Sound the Trumpet of the New Culture!

All Cadre, FORWARD!

In 1940, in the course-setting essay On New Democracy, Mao Zedong argued for a revolutionary movement built across multiple foundations; a political, economic, and military contest would also require a long cultural effort. “Both the cultural and practical movements must be of the masses,” he wrote. “Therefore all progressive cultural workers in the anti-Japanese war must have their own cultural battalions, that is, the broad masses. A revolutionary cultural worker who is not close to the people is a commander without an army, whose fire-power cannot bring the enemy down.” Art fought; artists led battalions in cultural struggle, and commanders went down to the battlefield and locked arms with the troops.

Two years later, Mao dug more deeply into the specifics of the cultural problem, leading a series of discussions with artists and intellectuals at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Sounding like Lenin, he denounced art that pleased and comforted the wrong people: “Literature and art for the bourgeoisie are bourgeois literature and art.” Instead, revolutionary art should serve the people making revolution, dirtying their hands on its real daily work: “the audience for our literature and art consists of workers, peasants and soldiers and of their cadres.”

Building art for the right people, artists then had to face the problem of making the right art. This part was simple: good art had proper politics, and moved an audience in a useful political direction. The cultural project needed to fall in line behind the political effort:

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 from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine…Revolutionary literature and art are part of the whole revolutionary cause, they are cogs and wheels in it, and though in comparison with certain other and more important parts they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position, nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause.

An artist — a writer, a composer, a filmmaker, whatever — was there to lead his battalions, to produce a message that served a political cause in a form and tone that served that same political cause. Culture was downstream of politics; first the message, the intended political purpose leading to the desired societal end state, then the characters and the setting and the narrative, and all the other matters of secondary importance. Politicians shape societies, and artists are politicians; you move the football toward your goal line, you move your troops toward the enemy’s fortress, you advance.

Compare:

Art is beauty! Bad cadre!

Now. This:

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo

SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, "as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.

This is shit, a commitment to make storytellers cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine. I have no objections of any kind to gay stories and characters; I’ll watch those stories, or make those stories, when it makes sense to do it. If you make Heavenly Creatures, there should be some lesbian stuff in there. That’s the story. The Oscar Wilde biopic should probably reference gay men in some way.

The commitment to “a minimum of 50 percent” — of anything — is a rejection of art itself, and a declaration of revolutionary intent that all but insists on artistic emptiness. It’s good, so far, but let’s throw in some LGBT stuff. I mean, my goodness, we’re only at 42% gay and minority, how can this be good art? It is fun to laugh and play in the park with you, Mary Poppins, but look there, those men are engaged in an interracial LGBT romantic and sexual relationship, I celebrate this! (Yes, children, those men are gay, it is good, I will now perform a pro-LGBT dance sequence with transgendered penguins!)

Captain, we have a new assignment — to find a soldier named Private Ryan and to save him! He is gay! That is very good! It is very good to be a gay soldier! He is fighting in a war alongside his boyfriend, a fact that the chain of command celebrates!

We’re in for a long, dull, ugly turn in cultural production, a tedious variation on Socialist Realism that will not be a pleasure to watch and to read.