire irtr.org

“There may be some Communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets; they will be defeated by sugar-coated bullets. We must guard against such a situation.” Mao Zedong, 1949 (1)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the furthest revolutionary advance in humyn history. One idea that came to prominence was that everything is political; everything is struggle. Every aspect of our lives, every aspect of culture is not only marked by its class origins but also plays a role in the class struggle, for better or for worse. At first, it may not be apparent how revolutionary this idea is and what a departure it is from the tradition of bourgeois thought. One example of the “all round” nature of this struggle was Maoist campaign against the Four Olds. The masses were unleashed against Old Custom, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. One crypto-Trotskyist Avakianite critic of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution recently asked the rhetorical question, “is a painting of tulips political? They are just pretty!” (2) The answer to this question will reflect into a wide range of issues from theories of humyn nature, the view of history and social change, counter-revolution, to the view on the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Mao has said, there is a communist answer and a reactionary one. In the history of the Chinese Party, they correspond to two lines that historically developed on the cultural front. (3) During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this struggle over the two lines in art became truly of life and death. This paper grew out of the challenge to answer this crypto-Trotskyist, although, the ideas in this paper go well beyond a simple answer to the question of tulips.

I. The Bourgeois Beautiful

In the history of art, one bourgeois view that remains in fashion to this day is “art for art’s sake.” Generally, what this means is that production of beauty is an end in itself and that art should not be subject to political agendas. This idea was revolutionary at one time because this bourgeois view liberated the artist from the the authoritarian Church and feudal order. Art no longer had to be a means of feudal indoctrination aimed at glorifying God, saints, and Christian martyrs. Art was now liberated from Medieval absolutism.

This view of “art for art’s sake” is a political expression of bourgeois aesthetics that was and continues to be bound up with a particular conception of humyn nature. One of the best expressions of this view is in the works of Immanuel Kant who stood both within the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and one foot in the Romantic reaction against it. Kant’s Critique of Judgment or Third Critique with its view of the beautiful is the epitome of an aesthetics of a bourgeoisie on the rise. On the other hand, Kant’s work in the idea of the sublime, opens up for the first time the possibility of value judgments being historically determined - an idea carried forward by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx. As Karl Marx wrote, “is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?” (4) In this same work, Kant also opened up the possibility of something other than ahistoric value which, in turn, opens up the idea in German idealism of something other than ahistoric self. These ideas would eventually become transformed in Hegel and Marx to a view that everything is in a kind of motion. So, Kant’s works span a wide range of bourgeois ideas about art and even occupy an important place in history that leads to up the eventual overcoming of that bourgeois history in the works of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. However, Kant is mostly known today for the first part of his Third Critique and ideas of beauty that eventually lead to the popular slogan “art for art’s sake.”

Historically, pastoral scenes of various kinds have been associated with the emergent bourgeoisie and its optimistic view of a scientifically ordered and moral nature and the emergent bourgeoisie’s own desire to be escape, if only temporarily, from its cramped and sometimes disjointed urban world. Of this disjointed world Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air,” of a capitalist world that is constantly revolutionizing society and also a world that has “profaned everything holy.” The whole idea of the vacation and also of bourgeois gardens and parks are part of this false return to nature found in one kind of escapist bourgeois culture. These scenes are also bound up idealized bourgeois family life as it is portrayed in the literature and experience of the family vacation, leisure time, and even baseball and camping trips. These scenes are not the real scenes of the countryside with its toiling and oppressed peasants nor is it an actual return to nature. Nor is it the quasi-fascist idealization of a mythological past and rejection of modern cosmopolitan life that one finds in critics like Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes. (5) Instead, this pastoral world is one of atemporality, of calmness, of wholeness — yet religion is not ever-present as in the feudal world.

For Kant the experience of beauty is the experience of the world as ordered and pleasing without the mind imposing order via concepts. Kant characterized this experience of beauty as in “free conformity of law.” (6) And aesthetic judgment as “purposive without purpose.” Beauty behaves as though it were a real property of objects as universal and necessary. Part of the experience of beauty is that one experiences the world as if freely ordered — when the world appears ordered as if there were a rationality behind it, be it God or man. The idea of a natural order is also an idea that characterizes feudalism, yet, this idea also re-emerges and transforms as a hope of the bourgeoisie when it confronts its own disjointed and modern life. For Kant, the beautiful becomes a symbol for humynity’s hope that the world is both scientifically knowable, ordered, and also moral. To bring this back to the example of the picture of tulips, one can easily see how this is not only an expression of of an era and a class, but even more specifically, it plays a roll as a symbol for bourgeois hope and ultimately for their own supposed scientifically ordered serene moral world.

A pastoral scene or painting of tulips as beautiful is also a symbol for the hope that the bourgeois individuals will find their place in the world without God, feudal tradition, or an all powerful authoritarian Church. For the bourgeoisie these pastoral scenes or our critic’s tulip or gardens painting were meant to show a kind of order to nature and the world that was not imposed from without. It is an order in the world that can be discovered and mastered by bourgeois science. A particular view of humyn nature is implied in this view.

“The historical experience of class struggle tells us that all reactionary classes inevitably spread the theory of human nature so as to strengthen their ideological control over the people and consolidate their political power.” (7) The bourgeois view of humyn nature has its origins in the the bourgeoisie’s role in production. The condition that the bourgeoisie finds itself in is projected in a more idealized form onto its notion of humynity and humyn nature — whether as an idealized self-interested self in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith or the divided self of Kant or even the tormented self of romanticism and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois decline. Humyn nature for the bourgeoisie becomes expressed in various ways from Locke to Rousseau and Kant to romanticism and even pop culture. Our conceptions of humyn nature are determined in part by the economic, yet, this historical origin is obscured and such bourgeois conceptions masquerade as science. Marxism is a tool that we can use to expose reactionary theories of humyn nature — and this applies to fiction and non-fiction. Maoists exposed fictional portrayals that presented the bourgeois self as humyn nature during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (8) “Speaking of Marx’s attitude toward criticism, Lenin said, ‘[Marx] critically reshaped everything that had been created by human society, without ignoring a single detail. He reconsidered, subjected to criticism, and verified on the working-class movement everything that human thinking had created, and therefrom formulated conclusions which people hemmed in by bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejudices could not draw.’” (9)

A pastoral scene or painting of tulips is not overtly propagandistic, in the sense that it does not thematically embrace reaction. For example, our critic’s tulip painting does not overtly romanticize humyns as self interested nor does it overtly romanticize the bourgeois family nor imperialism. Yet, in the context of the first world, the painting does become a symbol for the bourgeois world order and it also becomes a symbol for the bourgeois self and its alleged harmonious relationship with that world. Where in reality, the bourgeoisie’s relationship to the world is one of destruction and irrationality. To present it as otherwise plays into bourgeois hands — although, we should not generalize these arguments to apply to a Third World context where pattern-art or flowered-detailing can become a source of resistance as a cultural tradition of an oppressed people. In a first world context, pastoral scenes, images of “just pretty flowers” and so on obscure the bourgeoisie’s place generally because it obscures the reality of their own destructiveness and irrationality. It presents their order as one of science, optimism, and harmony. This is easily used by the bourgeoisie to say that their relationship to other classes and their whole social order is rational, progressive, scientific, and harmonious. It also becomes part of a whole symbolic system that aims to idealize the bourgeois social order and this includes the patriarchy, especially the bourgeois nuclear family. These kinds pastoral scenes, after all, are part of a whole bourgeois imagining and experience of the family. They are part of a domesticated and idealized nature and they play a part in Western Euro-Amerikan cultural mythology of the family vacation, serene gardens, also, things like baseball and camping trips.

