Can art change the world?

The question of whether art can change the world in a way it's a bit of a trick question because the reality is that art is actually an essential part of life and therefore we find that huge events which transform society and transform people's lives like revolutions for example inevitably find some sort of connection or expression to art. And yet in most people's existence arts I would say is disconnected from their lives. But when revolutions take place all of that changes and really I would say that there's not really been a revolution in in the period of class society that hasn't had this sort of corresponding expression in art in one way or another. Now of course art is a valuable tool in the transformation of society. There have been many artists that have sought to express revolutionary ideas in their art or even use their art as a direct weapon in the class struggle in the in the struggle to change society. And as communists we have to understand and value and defend great art and not just because it might be connected to revolution. We have to champion art because art is one of the things that makes life truly worth living and communism is about that just as much as it is about having food to eat or a roof over one's head. But also we have to remember that we can't ask more of art than what it's capable of and importantly we cannot judge art solely from the standpoint of Marxism or politics or the class struggle. We can't narrow down art to these things because that would be a huge mistake. The revolutionary struggle cannot be waged solely on the ideological front if you want to use that expression. Now art can play a revolutionary role but it must be linked to the overthrowing of capitalism itself which is the only thing that can guarantee the future of art and the future of all society. So in terms of what art is fundamentally we have to talk about the aesthetic sense right? The sense of what is beautiful. Now, that is something that is fundamental to the human species. A sense of aesthetics, a sense of beauty, it does exist in other species, in other animals, but it's more instinctive. It's not self-conscious. Often this aesthetics is linked to biological needs such as the need for birds to mate, for example. Now, in humans art is different. Art is learned. It's not inherent. It arises and develops alongside productive activity and labor. So, art today is made by humans and it is enjoyed by humans for its own sake. Even if originally, as art developed, it had a direct connection to what we call the productive forces, the way we produce and distribute the necessities of life, or even if art and aesthetics had a biological origin like in the need for mating, for example, like I mentioned in in some species. So, that is to say that we produce art because it is pleasurable, because it is enjoyable, not just because there is a utilitarian need for it, right? So, what is art at its root? Art is about communication at the end of the day of an inner state of mind within the artist that is represented in one way or another. And there is no super historical ideal of beauty, right? The idea of what is beautiful changes quite dramatically, actually, in different parts of the world and in different periods of time. Also, there is no single clear-cut definition of art and I would say that comrades should not be preoccupied with trying to define what art is or isn't at any given time because what is art is always changing. It's always molding and adapting and being redefined. For example, filmmaking is one of the most beloved forms of art today, and yet it didn't really exist 150 years ago. You know, are video games art, for example? No, I would say personally that a lot of them are made with a lot of artistic merit, and yet I would say that we are at the very early stages of that art form in terms of its uh existence, right? So we can see a lot of how these things will develop and and come into existence, you know, very rapidly. And changes in artistic ideas, artistic styles, concepts, trends, they are down to changes in the ideas, right? That are in the minds of the artists and the people that create them. Now, if you read some of the great sort of history books on arts, they talk about these changing ideas, right? That's a correct thing to do. But the point is, we would say that this changing psychology, this changing mindset of the artist does not come from nowhere because, you know, as Marxists we say that ideas do not come from the sky. They have a material basis in the real world. Now Trotsky says that in all social phenomenon, including arts, they all have a common root, which is in the development of the means of production. The production and distribution of the necessities of life. The way we do that determines, in the final analysis only, right? The social relations which are formed in society and the subsequent ideas which emerge. And that includes morality, religion, philosophy, and art is of course uh connected to this. Now, that does not mean there is a direct link between economics and arts. There is no direct link between ideology and economics in in in in a general sense. But what we have to say is that for 5,000 years we have lived in class society and in one way or another that has stamped its character on the art that we have seen produced in this period. So the developments of the means