Every element of the actual, physical war against the American people is at the same time a cultural war to divide and conquer. In the last two years, the cultural war enveloping our country and driving toward fascism has reached new heights. The big lie surrounding the 2020 election culminated in an attempted coup. When a mob attacked the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., that action helped consolidate the thinking of many people, who already distrusted government, around an ideology rooted in the white supremacy of American history.
At the same time, the thinking of another section of the American people was electrified by Derek Chauvin choking the life out of George Floyd. The subsequent rebellion brought to the fore a common hatred of the forces occupying communities around the country, regardless of color, gender, or age. The context for all of this, the battleground, was a pandemic of more than one million deaths in the U.S. alone, where the government response revealed a structure totally in thrall to private property of the corporations. Government solutions relied on blaming the victims for not seeking vaccinations, and government figures engaged in cultural opposition by not wearing masks.
How is this a cultural war? It’s a war for the thinking, the consciousness of the American people. Culture is, in its broadest sense, “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations” (Merriam Webster Dictionary). In a narrower sense, we often think of culture as artistic performance. Considering these two aspects of culture and the urgency of our time, poet Jack Hirschman called for a meeting of cultural workers.
LRNA hosted a conference of cultural workers on October 17, 2021. The theme of the conference, “Revolutionary Vision: Toward a Cultural Offensive,” reflected how cultural workers, like all workers, have found themselves on the defensive. In Hirschman’s words, from the keynote to the Conference: “And that is why I have uncovered a spark that hopefully will lead to a Cultural offensive against that fascism: it is essentially important that Poetry now be a weapon in the struggle to specifically overthrow the capitalist system everywhere.” Hirschman passed away in August, but his enthusiasm and spirit pervaded the entire conference.
The first thing to understand is that fascism today is not the same as the fascism of the 1930s. Poet Anna Lombardo emphasized that difference at the conference, from her vantage point in Italy. Sociologist Walda Katz Fishman, in the opening panel, showed how fascism is the only political alternative for a ruling class unable to provide for the welfare of its people.
As automation due to robotics displaces more and more workers, restructures the work remaining, and allows many to work from home, capital profits more and more from speculation. The ruling class has perfected how it uses deception to control the ideas of the workers. But, as displaced workers become more aware of who their enemy is, they begin to turn that understanding into action. That same ruling class enemy must turn more to force and violence. A dramatic cultural shift has taken place. How, we wonder, can we seize the initiative when the ruling class bombards us at every turn?
The movement that arose around the death of George Floyd gives us a number of clues. Visual art depicting George Floyd erupted everywhere including many places outside the US – where people adopted George Floyd often as a symbol of what was happening in their area of the world. Musicians created anthems. The demand to stop killer cops became palpable. But the movement went further.
The idea of abolishing the carceral state – that is, the institutions upon which the whole prison and judicial systems are built – spread as never before. And that idea introduced the concept that police killings are not only connected to our history in slavery, but also to the political and economic structure the judicial system protects. Abolition opened the door to questioning the need for an economics of market and exploitation, for private property itself. This offers a vision beneficial to the vast majority, but antagonistic to the ruling class view, a cultural vision that demands insulation of corporate private property rights from the reach of government.
The second half of the conference built on the description of fascism elaborated in the earlier session, and began to look at what next steps might be to go on the cultural offensive. This is how Rally! Board member and music critic Danny Alexander put it as part of the second session’s opening panel:
“And their [the ruling class] strategy is to keep us fighting for scraps until we are incapable of mounting the social force necessary to take on the system. Genocide is their strategy, genocide on all who threaten the private property system.
Our art emphasizes our basic needs, and our artists fight for our basic needs, for their own basic needs, too. But our art asks us to think bigger. Our art asks us what we need to be fully human, and our art thinks bigger than this system or any oppressive system.”
Cultural workers have responded to every assault upon our ability to survive. Cultural work lives within the context of the vast economic changes taking place at the base of society. There is no one-to-one correspondence between economics and culture. The fact that we live in a capitalist, exploitative society does not mean that everything created on that basis supports capitalism.
The disruption that has created a new economic class expelled from capitalism also creates the basis for castigating the system (Bertolt Brecht called that “singing about the dark times”). Even more, artists use the “dark times” to envision what is possible. Cultural workers, poets among them, carry that vision to the hearts and minds and souls of the people engaged in the fight. That vision isn’t always clear but it does focus more and more on “bigger than this system or any oppressive system.”
The Conference brought together artists from six cities in the United States and three other countries. It reinforced the need for artists to communicate, share work and discuss the major political issues to which we need to respond. To further this, the recording of the conference is posted on the LRNA website (lrna.org) where it can be viewed and shared.
Vagabond Press has offered to publish the text of the conference (the panel presentations as well as the artistic performances) and we anticipate a publication date of September 30. Through the efforts of Barbara Paschke and the late Tony Ryan, the Conference contacted Nancy Morejon, national poet of Cuba. Because of the US blockade and embargo of Cuba, she could not use the technology that is otherwise readily available to make a presentation and read her work. These closing lines from her poem, “Black Woman,” tell what kind of seeds we are trying to plant as we move forward.
Only one century later,
alongside my descendants,
from atop a blue mountain,
I came down from the Sierra
to put an end to capitalists and usurers,
and generals and the petit bourgeois.
Now I am: only now do we hold and create.
Nothing is beyond our reach.
Our land.
Ours the sea and sky.
Ours the magic and the amazing dreams.
My equals, here I see you dance
around the tree we planted for communism.
Its generous wood is clearly resounding.
Sólo un siglo más tarde,
junto a mis descendientes,
desde una azul montaña.
Bajé de la Sierra
Para acabar con capitales y usureros,
con generales y burgueses.
Ahora soy: sólo hoy tenemos y creamos.
Nada nos es ajeno.
Nuestra la tierra.
Nuestros el mar y el cielo.
Nuestras la magia y la quimera.
Iguales míos, aquí los veo bailar
alrededor del árbol que plantamos para el comunismo.
Su pródiga madera ya resuena.
[Nancy Morejon’s reading of the poem in this YouTube recording was played at the Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2ZZq8pqHXg. The Cultural Committee of LRNA is beginning to plan for a followup conference next fall, after the publication of the anthology mentioned above. Anyone interested in the work of this Committee or in helping to plan the Conference or participating in it please contact the committee through lrna.org]
July/August 2022 vol.32. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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