Editor's note: The following originally appeared in Political Affairs, March 1985. It is intended as part of an ongoing discussion of theory. Here the author addresses some aspects of this question through the lens of culture.

In 1951, Paul Robeson made the following declaration at a conference in New York organized around the theme of equal rights of Negroes in the arts, sciences and professions:

There are despoilers abroad in our land, akin to those who attempted to throttle our Republic at its birth. Despoilers who would have kept my beloved people in unending serfdom, a powerful few who blessed Hitler as he destroyed a large segment of a great people….

All [the] millions of the world stand aghast at the sight and the name of America – but they love us; they look to us to help create a world where we can all live in peace and friendship, where we can exchange the excellence of our various arts and crafts, the manifold wonders of our mutual scientific creations, a world where we can rejoice at the unleashed power of our innermost selves, of the potential of great masses of people. To them we are the real America. Let us remember that.

And let us learn how to bring to the great masses of the American pope our culture and our art. For in the end, what are we talking about when we talk about American culture today? We are talking about a culture that is restricted to the very, very few. How many workers ever get to the theatre? I was in concerts for 20 years, subscription concerts, the two thousand seats gone before any Negro in the community, and workers, could even hear about a seat….Only by going into the trade unions and singing on the picket lines and in the struggles for the freedom of our people – only in this way could the workers of this land hear me. [1]

More than three decades later, this problem articulated by Paul Robeson still remains one of the main challenges facing progressive artists and political activists: How do we collectively acknowledge our popular cultural legacy and communicate it to the masses of our people, most of whom have been denied access to the social spaces reserved for art and culture? In the United States, a rich and vibrant tradition of people's art has emerged from the history of labor militancy and the struggles of Afro-Americans, women and peace activists. It is essential that we explore that tradition, understand it, reclaim it, and glean from it the cultural nourishment that can assist us in preparing a political and cultural counteroffensive against the regressive institutions and ideas spawned by advanced monopoly capitalism.

As Marx and Engels long ago observed, art is a form of social consciousness – a special form of social consciousness that can potentially awaken an urge in those effected by it to creatively transform their oppressive environments. Art can function as a sanitizer and a catalyst, propelling people toward involvement in organized movements seeking to effect radical social change. Art is special because of its ability to influence feelings as well as knowledge. Christopher Caudwell, the British Communist who wrote extensively on aesthetics, once defined the function of art a the socializing of the human instincts and the education of the human emotions:

Emotion, in all its vivid coloring, is the creation of ages of culture acting on the blind, unfeeling instincts. All art, all education, all day-to-day social experience, draw it out … and direct and shape its myriad phenomena. [2]

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. While not all progressive art need be concerned with explicitly political problems – indeed, a love song can be progressive if it incorporates a sensitivity toward the lives of working-class women and men – I want to specifically explore overt sociopolitical meanings in art with the purpose of defining the role art can play in hastening social progress.

Because the history of Afro-American culture reveals strong bonds between art and the struggle for Black liberation, it holds important lessons for those who are interested in strengthening the bridges between art and people's movements today. Of all the art forms historically associated with Afro-American culture, music has played the greatest catalytic role in awakening social consciousness in the community. During the era of slavery, Black people were victims of a conscious strategy of cultural genocide, which proscribed the practice of virtually all African customs with the exception of music. If slaves were permitted to sing as they toiled in the fields and to incorporate music into their religious services, it was because the slaveocracy failed to grasp the social function of music in general and particularly the central role music played in all aspects of life in West African society. As a result, Black people were able to create with their music an aesthetic community of resistance, which in turn encouraged and nurtured a political community of active struggle for freedom. This continuum of struggle, which is at once aesthetic and political, has extended from Harriet Tubman's and Nat Turner's spirituals through Bessie Smith's "Poor Man's Blues" and Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit," through Max Roach's "Freedom Suite," and even to the progressive raps on the popular music scene of the 1980's.

With the Afro-American spiritual, a language of struggle was forged that was easily understood by the slaves as it was misinterpreted by the slaveholders. While the slaveocracy attempted to establish absolute authority over the slaves' individual and communal lives, the spirituals were both causes and evidence of an autonomous political consciousness. These songs formed the complex language that both incorporated and called forth a deep yearning for freedom. When the slaves sang, "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel and Why Not Every Man?", the utilized religious themes to symbolize their own concrete predicament and their own worldly desire to be free. When they sang "Sampson Tore the Building Down," they made symbolic reference to their desire to see the oppressive edifice of slavery come crashing down.

If I had my way,
O Lordy, Lordy,
If I had my way;
If I had my way,
I would tear this building down.