What of ‘pure’ art? Formal and also abstract art too can become a symbol for order generally, which without thematic political content tends to support the current system, capitalism. For similar reasons writers during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution criticized instrumental music without descriptive titles. (10) (11)

There is a mathematical order expressed in the images of abstract forms and some instrumental music that de facto supports the system because within its current context it symbolizes harmony and gets appropriated by propagandists of the current social order. Because this art has no overt political themes, it tends to work with the propaganda that is generally found in society already, which happens to mostly be bourgeois propaganda. Reactionaries poured money into and managed the production and promotion of anti-communist art. Abstract expressionism, cited approvingly as an example of legitimate social experimentation by Andrea Skybreak of the RCP=U$A (12) , is an example of a kind of abstract art that became a symbol and expression of alleged Western freedom; it became an expression of the dominant ideology of bourgeois society. The CIA and cold war art circles and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York saw in abstract expressionism “anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism.” (13) Despite its apparent lack of overt political content, abstract expressionism, for example, became a part of an imperialist culture war. Abstract expressionism, in addition to CIA sponsored music and literary works, was directly used to attack socialist and socialist influenced art throughout the world. (14)

Also, it is no accident that formal and abstract art is found in science fiction futurist visions of the good ordered techno capitalist society, for example, Star Trek with its decor of geometric shapes. Formal and abstract art or music can express mathematical relationships that become a symbol of harmony and order generally. This can be said of the bourgeois appropriation of Johann Sebastian Bach and also some contemporary electronic pop music like happy or “world” trance. Even under socialism art or music that emphasizes formal order or harmony works against the dictatorship of the proletariat because it falsely provides a symbol of social harmony rather than one of struggle. We have to always remember that class struggle continues under the dictatorship of the proletariat and it is our duty to promote that struggle. Such a formalistic art of harmony is appropriated by those revisionists who say that class struggle is over. Such was used by both ancient and neo-Confucians in China as a prop of the system, “[the] Confucian viewpoint on musical aesthetics, vigorously preached that the role of music is to bring the relations among people into harmony, draw them close together and make them bear no hatred or complaint against one another.” (15)

In the case of our pastoral scene or our critic’s tulip painting, could it be re-appropriated as a symbol of the harmony socialist order? Again, not only would such an image be caught up in its old bourgeois web of meaning, but we Maoists understand that class struggle must continue under socialism. And, tulips are ill-suited for struggle. Struggle was, after all, what the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was about.

What of emotions and art? Some bourgeois writers saw the connection between art, the self as conceived by the bourgeoisie, and pleasure and emotion. In Kant, for example, beauty is associated with the pleasure of a harmonization within the faculties of the self and also connected to harmony of the world. For, Kant, the artistic genius was to produce exemplary and original art that would meet his audience half way, elevating them, allowing them to experience through art the harmony within themselves and the world. (16) For this reason, romantic and also later utopian critics would suggest all art is subversive because it elevates the audience and awakens the imagination out of a world where humynity is stifled by technology. So, even bourgeois critics have tied aesthetic pleasure and also emotion to the supposed realization of humyn nature as free. However, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Maoists criticized this view, “abstract ‘emotional changes’ of delight and anger, joy and sorrow to conceal the class character of the feelings. For instance, they asserted that bourgeois music expressed ‘man’s lofty feelings,’ ‘true feelings,’ and so on.” (17) Maoists also criticized the view that our emotions and emotional lives are class-neutral. Music or art that provokes certain emotions or emotional patterns also have a class component even though they may have no words. Maoist Chao Hua uses the example of Franz Shubert’s Unfinished Symphony as a reflection of petty bourgeois vacillation, frustration, and despair. (18) But, more than being a reflection of it, Shubert’s work also provokes a kind of apathetic moping and petty bourgeois withdraw from the the world. Rather than an emergent bourgeoisie, a piece like Shubert’s represents a frustrated petty bourgeoisie and also, later, a lamenting bourgeoisie in decline. “As a matter of fact, classical music on the one hand and impressionist and modernistic music on the other reflect the political features, ideas and feelings of the bourgeoisie in two historical periods, one the rise of capitalism and the other its decline.” (19)

There is an issue of resources. The very choice of where our resources are directed is political. To place resources into one place necessarily takes it away from somewhere else. To paint a picture of tulips for a day means that you are not, for example, working, agitating or theorizing or producing genuinely revolutionary art for that same day. Mao asked: For whom is art going to be produced? In a way, we have been addressing this question throughout this paper. This is a question confronted by our comrades both the Soviet Union and China when those societies were socialist. Western intellectuals often criticize the Stalin or Maoist era because these critics (like the rcp=u$a) charge that intellectual life and art were stifled. Look at how this view puts a small professional elite above the vast majority. Both socialist China and the Soviet Union had to make decisions about where to place resources. Should a socialist society put resources into elitist art that may only be appreciated by a small elite? Or, should society create art that appeals to the broad masses? (20) It is the hight of irony that Western intellectuals criticize socialists for not being democratic, when those socialists are the ones bringing art to the people. Again, these intellectuals favor their intellectual “liberty” over the liberty of the masses. This is an idealist error that is very typical especially in the West. They fail to look at things in terms of what is really possibly. They don’t look at the fact that there are only a finite amount of resources — especially in a Third World nation. What is more important, elitist art that matters to almost nobody or people eating or having health care or having a proletarian culture they can relate too? This is like the Western socialist who just assumes that socialism will immediately raise the standard of living for both the Third World and the First World. By any measure, it simply isn’t possible in the short term. The First World will have to sacrifice its decadent ways. And, besides that, who wants to see tulips rather than revolutionary art anyway? Why devote resources to something which has no value other than, even according to our critic, “being pretty?” It is the masses that suffer from this bad allocation of resources.

Not only being class specific to the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, the tulip picture is also culturally specific to the West, in particular Holland. Whether it portrays a tulip field in Holland per se is not important. What is important is that the West, Holland in particular, is idealized in the kinds of images of serene tulip fields. The tulips are a kind of symbol for the West and its bourgeois and supposed peaceful social democratic society. Of course this class peace is a lie. Holland is plugged into the imperialist economies that, as a whole, super-exploit and oppress the Third World. So, here you have an image that is caught up in a reactionary chain of signifiers. And, this reactionary symbolic system will not vanish over night. It is not like one can just extract the image from its historical and symbolic context. While it is true that during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the West was made to serve the East and the Old to serve the New. And, this was a Maoist line in art too. (21) If Western art can be easily re-appropriated and adopted to serve the struggle of the revolutionary masses, then it need not be condemned. One example of a famous successful re-appropriation of non-communist art for revolution is The East Is Red, originally was a Chinese peasant love song that was transformed to serve the revolution. Another example is The Internationale which was a transformation, originally, from The Marseilles. Also, reactionary re-appropriation of revolutionary art has been spreading. Andy Warhol’s color silk screens of Mao has become a favorite of anti-communists, anarchists adopt the Warhol image to mock what they consider authoritarian. And, Soviet images and styles are being used in the capitalist consumer culture to sell everything from music to clothing. However, even if it was possible, who would bother putting so much energy into re-making a bourgeois image of tulips to serve the masses? So, not only are tulip paintings a bad allocation of resources, but additional resources would be needed to criticize its historical and symbolic context. Even if our critic was right (which he is not!) about art being neutral when it is not overtly political, he would still be wrong in terms of serving the people in the best ways we can. Jiang Qing spoke of the endless flood of poisonous art from the West. She also said, “It is in many cases out of the question to weed through all of the old and let the new emerge. How can we critically assimilate ghosts, gods, and religion? I hold it is impossible because we are atheists and communists.” (22) Our critic, at one point in the conversation talked about re-appropriating the banal bourgeois image of tulips; this is just a cover to reject Mao’s line as a whole and embrace the Trotskyist-liberal and also counter-revolutionary bourgeois line.

