This exhibition collects artwork from twenty children in Gaza over the past year, recovering some beauty, humanity, and resistance from the rubble of a genocidal war. It also includes five original artworks by Ibraheem Mohana created between 2022 and 2024. For him, teaching art in a ‘fun and entertaining way’ allows the children to ‘understand art a little bit, and be proud of themselves’ – the children in Gaza, after all, are still just children.

As of now, over 44,000 Palestinians – including 10,000 children – have been killed by Israeli forces, supported by the US and other Global North nations. These children’s artworks are the seeds of a future for Palestine; together they assert: from the river to sea, Palestine will be free.

In 1984, almost 40 years ago, a group of rural workers who were leading the struggle for land in Brazil held their 1^st National Meeting in the city of Cascavel, in the state of Paraná. There, they founded a peasant-led, popular movement that would become well known not only in Brazil, but worldwide: the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST).

Since then, that group of landless workers has grown, developed, and trained, and has become one of the largest social movements in the world, with more than 400,000 families settled throughout Brazil, carrying the banner of the struggle for land, agrarian reform, and social change.

To celebrate 40 years of the MST, ALBA Movimientos, the International Peoples Assembly, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research have come together with the MST to put out a call for artwork.

The idea is to invite grassroots artists from around the world in this mystical and symbolic process of celebration, to collectively reflect, through art, on the history and current challenges of the struggle for land and everything related to it.

To help in the creative process, we suggest four possible thematic axes from which to draw upon when working on the posters, which should be exclusively original illustrations. All submitted posters will be part of a virtual exhibition, but only 40 will be selected to be printed and shown in a physical exhibition. Illustrations must be submitted by October 30, 2023.

1. The MST and solidarity among peoples

Solidarity is a fundamental principle and human value, one that the MST has cultivated and practiced since its inception. It takes on many different forms in the movement: solidarity with the working class, with popular struggles, with collective organization, through food donations, literacy and political education programs, as well as in its internationalist orientation, with various brigades spread across the globe, where militants of the MST donate years of their life to support other popular struggles around the world.

2. 40 years of struggle and resistance

Today, the MST’s food production has been very much embraced by the people of Brazil, with fairs and stores all over the country where anyone can buy food produced by the movement. But one thing that cannot be overlooked is the fact that all of this is the result of a fundamental process: the struggle for land and the occupation of latifundios (large, landed estates). Every single fruit, legume, herb, grain, and dairy product produced by the MST has as its essential component the struggle for land that made their production possible. The struggle is the only way of advancing the victories and rights of the working class, and without it we cannot achieve the social transformations needed for a more just world.

3. We cultivate the land, and the land cultivates us

One of the principal contributions of the MST to Brazilian society is its commitment to producing healthy food for the Brazilian people. The result of the organization of cooperatives, associations, and agroindustries in the settlements, the movement seeks to develop agricultural cooperation as a concrete practice of mutual aid that strengthens solidarity and improves the conditions for agricultural production of the families in the settlements, as well as improving working conditions and wages in the countryside.

4. 40 years of liberating the land and the peasantry

Education is one of the main areas of work of the MST. Since its inception, the movement has developed educational processes and has prioritized the struggle for the universal right to public, socialized education, from early childhood through university. In this sense, the MST seeks to collectively construct a set of educational practices toward a worker-led emancipatory social project.

How to participate?

Poster size: A3 (vertical/portrait); JPG (300dpi)
Deadline for submissions: 10/30/2023
Submission form: https://bit.ly/3qn0VAM

Zheng Shengtian and Sun Jingbo, Winds from Fusang, 2017.

Winds from Fusang (2017), a mural by artists Zheng Shengtian and Sun Jingbo, stretches across twelve metres. Fusang, a word dating back two thousand years, is often used in Chinese poetry and folklore to refer to distant lands in the Americas, which some believe to be located in modern-day Mexico. The work of art is an homage to the influence of Latin America, particularly that of Mexican artists, on the development of modern Chinese art. Featuring portraits of fifty people – from David Alfaro Siqueiros to Lu Xun, Frida Kahlo, Li Cheng, José Venturelli, and Zheng and Sun themselves – the mural recovers a rich historical dialogue between the peoples of these distant lands.

This six-panel mural is featured in Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s dossier no. 51, Looking Towards China: Multipolarity as an Opportunity for the Latin American People, which explores China’s recent economic and geopolitical rise and its impact on the peoples and nations of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Contrasted with the political interventions, hybrid warfare, and financialisation that the United States empire has imposed upon the LAC region, China’s involvement there has taken on a different character of cooperation and political non-interference. However, this does not come without its own set of contradictions: although there is an increasing trade deficit between LAC and China, the country accounted for 34 per cent of LAC’s extractive exports and 20 per cent of agricultural exports in 2021, highlighted by vast soy production in ecologically sensitive regions like the Amazon. However, as our dossier notes, ‘China’s re-emergence minimises the space for unipolarity to advance and opens up windows of possibility for the world’s periphery’. This possibility, afforded by the shifting global configuration, also has a cultural dimension. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research interviewed Zheng Shengtian, who spoke to us from his home in Vancouver, Canada about his life’s work, Winds from Fusang, and about Chinese-Latin American cultural exchanges dating back to the 1950s, propelled by the Bandung Conference.

Diego Rivera, The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace, 1952.

In 1956, a year after the Bandung Conference gathered 29 newly and nearly independent African and Asian countries, a non-aligned Third World Project was being born and, with it, new possibilities for cultural ideas and exchanges. Artists and cultural workers like Zheng, who was in his third year of university at the time, were eager to help build the nation. In the catalogue of his exhibition at the Long March Space gallery in Beijing, I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico (2021), he recalls what it meant to be an artist back then: ‘Almost every day there was nothing to eat in the canteen but Chinese cabbage. … But in terms of our spiritual life, we felt unprecedently rich. … [W]e couldn’t stop thinking about and discussing the future of Chinese culture’. However, in the still young People’s Republic of China (PRC), the art that was officially condoned and available to these painters and the general public was made in the Soviet style of socialist realism.

‘We loved good Russian art, but I didn’t believe we should copy it because China was completely different from Russia’, Zheng says of the artists’ debates at the time. However, in 1956, ‘suddenly we saw a very large exhibition from Mexico. … [T]hat left the biggest impact, especially on the younger generation of artists’. Organised by left-wing organisations, the show brought the works of great Mexican muralists to China. ‘All of the artists in the show – Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco – were socialists. They talked about anti-imperialism, pride of the nation, praise of the working class. So, the content was politically correct for China, but all of these artists took on a different style’. Zheng calls this moment a turning point in Chinese contemporary art, and one that defined his personal life too; he has spent the six decades since unearthing these lesser-known histories of Chinese and Latin American artistic exchanges and creating new bridges.

The exhibition coincided with the visit of the renowned muralist and communist David Alfaro Siqueiros and writer Angélica Arenal Bastar, who arrived in Beijing in October 1956. Siqueiros was welcomed by senior Chinese leaders, including the premier at the time, Zhou Enlai, who sat down with him for a two-hour conversation spanning topics from the Bandung Conference to common battles against colonialism and imperialism. Siqueiros exchanged ideas about art with the foremost cultural theorist and Party leader Zhou Yang, who concluded that ‘realism cannot be in any way a recipe, a formula, something immobile, but [it is] a fact in perennial change, according to the transformation and development of the corresponding society’.

In his month-long stay in Beijing, Siqueiros gave two talks to the Chinese Artists’ Association and visited ancient Chinese cultural and historical sites that left a lasting impression on him. Jing Cao, a translator and scholar on contemporary Chinese art, writes on the importance of this exchange that ‘Siqueiros’s 1956 dialogues with Chinese artists represent a significant and previously neglected moment of cultural exchange between postwar peripheries, marked on both sides by intense curiosity and the promise of a nonaligned network of Third World nations connected by aesthetic discourse as well as political interests’. For the first time, the young artists saw that it was possible to express socialist content through forms other than Soviet style socialist realism. These artists looked for the possibility of multipolarity, both in politics and in culture.

Zheng and Sun pay homage to this artistic turning point, centring – quite literally – a reproduction of Siqueiros’s Nuestra Imagen Actual (‘Our Present Image’, 1947) above the portraits of Zhou and Siqueiros in their mural. In this mural, the faceless figure who is the subject of Siqueiros’s painting appears to offer the ‘winds from Fusang’ with its outstretched hands. The figure’s head, made of stone, suggests the possibility of a new human being, still in the process of becoming, its form yet to be carved.

Left: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Nuestra Imagen Actual (‘Our Present Image’), 1947.

Right: Detail of Zheng Shengtian and Sun Jingbo, Winds from Fusang, 2017.

Zheng tells us about another one of his great inspirations: the Chilean artist José Venturelli. In 1962, Venturelli returned from Cuba to China, where he was living, bringing news from the young revolutionary state as well as photographs and trace-paper sketches of his work there. He had just finished a mural in memory of the guerrilla leader Camilo Cienfuegos, the first of three murals that Che Guevara invited him to paint in Havana.

This visit took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis at the same time as mass demonstrations in solidarity with Cuba were taking place in Beijing. In a conference presentation entitled Chile, China, Cuba, A Mural and Beyond (2020), Zheng remarked, ‘I was marching with students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts to the Cuban Embassy, holding high the portrait of Fidel Castro and anti-US imperialism slogans, shouting loudly “Cuba Sí, Yankee No!”’. During our interview, he showed us a poster he made for the demonstration featuring a central figure resembling Cienfuegos, with his signature wide-brimmed cowboy hat, flanked by an African man and Asian woman. The poster reads: ‘Resolutely support the just struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America against US imperialism’.

A poster that Zheng Shengtian made for a march to the Cuban embassy in 1962 to condemn US imperialism.

Back in Chile, when he was 16 years old, Venturelli had worked as Siqueiros’s assistant, to whom he was introduced by fellow Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. Together, Neruda and Venturelli participated in several World Peace Council gatherings and became key figures in constructing the Asia-Pacific wing of the global anti-war campaign. Over the course of a decade, Venturelli spent significant time in China, where he raised his daughter, Paz Venturelli, and was given a studio in the centre of Beijing. In an era when no Latin American countries had formal diplomatic ties with the PRC, Venturelli became a cultural ambassador and built bridges with left-wing Latin American intellectuals. It was thanks to Venturelli that Siqueiros visited China and that a generation of young Chinese artists came to know the stories and artwork of people’s struggles in the distant lands of Fusang.

