London Marxism Reading Group

"In those exploratory early years, cultural organisations of all kinds were formed, merged, re-named, and dissolved. Artistic and literary groups were set up in factories, schools, military units, and rural bases. Street poetry groups were established, with one collective’s manifesto stating, ‘do not let a single wall in the countryside or a single rock by the side of the road lie free and empty… Write… Sing – for the resistance, for the nation, for the masses’. Theatre troupes, which emerged earlier in the 1930s as a powerful force in the resistance to Japanese imperialism, were particularly well received by a largely illiterate rural population. They were able to orally and accessibly communicate the most urgent problems of the day, explain the communist programme, serve as counter-propaganda, and, most importantly, win the confidence of the people."

Welcome back readers! This time we're in for double trouble with two fairly short readings taken together. In this special LMRG meeting, we're asking ourselves some important, occasionally uncomfortable questions about aesthetics and politics - a combo which, if you ask certain Marxists like Walter Benjamin, could equal fascism. That's right, we're talking about art, culture, and the strange power of myth, symbolism, imagery and the imagination.

Wait! Stop! Isn't this anti-materialist? Don't fundamental economic forces shape everything, and shouldn't our political activity focus on educating workers as to that fact? Aren't we getting dangerously close to Sorelianism and idealism with all this? Isn't it a slippery slope to "God-building"?

In asking these questions I'm obviously putting words in the mouth of a rather unfair caricature of a fusty old-minded Marxist. As we'll see with our two readings, politics and cultural practice go together hand-in-glove, at least philosophically. Gramsci's thought on these subjects is well-known, and has been adapted far and wide, including on the extreme right. Even the Fabian Society, founders of Labourism, got their start with a little outfit called the Leeds Arts Club.

Our two pieces demonstrate this from two very opposed ends of the left spectrum, from the strident Marxism-Leninism of the Tricontinental Institue with their dossier on the Ya'nan Soviet's 1942 Forum on Literature and Art (chaired by Mao Z) on the one hand and the late, great anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets on the other.

Find them here:

https://files.libcom.org/files/puppets.pdf

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-yanan-forum/

Both essays detail the concrete practices and theoretical underpinnings of two distinct movements: education, propaganda and mass mobilisation during China's Civil War and Anti-Japanese War, and the street theatre tactics of the 2000s-era alter-globalisation movement, respectively. Graeber's essay details the now only partly-remembered practices of building and fielding "giant puppets" - floats, papier-mache beasts, large-scale imaginative constructions, etc - and asks the question of why they seemed to have such a hold on the minds of the police from Seattle to Milan. Forget homo sapiens - homo ludens needs to play to learn.

Both will be starting-points for what will no doubt be a wide-ranging discussion on the topic of how art, culture and symbolism fit into anti-capitalist political practice. We'll ask where we stand today on the left in the Englishs-speaking world with regards to these matters, what we can learn from the past, and what we might do going forward.

Take care and happy reading!

This is a the long-awaited second chapter of our longform Tuesday-night reading group on China. If you didn't get to the first meetings, don't worry - come along anyway!

Find the text here: https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/2-development/

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About the China Study Group:

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.

Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.

Take care everyone and happy reading!

Hello comrades! We're trying something special for this one. Longtime LMRG-heads will remember our well-attended online meetups during the Covid lockdown era, in which we were honoured to welcome attendees from all around the world. Since then, group members in the US and elsewhere have occasionally asked if we'll ever be hosting online readings again. We can finally say that the answer is yes!

For this first one, we're going to take it easy with a casual discussion of the subject that's been on everyones' minds lately: the state of US politics, the ongoing rise of fascism during the second Trump administration, and the prospects for socialist organising, especially at the local electoral level, where groups like the Democratic Socialists of America have, famously, recently been enjoying well-publicised successes. We'll be talking, of course, about what Zohran Mamdani means for NYC and socialist electoralism more broadly, as well as Marxist former councilwoman Kshama Sawant's recently-announced bid for Congress and the democratic socialist mayor-elect of Seattle, Katie Wilson.

Here are a few article links if you want something to read up on before the event:

On Mamdani, his outlook, and the meaning of that Trump meeting: https://jacobin.com/2025/11/trump-mamdani-policy-capitalism-socialism

A little bit about Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson: https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/11/14/seattle-mayor-elect-katie-wilson-organizer-socialist-transit

Former Seattle city councilwoman Kshama Sawant's announcement of her Congressional candidacy: https://www.kshamasawant.org/why-im-running/

We're welcoming everyone, everywhere to attend this meeting, which will be held over the end-to-end encrypted video chat platform Jitsi Meet. Think of it like the security-conscious paranoic's answer to Google Meet or Zoom. Fear not: you won't need to download any apps, just click the link, which will be shared here in the Meetup description for this event in the next few days (check back for the edit) and we'll let you in.

In future, we'll aim to hold two International Cafe meetups on alternating weeks: one for the western and one for the eastern hemisphere. Western hemisphere meetings will probably continue to take place at 8PM GMT/UTC (London time), meaning 5PM in Brazil (UTC -3) 3PM on the Eastern US (UTC -5), and noon on the Pacific Coast (UTC -8). If we get some interest, we'll also try to host meetings around noon here in London, for late afternoon in (for examples) India or early evening in China.

Take care and hope to see you there!