Oftentimes the religious music of the slaves played real and instrumental roles in the operation of the underground railroad and in the organization of antislavery insurrections. The lyrics of "Follow the Drinking Gourd," for example, literally provided a map of one section of the underground railroad, and "Steal Away to Jesus" was a coded song rallying together those engaged in the organization of Nat Turner's rebellion. But even when the spirituals were not linked to specific actions in the freedom struggle, they always served, epistemologically and psychologically, to shape the consciousness of the masses of Black people, guaranteeing that the fires of freedom would burn within them. As Sidney Finkelstein pointed out,

The antislavery struggle was the core of the truffle for democracy, so spirituals embodied in their music and poetry the affirmation of an unbreakable demand for freedom. [3]

The spirituals have directly influenced the music associated with other people's movements at various moments in the history of the United States. Many songs of the labor and peace movements have their origins in the religious music of slaves, and the "freedom songs" of the Civil Rights Movement were spirituals whose lyrics were sometimes slightly altered in order to reflect more concretely the realities of that struggle.

Even the blues, frequently misrepresented as a music form focusing on trivial aspects of sexual love, are closely tied to Black people's strivings for freedom. In the words of James Cone:

For many people, a blues song is about sex or a lonely woman longing for her rambling man. However, the blues are more than that. To be sure, the blues involve sex and what that means for human bodily expression, but on a much deeper level … the express a black perspective on the incongruity of life and the attempt to achieve meaning in a situation fraught with contradictions. As Aunt Molly Jackson of Kentucky put it: "The blues are made by working people … when they have a lot of problems to solve about their work, when their wages are low … and they don't know which way to turn and what to do. [4]

And, indeed Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, reached the apex of her career when she composed and recorded a song transmitting an unmistakable political message, entitled "Poor Man's Blues." This song evoked the exploitation and manipulation of working people by the wealthy and portrayed the rich as parasites accumulating their wealth and fighting wars with the labor of the poor.

Another pinnacle in the evolution of Afro-American music was Billie Holiday's incorporation of the political anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" into her regular repertoire. Throughout Lady Day's career, thousands of people were compelled to confront the brutal realities of southern racism, even as they sought to escape the problems of everyday life through music alcohol, and the ambiance of smoke-filled nightclubs. Undoubtedly, some went on to actively participate in the antilynching movement of that era.

That Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit" in 1939 was no accident. Neither was the fact that the lyrics of this song were composed by progressive poet Lewis Allan, who was associated with activist struggles of the 1930s. The thirties remain the most exciting and exuberant period in the evolution of American cultural history. The process of developing a mature people's art movement today can be facilitated by a serious examination of that era's achievements. As Phillip Bonosky points out in a 1959 Political Affairs article entitled "The Thirties in American Culture":

There is every reason in the world why official reaction should want the thirties to be forgotten as if they never existed. For that period remains the watershed in the American democratic traditions. It is a period which will continue to serve both the present and the future as a reminder and as an example of how an aroused people, led and spurred on by the working class, can change the entire complexion of the culture of a nation. [5]

Bourgeois ideologists have consequently attempted to

…misrepresent and burn out the consciousness of the American people, and first of all the artists and intellectuals, the fact that the making of a people's culture once did exist in the United States and was inspired, to a large degree, by the working class, often led, and largely influenced, by the Communist Party. [6]

Answering the charges leveled against the Communist Party that it "belittles and vulgarizes the rule of culture," Bonosky argues that no other political party in the entire history of this country had ever manifested such a serious concern for art. The Communist Party was involved, for example, in the 1935 Call for an American Writers' Congress – which claimed Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and Erskine Caldwell among its signers. As a result of the work of the Communist Party and other progressive forces, artists won the right to work as artists in projects under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. What the WPA artists accomplished was an unprecedented achievement in the history of the United States: Art was brought to the people on a truly massive scale. It could no longer be confined to the private domain, monopolized by those whose class background made galleries, the first time, American art became public art. This meant, for example, that working-class people utilizing the services of the post office could simultaneously appreciate the public murals painted there. Sculpture, music, and theater were among the other arts directly taken to the people during that era. Moreover, to quote Bonosky once more, when these programs were threatened with dissolution,

…it was the Communist Party that struggled to heroically to save the art projects and with them of course the theory that art was responsible to the people of which these projects were the living embodiment. For the first time in American history artists and writers walked the picket lines in the name of and in the defense of the right of artists to be artists. [7]

The radical approach to art and culture inspired by the Communist Party and other Left forces during the Great Depression involved more than the forging of an art that was publicly accessible to the masses. Much of the art of that period was people's art in the sense that artists learned how to pay attention to the material and emotional lives of working people in America in the pores of working out the content of their aesthetic creations. Meridel LeSeuer explored the lives of working people in her literature as Woody Guthrie composed songs about their lives and struggles. This emerging people's art was therefore a challenge to the dominant bourgeois culture. Artists not only felt compelled to defend their right to communicate the real pains, joys, and aspirations of the working class through their art, but many went on to become activists in the labor struggles and in the fight for the rights of the unemployed and especially of Black people. In the process, of course, new artists were summoned up from the ranks of these struggles.