After the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which Zheng stopped painting and went to work alongside peasants in the countryside, he went on to study, teach, and travel to many countries, bringing art from each place home to inspire a younger generation of Chinese artists before eventually settling in Canada with his family in 1990. ‘Th[e] mural of Cienfuegos left an impression on my memory’, he told us, leading him on a journey to Cuba to look for the mural. Nearly half a century after first seeing Venturelli’s sketches, Zheng finally had a chance to go to Cuba, but no one seemed to recall the mural or its location. Zheng left the island disappointed. It would be many years and connections later before he visited the home of Venturelli’s daughter, Paz, in Santiago, Chile who told him the mural’s exact location – in a meeting room in Cuba’s Ministry of Health.

When Zheng returned to Cuba for the second time, he received special permission to see the mural with a delegation of Chinese artists and even met Venturelli’s assistant who helped paint it. He was pleased to see that the mural was in good condition, standing five metres tall and twenty metres long. From left to right, the three-part mural tells the story of the guerrilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra; Cienfuegos leading the revolutionary army to the plains; and, finally, a march of Latin American peoples, representing revolution on the continent. The mural features fifty people – the same number of people that Zheng and Sun’s painted in their own mural 55 years later. In his 2020 conference speech, Zheng remarked how Venturelli ‘implemented the formal vocabulary of modern art: distortion, exaggeration, and methods of symbolism and constructivism…

and it opened the eyes of Chinese artists’.

José Venturelli, Mural in Homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, 1962.

Zheng has lived through some of the great transformations of the twentieth century across the Global South, witnessing first-hand the solidarity between peoples struggling for national liberation and socialism, a battle in culture as much as in politics. To recall this history is to look beyond nostalgia of an earlier time and beyond the Cold War binaries of East versus West, capitalism versus socialism, Western modernism versus Soviet socialist realism. In his foreword to Winds from Fusang – Artistic Dialogue between Mexico and China in the Twentieth Century, Zheng writes: ‘Some art historians inherited the historiography of the two camps – the East and West – from the Cold War period and considered Western modernism and revolutionary realism as the two major trends in the development of Chinese art in the 20th century… Such a view is too simplistic. To a large extent, they ignore that there were alternative trends and practices between these two currents’.

The history that Zheng traces, connecting China to Mexico, Chile, and Cuba, helps us recover these other practices and a long tradition of exchange between governments as well as the peoples of China and Latin America. Since Venturelli’s time, 24 of the 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries have established diplomatic relations with China. Many have developed strategic partnerships, primarily in trade and investment, with ‘increasing equitable cultural exchange’ as one of the state goals that China put forward in the 2018 China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States meeting held in Chile. As the authors of our dossier write, ‘Ultimately, leaving behind the path of Western capitalist development requires a different form of globalisation and a break with Western notions of modernity. It requires a globalisation based on multipolarity, cooperation, and planning’.

After his trip seven decades ago, Siqueiros addressed his Chinese hosts in a reflection that continues to be relevant today:

To all [people] of Latin America, you will tell us how you have made the miracle that an entire nation of 600 million inhabitants is now building a new society, always singing and laughing, even without the violence before enemies that seemed inevitable in all social transformations of magnitude. … It is your responsibility, in short, to tell us how you have been able to make of your country, of your ‘Chinese misery’… a place that is walking with gigantic steps towards modernity, progress and peace.

Perhaps today, as the ‘winds from Fusang’ blow towards China, the peoples of Latin America will also look towards China in search of other possibilities and a multipolar world with a multipolar culture that defends the interests of developing nations and its people.

Front: Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform.
Back: Drama students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts (also known as Luyi) rehearse a play in a structure they built themselves. 
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

The Chinese communist base area of Yan’an was a literal and metaphorical stage for envisioning, experimenting, and building a new society and a new human being. On this stage, peasants, workers, and soldiers became the actors pushing history forward and the protagonists in the stories they wrote, sung, performed in, and lived. The images of this dossier are collages using photographs of cultural and everyday life during the ‘Yan’an decade’ (1935–1945)

My heart, don’t pound so hard.

Road dust, don’t block my view…

I grab a handful of yellow dirt and will not let it go,

Clutching it tight, close to my bosom.

Many were the times I dreamt of returning to Yan’an,

In dreams my arms embraced Pagoda Hill.

A thousand, ten thousand times I’ve been calling you,

– Mother Yan’an is here now, right here!

The Du Fu Creek Sings, and Willow Grove Village smiles,

The fluttering red flags are beckoning me.

White towels around their necks and red bands at their waist,

My dear people meet me, taking me across the Yan River.

I plunge into their arms, my arms stretched wide,

Too much to say at once, my tongue is tied.

– He Jingzhi, Return to Yan’an (1956).

Top: Students reading at the Luyi library. 
Bottom: Attendees of the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.
Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Wikimedia Commons/China Pictorial [人民画报]

Art That Serves the People

It was 1:30 in the afternoon on 2 May 1942, a cool spring day in the north-central Chinese city and communist revolutionary base of Yan’an. The central Party office, nicknamed ‘the airplane’, was housed in the city’s only three-storey building. The main hall was bustling, emptied of its usual dining furniture save for rows of benches and a single desk, ready to receive Mao Zedong when he punctually walked in. The attendees were convening for a meeting ‘to exchange views on various aspects of the current literary and artistic movement’.^[1] Though the precise number of participants was not recorded, over one hundred invitations had been sent days before by Kai Feng, the acting head of the Propaganda Department and chairperson of the meeting. That the invitation had been printed on pink paper, which was not locally produced, signalled the importance attached to the meeting by the top tiers of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The country’s leading intellectuals, military commanders, and political cadre gathered along with representatives from across the spectrum of art and literary work, including publishing, research, newspaper, film, photography, drama, poetry, and youth units, among others.

In the months leading up to the conference, Mao had personally exchanged dozens of letters and held several one-on-one conversations with key intellectuals, navigating the divergent artistic and literary currents of the Left and identifying the urgent cultural questions of the time. Beyond being a political leader, Mao was, after all, a poet whose own classically-informed work had documented the birth and rise of the Chinese communist movement. His poetry painted scenes of the many battles and encirclements, victories and defeats, from the communist base he helped establish in the Jinggang Mountains to the epic Long March that brought the Red Army westward. During the Yan’an period (1935–1945), he summarised these experiences in theoretical and practical writings which would come to be known as Mao Zedong Thought. There, in the cave dwellings with their iconic arches, Mao studied and wrote prolifically on topics from military tactics to philosophy, party-building to political economy, land reform to internationalism. Among these was the systematic analysis of the role of art and literature in advancing the revolutionary struggle, summarised in Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. In this text, published the year after the Yan’an Forum, Mao and others distilled years of experience and experimentation in communist cultural and ideological work.

Back in the Party office on that afternoon in 1942, Kai had officially opened the first of the forum’s three plenary sessions that stretched over the course of three weeks. In each of the plenaries, seated at the only desk in the room, Mao carefully took notes as points were being raised. Talks, the subsequently published text, drew from these interventions and conversations.

‘The purpose of our meeting today’, Mao said in his introductory remarks, ‘is precisely to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy’. To understand the enemy, Mao offered an analysis of the political conjuncture, which started ‘from objective facts…: the War of Resistance Against Japan which China has been fighting for five years; the world-wide anti-fascist war; the vacillations of China’s big landlord class and big bourgeoisie in the War of Resistance and their policy of high-handed oppression of the people’. Revolutionary conditions had emerged in China, Mao noted, because of the discontent and misery generated by a century of imperialist aggressions and the Japanese occupation; whether the political forces would be able to push back against the Chinese elite and drive an independent agenda remained to be seen. One example of the revolutionary development was the creation of the base areas and the mobilisation of popular support in these areas, including that of writers, artists, and other intellectuals. ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts’, Mao said, ‘among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts’.^[2]

He recognised that a military victory was insufficient without creating ideological unity in the Party and placing the proletarian subjectivity at the centre of revolutionary work. The ‘army with guns’ and the ‘cultural army’ carried out complementary work: the battle in the trenches and the battle over the hearts and minds of the people. Cultural work was key to this ideological transformation, supporting workers, peasants, and soldiers in seeing themselves as the protagonists of their own stories and history.

To achieve this goal, Mao laid out five artistic and literary ‘problems’ to be addressed: position, attitude, audience, work, and study. On the first point, Mao argued that cultural workers should take a ‘class stand’ – one that is firmly positioned alongside the people – in which artists also see themselves as workers in the struggle. Regarding ‘attitude’ and ‘audience’, Mao expanded on the correct approach that should be taken by artists and writers in order ‘to extol’ and ‘to expose’. In the first camp, the idea was that praise should be given to the struggles, aspirations, and ‘brightness’ of the people. On the other hand, it was also necessary to ‘expose the dark’, directing criticism towards the enemy and pointing out the shortcomings of allies in the united front to resist Japanese occupation.

In his introductory remarks, Mao highlighted some of the key debates that had emerged in Yan’an and sparked the need for the forum. He put forth a criticism of the earlier generation of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal awakening led by urban intellectuals and students, many of whom were politicised in that uprising and now found themselves in Yan’an. Though they helped spark the formation of a national consciousness and a new cultural movement, their work remained largely unknown to most people and to the peasant majority. They did not speak in ‘the rich, lively language of the masses’, as Mao called it. Two decades later, the country had reached a new political conjuncture which necessitated a different kind of cultural production and a new kind of intellectual. Only through immersion and work in the countryside – both mental and physical – could these urban intellectuals transform themselves into revolutionary workers and produce artistic creations that truly served the people. This, Mao said, required ‘a change in feelings, a change from one class to another’.

To understand the cultural workers that Mao was addressing and why they had come to Yan’an, we must examine how the city became the revolutionary heart of the communist movement. Thousands of writers, artists, and intellectuals had been inspired to go to Yan’an and brought with them different conceptions and practices of revolutionary cultural work. The Yan’an Forum sought to bring clarity and unity in the midst of diversity and divergence.

Top: A Luyi choir rehearses the Yellow River Cantata.
Bottom: Literature students travel to the battle front in northwest Shanxi.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Go to Yan’an!