of production does of course push arts and culture forward. There are certain art forms like architecture, for example, which are very dependent and closely connected with productive technique. But also, we have to recognize when we study art history that there are periods of economic ascendancy and also periods of economic decline which have produced great art. Each form of art has its own laws and you have to study them. You can't compare them all in a one-to-one fashion. You've got to look at their development and their history because again, there is a big danger of being mechanical and rigid when trying to make these broad generalizations about art and trying to understand it from a materialist perspective. And we do have to say as well that being a Marxist does not automatically make you an expert in art just in the same way as it wouldn't make you an expert in science for example. You take music. The bourgeois revolutions and the developments in the means of production have clearly led to spectacular advances in musical instruments, in techniques, the development of orchestras and things like that. But if you look at other forms of art, you look at drawing, painting and sculpture and I'm talking about these three things specifically. Um it is by no means given that those forms of art are better than the past because the productive forces are a higher level today. For example, it's not an accident that Pablo Picasso who many considered to be the greatest artist of the 20th century, he openly said that primitive cave paintings in his opinion were the best depictions of animals ever created. He said we have nothing to teach these people. And why? Because those paintings and those drawings reflect a completely different consciousness and mindset and relationship with the natural world that cannot be replicated. And those paintings are indeed beautiful and incredible. So I would encourage comrades to avoid being too categorical in saying what is the correct style of art either. For example, you look at Western painting and drawing after the Renaissance. The aim was to achieve optical naturalism to try and mimic the way that things appear in reality to our eyes. They used single point perspective and they used layering of precise detail. But if you look at other paintings, right? You look at Eastern aesthetics like Chinese traditional landscape painting which I would say is equally beautiful and equally technically proficient if you want to use terms like that. Their depictions are different. They use shifting perspectives, which make the paintings look unrealistic in a certain sense, but they also create a sense of storytelling and meditative contemplation. I've got an example for everyone here. Look at the banner behind us, right? It was designed by comrade Amy Harris, and I think it's I think it's very good. I think it's beautiful. Now look at the size of the person there. Look at the size of the flag. Look at the size of the tent, right? Is that done in a realistic scale? It's not unless this person is 30 ft and and that flag is the size of a hill. It's not realistic, right? Does that mean it's bad? Does that mean it's ugly? Of course not. You tell me, right? This is the kind of idea that we have to understand in relation to to painting and drawing. Is Renaissance painting automatically better because it just happens to be more detailed, it is more precise, and because the productive forces were at a high level at that period compared to other places? Well, not necessarily, right? There's not always a simple answer to these questions. Now I have a quote from Trotsky's Literature and Revolution to help illustrate this point. I quote Trotsky. With the exception of architecture, art is based on technique only in its last analysis. That is, only to the extent which the technique is the basis of all cultural superstructures. The practical dependence of art, especially of the art of words, poetry, upon material technique is insignificant. A poem which sings of skyscrapers can be written in a far away province, a far away corner of some Russian province on yellow paper with a broken stub of a pencil. In order to inflame the bright imagination of that province, it is quite enough if the skyscrapers are in America. So I don't have more time to go into detail on the history of art. We have a lot of great material on that by comrades like Alan Woods and others. I want to focus more on the connection between art and revolution. So, today we live in an almost paradoxical situation. In a way there has never been a more connection to art than what we have today. Capitalism has indeed revolutionized the productive forces. It's led to groundbreaking developments in art, in photography, film, complex instruments, computers, electronic music, right? These are all parts of those developments. Almost nine out of 10 of all adults today are literates. They can read and write. And that is a progressive development, right? It's a product of economic progress. A majority of people in the world, I would say, have access to phones. They have access to the internet. And that means that they can access music, film, TV, culture in in a relatively easy way, right? So, art and culture has long since broken from these narrow national boundaries. And we kind of have already have this world culture where people listen to the same music, they wear the same clothes, they