II. Maoism Against Reaction

Karl Marx’s view of our social world was that it was in constant change. All things are in motion; nothing is static and outside of change. For Marx, experience and the experience of production itself becomes aesthetic under communism. Alienation no longer exists and the contradiction between mental and manual labor no longer exists. Also, the distinction between work and artistic creation no longer exist as they do in the bourgeois epoch. However, communism and the end of all oppression is very far off. Before communism, there is a long journey of class struggle passing through capitalism and socialism. There is a constitutive and transformative relationship between the base and the superstructure. The base is the productive forces and relations of a society, whereas, the superstructure is all non-economic parts of our humyn world: culture, the legal system, ideology, our conceptions and experiences of ourselves, etc. Works of art, as a form of ideology, “are products of the relation of the human brain of the life in a given society.” (23)

All art, even that which claims to be apolitical, is both marked by its historical and social origins and also plays a role in class struggle. What Mao says of art is true of all forms of the super-structure. Nothing, no matter how apparently insignificant, is neutral; everything is charged with class.

Culture is a battleground between the forces of revolution and reaction. And, according to Maoism, revolution must be continued even during socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. One way that bourgeois ideology manifests itself under socialism is by the claim that there are independent spheres within the super-structure that are neutral in terms of the class struggle. This can manifest itself in various ways. One way is by saying that absolute music, instrumental music without descriptive titles, is neutral. Or, it can manifest itself by saying that the law of humyn morality stands above class struggle. Or, another way is the claim that the emotions we experience and patterns of those emotions are neutral. Or, it manifests itself in our critic’s claim that his picture of tulips is not political. Mao supported the materialist monistic proletarian line that said that all spheres are inter-connected in class struggle. Mao says, “Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause” and “literature and art are subordinate to politics, but in their turn exert a great influence on politics.” (24)

Not only is our critic wrong historically speaking, but to uphold such a position is totally revisionist. Because to uphold the idea that there is a sphere of cultural life that is apolitical or above politics, is to open the door to the claim that all culture is apolitical. Mao repeatedly warned that the door of capitalist restoration was being opened wider and wider. Not only does this allow the bourgeoisie to find a refuge where it can spread its ideology, but it also sets up the possibility of the Kautskyian revisionist idea that the state itself can be neutral and stand above class struggle. This sets up a basis theoretically for denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat; it actively undermines proletarian power across the board. Mao remarked that revolution requires pens and guns. Culture is a war zone. To say there is neutral art, is to cede to the bourgeoisie their own cultural “whites zones” from which they can spread their hegemony and counter-revolution. A view of art shared by some Trotskyists and some post-modernists is that art is always political, yet we cannot know whether or not it is ultimately revolutionary. Leon Trotsky even says, “Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic.” (25) In other places, he embraces epistemological agnosticism even more overtly, embracing reactionary dualism and even saying there is no proletarian art. Also, Trotsky openly denys the all round nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, saying, “the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organization for the production of the culture of a new society.” (26) This kind of anti-scientific epistemological agnosticism cedes everything but the most overtly reactionary art to the forces of reaction. Against the Trotsky-liberal view, “The position of literature and art if not occupied by the proletariat, will surely be taken over by the bourgeoisie.” (27) The Trotskyist view objectively amounts to “politics=Marxist, art=bourgeois.” It opens the door for all round bourgeois restoration, i.e. “politics=bourgeois.” (28)

The idea that there is an art, or a sphere of humyn life above struggle is also tied to reactionary theories of humyn nature and this also in turn undermines the dictatorship of the proletariat. One Maoist writes, “But their common characteristic is the bourgeois theory of human nature which runs through their structural ideas and creative conceptions. Later, this theory of human nature was taken over by revisionism to continue to spread its reactionary effect. The current claim that bourgeois musical works have no social content, in essence, stands for the bourgeois theory of human nature in opposition to the Marxist theory of classes.” (29) So, to say there is a universal, apolitical art is to say there is an apolitical humyn to appreciate it. And, if there is a humyn so removed from the class struggle, then that plays into the bourgeois idea of the possibility of a state for the whole people, a state above class struggle. In this way “an art of the whole people” (30) which was a line refuted by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, leads quickly to the bourgeois notion of “a state of the whole people.” On the other hand, Mao located humyn nature within class struggle, “Is there such a thing as human nature? Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract. In class society there is only human nature of a class character; there is no human nature above classes. We uphold the human nature of the proletariat and of the masses of the people, while the landlord and bourgeois classes uphold the human nature of their own classes, only they do not say so but make it out to be the only human nature in existence.” (31)

Lenin: “Those who recognize only class the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of the bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics.” “A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (32) It isn’t enough to recognize the reality of class struggle, but communists have to recognize the necessity of the all round dictatorship of the proletariat. A revolutionary has to extend the recognition of class struggle and proletarian dictatorship to all aspects of life and society. Maoist writers correctly said that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution itself was a continuation of the polemics on art which took place in the base areas in the 1940s. (33) And, also they are a continuation of the struggle against reaction and for communism. In China and in the Soviet Union, the bourgeoisie used art and literature to make many covert and no so covert attacks on proletarian power, we would be foolish not to go on the offensive against them. Mao many times spoke of this struggle in military terms and as important. Mao said, “After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will be still enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly.” Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution authors referred to “the mighty revolutionary cultural army.. an important force in opposing a capitalist restoration and checking the spread of revisionism.” (34)

This struggle is so important, one Maoist linked this struggle to the very survival of the revolution, “We must defend the dictatorship of the proletariat not only with guns but also with pens. We must, in line with Chairman Mao’s many instructions, pay serious attention to the class struggle on the literary and art front, take firm hold of the struggle between the two roads in the ideological sphere and view it from the level of the question concerning of political power, and not treat it lightly. To ignore this would be tantamount to forgetting about the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (35)

What kind of art? Jiang Qing went so far as to list impressionism, famous for its depiction of flowers, abstractionism, strip tease, among other things, as poisonous weeds, “there are some things that really flood the market…there is no end to them — all of which are intended to poison and paralyze the minds of the people.” (36) Obviously, our critic’s tulips are not going to cut it. Of bourgeois art and culture, “Decadent things that run counter to the trend of the times will be buried, once and for all, by the revolutionary people, in fact, are now in the process of being buried.” (37) Mao says art, like science, needs to reflect things more universally than how we experience things in our every day lives which is the source of all art. Art should not simply mirror reality, it should bring out the universality of our condition as we engage in class struggle. Mao says, “life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life.“ (38) So, like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism itself, proletarian art tries to bring out a higher understanding than what people get in the everyday. Art should, as Mao said at the Yenan forum, “help the masses to propel history forward.” (39) All art is an ideological weapon whether we like it or not. The question is: who will wield this weapon? The proletariat or the forces of reaction?

***

Bibliography/Footnotes

(1) Mao Tse-Tung. “Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” Selected Works, Vol. IV, March 5, 1949. p. 374

(2) This is an almost exact paraphrase of one portion of a long discussion with an Avakian supporter. This should not surprise anyone who has watched the Avakianites over the years. Recently, another Avakianite Joey Steele (who calls MIM hacks! This coming from a party that has never heard of citing sources except their own paper!) denied the Marxist position on art and defended a straight up liberal line. “I don’t think there are some simple clean categories to place art: revolutionary, reactionary, and other. I mean some art is more simple than others. But reality does not work out to be so easy, and frankly a reality that did work out that simple would be boring as hell.” This agnosticism toward art, shared by Trotsky, is in direct contradiction to Mao who held that art was revolutionary or reactionary and that science could discern the difference. Even more interesting, in the comments section of his blog, one of the more articulate Avakian supporters, openly claimed that Bob Avakian had gone beyond the line represented by Jiang Qing and Mao’s talks at the Yenan Forum. Should we really be surprised though? Why don’t the Avakianites just officially admit they have abandoned the Maoist line in art? It slows down debate and spreads confusion.