‘Father, I have to leave this home, but what should I do to leave?’, wrote a sixteen-year-old woman living and studying in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu in the spring of 1938.^[3] In the letter, she expressed her dissatisfaction and desperation while confronted with the state of her homeland. Months earlier, the Second Sino-Japanese War had been triggered by an armed conflict known as the July 7^th Incident on Beijing’s Luguo Bridge (or Marco Polo Bridge). The Japanese invasion and occupation of China – which began in 1931 and lasted 14 years until the end of World War II in 1945 – now entered full force, taking the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people and sparking mass migration in the country.^[4] High schools and universities dispersed their students; some sought refuge in safer regions while others were inspired to join in the struggle for ‘national salvation’, which had become the spirit of the times. ‘So now, I have nowhere to go but Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi)’, the teenage student continued. ‘I have been considering it for a very long time, thinking of all the ways others have tried, but this is the only place that won’t let me down and will allow me to survive’.^[5] She was one of thousands of students and intellectuals who decided to make the long journey to the communist-held revolutionary base of Yan’an.

Situated in the Loess Plateau of the north-central province of Shaanxi, Yan’an is an important site of Chinese civilisation and people and a sacred home of the Chinese Revolution. With roots tracing back 3,000 years, Yan’an was an ancient hub home to the Yellow River, the famous yellow earth, and the mythic Yellow Emperor before populations migrated southwards.^[6] By the time the communists made it their capital in 1937, it was a ‘poor, dusty, and remote frontier town of about 10,000 inhabitants’.^[7] Yan’an was also the destination of the epic Long March (1934–1935), a mass retreat of communists from their base area in south-eastern Jiangxi after they were pushed out by a series of encirclement campaigns led by the Nationalist Party forces (Kuomintang or KMT) with the support of Nazi Germany.

Midway through the Long March, in January 1935, the Zunyi Conference was held, attended by six of the twelve members of the politburo of the CPC. The Red Army had suffered huge losses and was deeply demoralised, and this pivotal meeting established Mao Zedong as the main leader of the Party and its troops at the helm of the Chinese revolutionary process. Some 12 months, 9,000 kilometres, 18 mountains, and 24 rivers later, only 8,000 soldiers on the Long March arrived in Yan’an.^[8] Of the original 86,000 people who had been organised into three columns and set off on the trek, many starved, were killed, defected, or gave up along the way. It was ‘an Odyssey unequal in modern times’, as Edgar Snow called it.^[9] In the caves of Yan’an, Snow was the first foreign journalist to interview Mao and report to the world about the early years of the Communist Revolution, published in his classic book, Red Star Over China (1937). That year, Yan’an became the official seat of power of the CPC in the heart of the communist-controlled region known as the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. In the ‘Yan’an decade’ that followed, the ragtag group of poorly-fed and poorly-equipped communists would mobilise the support of tens of millions of peasants in the region, gain popular support in the cities, grow its active Party membership to 1.2 million people, and build a Red Army made up of one million soldiers, supported by millions more armed peasants.^[10] On 1 October 1949, 14 years after arriving in Yan’an, Mao Zedong would declare the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

As the political and cultural epicentre of the Chinese communist movement, Yan’an captured the imagination of artists, writers, and urban intellectuals from far and wide. In 1938, painter and educator Wang Shikou made the 300-kilometre journey from Xi’an to Yan’an by foot despite contracting malaria along the way. Before becoming a world-renowned cartoonist, a young Hua Junwu set off from Japanese-occupied Shanghai, passing through the southern cities of Hong Kong and Guangzhou before reaching Yan’an – all without his mother’s knowledge. That same year, prominent feminist writer of the May Fourth generation Ding Ling arrived in the communist base area. These artists and writers were among the estimated 40,000 intellectuals who would make their way to Yan’an by 1943.^[11] Often coming from families of landlords, aristocrats, small business owners, and rich peasants, many of these intellectuals left relative urban comforts to traverse hundreds or thousands of kilometres in wind, sand, rain, and snow.

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’.^[12] 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. During his visit in 1936, Edgar Snow, impressed with the commitment and creativity of these troupes, called them the most ‘powerful weapon of propaganda in the communist movement’. To Snow, ‘there is no fine partition between art and propaganda. There is only a distinction between what is understandable in human experience and what is not’.^[13]

However, this cultural work was still dominated by the urban intelligentsia, comprised of full-time and amateur writers with elite or formal education backgrounds. Few peasants, workers, and soldiers participated in this sphere, and traditional forms of folk art were rarely featured. Though arriving with good intentions, these intellectuals came from realities that were worlds apart from those of the local peasantry. ‘Writers from other parts of the country were not used to life in the Liberated Zone, and it takes time to adjust, so there have been some disputes’, noted novelist, playwright, and future Minister of Culture of the People’s Republic of China Mao Dun.^[14] He continued, ‘The writers had idealised Yan’an and thought that everything would be perfect. But upon arrival, they found that there was a gap between the reality and the ideal, which has led to all kinds of comments’. The ‘comments’ mentioned referred to the growing discontent from a section of the intelligentsia and their divergent views from the Party on the social function and political duty of cultural workers.

Top: A Luyi choir rehearses the Yellow River Cantata.
Bottom: Literature students travel to the battle front in northwest Shanxi.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Expose the Dark or Praise the Bright?

In the months leading up to the Yan’an Forum, five prominent writers who were all CPC members published a series of essays in the Party paper, Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao). Ding Ling, the paper’s editor, along with Ai Qing, Lou Feng, Wang Shiwei, and Xiao Jun, criticised the lack of access to reading materials in the base area, unconducive conditions for artistic creation, special status of CPC leaders, and subjugation of women. At the heart of the essays was the question of artistic independence and the perceived restrictions set by the Party on artistic production. Was the role of art and literature to ‘praise the bright’ – to glorify the deeds of the Party and the people – or to ‘expose the dark’ and point to the problems in Chinese society and the communist movement?^[15]

Zhou Yang, a Party leader responsible for art and cultural work and a trusted comrade of Mao, led the other side of the debate. In Remarks on Literature and Life (1941), Zhou sharply rebuts the criticisms raised:

…in these very villages lie the fresh stories of life and struggle worthy of artistic treatment. If you feel there is nothing to write about now, let your intense desire for life replace your creative urge. Stepping out from your caves and mingling a bit with the common people would certainly help.^[16]

These back-and-forth exchanges precipitated the Yan’an Forum, where Xiao Jun, the key oppositional voice, was the first speaker invited by Mao to give comments at the initial plenary session. Over the following three weeks, the debates continued in convenings within respective artistic fields, in published articles, and in two other plenary sessions held on the 16^th and 23^rd of May 1942. The points raised were systematised, revised, and reflected upon. A year later, Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art was first published on the seventh anniversary of the death of the influential writer and leading figure of the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun.

In the published text, the conclusion is separated into five sections, starting with the central question: ‘literature and art for whom?’ Inspiration was drawn from Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905), which identified the goal of cultural work as serving the ‘millions of working people – the flower of the country, its strength and its future’.^[17] Mao broadened the conception of ‘the people’ to include not only industrial workers but also peasants, soldiers, and the urban bourgeoisie, thereby situating intellectuals as workers among the masses. The second section focuses on ‘how to serve’, balancing the need to popularise revolutionary ideas with the urgency to raise the cultural standards and literacy of the people. ‘Through the creative labour of revolutionary writers and artists’, Mao wrote, ‘the raw materials found in the life of the people are shaped into the ideological form of literature and art serving the masses of the people’. In other words, revolutionary culture draws from and returns to the people, the ‘inexhaustible’ and ‘only source’.

The third section takes up the relationship between cultural work and revolutionary work as a whole. It contains one of the better-known passages of the text, which argues against the detachment of art from politics, intellectuals from the people, and culture from revolutionary work:

In the world today, all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, or art that is detached or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

By placing politics – particularly class politics – at the centre of cultural work, Mao firmly rejected the notion that art and culture could exist disconnected from society.

In the fourth section, Mao defined the criteria for judging artistic intention based on social practice and impact. For Mao, the study of Marxism was essential to uprooting the inherited bourgeois, feudal, liberal, and individualistic ways of seeing, so that ‘while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed’. The final section points to the thousands of intellectuals who had arrived in Yan’an to serve the revolution, many of whom had joined the Party in body but not yet in mind. The Yan’an Forum and subsequent text were not just a response to a small group of intellectual critics: they were part of this greater ideological struggle against the ‘non-proletarian ideology’ that still existed among many Party members.

The historic forum was part of the Rectification Movement (1942–1944) that sought to create ideological unity in the Party and shrink the still-large gap between the work of the artists and writers and the reality of the peasant majority.^[18] The detachment of intellectuals from material circumstances has long been a problem explored in the Marxist tradition. ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’, wrote Karl Marx in Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Half a century later, Antonio Gramsci called for the creation of a ‘new intellectual’, one who would throw themself into ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, as organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator’. ^[19] Similarly, Mao believed that in order to create these ‘new intellectuals’, the traditional intellectuals like those who went to Yan’an had to struggle to transcend their class origins.

The revolutionary process required the creation of a new intelligentsia that brought in new revolutionary ideas rooted in the culture of rural China – in other words, a mass culture, a people’s culture. During the Yan’an decade, the new intellectuals partook in cultural programmes and mass literacy campaigns, combatting the 90 percent illiteracy rate in the countryside. At the time of the Yan’an Forum, Mao estimated that there were already more than 10,000 cadres in Yan’an who could read; during this process, they would unlearn and relearn how to interpret the world around them.

At the same time, the cultural power of the people had to be built. This required the ‘raising of standards’, as Mao put it in Talks: increasing the cultural literacy of the people while simultaneously awakening their revolutionary consciousness. However, the creation of a new popular culture would not happen overnight. In the early years after the Russian Revolution, Lenin reflected on a similar question regarding the building of workers’ power:

Soviet power is not a miracle-working talisman. It does not, overnight, heal all the evils of the past – illiteracy, lack of culture, the consequences of a barbarous war, the aftermath of predatory capitalism. But it does pave the way to socialism. It gives those who were formerly oppressed the chance to straighten their backs and to an ever-increasing degree to take the whole government of the country, the whole administration of the economy, the whole management of production, into their own hands.^[20]

In Yan’an, perhaps for the first time in millennia, Chinese peasants were learning to straighten their backs with every song, poem, artwork, and play – each integral to the creation of a new human being and a new society. Peasants would become the protagonists in their own lives and in the stories that they told – the subject driving history and culture forward. In Talks, Mao was speaking to the people’s hunger for culture: ‘The cadres of all types, fighters in the army, workers in the factories, and peasants in the villages all want to read books and newspapers once they become literate, want to see plays and operas, look at drawings and paintings, sing songs and hear music; they are the audience of our works of literature and art’. Though an urgent task, literacy was not treated as a prerequisite for enjoying and producing culture, for mass culture belonged to the people. In the meantime, the urban intellectuals who went to Yan’an had to go through their own transformation in order to close the gap between them and the peasant masses. This transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum, which offered a definition both of the ‘people’ and of the ‘intellectual’; together, they could turn into an effective political force.