watch the same kind of films, they have the same sort of cultural identity and interest. Now, if you think about the Trotsky quote I mentioned, right? He's talking about the idea of skyscrapers alone being enough to spark the imagination in people in parts of the world where no such thing even exists. Words, ideas, inspiration, concepts, these things can spread in this day and age to a far greater extent than they could ever do in the past. And yet today, even though there is this kind of abundance of art that surrounds our lives, I would say that in reality, in class society and the decline of capitalism, we've seen an adulteration of arts. We've It's contributed to its decay. There is a lot of art readily available, but it is largely mass-produced, profit-driven art with very little creative content behind it. You know, I mentioned that technology has advanced music, but it's also caused problems for it. If you look at streaming, for example, and the domination of streaming giants like Spotify in the art market and the way people consume art, new musical artists in effect are competing not only with all of the artists today, but they're competing with all music of all time because these things are actually more accessible than they ever were in the past. So, as a result, because of the market pressure, you've got a situation where musicians have resorted to writing Tik Tok songs for the algorithm with catchy hooks that are formulaic because they're designed to go viral cuz that's the only way that they can sort of get popular and and make a living. And perhaps what's more important than the proliferation, you know, of bad art is that art itself has become separated from people's lives and people's existence. Most people, I would say, are truly prohibited from created and and being involved in art. Their aesthetic sense is not fully developed. It's not fully utilized. Working class people are given bad art. They're given bad culture and they become accustomed to it. You know, they might even convince themselves that they are not that they're content with art of this quality. And this contributes to the domination of petty bourgeois and individualistic attitudes towards art in the art world. And I would say that further alienates ordinary people from the world of art. They think it's not for them, basically. Now, Marx explains in his early writings that through their activity and interactions, people change the world and in that process they change their consciousness. He also says that the manifestations of life of an individual are an also an expression of their social life and their existence. In other words, what we do on a day-to-day basis in the world is inseparable from our relationships with one another in society. Because we use our senses actively, not just passively. And through labor and through activity, we transform the world around us. But under capitalism, we're alienated from this process. We don't have a say in the work that we perform. We don't control the products of our labor, we don't own them, and often we don't even appreciate or agree with what we produce or what we work on on a on a day-to-day basis. And so, our sensuous activity under capitalism is necessarily one-sided and stunted. Now, I quote Marx, "The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. But the sense caught up in crude crude practical activity has only a restricted sense." So, in ordinary life under capitalism, people are not given the ability to think and to feel and to act as if they are real human beings. They're not free to pursue, enjoy, and experience art. And yet, these are the things which allow us to live a full humane existence. And really, if you think about it, that's why people strive to have beauty in their lives, even unconsciously, even if it's something small like having posters in your room or having some records that you listen to. Hegel, in his introduction to his lectures on aesthetics, he even talks about this is the reason why people dress themselves in in nice outfits, basically, and try and wear nice clothes. It's an expression of this deep desire to live beautiful lives, right? To have beauty. And no one, of course, is born an artistic genius. You know, talent, of course, has a genetic element, right? None of us would deny that, but that talent has to be honed, it has to be developed, it has to be identified at a young age and and fulfilled. But under capitalism, the vast majority of the masses do not have the opportunity to do this. They're usually too busy working long hours to have the time or the energy for art. And also, in a general sense, people in this society are emotionally repressed. They live in an insecure, uncertain world. They don't know if they're going to have rent to pay the bills. They don't know if they're going to be able to keep their jobs. They're not going to be able to know if they're going to feel part of anything in society. So, they feel vulnerable and alone and isolated. And in turn, that makes them too afraid to express themselves emotionally. They fear rejection. They might feel unworthy uh of just uh speaking and letting their voice be heard. So, yes, a lot of art is accessible in a technical sense due to the internet and due to computers, but I would say that there is still a hard limit on the type of development you can get from that sort of thing. There are many kinds