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Book Review: The Art of Protest

By Joel Wendland

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2006 – online

Janaury – February 2006

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2-16-06, 9:08 am

The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

T.V. Reed
University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In the past 20 years, a number of scholars have written a handful of important studies that examine the cultural work of US leftists, especially those who were affiliated with or sympathetic to the Communist movement. Paul Buhle, Constance Coiner, Michael Denning, Barbara Foley, Gerald Horne, Andrew Hemingway, Robin D. G. Kelley, Robbie Lieberman, William Maxwell, Paul Mishler, Stacy I. Morgan, Bill Mullen, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Smethurst, Alan Wald and Kate Weigand have led the way in re-opening the historical record on forgotten moments of the Communist left’s cultural impact. Each of these authors have produced scholarship that rejected Cold War political biases and honestly and sensitively portrayed a movement that continues to have positive repercussions on modern US life.

This scholarship, however, has a built-in the time constraint: roughly 1930 to 1953 (depending on which scholar you read). The long "red decade" was a period of important labor struggles, democratic movements and cultural production, which for most of today’s scholars appears to have a definite ending. So where can readers who sympathize with the left, especially those movements that fight for radical, even revolutionary social change, turn when looking for histories of the left in the latter half of the 20th century?

Some of the scholars listed above continue to focus on different aspects of the long "red decade," while others have turned to other cultural studies projects unrelated to the Communist left. Stacy I. Morgan’s book, Rethinking Social Realism is an excellent new study of African American writers and artists influenced by social realism that makes a valiant, though unsuccessful, effort to move beyond the 1950s. Interestingly, few of the writers mentioned here (e.g. Kelley, Smethurst and Mullen with their recent books, Freedom Dreams, The Black Arts Movement and Afro-Orientalism, respectively) have produced new cultural studies of the US left in the post-McCarthyite period. Smethurst’s study of the continuity of the Communist-led cultural movements with radical cultural forces in the African American community in the 1960s and 1970s is a rare contribution indeed.

Based on this record, one suspects that most scholars who have studied Communist cultural movements have accepted that they ceased to exist sometime in the 1950s. At the height of its size and influence, the Communist-oriented cultural front, whether for good or ill, monopolized the left’s cultural scene. The movement had become such an important force on the left, that it is impossible to study the "red decade" without looking at the activities of people who were Communists or who sympathized with the ideas, actions and program of the movement. From film, to music, drama, poetry, novels and art, Communists and their allies helped produce a massive body of cultural work that often was widely respected, consumed on a mass scale by the public and made a long-lasting mark on culture in the US.

After the McCarthyite assault on political freedoms and the consequent weakening of the Communist Party as a movement force, however, the left and its cultural resources changed. Michael Denning, in his important study, The Cultural Front, hints at the closing of one period and the opening of the new by citing Bob Dylan’s 1964 poem "11 Outlined Epitaphs," which might be seen as a eulogy to what came to be called the "old left." Dylan’s musical career had begun with a search for the famed Depression-era folk singer Woody Guthrie, and by the early 1960s, Dylan supported Broadside magazine, a publication and cultural movement that included musicians Sis Cunningham, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, The Freedom Singers and other progressive musicians that had fought to survive McCarthyite blacklisting. It provided space for radical singers and songwriters to publicize their work and focused on supporting the civil rights and anti-nuclear weapons movements.

In "11 Outlined Epitaphs," Dylan reminisced about the "hungry thirties," Woody Guthrie, the rise of the CIO "an’ the nmu." (Right-wing National Maritime Union members used McCarthyite tactics and red-baiting to force Communist Party members to either leave the union or step down from leadership positions). At the close of his poem, Dylan laments the decline of this left:

ah where are those forces of yesteryear?
why didn’t they meet me here
an’ greet me here?

Soon after, Dylan symbolically celebrated his own break with the "old left" by adopting new musical styles, moving away from the topical songs and folk styles that some left cultural workers, in extreme cases, felt to be the highest form of working class musical expression. Instead Dylan opted for electric sonic distortion and his signature surrealist lyrics, sparking important new directions in rock music and inspiring 1960s counter-cultural rejections of conservative cultural conformity during the Cold War. In a way, Dylan’s new musical direction mirrored a political and cultural rupture between "old" and "new." (For their part, folk purists on the left aided this by denouncing rock music as void of social consciousness and by often refusing to build bridges with advocates of the new styles.)

Dylan’s poem also hints at cultural amnesia that caused many to forget the brutal rise of the ultra right and its leadership in repressing the Communist movement and other trade union and democratic forces. Many leftist social critics pretended to have acquired this amnesia, sometimes out of fear of being targeted and sometimes through self-censorship, attributing the rupture not to the rise of the ultra right, but to other important factors. Marxist cultural critic Frederic Jameson, for example, downplayed the importance of the Communist-led left’s decline in favor of emphasizing the emergence of the new service-oriented consumer society, fueled by new and omnipresent forms of media and technology and the decline of industrial capital. In Jameson’s view, these factors fostered the fragmentation of coherent social analysis and the unity of progressive movements, which "those forces of yesteryear" had achieved on a mass scale. By implication, the kind of broad and comprehensive cultural movement that the Communist political movement had inspired and cultivated was, for the time being, impossible.