Top: Women and children at Luyi nursery. 
Bottom: Professor Wang Chaowen works on a sculpture.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

New Wine in Old Bottles

 At the time of the Yan’an Forum, Ma Ke was a music student at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts (also known as Luyi), an educational centre which had been transformed from a Catholic church to train artist-cadres in Yan’an. ‘[Mao’s] talk was an immense inspiration to us students’, Ma reflected in a 1962 article in Peking Review.^[21] ‘We wanted to go out to the people as soon as possible, to learn, to temper ourselves, and to do our bit for the revolution’. Ten months after the Yan’an Forum, the Central Committee of the CPC decided to mobilise literary and theatre workers to go to the countryside, which Mao called the ‘big school’.^[22] Ma was among these students, who, exhausted after trudging the hills for one day, were welcomed by a group of peasants beating gongs and drums, each carrying a broom. To Ma’s surprise, the local peasants had cleaned the path for ten li (five kilometres) in anticipation of the arrival of these young intellectuals who had been ‘sent by Chairman Mao to help in their fanshen’ (literally their ‘turning over’, their liberation).^[23]

Despite his enthusiasm, Ma admits the disdain that he initially carried for the folk melodies he heard: ‘I felt it was a bit monotonous, that it lacked refinement and so-called “artistry”. […] In one word, I didn’t like them, nor did I sing their songs’. It was through the process of engaging with the people that Ma’s thinking began to shift: ‘I [began] to sense the rich emotion contained in their music. I began to hear it differently. It now appeared so free and spirited, so simple and natural that it seemed that every valley and stream rang with its melody. Carried away by my sentiments, I too joined the rest, singing loud and long’. Going to the countryside was part of Ma’s self-transformation, overcoming the superiority he felt as an intellectual and as a professional artist in the face of mass, popular, and living culture. ‘We travelled 400 li [200 kilometres], and everywhere we found this same ocean of song. Throughout the vast countryside, everyone was a singer, man or woman, old or young’. Learning from the peasants’ songs, the urgency of their needs, and their determination for emancipation was part of the humbling work of ‘popularising the intellectuals’.^[24]

It was through this process that Ma went on to compose the music of one of the most important Chinese operas of the period, The White-Haired Girl, later turned into a film in 1951 and a national ballet in 1965. The story’s protagonist is Yang Xier, a peasant woman forcibly sold to a landlord to pay her father’s debts and separated from her fiancée, Wang Dachun. After she finally fled to the mountains, where her hair turned white while trying to survive, Wang joined the communist’s Eighth Route Army. When Wang and Yang eventually reunited, they did so not only as a couple, but as comrades.

This story of revolutionary love in the midst of class struggle is not a total work of fiction – it is based on local folklore of a ‘white-haired ghost’ that had been haunting villages in Northern China. Ma Ke and his fellow students learned of this story when they were sent to the countryside. They added musical form and revolutionary content to the local experience, which became a nationally celebrated classic. The opera can be seen as a living example of the ideas advanced by the Yan’an Forum, particularly the need for artists and writers to study and immerse themselves in their local conditions and popular cultural forms.

These cultural workers paid special attention to folk songs and dances, particularly yangge, or ‘rice songs’. These songs, traditionally sung for the gods or landlords, were given new connotations and content to instil a revolutionary spirit and encourage soldiers on the frontlines. Popular songs like Nanniwan (about a gorge in Yan’an) by He Jingzhi, who wrote the libretto of The White-Haired Girl, were distinctly ideological while also being rooted in mass culture, setting political messages to popular melodies. Building a new revolutionary culture did not mean discarding all the culture that came before it – be it of ancient, feudal, or foreign origins; it meant to ‘take over all the fine things in our literary and artistic heritage [and] critically assimilate whatever is beneficial’, Mao contended in Talks. Transmitting revolutionary ideas in a language and form that was familiar and welcomed by the local people was a way of serving ‘new wine in old bottles’.^[25]

Just as traditional forms of culture were given new revolutionary content, the ‘old bottles’ of traditional intellectuals were being transformed into ‘new’ intellectuals that served the people. Few writers embodied this process more than Ding Ling. When Ding left cosmopolitan Shanghai for the dusty fields of Yan’an, she was already an established writer, celebrated for novels like Miss Sophia’s Diary (1928) that spoke to the conditions of the modern, urban Chinese woman. Upon arriving in Yan’an, however, she struggled to write authentic descriptions of peasant life, which she was still unfamiliar with at the time, and to overcome her own prejudices, individualism, and alienation from the people. The difficulties that Ding and other writers had in portraying peasants in the context of class struggle was not based on their shortcomings alone, but also because the historical conditions had not yet created a revolutionary consciousness among the people. As literary historian Wang Xiaoping explains, ‘the revolutionary (“proletarian”) consciousness did not exist in modern China “as it was” but had to be cultivated and raised to a higher plane by experienced revolutionaries equipped with a dialectical political theory’.^[26] Ding’s short stories and novels are a testament to this transformative and dialectical process, and to the years of unlearning and relearning, to become intellectually and politically integrated with the masses, which in turn deepens class consciousness.

The path traversed by Ding reflects the process of popular ‘integration’ that Mao identified in Talks: ‘Intellectuals who want to integrate themselves with the masses, who want to serve the masses, must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well’. Nearly a decade after arriving in Yan’an, Ding wrote her first novel about the revolutionary movement and land reform, entitled The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1948). This work emerged from the years she spent living and working with women, peasants, workers, veterans, and cadres in some of the country’s most remote rural districts. Years later, like many intellectuals who suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Ding still held true to the Yan’an spirit. In one of her last speeches, written in 1980 a few years before she passed away at age 81, Ding explained, ‘It was hard and I suffered, but I also gained a lot… I can’t write about generals, because I don’t have that kind of experience. But I can write about peasants, about workers, about ordinary people, for I know them well’.^[27] To know the people well is what she and tens of thousands of intellectuals sought to do in the years following the Yan’an Forum, which helped bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution. In her speech, Ding eloquently summarised the Yan’an spirit: ‘Creation itself is a political action, and a writer is a politicised person’. Ding’s words are an affirmation that art and culture are essential to class struggle. They are a call to today’s writers, artists, and intellectuals who are committed to people’s struggles and aspirations to follow in her footsteps.

Top: Drama students engage in early morning physical training.
Bottom: An Eighth Route Army production brigade cultivates land in Nanniwan, southeast of Yan’an.
Credit:[Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台 ] and an unknown source

The Yan’an Spirit 80 Years On

After Talks was first published on 19 October 1943, the text was translated and published in dozens of languages, finding resonance with millions of people around the world.^[28] Inspired by the screen-printing tradition of woodcuts from Yan’an and Mao’s call for artists to be immersed in people’s struggles, the Indian artist Chittaprosad rendered heart-breaking sketches of the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which claimed the lives of three million people at the tail-end of Britain’s brutal colonial rule.^[29] Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén called Talks a ‘glittering scientific materialist platform for literature and art theories… that can help understand and determine the tasks of artists and writers amid the Cuban Revolution’.^[30] Indonesia’s Lekra, a cultural organisation of 200,000 members affiliated with the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), developed its core method of turun ke bawah, or ‘going down to the masses’, in the Yan’an spirit.^[31]

Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (1966) – ‘the little red book’ – includes excerpts from Talks, and its penultimate chapter is dedicated to art and culture. With over one billion official editions sold in three dozen languages, the little red book made its way into the hands of countless revolutionaries as one of the most circulated books of all time, second only to the Holy Bible. In an interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Emory Douglas, the first minister of culture of the Black Panther Party in the United States, recalled how the Party sold the little red book on street corners alongside the Party’s newspaper, each for 25 cents, carrying the message that art is a weapon in revolutionary struggle.^[32] The little red book was also sold in bookshops and small towns in Tanzania in Swahili and English under Julius Nyerere’s leadership. Comingled with African socialist ideas, Mao’s thinking was transmitted through the radio airwaves to reach illiterate and rural communities.^[33] Talks and its ideas found their own interpretations and uses in diverse places, from Mongolia to Mozambique, from Argentina to Albania, from Peru to the Philippines.

Talks is perhaps one of the most important systematisations emerging from the Third World on the role of art and culture and its theory, practice, mistakes, and lessons. It can be read as an exploration of Marxist aesthetics in the national liberation tradition, a proposal for socialist cultural policy, a manual for cadres carrying out cultural tasks, and a piece of literary theory or literature itself. Eight decades have passed since Mao gave his lectures on literature and art. Since then, China has gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries to the world’s second largest economy and a global power. So, what relevance does the Yan’an spirit hold today? In 2014, President Xi Jinping made an appeal to revive the Yan’an spirit at Talks at the Forum on Literature and Art, held in Beijing, in which he spoke about the need for writers and artists to continue Mao’s call for a socialist culture rooted in the Chinese context with an eye towards the world.^[34] The legacy of Talks does not belong only to China and the Chinese people, but is a product for the people of the Global South. In an interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social research, East China Normal University Professor Lu Xinyu made a similar reflection on this legacy and revival of Mao’s Talks:

[The Yan’an Forum] called on intellectuals to serve the people, with the development of mass culture that ensured that peasants’ subjectivity was at the centre of China’s Revolution. That has been the historical target of the CPC from that time till now. Intellectuals went to the countryside to combine forces with the peasants. Now, we see huge numbers of cadres, teachers, and intellectuals go to the countryside in the rural revitalisation and poverty alleviation campaigns.^[35]

According to Lu, this migration of intellectuals to the countryside is an essential example of the Yan’an era, without which today’s polarisation between city and countryside, between the developed eastern region and the poorer western area, cannot be addressed. At the end of 2020, China announced the end of extreme poverty among its population of 1.4 billion people.^[36] Despite the contradictions and ongoing difficulties that exist in the country, Lu believes that China’s rise should not be credited to the introduction of capitalist elements and market forces alone, but to the ongoing political commitment to socialism dating back to 1949: ‘The story of Yan’an is not just a China story; it belongs to the Third World, to twentieth century history, to the socialist movement, and to all the poor people in the world. Especially [given the current] the polarisation of the global situation, we need to remember the Yan’an spirit, not just for China, but for the Global South’.^[37] Eight decades later, we remember the enthusiasm with which young artists and intellectuals went to the countryside with the calling to ‘Go to Yan’an’.