Bourgeois aesthetics has always sought to situate art in a transcendent realm, beyond ideology, beyond socioeconomic realities, and certainly beyond the class struggle. In an infinite variety of ways, art has been represented as the pure subjective product of individual creativity. Lenin's 1905 article "Party Organization and Party Literature" challenged this vision of art and developed the principle of partisanship in art and literature – a principle with which many progressive artists of the 1930s were, at least implicitly in agreement. Lenin made it absolutely clear that in insisting that aesthetic creations be partisan, he was not advocating the dictatorship of the party over art and literature.

There is not question that literature is least of all subjects to mechanical adjustment or leveling to the rule of the majority over the minority. There is no question either that in this field greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content. [8]

He pointed out, however, that the bourgeois demand for abstract subjective freedom in art was actually a stifling of the freedom of creativity. Literature and art, he said, must be free not only from police censorship,

…but from capital, from careerism, and … bourgeois anarchist individualism. Partisan literature and art will be truly free, because it will further the freedom of millions of people. [9]

What are the current prospects for the further expansion of an art that is not afraid to declare its partisan relationship to people's struggles for economic, racial, and sexual equality? Not only must we acknowledge and defend the cultural legacy that has been transmitted to us over the decades, but we must also be in a position to recognize the overt as well as subtle hints of progressive developments in popular art forms today. Over the last several years, for example, such partisan films as Silkwood and Missing have emerged as beacons amid the routinely mediocre, sexist, violent, and generally antihuman values characterizing most producers of the Hollywood cinema industry.

To consider another art form, some of the superstars of popular-musical culture today are unquestionable musical geniuses, but they have distorted the Black music tradition by brilliantly developing its form while ignoring its content of struggle and freedom. Nonetheless, there is illumination to be found in contemporary Black music in the works of such artists as Stevie Wonder and Gil Scott-Heron, who have acknowledged the legacy of Black music in form and content alike. Their individual creations have awakened in their audiences a true sense of the dignity of human freedom.

Stevie Wonder's tune "Happy Birthday" touched the hearts of hundreds of thousands of young people mobilized them in support of the movement to declare Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. That Reagan was forced to sign the bill enacting that law, despite his openly articulated opposition, demonstrated that popular sentiment could prevail over the most intransigent official racism this country has known in many years.

Gil Scott-Heron's immensely popular son "B-Movie," released shortly after Reagan was elected to his first term, mobilized strong anti-Reagan sentiments in young Black public opinion. The song-poem particularly exposed the efforts of the Reagan propagandists to declare that he had received a "mandate" from the people.

The first thin I want to say is "mandate" my ass
Because it seems as though we've been convinced
That 26% of the registered voters
No even 26% of the American people
Form a mandate or a landslide…
But, oh yeah, I remember…
I remember what I said about Reagan
Acted like an actor/Hollyweird
Acted like a liberal
Acted like General Franco
When he acted like governor of California
Then he acted like a Republican
Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president
And now he acts like 26% of the registered voters
Is actually a mandate
We're all actors in this, actually

Bruce Springsteen's album Born in the USA was lauded by Reagan, who praised "the message of hope in the songs…of New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen" as he campaigned in that state for the presidency in 1984. However, Reagan's aides more than likely simply assumed that Springsteen's red, white, and blue album cover indicated acceptance of the fraudulent patriotism promoted by the Reagan administration. Two days after Reagan's remarks, Springsteen introduced a song entitled "Johnny 99" by saying, "I don't think the president was listening to this one," going on to sing about a desperate, debt-ridden, unemployed autoworkers who landed on death row after killing someone in the course of a robbery. Another one of his songs, "My Hometown," is about the devastation wrought by plant shutdowns:

Now Mainstreet's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back
To your hometown…