By the 1990s, cultural critics who aligned themselves with both Marxist and postmodernist ideas adopted this kind of viewpoint and developed social movement theory. Social movement theory essentially argues that while concepts like class struggle may be valuable modes of analyses in the abstract, the concrete story of social change is based in the creation, mobilization and influence of social movements.

Rather than looking for a single, unitary movement (such as the whole working class) to inspire, produce or bring into being one cultural movement, social movement theorists examined different movements or sections of society in isolation, even when they overlapped or were intertwined with other movements. Emerging out of the identity politics disparaged so often by some sectarian Marxists as fragmenting and anarchic, social movement theory highlighted and celebrated differences, diversity and identity. In some cases, social movement theorists adopted apolitical perspectives, favoring local movements over institutional activities (such as those initiated by national political parties).

Critics of this development, though correct in challenging political timidity and non-dialectical analysis, failed to recognize the necessity of such thinking. If McCarthyism and lingering anti-Communism had severely weakened the forces that sought a comprehensive movement and hegemony of the diverse left and working-class forces in the US, and if profound changes in US capitalism itself aided the fragmentation of social consciousness and undercut the possibility of united action, it seems unlikely that kinds of ideological movements other than identity politics, postmodernism or social movement theory would surface as important left-oriented modes of social analysis and political and cultural activism. Capitalism, led by the newly emergent ultra right, got trickier and more skillful at hegemony; so the left had to find new ways to respond. Arguably, social movement activists and theorists helped elevate democratic struggles enough to discard antiquated ideas that place the "fundamental" class struggle above all else, and to inflect analysis of class society with attention to democratic questions.

It is in this field that T.V. Reed’s newest book, The Art of Protest, is situated. Reed reflects both the condition of left thinking since the1950s as well as the concrete political and cultural terrain that emerged out of McCarthyism and the new economy. He doesn’t directly acknowledge this larger context but accepts its implications: the left had to develop new methods of fighting for social progress, and that "fragmentation" was necessary and unavoidable, even positive. Influenced by postmodern theory and Marxism and organized under the rubric of social movement theory, Reed’s book opens a new chapter in the history of leftist US culture. Maintaining theoretical and activist links to the pre-McCarthy left, albeit ones that are only hinted at, Reed consciously envisions the ties between culture and struggle, and the enduring hope of the broad left generally for unity in struggle and social transformation.

Reed introduces his work by outing himself as a partisan of the progressive left and sympathetic to the struggles he investigates, a rare deed even among scholars on the left. Theoretically, Reed’s work brings together a broad range of ideas, which, far from simply being an eclectic mish-mash, help to retrace a political terrain of ideas that may be a basis for broad unity, certainly against the ultra right, but also in forging new methods and modes of struggle.

The Art of Protest is a study of specific cultural elements of some of the important social movements since the 1950s. Its weakest point may be that it doesn’t include much study of the labor and peace movements. To compensate for this, however, Reed touches on struggles that usually receive scant attention from cultural historians. For example, a reader will find chapters on Mexican American muralists, graphic artists in the struggle against AIDS, the political demonstrations of the Black Panther Party, American Indian struggles against racist Hollywood images, the poetry of the women’s liberation movement, the music of the civil rights movement, the internet organizing that helped build the massive WTO protests in Seattle, and more. It would take too much space to try to elaborate on each social movement covered in this excellent study. A few highlights, however, are in order.

In discussing the broad and diverse movement for women’s liberation, Reed’s focus on feminist poetry provides some important insights into the movement’s organizing styles, diverse standpoints and theoretical debates. Feminist poetry, Reed argues, served as a re-socialization tool for women who were silenced by male-dominated society and forced to internalize negative images. It was a medium through which women could dismantle these images and inspire each other with visions of a new society and the action needed to get there. Poets such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde. Sonia Sanchez, Cherrié Moraga, Joy Harjo and many others took on sexism, reproductive rights, war, poverty, racism and homophobia.

Mexican American muralists used the medium of public art to achieve similar goals. Muralists painted images of Mexican American activists and mythical and historical Mexican figures from diverse moments in history and ideological backgrounds to invoke and inspire a spirit of common struggle against racism and exploitation. Inspired by the work of renowned leftist muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros, muralists in the 1960s and 1970s such as Antonio Bernal, Yreina Cervantes, Judy Baca as well as several artist groups and community art schools used art to teach both historical lessons and communicate contemporary ideas about the experiences of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans.