Top/Bottom: Yangge singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring Festival celebration.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily [中国青年报]

Beside the Yellow River, on the bank of the waters of the Yan,
is the yellow earth plateau.
Before the yaodong caves the millstone grinds,
it seems a return to yesterday.
I’m going to Yan’an,
to see the soft passing of time,
to see thousands of hills, everywhere red.

– ‘I’m going to Yan’an’ (2011), song composed by Xu Peidong, written by Hua Feng, and sung by Li Long for the 90^th anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s founding.

Endnotes

[1] Hu Qiaomu胡乔木, Hu qiaomu huiyi mao zedong胡乔木回忆毛泽东 [Hu Qiaomu Memories of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2003), 251–268.

[2] Mao, Zedong. ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm.

[3] Fan Xue范雪, ‘Dao shanbei qu: qiqi shibian hou yipi qingnian de rensheng xuanze’ 到陕北去：七七事变后一批青年的人生选择 [Go to Shaanbei: the life choice of a group of young people after the July 7th Incident], Baoma 保马, 16 March 2020, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CKzJ39SCb78OrNYBS3Yhyw.

[4] Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

[5] Fan Xue 范雪, ‘Dao shanbei qu: qiqi shibian hou yipi qingnian de rensheng xuanze’ 到陕北去：七七事变后一批青年的人生选择 [Go to Shaanbei: the life choice of a group of young people after the 7 July Incident].

[6] Kirk A. Denton, ‘Yan’an as a site of memory’, in Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity, ed. Marc Andre Matten (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 239.

[7] Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 75.

[8] Meisner, Mao Zedong, 74; ‘A quick look at the epic journey of the Long March’, CGTN, 1 July 2019, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-07-01/A-quick-look-at-the-epic-journey-of-the-Long-March–HYhdCulxPG/index.html.

[9] Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 190.

[10] Meisner, Mao Zedong, 75–76.

[11] Ma Kefung 马克锋. ‘Shu wan qingnian weihe maozhe fengzian benfu yan’an?’ 数万青年为何冒着风险奔赴延安？[Why do tens of thousands of young people take risks to go to Yan’an?]. 人民论坛 [China Forum], 25 February 2021, http://www.kunlunce.com/llyj/fl11111111111/2021-02-25/150570.html.

[12] Ellen R. Judd, ‘Prelude to the “Yan’an Talks”: Problems in Transforming a Literary Intelligentsia’, Modern China 11, no. 3 (July 1985): 377–408.

[13] Snow, Red Star Over China, 115–116.

[14] Ding Xiaoping丁晓平. ‘Hu qiaomu yu ‘zai yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua’ 胡乔木与《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》 [Hu Qiaomu and the Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art]. 中华读书报 [China Reading Weekly], 28 May 2012, https://www.tsinghua.org.cn/info/1951/18270.htm.

[15] Kyna Rubin, ‘Writers’ Discontent and Party Response in Yan’an Before “Wild Lily”: The Manchurian Writers and Zhou Yang’, Modern Chinese Literature 1, no. 1 (September 1984): 79–102; Judd, ‘Prelude to the “Yan’an Talks”’, 377–408.

[16] Rubin, ‘Writers’ Discontent and Party Response’, 90.

[17] V. I. Lenin, ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 44–49, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/13.htm.

[18] Judd, ‘Prelude to the “Yan’an Talks”’, 377–408.

[19] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses; Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (New York: International Publishing), 3–23, https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The New Intellectual, Dossier no. 12, February 2019, https://dev.thetricontinental.org/the-new-intellectual/.

[20] V.I. Lenin, ‘On Soviet Power’, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 29, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 248–249, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x08.htm.

[21] Ma Ke (spelled ‘Ma Ko’ in original publication), ‘From “Yangko” Opera to “The White-Haired Girl”’, in Peking Review 6, no. 21 (25 May 1962): 20–22.

[22] Hu Qiaomu, Hu qiaomu huiyi mao zedong胡乔木回忆毛泽东 [Hu Qiaomu Memories of Mao Zedong], 251–268.

[23] Ma Ke, ‘From “Yangko” Opera to “The White-Haired Girl”’, 20–22.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Li Huanhuan, ‘On the Inheritance and Development of Yan’an Yangge during the War of Resistance’, in Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 4, no. 2 (2021): 35–39.

[26] Wang Xiaoping, Contending for the ‘Chinese Modern’: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China, 1937–1949 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 575.

[27] Ding Ling, 作家是政治化了的人 [A writer is a politicised person], 全国高等院校文艺理论学术讨论会 [Symposium on Art and Literature Theory in China’s Higher Education], Lushang, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province, August 1980.

[28] Bonnie McDougall, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’na Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1953 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1980).

[29] Sanjukta Sunderason, ‘Framing margins: Mao and visuality in twentieth-century India’, in Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, ed. Jacopo Galimberti et al (Manchester University Press, 2020), 72–73.

[30] Huo Jinglian 霍静廉. ‘Qiantan mao zedong “zai yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua” zai guoneiwai de yingxiang’ 浅谈毛泽东《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》在国内外的影响 [On the domestic and international influence of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art]. 纪念毛泽东同志《讲话》发表60周年研讨会[Seminar to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of Comrade Mao’s Talks] (May 2002). https://cpfd.cnki.com.cn/Article/CPFDTOTAL-SQSL200205001016.htm.

[31] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Legacy of Lekra: Organising Revolutionary Culture in Indonesia, Dossier no. 35, December 2020, https://dev.thetricontinental.org/dossier-35-lekra/; Simon Soon, ‘Engineering the human soul in 1950s Indonesia and Singapore’, in Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, ed. Jacopo Galimberti et al. (Manchester University Press, 2020), 53–66.

[32] Emory Douglas, interview by Tings Chak, 7 March 2022, transcript Tings Chak.

[33] Priya Lal, ‘Maoism in Tanzania: Material connections and shared imaginaries’, in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 97–101.

[34] Xi Jinping, ‘Speech at the Forum for Literature and Art’, Transcript of the speech in Beijing, 15 October 2015, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/speech-at-the-forum-on-literature-and-art/.

[35] Lu Xinyu, interview by Tings Chak, 14 March 2022, transcript by Tings Chak.

[36] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, Studies in Socialist Construction no. 1, July 2021, https://dev.thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

[37] Lu Xinyu, interview by Tings Chak.

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Li Huanhuan. ‘On the Inheritance and Development of Yan’an Yangge during the War of Resistance’. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 4, no. 2 (2021): 35-39.

Lu, Xinyu. Interview by Tings Chak, 14 March 2022, transcript by Tings Chak.

Ma Ke. ‘From “Yangko” Opera to “The White-Haired Girl”’. Peking Review, 6, no. 21 (May 1962): 20–22.

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Mao, Zedong. ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’. In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm.

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Sunderason, Sanjukta. ‘Framing margins: Mao and visuality in twentieth-century India’. In Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, edited by Jacopo Galimberti et al, 67–86. Manchester University Press, 2020.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China. Studies in Socialist Construction no. 1, July 2021. https://dev.thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Legacy of Lekra: Organising Revolutionary Culture in Indonesia. Dossier no. 35, December 2020. https://dev.thetricontinental.org/dossier-35-lekra/.

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In all, 53 works were submitted, with contributions by artists from 13 states in Brazil and 7 different countries. Their works were arranged around the three axes suggested in the call for art: ‘Popular Education and Conscience: The Originality of Freirean Pedagogy’; ‘To Hope in 2021: The Relevance of Paulo Freire’s Ideas’; and ‘A Pedagogy That Changed the World: Freire’s Internationalist Practice’. As well as digital illustrations, collages, and drawings, we received photographs recording the experience of popular education in various corners of the country and the world, demonstrating how Freire’s ideas remain fundamental for our activism.

We would like to thank all the artists who participated in this call for their contributions and invite you to discover the works! Check out the posters below and keep an eye on our social media channels for upcoming activities in celebration of the 100 years of Paulo Freire

Download all posters in high quality here.

Please contact art@thetricontinental.org if you are interested in organising a local exhibition of the exhibition.

In honour of this anniversary, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research along with 26 international publishers, organised an online exhibition, Paris Commune 150. We invited artists from all over the world to reflect and reimagine the legacy of the Commune for the people’s struggles of today and tomorrow. 

The exhibition gathers work from 41 artists from 15 countries, with two works selected to be the cover and back cover art in the joint book publication Paris Commune 150 in 18 languages, which will be launched on 28 May – the day the Paris Commune was defeated 150 years ago. But as Karl Marx said, every defeat is in turn a lesson for the working class, to strengthen the struggles to come.

This exhibition gathers almost the same number of artists who established the Federation of Artists in the middle of the 72-day-long workers’ state. 47 painters, sculptors, architects, engravers and decorative artists came together and declared in their manifesto: ‘The last cannon, its upturned muzzle covered with a phrygian bonnet, planted on a pedestal resting on three cannon balls: that colossal monument that we’ll erect together on the place Vendôme will be our column, for you and for us, the column of the people.’ Gustave Courbet, French socialist painter and one of the communards behind the Vendôme Column’s toppling, was elected the Minister of Culture – he called the Commune ‘the beautiful dream’. 

From the embers of ‘the beautiful dream’, new rebellions and revolutions have been and continue to be sparked. The images in this exhibition are some of these sparks that carry on the Commune’s legacy so that new dreams can be dreamt, new socialist monuments can be erected. Viva la commune!

Please download and share this exhibition here.

In the middle of our pandemic year, 162 artists from 30 countries and 27 organizations contributed to the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions. They responded to a series of open calls to make posters that give expressions to four defining concepts of our time: capitalism, neoliberalism, imperialism and hybrid war. It was an experimental process, jointly organized by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle.

The overwhelming response from all corners of the globe affirmed something of the human spirit—that in one of the most challenging times in living memory, human beings do not create despite their suffering, they create out of it. That the concrete impacts of these four core concepts do not impede but compel creative expression. The calls gave confidence to working people to represent their own realities, while contributing to a collective process.