Also see, the Maoist Internationalist Movement’s criticisms of Joey Steele and also articles in the rcp=u$a’s paper advocating a liberal line in art. MIM’s criticisms can be found here: http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/wim/w ... rtline.txt

(3) “Summary Of the Forum on the Works in Literature And in the Armed Forces With Which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted Comrade Chiang Ching,” Peking Review #22, June 2, 1967. p. 11

(4) Karl Marx, “Karl Marx’s Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse),”
Transcribed for MEIA from the Penguin edition, transl. Martin Nicolaus, 1973, based on volume 13 of Marx Engels Werke, 1968
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... e/ch01.htm

(5) Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. translated by Albert Hofstadter. Harper and Row. USA: 1971 p. 113-117

(6) Immanuel Kant. Critique Of Judgment translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett Publishing Company. USA 1987

(7) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(8) Su Hsi. “The Struggle Between the Theory of Classes and the Theory of Human Nature in Literature and Art,” Peking Review #23, June 9, 1972. p. 5-6

(9) “Long Live the Revolutionary Spirit of Criticism,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967 p. 19

(10) Chao Hua. “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?” Peking Review #9, March 1, 1971. p. 15

(11) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 195

Jiang Qing went as far as to say, “I have listened to the music of the capitalist countries. The number of so called ‘classical’ music is limited — only a few — and not much more has been achieved since. Nor is there much future in it. In fact, it has already been declining.”

(12) Andrea Skybreak. “Some Ideas on the Social Role of Art,” From the selections of the RCP USA Draft Programme available at: http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1114/skybreak_art.htm

(13) Frances Stonor Saunders. “Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War,” Granta Books: 2000 p. 254

(14) Eva Cockcroft. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon in the Cold War” from the anthology edited by Francis Frascia. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate 2nd ed. Routledge NY, NY USA: 2000. p 150-154

Like so much with the crypto-Trots, much of their position on art is an indirect attack on revolutionary Marxism, and also, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Their position on art (http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1117/skybreak4.htm), while quoting Mao a couple of times, actually works to undermine the obvious implications of Mao’s position. They basically give Mao-window dressing to an essentially liberal counter-revolutionary position. In this way, the rcp=u$a, like the Trotskyists, try to occupy a kind of middle ground between the Marxist position on art and a straight up liberal position. In typical rcp=u$a doublespeak, they claim to uphold science while at the same time defending everything from snail paintings to CIA art as legitimate.

Skybreak of the rcp=u$a writes of approvingly of the consciousness behind Pollock’s abstract expressionist drip paintings. There was a consciousness at work behind abstract expressionism, and specifically Jackson Pollock. However, the rcp=u$a is wrong in calling it legitimate; the consciousness behind it was liberalism and even the CIA and cold warriors controlling the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and amerikan art circles. Abstract expressionism, and Pollock, were part of a CIA backed culture war to undermine socialist art and socialist influenced art from China, the Soviet Bloc, and Europe. As early as 1952, cold war congressman Alfred Barr Jr. wrote an article in the NY Times Magazine supporting amerikan modern art against socialist realism which he associated with “totalitarianism.” It is a matter of public record that the CIA financed and even managed the production and promotion of some of this art which the rcp=u$a approves of. Here are some quotes from an academic essay, cited above, by Eva Cockcroft on the subject:

“Especially important was the attempt to influence intellectuals and artists behind the ‘iron curtain.’ During the post-Stalin era in 1956, when the Polish government under Gomulka became more liberal, Tadeusz Kantor, an artist from Cracow, impressed by the work of Pollock and other abstractionists which he had seen during an earlier trip to Paris began to lead the movement away from socialist realism in Poland. Irrespective of the role this art movement within the internal artistic evolution of Polish art, this kind of development was seen as a triumph for ‘our side.’ In 1961, Kantor and 14 other non-objective Polish painters were given an exhibition at MOMA. Examples like this one reflect the success of the political aims of the international programs of the MOMA. “

Should it really be a surprise to us that the rcp=u$a is promoting the same art as the CIA? Jiang Qing denounced Pollock was used by the CIA as a tool to aid post-Stalin revisionism in Eastern Europe. Our Chinese comrades understood that the kind of line that the rcp=u$a promotes in art was a direct challenge to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Our Chinese comrades, at the famous art conference where Jiang Qing participated, denounced the line rcp=u$a now holds as Trotskyist. Our Chinese comrades understood that the life and death struggle for the revolution itself was taking place in the super-structure. More quotes from Eva Cockcroft’s essay:

“..the CIA sought to influence the foreign intellectual community and to present a strong propaganda image for the United States as a ‘free’ society as opposed to the ‘regimented’ communist bloc.”

“…CIA and MOMA cultural projects could provide the well funded and more persuasive arguments and exhibits needed to sell the rest of the world on the benefits of life and art under capitalism.”

“In the world of art, Abstract Expressionism constituted the ideal style for those propaganda activities. It was the perfect contrast to ‘the regimented, traditional, and narrow’ nature of ’socialist realism.’ It was new fresh and creative.

In the last citation, Eva Cockcroft quotes anti-communists writers who parallel Skybreak’s and the rcp=u$a’s own anti-communist position. Skybreak’s words (http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1117/skybreak4.htm) are almost straight out of the CIA playbook on art. Like the CIA, the implication running throughout her work is that the proletarian art of the Soviet Union and China was too narrow and regimented. Then, to top it all off, she cites approvingly of an artist and style that was in fact directly a part of the CIA’s own culture war. Is the rcp=u$a, like the CIA, consciously promoting a counter-revolutionary line in art? Or, did they just blunder their way to their counter revolutionary line and overt support for CIA artists? Does it matter? This is yet again what we have been saying, that it is simply impossible to distinguish the rcp=u$a from the pigs.

Another interesting thing is that in their efforts to see up a counter-avant-gard in art to oppose socialist influence, the CIA actually funded a Paris Tour of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952. So, their intervention in the art world was not just limited to painting, but also to high music. They also provided support for certain literary projects.

(15) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(16) Timothy Gould. “Audience of Originality,” Essays In Kant’s Aesthetics edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. University of Chicago 1982 USA.

(17) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(18) Chao Hua. “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?” Peking Review #9, March 1, 1971. p. 15

(19) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(20) Madame Mao, edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 213-215

“We favor ‘rule by the voice of the many’ and oppose ‘rule by the voice of man alone.’”

“We must encourage revolutionary and militant mass criticism of literature and art, and break the monopoly of criticism of literature and art by a few so called critics. We must place the weapon of criticism of literature and art in the hands of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers and integrate professional critics with critics among the masses. We must make this criticism more militant and oppose unprincipled vulgar praise.”

(21) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 226

(22) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 225-226

(23) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(24) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(25) Leon Trotsky. “Literature and Revolution,” Chapter 7. Russell & Russell, New York, 1957 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /lit_revo/

(26) Leon Trotsky. “Literature and Revolution,” Chapter 6. Russell & Russell, New York, 1957 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /lit_revo/

(27) Lin Piao. “Letter from Lin Piao to responsible comrades of the Military Commission, March 23, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 201-202

(28) Chen Po-ta. “Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 21

(29) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, 7 June 1974. p. 18-22

(30) “Fight to Safeguard the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 35

(31) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(32) Chi Pen-Yu. “Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art’ Is a Programme for Building a Mighty Cultural Army,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 25

(33) Chen Po-ta. “Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 23

(34) Chi Pen-Yu. “Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art’ Is a Programme for Building a Mighty Cultural Army,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 26-28

(35) “Great Truth, sharp Weapon,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967. p. 19

(36) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 226-227

(37) “Great Truth, sharp Weapon,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967. p. 19

(38) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(39) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

Maoism vs. “Just Pretty Tulips”
January 15, 2006

Maoism vs. “Just Pretty Tulips”
by Prairie Fire irtr.org

“There may be some Communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets; they will be defeated by sugar-coated bullets. We must guard against such a situation.” Mao Zedong, 1949 (1)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the furthest revolutionary advance in humyn history. One idea that came to prominence was that everything is political; everything is struggle. Every aspect of our lives, every aspect of culture is not only marked by its class origins but also plays a role in the class struggle, for better or for worse. At first, it may not be apparent how revolutionary this idea is and what a departure it is from the tradition of bourgeois thought. One example of the “all round” nature of this struggle was Maoist campaign against the Four Olds. The masses were unleashed against Old Custom, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. One crypto-Trotskyist Avakianite critic of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution recently asked the rhetorical question, “is a painting of tulips political? They are just pretty!” (2) The answer to this question will reflect into a wide range of issues from theories of humyn nature, the view of history and social change, counter-revolution, to the view on the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Mao has said, there is a communist answer and a reactionary one. In the history of the Chinese Party, they correspond to two lines that historically developed on the cultural front. (3) During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this struggle over the two lines in art became truly of life and death. This paper grew out of the challenge to answer this crypto-Trotskyist, although, the ideas in this paper go well beyond a simple answer to the question of tulips.