In his study, Reed adopts expansive notions of cultural struggle. For example, the widely-publicized armed political demonstrations and militant rhetoric of the Black Panthers, in Reed’s view, also served as a kind of theater in which to dramatize both the violence of white supremacy and emergence of African American men and women ready to fight back openly and directly. Reed notes that while most Black people didn’t accept the Black Panther Party’s ideology, large majorities did express sympathy for and were influenced by the Party’s revolutionary style and its community work.

More contemporary movements were also influenced by this type of cultural of political demonstration, even if they have not acknowledged it. AIDS activists adopted a confrontational, non-violent mode of civil disobedience designed to highlight the threat of AIDS and the government’s refusal to even acknowledge it because of religiously motivated anti-gay attitudes. ACT UP, a major organizational arm of the anti-AIDS movement, developed artistic styles that graphically demanded that people speak up, act up, fight back, or die.

With the emergence of Internet technology on a mass scale in the 1990s, political organizing and activist culture took on a qualitatively new form. In asking the question "will the revolution be cybercast," Reed narrates events leading up to the demonstrations against the WTO in 1999 known "battle of Seattle." This event, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of anti-globalization sentiment, was a conscious, organized effort to link diverse social movements, environmentalists, labor unions, anarchists, students, civil rights activists, community and global groups together to radically challenge the capitalist globalization agenda.

While Reed doesn’t provide detailed historical backgrounds for each movement (such a book would be thousands of pages), he does give enough of a general picture to be able to situate the specific cultural activities within a larger social setting and movement history. He rejects the notion of evaluating cultural work for its own sake or in a vacuum from its specific historical setting and the conditions that produced it. Indeed, for Reed, while culture is under no obligation to be purely political or oriented as politics under all circumstances, in the movements for which he provides these snapshots, culture was closely linked to political struggle.

This aspect of The Art of Protest ties it to the 1930s social realists who built activist artistic movements around the principle that art cannot be isolated from the social forces out of which it was born and that artists themselves must be part of democratic and class struggles. In all, the music, drama, poetry, art, technology and more that fostered and emerged from social movements in the last half of the 20th century helped to record the history of struggles, to inspire, organize and mobilize participants, to educate observers, to explain and debate ideological issues and to sustain participants with pleasurable activities that spoke to them uniquely and allowed them to amplify their own voices in a repressive society that silenced them. Further, while the visions of each movement may have not been fully realized, many goals were, and, as Reed argues, the cultural impact of each movement continues to reverberate in and influence contemporary life.

In his concluding chapter, Reed offers an explanation for what I consider to be his dialectical approach. He notes that his emphasis on culture isn’t meant to place more importance on it than economic analysis or political histories. Revisiting the contentious debate over the Marxist metaphor of the base and superstructure, Reed writes:

The economic, the social, and the political never fully determine the shape of culture, but they do set conditions of possibility and limit that no amount of cultural action can shift. At the same time, culture is always involved dialectically with the goings-on at the level of economics and politics, contesting for the meanings that can be made from the raw material of economic and politic event-texts.

In a manner that echoes Marx, Reed argues convincingly that movements are burdened by history and social context but are free to respond to the conditions in which they emerge. Likewise, no such thing as pure objective reality exists freely of the meaning imparted to it. In fact, the struggle over the meaning of events – cultural struggle – is tied to political struggles for equality and working class liberation – the possibility of completely new and liberatory contexts in which to act. This fact makes cultural struggle a decisive factor in social progress. It is on this basis, heavily influenced by Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci as well as contemporary left-grounded postmodern ideas, that Reed insists on the significance of cultural elements in the struggle.

Regular readers of Political Affairs may become frustrated with Reed’s refusal to note specific influences of Communist activists on the new social movements. For example, in discussing the roots of the Mexican American equality struggle, Reed rightly highlights the activism of labor organizers such as Josefina Fierro de Bright and democratic movements such as El Congreso de Pueblo de Habla, but merely describes these as part of the "popular front movement" of the 1930s. The Marxist-Leninist backgrounds of muralists Diego Rivera and David Siquieros aren’t mentioned. Angela Davis is identified as Black Panther Party "associate," while her membership and leadership in the Communist Party are erased. Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin’s political training in the Young Communist League appears to have had too little significance to be noted. While Reed remarks extensively on the influence of important Depression-era poet Muriel Rukeyser on the feminist poetry movement, her political activism in the Communist Party is ignored. Reed’s reference to Gramsci as "Italian theorist" rather than as Communist Party of Italy founder or even as a Marxist theorist is also troubling. To his credit, Reed makes a point of linking the new movements with the old by ensuring that these individuals aren’t simply left out of the ferment of the last half of the 20th century. But silencing an important historical experience by failing to name it weakens the book, in my admittedly partisan view.

Still, The Art of Protest is valuable contribution to the cultural history of the left in its diversity since the 1950s. It will prove a necessary resource both for students and progressive activists interested in learning about the rich tradition of organizing and cultural struggle that probably have had a profound, if unacknowledged, impact on their own work and lives.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

Book Review: The Art of Protest

The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle

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