In an event organized by The People’s Forum, two exhibition participants, Judy Seidman (South Africa) and Oscar Coraspe (Utopix/Venezuela), came together in a discussion on CoronaShock and Art (full recording of the event here), moderated by Tings Chak, exhibition co-curator and lead designer of Tricontinental. The conversation brought practices and wisdom across generations and regions, including the exiled cultural group, Medu Arts Ensemble, working towards South African liberation in the 1980s to Utopix, a cultural community formed out of the trenches against US-imposed hybrid war in Venezuela. One central question was, what are the tasks of artists of cultural workers involved in uplifting people’s struggles in the time of a global pandemic?

To reflect reality.

To breathe.

To hope.

To stay human.

These are among the tasks set out for us so that we can “Not only to stay alive, but to stay human”, quoting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is some of the offerings that the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions bring for a process still very much in process. Here are some reflections on Hybrid War, the fourth and final in this series exhibition, collecting work from 39 artists in 18 countries.

Hybrid forms

<Jorge Luis Rodríguez-Aguilar (Cuba), Hybrid War, 2020>

Hybrid war is not a simple concept to grasp, because it is not one thing. In some—relatively few—cases, it means direct military intervention by the imperialist power, but most often it means war by other means. These other means include sanctions, blockades, fake news, bribes, engineering economic or social unrest and coups, both soft and hard. It is a challenge, then, to represent this concept graphically.

The designs chosen here use a variety of artistic methods to convey their ideas—or hybrid forms, in other words. Jorge Luis Rodríguez-Aguilar (Cuba), for example, portrays the concept in the simple, yet effective, barcode, taking the viewer directly to Tricontinental’s dossier no.17, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America.

The hybrid forms are many. Andrea Busi’s (Italy) Chessboard clarifies the difference between traditional and hybrid war tactics through a game of chess. There is the paper collage in Zaira Desiré Coronel’s (Argentina) El Grito (no. 6), the digital collage Robert Streader’s (UK) We Shall Not Submit, the multi-media methods of Ghalmi Othmane’s (Morocco) War Hole (no. 8), and the childhood favourite of colour pencils in Giovanni Montena’s (Italy) The Economic War Against Cuba.

The exhibition seems to provide a diversity of hybrid forms, as diverse as the tactics of hybrid war itself.

Media warfare

<Madhuri Shukla (USA), Wring, 2020>

We live in a world where truth seems to mean little. Life seems only liveable when surrounded in an ecosystem of ideas that provide comfort, not contradiction. This world of misinformation circulates on our cellphones, our devices and our mediascape.

A man being tranquilized with a syringe-full of social media in Choo Chon Kai’s (Parti Sosialis Malaysia) (Dis)information Warfare poster shows. Bombs of fake news bombard Whatsapp in Gabrielle Sodré’s (Brazil)’s Fake News and the Battle of Ideas, reminding us of the lawfare and process that sustained Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency in Brazil. We become ammunition for hybrid wars.

Technology and telecommunications, like any other commodity, transcends borders and at the heart of financial capitalism. In Arjun Raman and Cadie Buckley’s (Unfunded Science/Alaska) Waroboros, a snake with the Pentagon building and IT multinationals for a brain is encircling Africa as it prepares to swallow it. People’s resistance to encirclement must start from breaking the false premise of freedom of the press and neutrality of information. Otherwise, as Madhuri Shukla’s (USA) Wring shows us, we will be looking at reality through the cell phone instead of our own eyes.

Monsters

<Midhun Puthupattu (India), The Hybrid Monster, 2020>

Everyday life is filled with monsters—not the “Boo!”-in-the-night sort, but the kind that saps away the life force of humankind. As Suhail Al-Ali’s (Palestine/Lebanon) US imperialism is the bloodsucker of peoples and the plunder of their wealth depicts—imperialism, our modern-day terrorizer, has an unquenchable thirst for human life and labour.

There are monsters we see clear as daylight: Military invasions. Nuclear explosions. Police violence. Domestic violence. Drone strikes. Oil spills. Fox News. They often are welded together to form a great mechanical beast, as Adelso Ramon Moran Colon (Venezuela) shows in World Military Industrial Complex and the Hybrid War Against Venezuela.

Other carnivorous creatures are cloaked in darkness: Banks. Insurance. Retail-tainment. Digital surveillance. Data mining. Social media. Clandestine coups and puppeteers behind so-called ‘human rights demonstration’. Some monsters extend their tentacles to orchestrate covert attacks on their enemies, as we see in the anonymous submission from Hong Kong (China), Foreign Interference in Hong Kong.

All form a part of the monster of the marketplace. When it sees resistance or rebellion from a people, it shapeshifts into The Hybrid Monster, as Midhun Puthupattu (India) depicts. But where did they get the power to frighten, intimidate and dominate?

There is one thing we have to realize: These monsters cannot survive without us, without our labour that reproduces them. As Karl Marx explained in Capital Vol. 1:

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… If labourers consume their disposable time for themselves, they rob the capitalist.

Through unity and struggle, we can, as Naresh Prerna (India) declares, “stop the lust for blood, money, land and everything”. It is possible to take back what is ours. They—the minority—want what we—the majority—have.

Sanctions

<Anonymous (Hong Kong, China), Foreign Interference in Hong Kong, 2020>

Sanctions, blockades and trade wars. For decades, the US state has used the economic arm of hybrid war to force countries and their economies to submit to its hegemony. The US imposes sanctions, blocks the transportation of essential commodities, medicines and aid and freezes bank accounts of other countries.

This cruelty is seen in the simple image of an empty shopping cart in Hybrid War (Economy) by Gabriel Martínez and Sonia Díaz (Spain). Giovanni Montena (Italy), in her work, The Economic War Against Cuba, portrays the 60-year old economic blockade imposed by the US through barbed wire fences around the island—sitting less than 150km off the shores of the world’s great Empire.

Today, China faces an intensification of a hybrid war from the US and Foreign Interference in Hong Kong by Anonymous (Hong Kong, China) shows the way that the US fueled the protests in the former British colony through media disinformation and financial backing. It is such misinformation that we have seen time and time again be used as a pretext for intervention and “regime change”, undermining national sovereignty and popular support.

People’s Resistance

<Judy Ann Seidman (South Africa), Unite, Organize, Arise, 2020>

When we speak about popular resistance, we conjure up images of people in the thousands, or millions, marching all over the planet. They are confronting the powerful and calling for a better, more just, more egalitarian world. We see this in Resistance and Resilience in the Neolliberal State by Samina Sirajuddowla (USA), which reads: “No justice, no peace! All power to the people”.

When we speak of resistance, we think of the brothers and sisters of Cuba and Venezuela, who are beacons of people’s resistance for the world. In Diani Barreto’s (Germany) Cuba: Proudly Resisting Hybrid War Since 1959, she lists the different forms in which these hybrid wars manifest themselves—information warfare, financial asphyxiation, diplomatic isolation, exclusion from the market, trade wars—so that we do not forget them. That the Cuban people have continued to resist the decades-long attacks invites us to continue dreaming, to not relinquish the struggle for sovereignty for peoples all over the world.

When we speak of resistance, we also speak of solidarity, and this means solidarity to end the blockades from Cuba to Venezuela, where we see the daily media attacks, shown so clearly in Zoe PC’s (USA) ¡Váyanse al carajo!. In this work, we see the outline of Hugo Chavez’s figure, with an outstretched arm, inviting us to dream about that 21st century socialism that the Venezuela leader entrusted us.

From Latin America to Africa, where Judy Ann Seidman’s (South Africa) Unite, Organize, Arise to Europe and Robert Streader’s (UK) poster We Shall Not Submit, this exhibition is a display of internationalist people’s resistance. These posters carry forth the dreams, aspirations and struggles of the past to help guide us into the future.

Looking to 2021, we know that it will be a year of continued and intensified struggle; for a vaccine for all, to demand the rights that were stolen from us while we were inside our homes trying to stay alive or on the frontlines to ensure our collective survival, to continue our struggle for basic conditions for a dignified life, and to defend the sovereignty of all peoples and nations. In the face of these multi-headed monsters that at all costs defend the interests of the imperialist neoliberal capitalist order, we have our conviction, our hope and our unity, and with this we will be victorious.

—Curation committee of the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions

Literature That Defends Victims, Not Power.

Amrus Natalsya, Interogasi Orde Baru (‘New Order Interrogation’), 1961.

‘It was the worst when I was released. That’s the biggest prison I had to face’.

Martin Aleida recalls the moment he was released from prison at the end of 1966. The then twenty-two-year-old writer emerged from nearly a year behind bars to Jakarta unable to find his friends and comrades. His workplace, Harian Rakjat (‘The People’s Daily’), the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), was no longer. His Party and cultural organisation, Lekra (Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat or ‘The Institute for People’s Culture’), was banned – and has been illegal ever since.

Three months into the pandemic, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reached out to the now seventy-six-year-old Martin. Though a North Sumatra native, Martin has lived in Jakarta since the early 1960s, where he responded to us from a local library that he frequents every Saturday.

‘There are a lot of events and feelings I had gone through during the last fifty years that I couldn’t tell.’ Martin first tells us about his recently published memoir, Romantisme Tahun Kekerasan (‘Romance in the Years of Violence’). Martin, however, isn’t his name at all.

‘During the thirty-two years of military rule under General Suharto, in order to write, I had to use a pseudonym – Martin Aleida – since as a writer I was prohibited by the authorities to write. Being accused arbitrarily and without proof that I was involved in the failed coup attempt of the September 30th Movement in 1965 [also known as G30S] by the military, I couldn’t get back to my professional field as a writer. The same applied to thousands of teachers, civil servants, even puppet masters who were prohibited from going back to their fields, unless they were prepared to be investigated again and again with the possibility of being detained, and at worst, eliminated’.

The September 30th Movement was a military splinter group that carried out an early-morning action in 1965, resulting in the kidnapping and killing of six senior officials. Though the details of the day continue to be murky, what is clear is that the communists were scapegoated. This event served as a convenient pretext for the genocidal crackdown on the PKI that was to come. Led by the US-backed General Suharto – perhaps known better to the CIA than to the Indonesian people at the time – in the short months that followed, one million communists and their sympathisers were murdered. President Sukarno – not a communist, but still a great champion of the Third World project and convener of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung – was deposed. Suharto and his ‘New Order’ military dictatorship would stay in power for the next thirty-two years until 1998.

Faced with one of the bloodiest and most-silenced massacres of communists in history, Martin deepened his commitment to literature – one that, as he says, ‘defends the victims, not power’. Under the penname of Martin, he writes novels and short stories, fiction and non-fiction, about the suffering of the people and the disappeared and the silenced aspirations of a generation. He writes in Bahasa Indonesian – one of the Indonesian languages that was adopted as a language of the national struggle in 1928 and matured out of necessity through the anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggles of the 1930s and 1940s.