I. The Bourgeois Beautiful

In the history of art, one bourgeois view that remains in fashion to this day is “art for art’s sake.” Generally, what this means is that production of beauty is an end in itself and that art should not be subject to political agendas. This idea was revolutionary at one time because this bourgeois view liberated the artist from the the authoritarian Church and feudal order. Art no longer had to be a means of feudal indoctrination aimed at glorifying God, saints, and Christian martyrs. Art was now liberated from Medieval absolutism.

This view of “art for art’s sake” is a political expression of bourgeois aesthetics that was and continues to be bound up with a particular conception of humyn nature. One of the best expressions of this view is in the works of Immanuel Kant who stood both within the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and one foot in the Romantic reaction against it. Kant’s Critique of Judgment or Third Critique with its view of the beautiful is the epitome of an aesthetics of a bourgeoisie on the rise. On the other hand, Kant’s work in the idea of the sublime, opens up for the first time the possibility of value judgments being historically determined - an idea carried forward by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx. As Karl Marx wrote, “is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?” (4) In this same work, Kant also opened up the possibility of something other than ahistoric value which, in turn, opens up the idea in German idealism of something other than ahistoric self. These ideas would eventually become transformed in Hegel and Marx to a view that everything is in a kind of motion. So, Kant’s works span a wide range of bourgeois ideas about art and even occupy an important place in history that leads to up the eventual overcoming of that bourgeois history in the works of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. However, Kant is mostly known today for the first part of his Third Critique and ideas of beauty that eventually lead to the popular slogan “art for art’s sake.”

Historically, pastoral scenes of various kinds have been associated with the emergent bourgeoisie and its optimistic view of a scientifically ordered and moral nature and the emergent bourgeoisie’s own desire to be escape, if only temporarily, from its cramped and sometimes disjointed urban world. Of this disjointed world Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air,” of a capitalist world that is constantly revolutionizing society and also a world that has “profaned everything holy.” The whole idea of the vacation and also of bourgeois gardens and parks are part of this false return to nature found in one kind of escapist bourgeois culture. These scenes are also bound up idealized bourgeois family life as it is portrayed in the literature and experience of the family vacation, leisure time, and even baseball and camping trips. These scenes are not the real scenes of the countryside with its toiling and oppressed peasants nor is it an actual return to nature. Nor is it the quasi-fascist idealization of a mythological past and rejection of modern cosmopolitan life that one finds in critics like Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes. (5) Instead, this pastoral world is one of atemporality, of calmness, of wholeness — yet religion is not ever-present as in the feudal world.

For Kant the experience of beauty is the experience of the world as ordered and pleasing without the mind imposing order via concepts. Kant characterized this experience of beauty as in “free conformity of law.” (6) And aesthetic judgment as “purposive without purpose.” Beauty behaves as though it were a real property of objects as universal and necessary. Part of the experience of beauty is that one experiences the world as if freely ordered — when the world appears ordered as if there were a rationality behind it, be it God or man. The idea of a natural order is also an idea that characterizes feudalism, yet, this idea also re-emerges and transforms as a hope of the bourgeoisie when it confronts its own disjointed and modern life. For Kant, the beautiful becomes a symbol for humynity’s hope that the world is both scientifically knowable, ordered, and also moral. To bring this back to the example of the picture of tulips, one can easily see how this is not only an expression of of an era and a class, but even more specifically, it plays a roll as a symbol for bourgeois hope and ultimately for their own supposed scientifically ordered serene moral world.

A pastoral scene or painting of tulips as beautiful is also a symbol for the hope that the bourgeois individuals will find their place in the world without God, feudal tradition, or an all powerful authoritarian Church. For the bourgeoisie these pastoral scenes or our critic’s tulip or gardens painting were meant to show a kind of order to nature and the world that was not imposed from without. It is an order in the world that can be discovered and mastered by bourgeois science. A particular view of humyn nature is implied in this view.

“The historical experience of class struggle tells us that all reactionary classes inevitably spread the theory of human nature so as to strengthen their ideological control over the people and consolidate their political power.” (7) The bourgeois view of humyn nature has its origins in the the bourgeoisie’s role in production. The condition that the bourgeoisie finds itself in is projected in a more idealized form onto its notion of humynity and humyn nature — whether as an idealized self-interested self in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith or the divided self of Kant or even the tormented self of romanticism and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois decline. Humyn nature for the bourgeoisie becomes expressed in various ways from Locke to Rousseau and Kant to romanticism and even pop culture. Our conceptions of humyn nature are determined in part by the economic, yet, this historical origin is obscured and such bourgeois conceptions masquerade as science. Marxism is a tool that we can use to expose reactionary theories of humyn nature — and this applies to fiction and non-fiction. Maoists exposed fictional portrayals that presented the bourgeois self as humyn nature during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (8) “Speaking of Marx’s attitude toward criticism, Lenin said, ‘[Marx] critically reshaped everything that had been created by human society, without ignoring a single detail. He reconsidered, subjected to criticism, and verified on the working-class movement everything that human thinking had created, and therefrom formulated conclusions which people hemmed in by bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejudices could not draw.’” (9)

A pastoral scene or painting of tulips is not overtly propagandistic, in the sense that it does not thematically embrace reaction. For example, our critic’s tulip painting does not overtly romanticize humyns as self interested nor does it overtly romanticize the bourgeois family nor imperialism. Yet, in the context of the first world, the painting does become a symbol for the bourgeois world order and it also becomes a symbol for the bourgeois self and its alleged harmonious relationship with that world. Where in reality, the bourgeoisie’s relationship to the world is one of destruction and irrationality. To present it as otherwise plays into bourgeois hands — although, we should not generalize these arguments to apply to a Third World context where pattern-art or flowered-detailing can become a source of resistance as a cultural tradition of an oppressed people. In a first world context, pastoral scenes, images of “just pretty flowers” and so on obscure the bourgeoisie’s place generally because it obscures the reality of their own destructiveness and irrationality. It presents their order as one of science, optimism, and harmony. This is easily used by the bourgeoisie to say that their relationship to other classes and their whole social order is rational, progressive, scientific, and harmonious. It also becomes part of a whole symbolic system that aims to idealize the bourgeois social order and this includes the patriarchy, especially the bourgeois nuclear family. These kinds pastoral scenes, after all, are part of a whole bourgeois imagining and experience of the family. They are part of a domesticated and idealized nature and they play a part in Western Euro-Amerikan cultural mythology of the family vacation, serene gardens, also, things like baseball and camping trips.

