A revolutionary movement is itself a feature of the superstructure. Revolutionaries organize by taking advantage of the old and weakening economic and political structures and win the masses' allegiance away from these crumbling institutions. Thus, for example, in the GPCR the principal task of the revolution was the transformation of the superstructure - ideology, religion, art and state power. Our principal task right now in the imperialist countries - building public opinion for revolution - is ideological, or cultural broadly speaking. Nevertheless, MIM would be foolish to think we could win the aptly-titled "culture wars" without state power.

Take a recent example. The quote from a Yiddish scholar - made with reference to Ebonics or Black English - is well put: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."(1) Languages such as Black English are "minority dialects" while the people who make and speak them are subjects of domination. They are liberated as languages only when their people are free. So it is with culture in general.

So we must guard against the error - an error of left opportunism - of thinking that we can successfully advance beyond the current stage in cultural struggles. Our cultural struggle is extremely important, and must be waged relentlessly. But although it prepares the ground for the inevitable military struggle for power, it is not a replacement for seizing power through war, and then for transforming a capitalist economy into a socialist economy, and so on. The cultural victories of the oppressed will always be constrained by the dominance of imperialism and patriarchy as long as they retain power.

Consider this passage from China's People's Daily, a Communist Party organ, on June 1, 1966, at the start of the GPCR: "In every revolution the basic question is that of state power. In all branches of the superstructure - ideology, religion, art, law, state power - the central issue is state power. State power means everything. Without it, all will be lost."(2) For socialist societies, the formerly-dominant ideology of the exploiters is a time-bomb set to go off after a revolution. Without state power, the revolutionaries can't protect against its resurgence and fight for a new, communist dominant ideology. At the same time, once state power is won, without cultural struggle there is no way to prevent the reactionaries from returning to power.

In 1923 in the Soviet Union, V. I. Lenin criticized a movement that sought to declare the establishment of a "proletarian culture" in a clean break from the existing or past dominant culture. Lenin said he would rather consider it progress to even emerge from pre-bourgeois culture into a "real" bourgeois culture.(3) That does not mean that there was not a proletarian approach to culture, or proletarian cultural products, because there were. But proletarian culture was not yet dominant. So we take from this the importance of the stage we are in. In the imperialist countries today bourgeois culture dominates, but its purveyors still do use pre-bourgeois motifs when it serves their purposes: in the form of religious mysticism and postmodern idealism, for example.

MIM recognizes the importance of revolutionary cultural work in three important ways: studying old and existing culture, actively criticizing the dominant cultures of the systems we oppose, and creating new revolutionary cultural expressions.

 Study

 First, we study culture. The development of dominant and resistant languages over time, Hollywood movies, the literature of the oppressors' culture, and preserved art from regimes of the past - all these are windows into society that revolutionaries ultimately must understand if we are to grasp the essence of today: the revolutionary imperatives we face, the obstacles in our path, and so on.

One myth about Maoists is that we are opposed to cultural expression in general, and seek to wantonly destroy the artifacts of the oppressor culture, as if to remove their every trace. In this view, communists fear culture because culture is assumed to be opposed to communism: culture represents "freedom," and communism represents "totalitarianism." They think culture represents freedom because they think "pure" culture is devoid of politics, and communists seek to impose politics onto culture, thus ruining culture. Through the many layers of myth, obfuscation and hypocrisy prevalent in bourgeois ideology, the political contentlessness of "pure" art or culture is one of the most pernicious. We return to this below.

Although there is no reason to waste the people's resources preserving every piece of reactionary culture, Maoists also oppose their immediate obliteration. In the conversation between Mao Zedong and his niece Wang Hai-jung, published in 1970, she complained about a student who reads reactionary old literature, but Mao replied that they should read it: "not for its story but as history," to learn about feudalism.

Then, when he further suggested a poem for her to read, she asked, "What precaution should I take against its influence?" And he answered: "You are always metaphysical. Why should you take precaution? No. You should receive some influence. You should go deep in it and then emerge from it." He went on to tell her to read the Bible and Buddhist sutras, so she might learn translation and foreign affairs. He told her there were kind-hearted characters in another classical story, that it was "well-written" and "worth reading."(4) Mao did not fear exposure to the old culture but instead demanded that it be taken seriously - and then overcome.

As for integrating Western and past cultures, Mao used the metaphor of eating that we can apply to our own consumption of imperialist culture:

 "We must treat these foreign [cultural] materials as we do our food, which should be chewed in the mouth, submitted to the workings of the stomach and intestines, mixed with saliva, gastric juice, and intestinal secretions, and then separated into essence to be absorbed and waste matter to be discarded. Only thus can food benefit our body; we should never swallow anything raw or absorb uncritically."(5)

 As with any study, however, Mao and all Maoists are careful not to divorce study from struggle and practice. Mao did say people should not read too many books, because they would become bookworms and dogmatists.

If we are to study old and existing dominant cultures, we will do so with new methods that serve the interests of the people's revolution, however. Thus, Mao said exam grading should stress creative thinking rather than rote memorization. How else could the people critically learn without merely following the ideologies of the oppressors? He also said exams should be open-book and without surprises - to treat students as friends instead of as enemies.(6)

Lenin agreed that studying culture and preparing for a new culture does not mean obliterating past culture. Quite the contrary, Lenin said in 1920:

 "the teaching, training and education of the new generations that will create communist society must proceed from the material that has been left to us by the old society. We can build communism only on the basis of the totality of knowledge, organisations and institutions, only by using the stock of human forces and means that have been left to us by the old society."(7)

 In Lenin's view, this was necessary before proletarian culture could take hold:

 "We shall be unable to solve this problem [of proletarian culture] unless we clearly realise that only a precise knowledge and transformation of the culture created by the whole development of mankind will enable us to create a proletarian culture. The latter is not clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those who call themselves experts in proletarian culture. That is all nonsense. Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the story of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to lead up to proletarian culture, in the same way as political economy, as reshaped by Marx, has shown us what human society must arrive at, shown us the passage to the class struggle, to the beginning of the proletarian revolution."(8)

 The old schools still had to be abolished and destroyed, but in the process communists would have to decide what in them was necessary for capitalism, and what was necessary for communism.

