At 23:20 02/01/2007, Yoshie wrote about some holes in Marxist
thinking and said:
There are a few exceptions, though, but mainly in the area of
Marxist art, e.g.:
<blockquote>For example, the learning play The Measures Taken
confronts the audience with basic questions of revolution: violence,
discipline, the structure of the party, the relation to the masses,
revolutionary justice, and so on. In the plot, revolutionaries are
forced to sacrifice a comrade to advance the aims of the revolution
and he submits to the discipline. There is no "correct doctrine" set
forth; the actors are to present a scene and then discuss it with the
audience. Indeed, I saw a performance of this play in the 1970s and it
elicited strenuous debate among the members of the audience --
Stalinists, Trotksyists, members of the New Left, liberals, and
hardcore anti-communists -- about politics and morality. (Douglas
Kellner, "Brecht's Marxist Aesthetic,"
<http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell3.html>)</blockquote>
Most Marxists avoid the kind of hard questions that Brecht sought to
compel the audience to consider.
This is something that artists like Brecht can do and do
well. But, how often do we take the work of those artists and create
a forum which does compel the audience to consider those questions?
How many people have used this play or others in order to explore
these problems and to help develop a revolutionary consciousness? I
remember a reading of this very play way back when I was in grad
school in Wisconsin and it was extremely effective--- exactly what
Kellner describes from a decade later.
Around 5 years ago, when working with a group, 'Rebuilding
the Left' (self-explanatory name), I staged a reading of Wallace
Shawn's 'The Fever' by dividing what was written as a long monologue
into sequences to be read by 5 non-professionals drawn from the
different constituencies we were trying to organise (eg., trade
union, feminist, anti-globalisation, community and environmental
activists). The play is a wonderful one (including an excellent
description of reading Capital and understanding... briefly... the
concept of commodity fetishism), which focuses upon a rich white
liberal who goes to an unnamed country of the South, sympathises with
the poor and thus the revolutionaries who are fighting and being
tortured. As the play continues, however, the protagonist turns
against the poor and supports the torture of those who would try to
change things; the key turning point occurs where s/he is thinking
about giving money to a poor person and then thinks, 'why not give
ALL my money to her?' and continues-- THAT's the question you must
NEVER ask! (It's not a big leap to--- I WORKED for my money....).
Once the reading was over, I posed a series of questions--
basically, 'what was to be done?' What were the options? I
anticipated (correctly) that each of the readers would attract their
own friends drawn largely from their constituencies. What I never
expected was that the most vigorous participants in the discussion
that followed (2 nights with different readers) were the readers
themselves who were completely absorbed in the play in a way that
observers could not be. (Ie., a rich discussion with positions
like--- this is a male perspective, this is liberalism, this is the
difference between liberalism and marxism, there are no
individualistic solutions, etc.) Ie., a great success, I felt, but
one major problem (before you try this at home): it's too long! The
reading itself takes about 100 minutes, and when you add a bathroom,
etc break, you have two hours before the discussion has even begun. I
thought I'd try editing it down to a hour's length to avoid the
inevitable loss of people, exhaustion for many, etc and then to
present it again, but other things have intervened. But, it was a
great learning experience.
I should note as well that we put these activities on at
what was then a great annual Vancouver event, 'Mayworks', two weeks
of political art and discussion at the time of May Day. (The other
activities organised that year for it by RtL were 4 panels on the
theme of 'Thinking Practice', exploring current forms of activism,
and a staged performance of Marcos' writings.) Also, for the record,
RtL no longer exists in Vancouver as most of its activists are
involved in the anti-war movement; however, the best parts of it in
Ontario now function as 'the Socialist Project'.
So, back to Yoshie's point: Brecht and other writers can
pose important and hard questions, but do they make a sound in the forest?
in solidarity,
michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela.
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