A new genre of music with roots in the age-old tradition of storytelling has gained increasing popularity among the youth of today. Rap music clearly reflects the daily live of working-class people particularly urban Afro-American and Latino youth. Many rap songs incorporate a progressive consciousness of current political affairs as revealed, for example, by the following rap by Grand Master Flash and Melle Mel which calls upon youth to associate themselves with the Reverend Jesse Jackson's 1984 campaign for the presidency:

Oh beautiful for spacious skies
And your amber waves of untold lies
Look at the politicians trying to do a job
But they can't help but look like the mob
Get a big kickback, put it away
Watch the FBI watch the CIA
They want a bigger missile and a faster jet
But yet they forgot to hire the vets

Hypocrites and Uncle Toms are talking trash
Let's talk about Jesse
Liberty and Justice are a thing of the past
Let's talk about Jesse
They want a stronger national at any cost
Let's talk about Jesse
Even if it means that everything will soon be lost
Let's talk about Jesse
He started on the bottom, now he's on the top
Let's talk about Jesse
He proved that he can make it, so don't ever stop

Now let's stand together and let the whole world see
Our brother Jesse Jackson go down in history
So vote, vote, vote
Everybody get up and vote….

Young people are becoming more and more conscious of the need to oppose the nuclear-arms race. A rap tune popularized by Harry Belafonte's film Beat Street contains the following warning:

A newspaper burns in the sand
And the headlines say man the story's bad
Extra extra read all the bad news
On the war or peace
That everybody would lose
The rise and fall of the last great empire
The sound of the whole world caught on fire
The ruthless struggle the desperate gamble
The games that left the whole world in shambles
The cheats the lies the alibis
And the foolish attempt to conquer the skies
Lost in space and what is it worth
The president just forgot about earth
Spending all time billions and maybe even trillions
Because the weapons ran in the zillions…
A fight for power a nuclear shower
The people shout out in the darkest hour
It's sights unseen and voices unheard
And finally the bomb gets the last word…
…We've got to suffer when things get rougher
And that's the reason why we've got to get tougher
So learn from the past and work for the future
Don't be a slave to no computer
'Cause the children of man inherit the land
And the future of the world is in your hands.

While numerous examples of progressive trends in contemporary popular music might be proposed, it would be a gross misconception of the music industry to argue that such songs are representative of what young people are hearing on the airwaves today. In general, the popular-musical culture that greets young people has been rigorously molded by the demands of the capitalistic marketplace, which measures its products according to their profit-making potential. While progressive messages sometimes manage to slip through the net of capitalist production, by and large the musical culture it advances promotes reified sexuality, crass individualism, and often violent, sexist, antiworking-class values. Many talented musicians ultimately destroy their artistic potential as they attempt to create music that conforms to what is deemed salable by the market. As Marx pointed out long ago in Theories of Surplus Value, "capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production namely poetry and art." [10]

We cannot expect mass popular art to express stronger and more efficacious progressive themes without the further development of an art movement philosophically and organizationally allied with the people's struggles. In recent years, conscious political art has become increasingly evident. The importance of the Chicago Peace Museum, for example, should not be underestimated. Nor should the development of the national movement Artists' Call Against Intervention in Central America. This mobilization, which spread to twenty-five cities across the country, came as a response to an appeal from the Sandinista Cultural Workers' Association:

May it go down in the history of humanity that one day during the twentieth century, in the face of the gigantic aggression that one of the smallest countries in the world, Nicaragua, was about to suffer, artists and intellectuals of different nationalities and generations raised align with us the banner of fraternity, in order to prevent our total destruction. [11]

In San Francisco alone, over two hundred artists participated in three major exhibitions. Funds collected nationwide by this movement were donated to the Association of Cultural Workers in Nicaragua, the University of El Salvador, a labor union in El Salvador, and to Guatemalan refugees. Another artists' movement in solidarity with Central America that emerged in the San Francisco Bay area chose the name PLACA, which means to make a mark, to leave a sign. They dedicated an entire street of murals with the theme of opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America. In their manifesto, the artists and muralists proclaim:

PLACA members do not ally themselves with this Administration's policy that has created death and war and despair, and that threatens more lives daily. We aim to demonstrate in visual/environmental terms our solidarity, our respect, for the people of Central America. [12]

Similar to Artists' Call, a cultural movement in opposition to U.S. support for the racist and fascist policies of the South African government declared October 1984 Art Against Apartheid month. Exhibitions and cultural events advocating involvement in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia were held throughout the New York City area and in other cities across the country. At the San Francisco Art Institute, a group of artists associated with the Art Against Apartheid movement organized a month-long festival in the spring of 1985 in solidarity with the people of South Africa.