of arts, theater, film, ballet, opera, classical music, architecture. If you don't have time, money, space, connections, I would say it is impossible for you to train yourself fully in these things. And so, this art becomes the sole preserve of the wealthy and the powerful, as it has always been in class society. But revolutions change and transform all of that. In a revolution, what were yesterday downtrodden and oppressed masses suddenly become involved in this hugely complex and engaging social activity. They involve themselves in mass strikes, uh in democratic assemblies, soviets, other forms of workers organization. And in that process, the masses achieve things they never thought were possible. And they begin to express themselves fully as human beings, and they can appreciate uh more complex art, uh deeper art if you want to use that term, uh which expresses things like the desire to change the world. Now, this sensuous outburst of human activity, which comes from the practical experience of carrying out a revolution, is part of that process of human beings striving to become whole again. Now, that is what a revolution provides for the masses. And actually, as I mentioned, I can't really think of a major revolution that's taken place in the last few hundred years that has not produced this outburst of creativity on artistic expression. Even in the bourgeois revolutions, this was the case. Although I would say for the bourgeois revolutions, it was more confined to sort of the expression of individual artistic geniuses, right? The great sort of artist. But it's there nonetheless. You look at the English Revolution, for example. You have the works of Andrew Marvell and the great John Milton. In the French Revolution of 1789, initially you have heroic neoclassicism as a style becoming popular and emerging, which is then uh superseded by romanticism. Pierre Beaumarchais, the playwright, uh he wrote the play The Marriage of Figaro, uh which probably comrades have heard uh was made into an opera by Mozart of the same name. Now, Napoleon Bonaparte described this play as the first shot of the French Revolution. The greatest poets of the time also celebrated and defended the French Revolution. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, uh and so did the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Uh and also the German poets Goethe and Schiller also defenders uh of the Russian Oh, sorry, of the French Revolution. Now, there was a similar response to the 1848 Revolutions. Uh Alan is a very Alan Woods is a very big fan of classical music, and he's always keen to point out the fact that uh the composer Richard Wagner actually fought in the 1848 Revolutions. Wagner actually wrote an essay called Art and Revolution, where he argued that uh art uh and true art cannot exist under capitalism, and and a revolution is necessary to free art from these constraints. And once capitalism develops fully and the proletariat emerges finally as a fully formed historical force, again you see a corresponding impact and change in the world of art. And of course, we have the great example of the Russian Revolution. And again, I can't go into too many details on this. Maybe comrades can come in on some of these points. But there are some other great examples from the 21st century that I think are worth mentioning as well. You look at the the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, for example. There was a huge outburst of street art and music uh that emerged at the time. There was a similar thing in the Egyptian Revolution, and also in the Arab Spring as a whole. Um and these latter examples, you know, of course are not on the scale of say the Russian Revolution, but again, they're sufficient to demonstrate this inherent connection between art uh and revolution. So, the question then arises, I suppose, um what is political art? What is revolutionary art? What are some of these features? Because, of course, art is created by individual artists at the end of the day, right? Even if it's done, you know, uh collectively. There are times, though, when the individual consciousness of the artist begins to align with a revolutionary process taking place in society. Can art have political messages? Can art be a weapon for revolution? Well, the answer is yes to both of those questions. But, we have to stress, does this mean that art has to take a particular form in order to be good, in order to be revolutionary? Well, again, not necessarily. Should political art or revolutionary art be judged solely from the standpoint of whether the political ideas within it are correct or not, whether they're Marxist or not? Again, I don't think that's the case, right? To make this clear, what we're saying is that it is not a prerequisite that an artist has a full understanding of Marxism, a full understanding of dialectical materialism, in order to produce good art. And actually, I would say that the world would be a very boring place if all art was about Marxism and the class struggle. In fact, art doesn't have to be directly about politics at all, uh as opposed to something like individual emotions for it to be good, for it to be engaging, for it to be revolutionary. I'll take a great example from the 20th century. So, Diego Rivera was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His work is imbued with revolutionary spirit, and Trotsky directly