In one short story, the protagonist Dewangga lies on her deathbed, reliving memories of an entire marriage with her husband, Abdullah. Only in her final moments, after a lifetime spent together in silence, do they finally have the courage to reveal their militant pasts to one another – he as a jailed activist in 1965, she as an organiser of landless peasants. Martin’s recent memoir, he hopes, can revive these not uncommon stories of Dewangga and Abdullah for the younger generation about life before 1965, life after, and the conditions that led to this still open wound in Indonesian history.

We are the Legitimate Heirs of World Culture.

Hendra Gunawan, War and Peace, c. 1950s, oil on canvas, 93.7 x 140.3 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

When they say the ‘the east was red’, it was because the east was indeed red. In 1965, the PKI had three and a half million cadre and 20 million people in its mass organisations of youth, women, peasants, and workers. It was the third largest communist party in the world, after the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Lekra was one of its mass organisations with over 200,000 members, totalling 1.5 million with its supporters. Lekra was likely the world’s largest cultural organisation not affiliated with a state to have ever existed. Too little is known about this historic organisation.

As a former member of Lekra, Martin recalls, ‘I was attracted by the organisation’s point of view that literature should take a side and uphold justice of the oppressed majority – the labourers, peasants, and fishermen. Literature, and art in general, are predestined to defend the oppressed’. In August of this year, Lekra would have celebrated seventy years since its founding – sharing the date of 17 August with Indonesia’s independence, a struggle that has always been intimately connected with the battle over culture.

Two decades earlier, Indonesia’s national liberation was born out of a cultural cry. After independence was proclaimed on 17 August 1945, the Dutch and Japanese continued to hold onto their colonial interests until 1949. Gelanggang, a group of artists associated with the Siasat weekly magazine aligned with the Socialist Party of Indonesia, published its ‘Testimony of Beliefs’, a cultural manifesto for the months-young nation state:

We are the legitimate heirs of world culture, and we will perpetuate this culture in our own way. We were born from the ranks of ordinary people, and for us, the concept of ‘the people’ signifies a jumbled hodgepodge from which new, robust worlds are born. Our Indonesian-ness does not just derive from our brown skin, our black hair or our prominent foreheads, but rather from what is expressed by the form of our thoughts and feelings… Revolution for us is the establishment of new values on top of obsolete ones which must be destroyed… Our appreciation of the surrounding conditions (society) is that of people who acknowledge the reciprocity of influences between society and the artist.¹

It was in this moment when many revolutionary cultural organisations flourished. Lekra was not only the largest but was also the most left-aligned. Many of its senior members were PKI cadre, including two of Lekra’s founding members: Njoto, editor of Harian Rakjat who was elected into the PKI’s five-member politburo, and D.N. Aidit, the Party’s future secretary-general. Both of them were killed in 1965.

At Lekra’s first National Congress in 1959, Secretary-General Joebaar Ajoeb said, ‘Lekra was founded in 1950 due to an awareness of the essence of the August 1945 Revolution and of the connection between the Revolution and culture, an awareness that the Revolution has great significance for culture, and, at the same time, culture has great significance for the August Revolution’.

From this congress, Lekra was divided into seven institutes: Literature, Fine Arts, Film, Theatre, Music, Dance, and Science. Through each of these artistic languages, Lekra artists sought to build a new culture, rooted in the traditional, and infused with revolutionary ideas. The cultural tasks were tall and many; they ranged from systematising popular and traditional music to identifying the decadent aspects that persisted, from developing a cultural political education program to encouraging new creative production, from rediscovering ‘people’s music’ and instruments to organising international cultural exchanges. Through its fifteen-year existence, Lekra not only mobilised millions, but developed cultural practices rooted in the people’s concrete and material conditions. From their organising, new expressive forms and new artistic theories emerged – they were, in essence, writing art history in the Marxist tradition.

To Catch the Heartbeat of Those Below.

Amrus Natalsya, Mereka Yang Terusir Dari Tanahnya (‘Those Chased Away from Their Land’), 1960, oil on canvas, 80 x 187 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

One of Lekra’s key principles was Turun ke bawah or turba (‘descend from above’²), which was concretised in the first National Congress as a theory to guide the artist-militant’s work. ‘It literally means going down to the grassroots – working, eating, living with labourers, landless peasants, and fishermen’, Martin explains. Along with the ‘three alikes’ – work alike, eat alike, sleep alike – this methodology ‘was a way to intensify your imagination and inspiration, to sharpen your feelings about how hard the lives of the people are’.

Hersri Setiawan was another Lekra member and the Indonesian representative to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in the 1960s. He was jailed on Buru Island for many years for his work with Lekra. In the documentary Tjidurian 19 – named after the street address of Lekra’s secretariat in Jakarta, which was raided during the crackdown – he remembers spending days hoeing and weeding and nights discussing folk tales while weaving with the peasants. To him, the purpose of an artist was to ‘catch the heartbeat of those below’.

Martin spoke about Amrus Natalsya, a prominent Lekra sculpturer whose work was admired by President Sukarno and exhibited at the Bandung conference art exhibition. Amrus lived among the Central Javanese peasants and created one of his most famous wood sculptures after a land dispute that resulted in the death of eleven landless peasants. The work was a record of an event, an analysis of class struggle, and an embodiment of the Lekra principle kreativitas individual dan kearifan massa (‘individual creativity and the wisdom of the masses’). The eighty-six-year-old Amrus held his last solo exhibition in Jakarta last year entitled Terakhir, selamat tinggal dan terima kasih (‘The last, farewell and thank you’).

But the Spirit Lives, If It Is Right.

Viva Cuba, collection of Lekra poetry in homage to the Cuban Revolution, 1963.

In 1959, Sukarno called upon artists to stand in the ranks of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fronts. He knew that developing a robust national culture must be anti-imperialist. ‘We must be more vigilant, more tenacious, and more persevering in opposing imperialist culture, especially US imperialist culture, which in reality continues to threaten us in every shape and way.’ This was also the year of the Cuban Revolution.

In those six years before Sukarno was deposed, he was getting closer to the left flank of the Non-Aligned Movement, of which both Cuba and Indonesia were a part. They were united against imperialism and jointly organised the Tricontinental Conference that would take place in Havana in 1966 – the very conference that we pay homage to in our own name at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Neither the PKI, Lekra, or Sukarno’s presidency would live to see that conference.

But history arms us. ‘For the younger generation it is very important to relay to them the recent past and history of the country’, Martin insists. During the 2015 International People’s Tribunal on the 1965 events, Martin testified about the crimes against humanity that he saw. When questioned about his PKI affiliation – a Party that continues to be illegal – he responded, at great risk to himself, that he never regretted joining the Party when he was twenty-years-old. ‘I am a human being; I am proud that I have ideals, even if everyone condemns what I aspire to’.

In 1966, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association organised the Anti-Imperialist Caricature Exhibition in Beijing, hosting 180 works from 24 countries on the Asian and African continents. Following this lineage, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle have been organising a series of four Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions. We have had over 145 artists from 35 countries contribute work to our first three cycles themed, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Neoliberalism’, and ‘Imperialism’. The third exhibition launched on 1 October as part of the week of actions from 5-10 October, organised by hundreds of popular movements and political organisations around the world.

‘Formal organisations can disappear; Party organisations can be abolished’, Lekra poet Putu Oka Sukanta reminds us, ‘but the spirit lives, if it is right’. We call on you to contribute art to our exhibition so that we may – in the spirit of Lekra on its seventieth anniversary – combine individual creativity with the wisdom of the masses.

S. Nar, People’s Iron Broom, from the Afro-Asian People’s Anti-Imperialist Caricature Exhibition, 1966

Martin Aleida is a survivor of the bloody political upheaval in Indonesia from 1965-66 during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. He was a former journalist of Harian Rakjat (‘The People’s Daily’) and editor of Lekra’s monthly magazine Zaman Baru (‘New Age’). He was detained for almost a year when he was just twenty-two years old. After being released, he wrote a good number of short stories on the impacts of the massacres carried out by the army and the civilian paramilitary. He worked as a reporter for TEMPO, a prominent weekly news in Jakarta in 1971 and was interrogated multiple times by the military authority under General Suharto’s pro-United States regime.

Martin Aleida gives a testimony at the International People’s Tribunal in The Hague in November, 2015

¹ Translated from Goenawan Mohamad, ‘Forgetting; Poetry and the nation, a motif in Indonesian literary modernism after 1945’, 2002.
² Translated by Antariksa, Sari D., Sol Aréchiga, Edwina Brennan for School of Improper Education, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, 2018.

Greta Acosta Reyes (Cuba), Neoliberalism, 2020

‘We paint because screaming is not enough and

neither crying nor rage is enough.

We paint because we believe in the people and

because we will conquer defeat’

(adapted from the poem, ‘Why we sing’, by Mario Benedetti)

When they really, urgently, desperately need to say something, the people don’t wait for designers. They get on with it, producing posters and handbills as best they can – sometimes with spectacular results. In the process, they too become designers, organic to their movements, communities, and contexts. The posters in Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition II: Neoliberalism run the gamut, from those created by trained designers to those by self-taught artists, from those by activists without formal training to first-timers. 

Charmingly, the posters exhibit a variety of artistic and design styles. From the minimalism of Choo Chon Kai (Parti Sosialis Malaysia, Malaysia) to the bustling illustrations of Miguel Guerra (Utopix, Venezuela), from the comic book approach of Roland Nalukoma Cubaka (Congo Love, Democratic Republic of Congo) to the elegant typography of Nancy Naser Al Deen (Lebanon), there is something about each poster that evokes the culture it was created in.

While the poster has been a weapon in the struggle of the oppressed all over the world, there are few places that have developed this tradition into a great art and science as Cuba has done. Since the 1959 revolution, Cuba has produced tens of thousands of political posters for use both domestically as well as in other lands, uplifting the peoples’ struggles internationally. The six posters from Cuba in this exhibition show us how this glorious tradition has been carried forward – and continues to be transformed – by a new generation of Cuban graphic artists.

Despite the different formal qualities, regional contexts, and means of production, the exhibition is unified by its contemplation of ‘neoliberalism’ as a defining characteristic of our time. Neoliberalism is at times a difficult concept to grasp, but this series of posters tries to break it down into a few visual themes: the handcrafted, extractivism, privatisation, austerity, financialisation, and hope and resistance.