 Criticize

 Second, we criticize the dominant culture through artistic as well as other political means. We review and criticize the cultural products of the system we seek to destroy in ways that build public opinion for revolution, socialism and communism. The cultural products of our enemies offer the ideological justifications for their crimes against humanity, even though they do so with forked tongues: the ideology is often concealed, and always distorted. Most pernicious of all is the hegemonic art that is of high artistic quality yet reactionary political content - including the art that pretends to have no political content at all.

MIM's criticism of culture materials includes both outright reactionary products of the dominant culture such as Hollywood movies, as well as progressive products such as radical bands like Rage Against the Machine or Paris.

Also in this category are MIM's distortions of oppressor-culture language and terms: our use of United $tates, calling police "pigs," and the gender terms womyn and wimmin, for example. These are not comprehensive attempts to create new language, but rather efforts to undermine existing dominant culture and show the way toward a people's liberation language in the future. In the case of Black English, a so-called "minority dialect," we uphold this as the language of an oppressed nation that is underdeveloped because of the constraints put on it by imperialism. We lead by example in this area, as the pages of our publications are open to linguistic subversion and creation of all kinds.

 Create

 Finally, cultural creations - art, literature (including language), music - are expressions of class, nation and gender ideology. Maoists therefore attempt to create cultural expressions that speak for and to the oppressed, that help to unify the allies of revolution, and that expose the horrors and hypocrisies imperialism and patriarchy. The culture of revolution is about tearing down the old and creating a vision of the new society that is to come.

Mao saw artists and writers as teachers or political leaders - people who gave the masses the culture that met their immediate needs, which feudal culture had not. "Only by speaking for the masses can he [every artist or writer] educate them, and only by becoming their pupil can he become their teacher.(9)

MIM is itself undeveloped in this regard. Besides the black-and-white-on-newsprint artwork of our major publications - often cartoons or representations of article content, we write and publish some poetry, and make banners and posters. One goal of this issue of MIM Theory is to stimulate more revolutionary cultural expression in MIM circles, to encourage submissions of artistic work, and find new ways of getting this stuff out.

Mao insisted that actors and writers live and work in the countryside instead of sitting in offices separate from the toiling people. Learning to be a "great" artist in isolation from the masses produces art that appears "empty" but is in fact supportive of the oppressive status quo or idealized utopias. In this issue we review the movie Shine, which (perhaps inadvertently) shows the true emptiness of "greatness" in artistry - or virtuosity - when it is removed from meaningful social life.

In the original artwork of the revolution that we hope to produce, we will have to practice the balance of what Mao called the "political criterion and the artistic criterion." We quote him at some length from the Yenan forum on literature and art in May 1942:

 "There is the political criterion and there is the artistic criterion; what is the relationship between the two? ... We deny not only that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable political criterion, but also that there is an abstract and absolutely unchangeable artistic criterion; each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria. [This is implies that there is "proletarian culture" in once sense, but not in the hegemonic sense. -MC12] But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. The bourgeoisie always shuts out proletarian literature and art, however great their artistic merit. The proletariat must similarly distinguish among the literary and art works of past ages and determine its attitude towards them only after examining their attitude to the people and whether or not they had a progressive significance historically. Some works which politically are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people, and the more necessary it is to reject them. A common characteristic of the literature and art of all exploiting classes in their period of decline is the contradiction between their reactionary political content and their artistic form. What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form. Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the 'poster and slogan style' which is correct in political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power."(10)

 While it is important to raise artistic standards, which are often neglected, Mao added, "the political side is more of a problem at present." So it may be one or the other, depending on conditions. Again the question of the stage of struggle is crucial. In the present in imperialist society, it is the content that is principal, precisely because of the worship of contentless art that dominates in the bourgeois culture. In fact, if we go up against the imperialists on the artistic quality criterion, we will surely lose at present, if only because they have the better computers, the years of exclusive training with the right materials, and endless study and practice subsidized by imperialist exploitation. So, while we appreciate artistic quality, content comes decisively first for us. MIM will not restrict art work we publish or distribute on the basis of its artistic quality. We will work to improve artistic quality to enhance the impact of our work when possible, but ahead of doing this we place encouraging young cadres to engage in revolutionary culture production, distributing our materials to the greatest numbers of people.

Just as analyzing the content of reactionary art is a great way for us to reach people and argue with them about "experiences" we have in common - Was it "the right thing" for Spike Lee's character to throw that garbage can, Why are the aliens in Independence Day bad? And so on. Anyone who saw these movies can answer like we were there - so it is with revolutionary culture also, only more. We can create situations and scenes, pictures and music, to instruct upon or raise questions from a revolutionary perspective, and these will stimulate public opinion, inspire, and lead the masses into revolutionary work.

 Notes:

1. Washington Post, 7 January 1996.

2. People's China, David Milton, Nancy Milton, and Franz Schurman, eds. Vintage: New York, 1974. p. 253.

3. "Better Fewer, But Better," V. I. Lenin, Selected Words in One Volume. International Publishers: New York, 1971. p. 700.

4. People's China, pp. 243-44.

5. The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung, by Stuart Schram. Praeger: New York, 1971. p. 357.

6. People's China, pp. 246-248.

7. Lenin, p. 607.

8. Lenin, p. 610.

9. Schram, p. 362.

10. Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung. Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1971. pp. 275-276.