praised Rivera's work, uh and he collaborated with him in 1938 on the Surrealist Manifesto. Now, Trotsky describes Rivera as an authentic revolutionary, uh who played an invaluable role in inspiring others with his imagination and with his ardor. Now, we have a great article on Mexican muralism, uh in the Latin America issue of the item that came out this year, which goes into further detail about the work that was produced at the time. So, Rivera was a fantastic artist, right? You might Rivera must have been an excellent Marxist, a great communist for him to make such incredible art. But in fact, the opposite was true. He was a terrible communist. Trotsky considered Rivera Rivera a personal friend and an ally of the Fourth International who played an invaluable role. But also, Trotsky in his writings described Rivera as impulsive, as unpredictable. And he also said that he was organically incapable of carrying out the day-to-day work of a revolutionary. Um Trotsky actually says he never turns up to branch in his writings. >> [laughter] >> Rivera thought that because he was a great artist, he could produce miracles in politics, but he couldn't, right? In fact, he made disastrous errors uh and judgment uh and his and he couldn't submit to the common decision-making of the party and structures of the party. And eventually, as is the case with most intellectuals, he actually went through an ideological crisis and eventually broke with Trotsky, with Marxism, and eventually with the Fourth International. And sadly, he actually reconciled himself in the end with Stalinism. There was a similar dynamic between uh the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and Lenin. Gorky was a very talented playwright. I recommend uh comrades uh investigate his works. He was a great playwright, a great author, and he was actually a close friend of Lenin. Uh and Gorky helped to finance the Bolsheviks over many years, but his political ideas and his temperament were terrible. And during the period of reaction that followed the 1905 revolution's defeat, Gorky actually joined Bogdanov's faction uh and they ended up opposing the October Revolution itself when it took place uh in 1917. So clearly, right? You don't have to be a genuine Marxist or good Marxist to be a good artist, right? There is an argument to be made that certain artists' work suffers when they abandon revolution, when they become Stalinists, etc., right? But that's a separate point. You know, in general, we have to say it's not enough to judge art solely on the artist's politics alone. So what are some of the elements of great revolutionary art? Well, one of the first and most important factors is the idea of expressing truth. You know, Lenin said that to tell the truth is a revolutionary thing. Uh and one of the great things about art is it because art utilizes imagination, conscious distortion, abstraction, it can help illuminate truth in ways which mere facts alone cannot. In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare gives Hamlet the following lines about acting. The purpose of playing, whose ends both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. To show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Art holds the mirror up to society. It reveals the truth about the world that we live in. And again, there is no one single way that an artist can do this. The realist style of painting emerged in France under the direct influence of the French Revolution and the 1848 Revolution. You have Gustave Courbet's striking realist images of ordinary peasants and working people. It was an attack on the stuffy neoclassicist style of the French Academy at the time. But again, truth does not always mean attempting a one-to-one imitation of nature, right? Copying nature. Later on, painting develops well beyond realism uh to express emotion and truth in new ways. Look at the paintings of Van Gogh, for example, right? His painting style and his technique is one of the most powerful and striking and beautiful examples of emotion uh that has ever been put to painting. Take Cubism, for example, right? One might think that Cubist paintings, again, are not realistic, but in the way, you know, um that the abstractions of Cubism actually demonstrate an even greater sense of how humans perceive the world through sight, time, memory, and movement. Because, of course, this has been proven by science. When we look at objects, our eyes don't stand still. They make tiny, rapid, microscopic movements uh from different angles. And those images and those perceptions are then pieced together to form our picture of of the world, right? And cubism demonstrates that fragmented process and the different perspectives that are necessary to form and perceive an object, right? We have an article in the In Defense of Marxism magazine about the development of psychological realism in acting and how Constantine Stanislavski's ideas helped to develop how to help to allow actors to achieve emotionally truthful performances. And one of the points that's emphasized in that article is that something can be emotionally realistic even if it is fantastical, even if it is imaginary and false. It just has to feel as if it is real emotionally for it to be good. Great novels don't always base themselves on a realistic depiction of the world, but they can still explore truths about reality about the world