Culture War: "Go to Ya'nan" & "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets" (Graeber)

"In those exploratory early years, cultural organisations of all kinds were formed, merged, re-named, and dissolved. Artistic and literary groups were set up in factories, schools, military units, and rural bases. Street poetry groups were established, with one collective’s manifesto stating, ‘do not let a single wall in the countryside or a single rock by the side of the road lie free and empty… Write… Sing – for the resistance, for the nation, for the masses’. Theatre troupes, which emerged earlier in the 1930s as a powerful force in the resistance to Japanese imperialism, were particularly well received by a largely illiterate rural population. They were able to orally and accessibly communicate the most urgent problems of the day, explain the communist programme, serve as counter-propaganda, and, most importantly, win the confidence of the people."

Welcome back readers! This time we're in for double trouble with two fairly short readings taken together. In this special LMRG meeting, we're asking ourselves some important, occasionally uncomfortable questions about aesthetics and politics - a combo which, if you ask certain Marxists like Walter Benjamin, could equal fascism. That's right, we're talking about art, culture, and the strange power of myth, symbolism, imagery and the imagination.

Wait! Stop! Isn't this anti-materialist? Don't fundamental economic forces shape everything, and shouldn't our political activity focus on educating workers as to that fact? Aren't we getting dangerously close to Sorelianism and idealism with all this? Isn't it a slippery slope to "God-building"?

In asking these questions I'm obviously putting words in the mouth of a rather unfair caricature of a fusty old-minded Marxist. As we'll see with our two readings, politics and cultural practice go together hand-in-glove, at least philosophically. Gramsci's thought on these subjects is well-known, and has been adapted far and wide, including on the extreme right. Even the Fabian Society, founders of Labourism, got their start with a little outfit called the Leeds Arts Club.

Our two pieces demonstrate this from two very opposed ends of the left spectrum, from the strident Marxism-Leninism of the Tricontinental Institue with their dossier on the Ya'nan Soviet's 1942 Forum on Literature and Art (chaired by Mao Z) on the one hand and the late, great anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets on the other.

Find them here:

https://files.libcom.org/files/puppets.pdf

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-yanan-forum/

Both essays detail the concrete practices and theoretical underpinnings of two distinct movements: education, propaganda and mass mobilisation during China's Civil War and Anti-Japanese War, and the street theatre tactics of the 2000s-era alter-globalisation movement, respectively. Graeber's essay details the now only partly-remembered practices of building and fielding "giant puppets" - floats, papier-mache beasts, large-scale imaginative constructions, etc - and asks the question of why they seemed to have such a hold on the minds of the police from Seattle to Milan. Forget homo sapiens - homo ludens needs to play to learn.

Both will be starting-points for what will no doubt be a wide-ranging discussion on the topic of how art, culture and symbolism fit into anti-capitalist political practice. We'll ask where we stand today on the left in the Englishs-speaking world with regards to these matters, what we can learn from the past, and what we might do going forward.

Take care and happy reading!