What of ‘pure’ art? Formal and also abstract art too can become a symbol for order generally, which without thematic political content tends to support the current system, capitalism. For similar reasons writers during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution criticized instrumental music without descriptive titles. (10) (11)

There is a mathematical order expressed in the images of abstract forms and some instrumental music that de facto supports the system because within its current context it symbolizes harmony and gets appropriated by propagandists of the current social order. Because this art has no overt political themes, it tends to work with the propaganda that is generally found in society already, which happens to mostly be bourgeois propaganda. Reactionaries poured money into and managed the production and promotion of anti-communist art. Abstract expressionism, cited approvingly as an example of legitimate social experimentation by Andrea Skybreak of the RCP=U$A (12) , is an example of a kind of abstract art that became a symbol and expression of alleged Western freedom; it became an expression of the dominant ideology of bourgeois society. The CIA and cold war art circles and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York saw in abstract expressionism “anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism.” (13) Despite its apparent lack of overt political content, abstract expressionism, for example, became a part of an imperialist culture war. Abstract expressionism, in addition to CIA sponsored music and literary works, was directly used to attack socialist and socialist influenced art throughout the world. (14)

Also, it is no accident that formal and abstract art is found in science fiction futurist visions of the good ordered techno capitalist society, for example, Star Trek with its decor of geometric shapes. Formal and abstract art or music can express mathematical relationships that become a symbol of harmony and order generally. This can be said of the bourgeois appropriation of Johann Sebastian Bach and also some contemporary electronic pop music like happy or “world” trance. Even under socialism art or music that emphasizes formal order or harmony works against the dictatorship of the proletariat because it falsely provides a symbol of social harmony rather than one of struggle. We have to always remember that class struggle continues under the dictatorship of the proletariat and it is our duty to promote that struggle. Such a formalistic art of harmony is appropriated by those revisionists who say that class struggle is over. Such was used by both ancient and neo-Confucians in China as a prop of the system, “[the] Confucian viewpoint on musical aesthetics, vigorously preached that the role of music is to bring the relations among people into harmony, draw them close together and make them bear no hatred or complaint against one another.” (15)

In the case of our pastoral scene or our critic’s tulip painting, could it be re-appropriated as a symbol of the harmony socialist order? Again, not only would such an image be caught up in its old bourgeois web of meaning, but we Maoists understand that class struggle must continue under socialism. And, tulips are ill-suited for struggle. Struggle was, after all, what the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was about.

What of emotions and art? Some bourgeois writers saw the connection between art, the self as conceived by the bourgeoisie, and pleasure and emotion. In Kant, for example, beauty is associated with the pleasure of a harmonization within the faculties of the self and also connected to harmony of the world. For, Kant, the artistic genius was to produce exemplary and original art that would meet his audience half way, elevating them, allowing them to experience through art the harmony within themselves and the world. (16) For this reason, romantic and also later utopian critics would suggest all art is subversive because it elevates the audience and awakens the imagination out of a world where humynity is stifled by technology. So, even bourgeois critics have tied aesthetic pleasure and also emotion to the supposed realization of humyn nature as free. However, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Maoists criticized this view, “abstract ‘emotional changes’ of delight and anger, joy and sorrow to conceal the class character of the feelings. For instance, they asserted that bourgeois music expressed ‘man’s lofty feelings,’ ‘true feelings,’ and so on.” (17) Maoists also criticized the view that our emotions and emotional lives are class-neutral. Music or art that provokes certain emotions or emotional patterns also have a class component even though they may have no words. Maoist Chao Hua uses the example of Franz Shubert’s Unfinished Symphony as a reflection of petty bourgeois vacillation, frustration, and despair. (18) But, more than being a reflection of it, Shubert’s work also provokes a kind of apathetic moping and petty bourgeois withdraw from the the world. Rather than an emergent bourgeoisie, a piece like Shubert’s represents a frustrated petty bourgeoisie and also, later, a lamenting bourgeoisie in decline. “As a matter of fact, classical music on the one hand and impressionist and modernistic music on the other reflect the political features, ideas and feelings of the bourgeoisie in two historical periods, one the rise of capitalism and the other its decline.” (19)

There is an issue of resources. The very choice of where our resources are directed is political. To place resources into one place necessarily takes it away from somewhere else. To paint a picture of tulips for a day means that you are not, for example, working, agitating or theorizing or producing genuinely revolutionary art for that same day. Mao asked: For whom is art going to be produced? In a way, we have been addressing this question throughout this paper. This is a question confronted by our comrades both the Soviet Union and China when those societies were socialist. Western intellectuals often criticize the Stalin or Maoist era because these critics (like the rcp=u$a) charge that intellectual life and art were stifled. Look at how this view puts a small professional elite above the vast majority. Both socialist China and the Soviet Union had to make decisions about where to place resources. Should a socialist society put resources into elitist art that may only be appreciated by a small elite? Or, should society create art that appeals to the broad masses? (20) It is the hight of irony that Western intellectuals criticize socialists for not being democratic, when those socialists are the ones bringing art to the people. Again, these intellectuals favor their intellectual “liberty” over the liberty of the masses. This is an idealist error that is very typical especially in the West. They fail to look at things in terms of what is really possibly. They don’t look at the fact that there are only a finite amount of resources — especially in a Third World nation. What is more important, elitist art that matters to almost nobody or people eating or having health care or having a proletarian culture they can relate too? This is like the Western socialist who just assumes that socialism will immediately raise the standard of living for both the Third World and the First World. By any measure, it simply isn’t possible in the short term. The First World will have to sacrifice its decadent ways. And, besides that, who wants to see tulips rather than revolutionary art anyway? Why devote resources to something which has no value other than, even according to our critic, “being pretty?” It is the masses that suffer from this bad allocation of resources.

Not only being class specific to the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, the tulip picture is also culturally specific to the West, in particular Holland. Whether it portrays a tulip field in Holland per se is not important. What is important is that the West, Holland in particular, is idealized in the kinds of images of serene tulip fields. The tulips are a kind of symbol for the West and its bourgeois and supposed peaceful social democratic society. Of course this class peace is a lie. Holland is plugged into the imperialist economies that, as a whole, super-exploit and oppress the Third World. So, here you have an image that is caught up in a reactionary chain of signifiers. And, this reactionary symbolic system will not vanish over night. It is not like one can just extract the image from its historical and symbolic context. While it is true that during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the West was made to serve the East and the Old to serve the New. And, this was a Maoist line in art too. (21) If Western art can be easily re-appropriated and adopted to serve the struggle of the revolutionary masses, then it need not be condemned. One example of a famous successful re-appropriation of non-communist art for revolution is The East Is Red, originally was a Chinese peasant love song that was transformed to serve the revolution. Another example is The Internationale which was a transformation, originally, from The Marseilles. Also, reactionary re-appropriation of revolutionary art has been spreading. Andy Warhol’s color silk screens of Mao has become a favorite of anti-communists, anarchists adopt the Warhol image to mock what they consider authoritarian. And, Soviet images and styles are being used in the capitalist consumer culture to sell everything from music to clothing. However, even if it was possible, who would bother putting so much energy into re-making a bourgeois image of tulips to serve the masses? So, not only are tulip paintings a bad allocation of resources, but additional resources would be needed to criticize its historical and symbolic context. Even if our critic was right (which he is not!) about art being neutral when it is not overtly political, he would still be wrong in terms of serving the people in the best ways we can. Jiang Qing spoke of the endless flood of poisonous art from the West. She also said, “It is in many cases out of the question to weed through all of the old and let the new emerge. How can we critically assimilate ghosts, gods, and religion? I hold it is impossible because we are atheists and communists.” (22) Our critic, at one point in the conversation talked about re-appropriating the banal bourgeois image of tulips; this is just a cover to reject Mao’s line as a whole and embrace the Trotskyist-liberal and also counter-revolutionary bourgeois line.

II. Maoism Against Reaction

Karl Marx’s view of our social world was that it was in constant change. All things are in motion; nothing is static and outside of change. For Marx, experience and the experience of production itself becomes aesthetic under communism. Alienation no longer exists and the contradiction between mental and manual labor no longer exists. Also, the distinction between work and artistic creation no longer exist as they do in the bourgeois epoch. However, communism and the end of all oppression is very far off. Before communism, there is a long journey of class struggle passing through capitalism and socialism. There is a constitutive and transformative relationship between the base and the superstructure. The base is the productive forces and relations of a society, whereas, the superstructure is all non-economic parts of our humyn world: culture, the legal system, ideology, our conceptions and experiences of ourselves, etc. Works of art, as a form of ideology, “are products of the relation of the human brain of the life in a given society.” (23)

All art, even that which claims to be apolitical, is both marked by its historical and social origins and also plays a role in class struggle. What Mao says of art is true of all forms of the super-structure. Nothing, no matter how apparently insignificant, is neutral; everything is charged with class.