that we live in today. So art by consciously distorting the appearance of things can penetrate through the superficial and reveal deeper truths. The surrealist movement is a fantastic example of this. In expressing a warped and illogical view of reality, surrealism exposes the petty bourgeois hypocrisy and politeness sort of hypocrisy behind the politeness and reveals the under the truth the ugly truth that lies underneath. Realism in that circumstance might be too clunky. It might be too didactic. It might be ineffective at communicating these same ideas. If anyone's a fan of the film the films of David Lynch, I would say they do a similar thing in this period as well. Now in these examples, what is surreal, what is distorted, what is exaggerated, right? All of these things are advantages rather than disadvantages in communicating certain ideas. Again, I don't have time to go into further detail, but I recommend that comrades revisit the Revolution Festival talk we have on surrealism by comrade Will Collins. So revolutionary art of course is about truth, right? There are other artists though that go even further than this concept. They seek to use their art as conscious weapons in the revolutionary struggle. They aim to change society itself with their art. Now, the great communist and German playwright Bertolt Brecht, he said it best in his quote, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer to shape it." Now, of course, that idea, which I think is correct, kind of contradicts everything I just said earlier, right? But, the point is again, there is no one way to do this, right? There is no one form of art that the that the artist has to produce in order to be an aid to revolution, in order to express truth. What are some of the best examples of this idea? Now, I would say one of the best examples is the great El Lissitzky, the typographer, who emerged in the Russian Revolution. His Red Wedge manages to strike a rare balance of being quite literally a Bolshevik propaganda poster, and yet at the same time a magnificent piece of art. The Red Wedge was a mass-produced propaganda poster that was created during the Russian Civil War. And not only does the abstract form of this poster brilliantly condense the essence of the Russian Revolution, it was a call to arms for the building of socialism. You know, El Lissitzky is quoted as saying these things. There were too many examples to mention, but I have to just focus on one more, which I think is the clearest. And as I mentioned, it's it's the plays of Bertolt Brecht. So, Brecht considered himself a communist. He was radicalized following World War I, where he actually fought. And his ideas developed very rapidly from the '20s onwards. Now, he's most known for the concept of epic theater. So, in short, Brecht's style of theater is designed so audiences wouldn't lose themselves in the emotion of a play. Brecht went >> [snorts] >> He wanted audience members to not forget that the play is an artificial creation, it's fake. He wanted them to think about the performance critically and relate it to the real world outside the stage. He didn't want them to be too emotionally invested, but instead be sort of critically detached. Now, if you watch Brecht's plays, especially the later ones, uh are masterpieces in my opinion. You know, they're borderline propaganda in many ways, right? Uh they're didactic. They're intended to teach a lesson as well as just entertain. You know, the the message is very clear in Brecht's work. Capitalism is bad. It has this or that effect on women, children. It produces all manner of themes, cutthroats, horrible people. And of course, he says very clearly the audience should think about this and then do something about it. They should change society. So, he uses staging techniques to remind people of the artificiality of the plays. And basically, he wants people to to watch the play, decide that capitalism is bad, and then go out and be revolutionaries and transform society. So, did Brecht succeed in using theater as a vehicle for revolution and social change? Well, no. He failed. Uh he failed to do this, right? Despite being a great artist. Some of his plays, for example, when they were produced, like The Threepenny Opera, uh which again is a brilliant piece of work, uh they were enormous they were enormous commercial successes. They were hugely popular at the time. And yet, they had zero impact on the class struggle uh in Germany. Brecht was a genuine artist. He was a great artist. And I think he was genuine in his communism, although it's a it's a bit ambiguous, I think, in his public statements. But the reality is that Brecht did not understand Marxism. In fact, Brecht was trained in Marxism uh by a petty bourgeois German intellectual called Karl Korsch, whose ideas are very similar to the Frankfurt School's and and Lukács's. Now, Korsch argued that the failure of the German Revolution was due to insufficient preparation on the ideological front. Right? In other words, uh well, the workers are to blame, but also, you don't need to change society. You just need to change the ideas in people's heads, right? You just need to offer them new alternative ideas, new culture. Now, I think this is where Brecht's sort of philosophical ideas came from, and that's how he formed his ideas on on theatercraft, actually. Now, he had this idea of theater and and culture being