Marxism & Art

This recording is from the World School of Communism 2026, an international event translated into many languages in real time.

To make it easier to watch, we have edited out translation pauses and preserved the content of the presentation.

Subtitle translations are available in Arabic, Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Mandarin (Simplified), Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Please note that these are automated translations and there may be slight errors.

Marxism is often caricatured as a dull, grey theory, narrowly focused on politics and economics.

In fact the opposite is true.

As revolutionaries we are not only fighting for bread, but to emancipate the enormous cultural treasures of human civilisation which, today, are in the hands of a small minority. As Leon Trotsky put it, “not by politics alone does man thrive”. Communists must take a keen interest in art and culture, which are integral parts of the development of human society.

In this talk Alan Woods, leading theoretician of the Revolutionary Communist International, will examine some of the great revolutions in art and society, and the role of art in the emancipation of mankind.

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