Culture is a battleground between the forces of revolution and reaction. And, according to Maoism, revolution must be continued even during socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. One way that bourgeois ideology manifests itself under socialism is by the claim that there are independent spheres within the super-structure that are neutral in terms of the class struggle. This can manifest itself in various ways. One way is by saying that absolute music, instrumental music without descriptive titles, is neutral. Or, it can manifest itself by saying that the law of humyn morality stands above class struggle. Or, another way is the claim that the emotions we experience and patterns of those emotions are neutral. Or, it manifests itself in our critic’s claim that his picture of tulips is not political. Mao supported the materialist monistic proletarian line that said that all spheres are inter-connected in class struggle. Mao says, “Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause” and “literature and art are subordinate to politics, but in their turn exert a great influence on politics.” (24)

Not only is our critic wrong historically speaking, but to uphold such a position is totally revisionist. Because to uphold the idea that there is a sphere of cultural life that is apolitical or above politics, is to open the door to the claim that all culture is apolitical. Mao repeatedly warned that the door of capitalist restoration was being opened wider and wider. Not only does this allow the bourgeoisie to find a refuge where it can spread its ideology, but it also sets up the possibility of the Kautskyian revisionist idea that the state itself can be neutral and stand above class struggle. This sets up a basis theoretically for denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat; it actively undermines proletarian power across the board. Mao remarked that revolution requires pens and guns. Culture is a war zone. To say there is neutral art, is to cede to the bourgeoisie their own cultural “whites zones” from which they can spread their hegemony and counter-revolution. A view of art shared by some Trotskyists and some post-modernists is that art is always political, yet we cannot know whether or not it is ultimately revolutionary. Leon Trotsky even says, “Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic.” (25) In other places, he embraces epistemological agnosticism even more overtly, embracing reactionary dualism and even saying there is no proletarian art. Also, Trotsky openly denys the all round nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, saying, “the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organization for the production of the culture of a new society.” (26) This kind of anti-scientific epistemological agnosticism cedes everything but the most overtly reactionary art to the forces of reaction. Against the Trotsky-liberal view, “The position of literature and art if not occupied by the proletariat, will surely be taken over by the bourgeoisie.” (27) The Trotskyist view objectively amounts to “politics=Marxist, art=bourgeois.” It opens the door for all round bourgeois restoration, i.e. “politics=bourgeois.” (28)

The idea that there is an art, or a sphere of humyn life above struggle is also tied to reactionary theories of humyn nature and this also in turn undermines the dictatorship of the proletariat. One Maoist writes, “But their common characteristic is the bourgeois theory of human nature which runs through their structural ideas and creative conceptions. Later, this theory of human nature was taken over by revisionism to continue to spread its reactionary effect. The current claim that bourgeois musical works have no social content, in essence, stands for the bourgeois theory of human nature in opposition to the Marxist theory of classes.” (29) So, to say there is a universal, apolitical art is to say there is an apolitical humyn to appreciate it. And, if there is a humyn so removed from the class struggle, then that plays into the bourgeois idea of the possibility of a state for the whole people, a state above class struggle. In this way “an art of the whole people” (30) which was a line refuted by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, leads quickly to the bourgeois notion of “a state of the whole people.” On the other hand, Mao located humyn nature within class struggle, “Is there such a thing as human nature? Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract. In class society there is only human nature of a class character; there is no human nature above classes. We uphold the human nature of the proletariat and of the masses of the people, while the landlord and bourgeois classes uphold the human nature of their own classes, only they do not say so but make it out to be the only human nature in existence.” (31)

Lenin: “Those who recognize only class the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of the bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics.” “A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (32) It isn’t enough to recognize the reality of class struggle, but communists have to recognize the necessity of the all round dictatorship of the proletariat. A revolutionary has to extend the recognition of class struggle and proletarian dictatorship to all aspects of life and society. Maoist writers correctly said that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution itself was a continuation of the polemics on art which took place in the base areas in the 1940s. (33) And, also they are a continuation of the struggle against reaction and for communism. In China and in the Soviet Union, the bourgeoisie used art and literature to make many covert and no so covert attacks on proletarian power, we would be foolish not to go on the offensive against them. Mao many times spoke of this struggle in military terms and as important. Mao said, “After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will be still enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly.” Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution authors referred to “the mighty revolutionary cultural army.. an important force in opposing a capitalist restoration and checking the spread of revisionism.” (34)

This struggle is so important, one Maoist linked this struggle to the very survival of the revolution, “We must defend the dictatorship of the proletariat not only with guns but also with pens. We must, in line with Chairman Mao’s many instructions, pay serious attention to the class struggle on the literary and art front, take firm hold of the struggle between the two roads in the ideological sphere and view it from the level of the question concerning of political power, and not treat it lightly. To ignore this would be tantamount to forgetting about the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (35)

What kind of art? Jiang Qing went so far as to list impressionism, famous for its depiction of flowers, abstractionism, strip tease, among other things, as poisonous weeds, “there are some things that really flood the market…there is no end to them — all of which are intended to poison and paralyze the minds of the people.” (36) Obviously, our critic’s tulips are not going to cut it. Of bourgeois art and culture, “Decadent things that run counter to the trend of the times will be buried, once and for all, by the revolutionary people, in fact, are now in the process of being buried.” (37) Mao says art, like science, needs to reflect things more universally than how we experience things in our every day lives which is the source of all art. Art should not simply mirror reality, it should bring out the universality of our condition as we engage in class struggle. Mao says, “life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life.“ (38) So, like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism itself, proletarian art tries to bring out a higher understanding than what people get in the everyday. Art should, as Mao said at the Yenan forum, “help the masses to propel history forward.” (39) All art is an ideological weapon whether we like it or not. The question is: who will wield this weapon? The proletariat or the forces of reaction?

***

Bibliography/Footnotes

(1) Mao Tse-Tung. “Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” Selected Works, Vol. IV, March 5, 1949. p. 374

(2) This is an almost exact paraphrase of one portion of a long discussion with an Avakian supporter. This should not surprise anyone who has watched the Avakianites over the years. Recently, another Avakianite Joey Steele (who calls MIM hacks! This coming from a party that has never heard of citing sources except their own paper!) denied the Marxist position on art and defended a straight up liberal line. “I don’t think there are some simple clean categories to place art: revolutionary, reactionary, and other. I mean some art is more simple than others. But reality does not work out to be so easy, and frankly a reality that did work out that simple would be boring as hell.” This agnosticism toward art, shared by Trotsky, is in direct contradiction to Mao who held that art was revolutionary or reactionary and that science could discern the difference. Even more interesting, in the comments section of his blog, one of the more articulate Avakian supporters, openly claimed that Bob Avakian had gone beyond the line represented by Jiang Qing and Mao’s talks at the Yenan Forum. Should we really be surprised though? Why don’t the Avakianites just officially admit they have abandoned the Maoist line in art? It slows down debate and spreads confusion.