What all of these posters have in common is the urgent need to translate this difficult concept into the context of the people’s own experiences and struggles, rooted as much in their specific contexts as in the interconnectedness of the global capitalist system. These posters are weapons in struggle.

The Handcrafted

Miguel Guerra (Venezuela), Estructura de Opresión (‘Structure of Oppression’), 2020

The artwork for the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition II: Neoliberalism allows us to see different views of the same problem in different languages, cultures and regions. This is art. Art allows us to share with others the good and the bad things that happen, reflecting on the experiences of a culture, a people and a class and bringing them to a personal level; it is about  building a common language amongst those who identify with the work that is shared.

The exhibition features posters created in a variety of manners – using the most sophisticated design software, manual techniques, and hybrid methods. This diversity foregrounds the question of access to resources and at the same time the conditions of production. 

We chose to highlight work crafted by hand because we live in a world that is so technologically-mediated that it sometimes stops us from creating – and seeing – art that is created by hand. We fear that the handcrafted work is not perfect, or that it is not technically sophisticated enough; as a result, we forfeit manual tools, which are often more accessible, in the battle of ideas and the struggle of the working class. We miss opportunities to see pieces that are as good and as diverse as the ones that we see in this exhibition. 

Work done by hand not only amplifies the possibilities of expression, but it helps connect the ideas conveyed to our subjectivity. When preparing the poster by hand, we engage and activate the body in a way that digital work does not allow. We feel the strong gestures in the hand-painted work of Ciara Taylor (Popular Education Project, United States), the detailed motions of migration in Labani Jangi’s painting (People’s Archive of Rural India, India), the organic curves of human suffering in Deivisom Shirmer de Lima’s poster (Associação de Moradores do Bairro Riveira, Brazil).

As a curatorial decision, we chose not to judge and analyse the posters based on bourgeois standards of aesthetics and technique; rather, we chose to judge them by their ability to convey visions of a concrete reality of people’s global struggles against neoliberalism.

Extractivism

Roland Nalukoma Cubaka (Congo Love, Democratic Republic of Congo), L’enrichissement illicite des riches à travers la guerre et exploitation des minerais (‘The illegal enrichment of the wealthy through war and the exploitation of minerals’), 2020

Capitalist exploitation and its relations of production only deepen in the peripheral territories, where there is a reservoir of surplus labour, natural resources, and social goods. So goes the logic of capitalism in its stage of imperialist expansion. 

Capitalism since its inception has been based in the logic of self-expansion, which is to say that capital only serves to accumulate more capital, and for this it has subsumed all of the social relations of production, distribution and exchange.

However, in its most recent phase, ‘accumulation through dispossession’, capital is increasingly putting the survival of the planet and humanity at risk. The amplified reproduction of capital has meant the mercantilisation of all aspects of life and all natural resources that allow for the development of humanity, from water and nature to health and education.

Accumulation through dispossession was clearly consolidated with the neoliberal offensive of the 1990s and the extractivist-export model, with privatisations and tremendous advances in the commercialisation of public and natural goods.

Extractivism knows no borders. In this exhibition, we see this theme recurring from mineral resources of Papua to the Congo, from the commons of Cape Verde to Brazil.

Privatisation

Kelana Destin (Indonesia), Water, 2020

Privatisation will not allow for the water and the trees, nor for the soil and the fruits of the world to service the needs of humanity. To profit, the ruling class must privatise that which we need to survive and make with our labour becomes theirs. All that has a common use cannot stay freely with the people, nor can it be used for the common good.

Neoliberalism ‘socialises losses and privatises gains’, as Jeremy Kane (Chicago DSA, USA) visualises it in his poster USA. A pillar of this domination is the compulsion to privatise all that is socially owned for the common good. Centuries in the making, there has been a slow and painful shift from publicly to privately produced goods and services. Programs that serve the public interest are gradually phased out and social welfare is no longer a responsibility of those who are elected.

To eat becomes a privilege of one class, made up of vultures in suits, as demonstrated by Jorge González Morales (Mexico) in his poster Bienes comunes (‘Common goods’). Hospitals are transformed, with every bed and machine treated as real estate for maximising rent collection. Education becomes about creating more sellable labour as the great centres of learning tie sandbags of debt to the ankles of young people. Nations colonised become meat to be sold and traded on the global market; Puerto Rico is packaged in Styrofoam in Malena Vargas Sáez’s poster, Lista para su consume (‘Ready for your consumption’). Whole continents, their people, and the very air they breathe, are on sale; Kalia Venereo (Cuba) serves us Latin America on a platter in her poster, ON SALE. This is privatisation. 

As Seraphina Yoku shows in Republic of Investor (Papua-Indonesia), the barrel of a gun hovers into view should we dare to resist. When we ask questions, the mobile drug dispensary is wheeled out and a big pill distributed for our consumption in Priscila Adamo’s (Argentina) Contraindicaciones (‘Contraindications’).

What remains for the people of the world? Collecting fallen branches for wood-fired heating becomes a crime. Towering walls are erected to keep property safe from the ‘greedy’ hands of the starving populations who have the audacity to attempt to stay alive. Men in boots trample on our backs and press down on the necks of the people.

Austerity

Choo Chon Kai (Parti Sosialis Malaysia, Malaysia), Freedom of choice?, 2020

‘They cut, we bleed’. The bold text in Robert Streader’s poster (Young Communist League of Britain, Great Britain) sums up the underpinnings of austerity; it is part and parcel of neoliberal economic policy. The slashing of the public sector is more than the sterile process through which bureaucrats add and subtract numbers and write convincing arguments in a budget report. It is a violent process. It is the tearing away of resources and services that the state should be providing for its people, leaving them less protected and less stable, and therefore vulnerable to any crisis.

Austerity economics have time and time again proved to be a failure, yet the mighty scissors of the international financial institutions continue to move at a rapid speed. While states advise their people to wear masks, wash their hands, and stay inside, they simultaneously tell people that there will be no more state-funded social support; instead, they are told that they should just work harder.

One of the biggest lies of austerity is the notion that people are somehow demanding things for free, but as brilliantly visualised in Kelana Destin’s poster, Water, these are the resources of the people. 

Financialisation

Nancy Naser Al Deen (Lebanon), Down with neoliberalism, 2020

The global ruling class knows that it is morally bankrupt. It tries to compensate for its political bankruptcy by playing the chords of morality, philanthropy, and human rights. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the institutions owned by billionaires, whose names they often bear, lend the ruling class moral authority that it does not deserve. They know that what they have accumulated is a clear expression of their corruption; it overwhelms them to the soles of their feet.

While the ultra-rich keep their wealth in off-shore accounts evading taxes with ease, it is the poor who bear the consequences. The oppressed classes do not benefit from the services that the state is supposed to provide them. In the era of neoliberalism, capital has shifted almost entirely to the speculative financial sector to increase its wealth, thereby placing a time bomb beneath the foundation of the entire capitalist system. In Fabiola Sánchez Quiroz’s (Jovenes ante la Emergencia Nacional, Mexico) poster, the bull that sits on Wall Street seems to forebode where this speculative capital is headed.

Under the neoliberal model, huge profits are made and huge wealth accumulated in the hands of speculators, a process detached from production. This has left us with a phenomenon called ‘profits without production’. 

There are now deep structural imbalances in the global capitalist economy. The most prominent – and dangerous – is the imbalance between the massive quantity of accumulated financial capital and the real economy, the sector that produces goods and creates real wealth.

Under neoliberalism, financial markets began to grow independently of actual financing needs. Custody of the global economy has shifted from the hands of investors and entrepreneurs of the real economy to the financial managers and market experts of the virtual economy, far removed from the production process. In light of all of this, the role of the state has been reduced to the field of monetary policy in order to combat inflation. The state has abandoned the task of protecting the economy and, more often, its people.

Hope and Resistance

Vikas Thakur (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, India), Neoliberalism, 2020

Hope emerges in acts of resistance against neoliberalism. Hope emerges from the people as they struggle for a new society – one that places the interests of humanity over corporate profits. The artwork for the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition II: Neoliberalism visualises the impacts of neoliberalism on our way of life and offers the glimmers of hope emerging from peoples’ struggles. 

The beauty of this set of posters in large part emanates from the unique ways that these artists use colour and imagery to portray resistance and hope. 

Obed Mayambau Ngama (Congo Love, Democratic Republic of Congo) uses colours to depict the dark abyss of neoliberalism, the poisonous effects of this ideology, and the worker struggling against the weight of corporate exploitation. Adeeb Hamdan (Palestinian Democratic Youth Union, Palestine) makes use of colours to highlight and accent the Palestinian people’s resistance to the terror and oppression inflicted by Israel and sponsored by the United States. Gerónimo Dellacasa (Argentina) uses different shades of colour to depict the clash between the oppressed and neoliberal oppressors. 

The detailed imagery in Philani Emmanuel Mhlungu’s (Socialist Revolutionary Worker’s Party/Soweto Action Committee, South Africa) hand-drawn artwork depicts the people’s struggles against neoliberalism and towards a future of socialism. Judy Seidman (South Africa) illustrates working-class mistica and colourfully depicts the oppressed joining hands together in struggle. Danny Isham (Red Star Rising, United States) uses a line of demarcation to show that workers stand on the right side of history against the free market policies of neoliberalism. Haydar Özay (Turkey) creates a fierce portrait of Karl Marx and his text which continue to enlighten our movements and people’s struggles throughout the world. The collective Un Mundo Feliz (Spain) presents the Euro symbol superimposed with the female symbol, warning us that we cannot let neoliberalism reduce feminism into a commodity. We must put those who are at the centre of exploitation at the centre of struggle. Feminism will be anti-capitalist or it won’t be at all.

The importance of these posters is that they show that neoliberalism will not end without a concerted and organised effort from the people. These posters powerfully capture the struggles of today and the fight to end neoliberalism for the sake of humanity. 

This text was prepared collectively by the curation team of the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition:

Luciana Balbuena, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Argentina)

Gabriela Barraza, Escuela José Carlos Mariátegui (Argentina)

Ibnou Ali Abdelouahad, Democratic Way (Morocco)

Tings Chak, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (China)

David Chung, The People’s Forum (USA)

Sudhanva Deshpande, LeftWord Books (India)

Ingrid Neves, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil)

Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (South Africa)

Nora García Nieves, Partido Comunista de España (Spain)

Zoe PC, International People’s Assembly and People’s Dispatch (USA)

Ambedkar Pindiga, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (India)