this ideological battleground, right? For revolution. But this idea was not Marxism, right? It is not something that Marx or Engels or Lenin or Trotsky ever argued. Uh it's it's Frankfurt School stuff, right? It's critical theory. The idea of solely fighting on the intellectual front is alien to Marxism. So clearly, Brecht's political and philosophical foundations were all wrong. Does that mean Brecht's art was bad? Does that mean he was a bad artist? Well, of course not. Clearly not. In fact, you can see, even with Brecht, how wildly incorrect and actually reactionary political and philosophical ideas can actually producing can actually produce incredible art, right? Brecht's ideas on theater, in my opinion, um he's single-handedly responsible for the continued relevance of theater in the age of film and in the age of computers. And I think he's second only to Stanislavski in terms of importance for theater as an art form. But as great as Brecht was, he did not bring out about a revolution. He could not change society through his art alone because again, you can't ask art to do what it is not capable of doing. Art alone cannot change society. It can only do so as part of a broader class struggle, a revolutionary struggle. So just to bring things to a conclusion then, art can and will play a revolutionary role in the struggles of the future. And we have to build a revolutionary communist party and the revolutionary communist international. We have to win over the biggest and the best and and the brightest artists and put them in service of the proletarian revolution. Art is important because it's important for us to build a powerful organization. Uh and in doing so, we need to have, you know, basically all of the talents of people inside the organization and outside of the organization. Now Daniel Morley at the recent CC meeting, he made a very interesting point about how the CIA, following World War II in their war against the Soviet Union and communism, they actually sent American orchestras on tour. They paid for them to go all across Europe in this war to win hearts and minds in this in this war against communism. Now, we have to wage a similar struggle, right? Because the CIA understood and recognized the power of that art to move people in an emotional way. They knew that it was more powerful than 10 speeches given by some random American bureaucrats on the need for a sort of capitalism. If we eventually get to thousands of members, which I have absolute confidence that we will, if we are all dry, boring, rigid, and mechanical in our approach to art, to culture, to science, we're going to be weaker as a result of it. We're not going to be able to win people over. Um in the past, a few decades ago even, uh the Heliades, uh the Workers Revolutionary Party, they had Vanessa Redgrave, the actress, uh as a member. Uh the Mandelay Group, they had John Lennon selling their newspaper on public demos. You know, that should be us. We should win these people over, right? And I think we've already made a start, right? We're making progress in this field. Ken Loach, who I consider to be the greatest living British film director, he supported Fiona's election campaign. We've got Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. He's basically Fiona's mate at this point supporting her campaign. >> [snorts] >> Pink Floyd changed the face of 20th century music, right? And this is the potential that we can uh that we can get in the party. So again, in the RCP, we stand for and we defend total artistic freedom, right? I can't stress that point enough. We do not narrowly fit art into this box of what we think it ought to be about. Eventually, what we have to do though, through revolution, is to lay the foundations for a future society which will allow everyone to fulfill their artistic potential and to truly free art from the fetters of capitalism and class society. And I'm going to end with a quote from Lenin, which he made in a 1922 speech. And the context is this is the Soviet Union straight after a brutal civil war, a country that is on the brink of economic collapse. Now, I quote Lenin. Fantasy is a virtue of inestimable value, and it is vainly presumed that it is only needed by the poet. This is a foolish prejudice. Even in mathematics it is needed. Even the discovery of the differential and the integral calculi would have been impossible without fantasy. Even science requires a flight of fancy. It requires imagination. But it's through our revolutionary and practical activity that we can turn these dreams into reality. Humans have had the dream of flight for over a millennia, but it's through science and it's through progress and development that we actually achieve these things. We've made them into a reality. So, comrades, we are communists. We are revolutionaries. We aim to overthrow capitalism and bring about a socialist revolution to usher in a new world, and that's a huge task. It is a monumental task. And if we're going to succeed in it, then I would say, yes, we need uncompromising dialectical materialism and Marxism. We need willpower and determination to smash obstacles. We need to build the RCP and the RCI. But we also need something more. We need something else. We're going to need some creativity, some imagination. Yes, we're going to need some emotion as well. And those are the things which art can give us. >> [applause]