"The polarization in the 'culture war' declared by Buchanan and other ultrarightists takes many forms: chauvinist anti-foreigner agitation, racist assaults on affirmative action, vulgar attacks on women's social equality, half-hidden but virulent outbursts of Jew-hatred, fearful prejudice against homosexuals.… These are not movements about art or culture; they are not movements about schools or education. Those just provide some of the words that emotional energy is invested in. It is a reactionary, demagogic, petty-bourgeois social and political movement, one that over time becomes increasingly brutal and murderous in its methods.…"  
 
— Jack Barnes in Capitalism's World Disorder

Working people and all supporters of democratic rights have an obligation to speak out in defense of free speech and against censorship, in face of New York City Hall's threat to cut funding and take other punitive measures against the Brooklyn Museum of Art based on the content of an art exhibit.

This is an attack on the rights of all working people, including on access to public cultural institutions such as museums and libraries—gains that are the product of working-class struggles over the past century and a half. Like other assaults on public funding of art and culture by city governments and U.S. Congress alike, it is part of the broader efforts today by the U.S. ruling families, driven by the worldwide economic crisis of the profit system, to undermine the social rights of our class—and to curtail gains codified in the Bill of Rights such as freedom of expression.

Condemnations of "degenerate art" were a stock-in-trade of the Nazis, who banned innumerable works of art, literature, and music — along with artists, writers, and musicians — as part of paving the way for smashing the elementary defensive organizations of the working class and imposing fascist rule. As in the 1930s, the demagogy of today's "culture war" is intended to mobilize forces against the hard-won gains of working people.

The attack on free speech spearheaded by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has become the latest focal point in this culture war. It will nourish the demagogy of ultrarightists like Patrick Buchanan, who is currently waging his third presidential campaign in an effort to win cadre to his incipient fascist movement.

Buchanan and his ilk are not pushing Giuliani, a liberal Republican, to the right. Rather it is the inability of the capitalist system to offer anything but growing economic instability and social polarization, and the rightward drift of both the Democratic and Republican parties, that provide such demagogues with the themes of their campaigns. Buchanan simply states more clearly and forcefully the logic of policies carried out by politicians of both these parties.

Statements by figures ranging from Democratic politician Hillary Clinton to Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello denouncing the content of exhibit, even as they state opposition to censorship, simply put wind in the sails of the ultraright.

Most working people rightly recoil from vandalism of churches, synagogues, and mosques, or other attacks against religious believers. That has nothing to do with decreeing a work of art to be blasphemous and banning its exhibition, however.

Class-conscious workers need to reject any attempt at defining an official art — either under a capitalist censor's eye or in a workers state.

Part of the fight of the labor movement must be to broaden access to art, books, and music of all varieties. Workers must have access to a broad range of reading material, be able to exchange ideas, learn from history of past struggles, and decide for themselves what they think. They don't need to be told by Giuliani, Montebello, or Hillary Clinton what's "good" or "bad" art. They can make up their own minds. That's the opposite of everything capitalist society tries to impose.

We encourage our readers — as they join in rallies, forums, and discussions in defense of free speech — to dig into Capitalism's World Disorder: Working Class Politics at the Millennium and other books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder that address these questions, such as Art and Revolution by Leon Trotsky and Socialism and Man in Cuba by Ernesto Che Guevara.  
 
 
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