Also see, the Maoist Internationalist Movement’s criticisms of Joey Steele and also articles in the rcp=u$a’s paper advocating a liberal line in art. MIM’s criticisms can be found here: http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/wim/w ... rtline.txt

(3) “Summary Of the Forum on the Works in Literature And in the Armed Forces With Which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted Comrade Chiang Ching,” Peking Review #22, June 2, 1967. p. 11

(4) Karl Marx, “Karl Marx’s Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse),”
Transcribed for MEIA from the Penguin edition, transl. Martin Nicolaus, 1973, based on volume 13 of Marx Engels Werke, 1968
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... e/ch01.htm

(5) Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. translated by Albert Hofstadter. Harper and Row. USA: 1971 p. 113-117

(6) Immanuel Kant. Critique Of Judgment translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett Publishing Company. USA 1987

(7) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(8) Su Hsi. “The Struggle Between the Theory of Classes and the Theory of Human Nature in Literature and Art,” Peking Review #23, June 9, 1972. p. 5-6

(9) “Long Live the Revolutionary Spirit of Criticism,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967 p. 19

(10) Chao Hua. “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?” Peking Review #9, March 1, 1971. p. 15

(11) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 195

Jiang Qing went as far as to say, “I have listened to the music of the capitalist countries. The number of so called ‘classical’ music is limited — only a few — and not much more has been achieved since. Nor is there much future in it. In fact, it has already been declining.”

(12) Andrea Skybreak. “Some Ideas on the Social Role of Art,” From the selections of the RCP USA Draft Programme available at: http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1114/skybreak_art.htm

(13) Frances Stonor Saunders. “Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War,” Granta Books: 2000 p. 254

(14) Eva Cockcroft. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon in the Cold War” from the anthology edited by Francis Frascia. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate 2nd ed. Routledge NY, NY USA: 2000. p 150-154

Like so much with the crypto-Trots, much of their position on art is an indirect attack on revolutionary Marxism, and also, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Their position on art (http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1117/skybreak4.htm), while quoting Mao a couple of times, actually works to undermine the obvious implications of Mao’s position. They basically give Mao-window dressing to an essentially liberal counter-revolutionary position. In this way, the rcp=u$a, like the Trotskyists, try to occupy a kind of middle ground between the Marxist position on art and a straight up liberal position. In typical rcp=u$a doublespeak, they claim to uphold science while at the same time defending everything from snail paintings to CIA art as legitimate.

Skybreak of the rcp=u$a writes of approvingly of the consciousness behind Pollock’s abstract expressionist drip paintings. There was a consciousness at work behind abstract expressionism, and specifically Jackson Pollock. However, the rcp=u$a is wrong in calling it legitimate; the consciousness behind it was liberalism and even the CIA and cold warriors controlling the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and amerikan art circles. Abstract expressionism, and Pollock, were part of a CIA backed culture war to undermine socialist art and socialist influenced art from China, the Soviet Bloc, and Europe. As early as 1952, cold war congressman Alfred Barr Jr. wrote an article in the NY Times Magazine supporting amerikan modern art against socialist realism which he associated with “totalitarianism.” It is a matter of public record that the CIA financed and even managed the production and promotion of some of this art which the rcp=u$a approves of. Here are some quotes from an academic essay, cited above, by Eva Cockcroft on the subject:

“Especially important was the attempt to influence intellectuals and artists behind the ‘iron curtain.’ During the post-Stalin era in 1956, when the Polish government under Gomulka became more liberal, Tadeusz Kantor, an artist from Cracow, impressed by the work of Pollock and other abstractionists which he had seen during an earlier trip to Paris began to lead the movement away from socialist realism in Poland. Irrespective of the role this art movement within the internal artistic evolution of Polish art, this kind of development was seen as a triumph for ‘our side.’ In 1961, Kantor and 14 other non-objective Polish painters were given an exhibition at MOMA. Examples like this one reflect the success of the political aims of the international programs of the MOMA. “

Should it really be a surprise to us that the rcp=u$a is promoting the same art as the CIA? Jiang Qing denounced Pollock was used by the CIA as a tool to aid post-Stalin revisionism in Eastern Europe. Our Chinese comrades understood that the kind of line that the rcp=u$a promotes in art was a direct challenge to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Our Chinese comrades, at the famous art conference where Jiang Qing participated, denounced the line rcp=u$a now holds as Trotskyist. Our Chinese comrades understood that the life and death struggle for the revolution itself was taking place in the super-structure. More quotes from Eva Cockcroft’s essay:

“..the CIA sought to influence the foreign intellectual community and to present a strong propaganda image for the United States as a ‘free’ society as opposed to the ‘regimented’ communist bloc.”

“…CIA and MOMA cultural projects could provide the well funded and more persuasive arguments and exhibits needed to sell the rest of the world on the benefits of life and art under capitalism.”

“In the world of art, Abstract Expressionism constituted the ideal style for those propaganda activities. It was the perfect contrast to ‘the regimented, traditional, and narrow’ nature of ’socialist realism.’ It was new fresh and creative.

In the last citation, Eva Cockcroft quotes anti-communists writers who parallel Skybreak’s and the rcp=u$a’s own anti-communist position. Skybreak’s words (http://rwor.org/a/v23/1110-19/1117/skybreak4.htm) are almost straight out of the CIA playbook on art. Like the CIA, the implication running throughout her work is that the proletarian art of the Soviet Union and China was too narrow and regimented. Then, to top it all off, she cites approvingly of an artist and style that was in fact directly a part of the CIA’s own culture war. Is the rcp=u$a, like the CIA, consciously promoting a counter-revolutionary line in art? Or, did they just blunder their way to their counter revolutionary line and overt support for CIA artists? Does it matter? This is yet again what we have been saying, that it is simply impossible to distinguish the rcp=u$a from the pigs.

Another interesting thing is that in their efforts to see up a counter-avant-gard in art to oppose socialist influence, the CIA actually funded a Paris Tour of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952. So, their intervention in the art world was not just limited to painting, but also to high music. They also provided support for certain literary projects.

(15) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(16) Timothy Gould. “Audience of Originality,” Essays In Kant’s Aesthetics edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. University of Chicago 1982 USA.

(17) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(18) Chao Hua. “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?” Peking Review #9, March 1, 1971. p. 15

(19) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(20) Madame Mao, edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 213-215

“We favor ‘rule by the voice of the many’ and oppose ‘rule by the voice of man alone.’”

“We must encourage revolutionary and militant mass criticism of literature and art, and break the monopoly of criticism of literature and art by a few so called critics. We must place the weapon of criticism of literature and art in the hands of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers and integrate professional critics with critics among the masses. We must make this criticism more militant and oppose unprincipled vulgar praise.”

(21) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 226

(22) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 225-226

(23) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(24) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(25) Leon Trotsky. “Literature and Revolution,” Chapter 7. Russell & Russell, New York, 1957 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /lit_revo/

(26) Leon Trotsky. “Literature and Revolution,” Chapter 6. Russell & Russell, New York, 1957 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky ... /lit_revo/

(27) Lin Piao. “Letter from Lin Piao to responsible comrades of the Military Commission, March 23, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 201-202

(28) Chen Po-ta. “Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 21

(29) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, 7 June 1974. p. 18-22

(30) “Fight to Safeguard the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 35

(31) Chu Lan. “Deepen the Criticism of the Bourgeois Theory of Human Nature,” Beijing Review, #17, June 7, 1974. p. 18-22

(32) Chi Pen-Yu. “Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art’ Is a Programme for Building a Mighty Cultural Army,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 25

(33) Chen Po-ta. “Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 23

(34) Chi Pen-Yu. “Chairman Mao’s ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art’ Is a Programme for Building a Mighty Cultural Army,” Peking Review #22 May 26, 1967. p. 26-28

(35) “Great Truth, sharp Weapon,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967. p. 19

(36) Chiang Ching. “Chiang Ching speaks at Peking Cultural Revolution Rally of Literature and Art Workers Dec, 3, 1966,” in Madame Mao edited by Chung Hua-Min and Arthur C. Miller, Union Research Group, Hong Kong: 1968. p. 226-227

(37) “Great Truth, sharp Weapon,” Peking Review #2, June 23, 1967. p. 19

(38) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

(39) Mao Tse-Tung. “Talks At The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Peking Review #22, May 26, 1967.

Are you being serious?

Quote:

humyn

Maoists...

Quote:

Are you being serious?

Did you read any of it?
Do you think Marxists should not make cultural critiques?