One of the most exciting progressive cultural developments is the smog movement, which has built musical bridges between the labor movement, Afro-American movement, the solidarity struggles with Central America and South Africa, and the peace movement. Such politically committed musicians as Sweet Honey in the Rock, Holly Near, and Casselberry-Dupree, have brought a keen awareness of these struggles into the women's movement. Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock has published numerous articles and delivered speeches appealing to those who support women's music to associate themselves with working-class struggles, antiracist movements, peace struggles and solidarity work. And anyone familiar with Sweet Honey's songs can attest to the fact that they effectively and poignantly promote these coalition politics. Occupational health hazards – asbestosis, silicosis, brown-lung and black-lung disease – are the enemies of "More Than a Paycheck," for example. In other songs, Sweet Honey evokes the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the murdered South African activist Steven Biko, and Mexican immigrants who fall prey to the repressive immigration laws of the United States.

Sisterfire, the annual women's music festival in which Sweet Honey in the Rock has played an instrumental role, attempts to actualize the concept of coalitions politics through cultural vehicles. In one of its manifestoes, Sisterfire was described as

a salutation to all women, working people, minorities and the poor who stand fast against dehumanizing political and economic systems. [13]

Moreover,

culture, in its most valid form, expresses a mass or popular character. It must not be defined and perpetuated by an elite few for the benefit of a few. Culture must, of necessity, reflect and chart humanity's attempt to live in harmony with itself and nature…. We are building bridges between the women's movement and other movements for progressive soil change. We are playing with fire, and we want nothing less from this event than to set loose the creative, fierce and awesome energies in all of you. [14]

Holly Near, who has been associated for many year with the women's music movement as well as with many other people's struggles, continues to encourage musicians to move beyond narrow social and political concerns and to promote justice for women and men of all races and nationalities. In 1984, she and Ronnie Gilbert did a "Dump Reagan" tour, which took them to 25 cities where they sang to over 25,000 people. Another exemplary action in the bridge-building effort undertaken by the women's music movement was the song written by Betsy Rose for the mayoral campaign of Black activist Mel King in Boston, entitled "We May Have Come Here on Different Ships, but We're in the Same Boat Now."

Within the development of this song movement, Communists have played important roles. The Ad Hoc Singers, for example, who first came together during the 1980 presidential campaign, have brought to the movement songs that deepen the class consciousness of those who experiences them. Their "People Before Profits," introduced during the first anti-Reagan campaign, is a virtual anthem of people's struggles. What is perhaps most important about the Ad Hoc Singers is that they bring to the song movement a dimension of concrete, activist experience in these struggles.

And, indeed, if we can anticipate the further expansion of people's culture today, it will be a direct function of the deepening and growing influence of mass movements. Progressive and revolutionary art is inconceivable outside of the context of political movements for radical change. If bold new art forms emerged with the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and more recently the Sandinista and Grenada Revolutions, then we can be certain that if we accomplish the task before us today of strengthening and uniting our mass movements, our cultural life will flourish. Cultural workers must thus be concerned not only with the creation of progressive art, but must be actively involved in the organization of people's political movements. An exemplary relationship between art and struggle has been at the very core of the journal Freedomways – not only does it serve as a vehicle for the dissemination of progressive Black literature, but it actively participates in the political struggles of Afro-Americans and their allies.

If cultural workers utilize their talents on an ever-increasing scale to accomplish the task of awakening and sensitizing people to the need for the a mass challenge to the ultraright, the prospects for strengthening and further uniting the antimonopoly movement, bringing together labor, Afro-Americans, women, an peace activists will greatly increase. As the movement wins victories, existing artists will draw inspiration format he creative energy of this process, and new artists will emerge as a result. If we are able to see this dynamic in motion, we will begin to move securely in the direction of economic, racial, and sexual emancipation – indeed, toward the ultimate goal of socialism – and we will be able to anticipate a peaceful future, free of the threat of nuclear war.

Notes:

1. Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1978, 3030-304.
2. Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 183.
3. Sidney Finkelstein, How Music Expresses Ideas, New York: International Publishers, 1971, 118.
4. James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, New York: Seabury Press, 1972, 115-116.
5. Phillip Bonosky, "The Thirties," Political Affairs, January 1959.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. V.I. Lenin, "Party Organization and Party Literature," in Lenin on Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970, 24.
9. Ibid.
10. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1976, 141.
11. "Artists call Against Intervention in Central America, brochure, San Francisco, 1984.
12. PLACA Mural Group: General Statement, brochure, San Francisco, 1985.
13. "Sisterfire: Statement of Purpose," leaflet, Washington, 1982.
14 Ibid.