This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Maoist Internationalist Movement

Assorted resolutions on art 2005

  • Artistic form is political because of its distribution by class, nation and gender, so that a pleasing work of art brings about pacification, as Godard said in his films about the photograph of a beautiful face or a mountain.

  • "Socialist realism" is the artistic expression of dialectical materialism and serves the struggle of the proletariat against imperialism and for socialism, with the ultimate goal of communism. As such, it is not limited to a naively "realistic" portrayal of people, places or things. The fantastic elements in the films of Godard or the plays of Brecht are consistent with socialist realism. Good science fiction is consistent with socialist realism, even though it portrays technology that does not yet exist or may never exist. On the other hand, even socialist realist artworks like the film "Breaking with Old Ideas" which have a "realistic" style as popularly understood contain highly stylized and fantastic elements. (Passed unanimously.)

  • The method of combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism" is synonymous with socialist realism. In particular, "revolutionary romanticism" is the artistic expression of the proletariat's strategic confidence. Without revolutionary romanticism, works that accurately portray the gory surface of imperialist oppression run the risk of encouraging misanthropy, fatalism, and defeatism.

  • Real artists in the imperialist countries may dominantly oppose Mao's line, but at some level they know that form is not class neutral. That goes for elite art in which a history of art book is necessary to know what is going on with some old forms to popular art. If a struggle around the question of race were raging, rap music --even if excerpted without lyrics--would play and carry a certain meaning in certain contexts. True, the initial radicalism of rap has faced major watering down, but we can still easily see rap form have some meaning in intra-bourgeois struggle concerning race. For example, a commemoration of the struggle against Italian invasion of Africa in World War II could be majorly disrupted by playing merely the excerpted music (without the words) of Frank Sinatra. No matter how many lyric-less songs or symphonies we use to generalize about Italian music, playing Italian music in a commemoration to the resistance to the Italian invasion of Africa would have a rather sharp meaning, either entirely disruptive or foolish. Even instrumental music written by an Italian proletarian to oppose the invasion might take some explanation. One reason for that is the dialectical law of uneven development, that musical form does not appear simultaneously in the world as if in permanent Trotskyist revolutionary class struggle. Musical form is not evenly distributed by class or nation and its appreciation is not distributed evenly by gender either. Many artists try to blur or "cross boundaries" like that on behalf of form, but they also know that they are still crossing boundaries, which only proves that there is still an underlying uneven distribution. Musical form like national borders still has national context.
    (Passed unanimously.)

  • One of the reasons musical form is not evenly distributed across class, national and gender boundaries is the fact productive forces (or access to them) are not evenly distributed across class, national and gender boundaries. Electric guitars and synthesizers were made possible by the availability of electric power and advances in electronics; where these were not readily available, they were not assimilated into local musical forms. Thus in some sense musical and artistic forms made possible by the technical advancement of capitalism will be associated with the capitalist class--e.g. electric guitars and film are to many symbols of Amerikan cultural hegemony. However, that does not mean proletarian artists should automatically eschew these new forms. Rather, in the spirit of the Maoist slogan "make foreign things serve China," proletarian artists in the oppressed nations should adapt the new technologies and the new forms they make possible to the needs of the revolutionary struggle, just as the proletariat will critically use the scientific and technical advances of the bourgeoisie in the realms of medicine, food production and storage, information technology, transportation, etc.
    (Passed unanimously.)

  • "In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.... There is the political criterion and there is the artistic criterion; what is the relationship between the two? Politics cannot be equated with art, nor can a general world outlook be equated with a method of artistic creation and criticism. 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. But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second.... 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. On questions of literature and art we must carry on a struggle on two fronts."

    Mao seems to agree that there is a question of distribution of form, because he says each class has its own artistic criteria. Someone playing Wagner at VE day celebrations may not be well received.

    In 2005 with no state power, on the question of art criticism, the proletariat has to play more vulture feeding on the scraps than usual. If artistic work meets the political criterion Mao spoke of, we can't usually then afford to dump it because of artistic criteria. On this question, MIM's anti-nihilism method comes into play.

    If a second, third etc. Star Wars game comes out and you want to criticize the other Star Wars games because of one progressive one, then good. If only one good one comes out and you want to pan it, because it only runs in 32-bit color instead of 64, then bad.

    If two or three very similar games come out, and you want to criticize two based on artistic advances in the third, then that is good. This is a reminder that the political criterion comes first. If you have 10 movies on gay-straight relations in high school that are all more or less progressive, then it is OK to pick one on artistic criteria. We cannot pan them based on artistic advances in science fiction movies, because we cannot replace movies on high school sexuality with ones on science fiction. It is the party's job to categorize art socially and politically and then making the appropriate comparisons.
    (Passed unanimously.)

  • If two or three very similar games come out, and you want to criticize two based on artistic advances in the third, then that is good. This is a reminder that the political criterion comes first. If you have 10 movies on gay-straight relations in high school that are all more or less progressive, then it is OK to pick one on artistic criteria. We cannot pan them based on artistic advances in science fiction movies, because we cannot replace movies on high school sexuality with ones on science fiction. It is the party's job to categorize art socially and politically and then making the appropriate comparisons.
    (Passed unanimously.)

    [mim3@mim.org comments: My apologies for misplacing these till now, February 2006.]