 Yeah, so let me welcome everyone to today's lunchtime lecture, and this is in our continuing series about Asia in Marxism and Marxism in Asia. I'm Nathan Hill, director of the Center for Asian Studies, and today's speaker is Edwin Mickelson, who studied Japanese studies at Leiden for his BNMA and did his PhD at the University of Toronto, finishing in 2021. His dissertation was called Assembling Solidarity, Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia, and I think that today's talk is linked to this topic, and the talk is called Celebrating the Proletariat, Mayday Strikes and Synthesis of Solidarity. I would like to thank, of course, Professor Nathan Hill for inviting me to be really honored to receive this invitation last year to be part of this speaker series and to present my research. I would also, of course, like to thank the Trinity Asian Study Centre at the University of Dublin for hosting me. Okay, great. So this is my research that is now part of my current manuscript, and I will try to show you how I examine proletarian literature and arts in East Asia through the notion of international solidarity. I argue that solidarity in proletarian literature and culture is not merely an allegiance to organizational structures such as political parties, labor unions, and hierarchical groups, as is conventionally understood, but a process of assembling the myriad of differences and often oppositional interests into semi-stable and temporary formations of unity. Then I will examine practices of assembling solidarity found in the intermedial culture and a cultural and literary production surrounding Mayday, the International Workers Day, celebrating the intimate relationships between political struggles through mass strikes and demonstrations against imperial capitalist oppression worldwide. Proletarian writers and artists aimed to weave together innumerable spatial experiences into cohesive proletarian space time. Proletarian literature focusing on international encounters and interaction between proletarians in East Asia, different from hierarchical organizational structures, which many proletarian intellectuals consider necessary to foster class consciousness and prepare revolution, the contingent encounter between so-called unorganized proletarians from various backgrounds depicted in proletarian literature and arts reveals that solidarity was not a presupposed relation but rather a process that needed to be assembled in the event itself. The stories show readers that attempt to define solidarity were co-evil with the probability of encounters from which these very relations of solidarity could emerge. Yet it was difficult for these encounters to occur because the Japanese imperial and Guomindang governments together with local rulers, colonial rulers and warlords constructed various systems to limit and control exchange among proletarians in East Asia. Moreover, a mutually intelligible language was required to make exchange possible among the international proletariat. Writers presented encounters with Cooley's factory workers and prostitutes or turned their attention to the exploitation of colonized proletarian figures in their stories to agitate a readership to show solidarity with colonial struggles. Many of these stories were set in Manchuria, further explored in works by writers who grappled with ethnic tensions created by imperialists while also searching for possible political alliances of resistance among proletarians and others invested in describing the revolutionary potential in mainland China following the split between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. Inspired to imagine a similar potential to unfold in the Japanese empire, taken together in thousands of proletarian literary works were written within a decade in East Asia to render visible the growing social enemy and call for solidarity with millions of disenfranchised. Proletarian writers were neither merely preoccupied with creating alternative worlds in their literary narratives nor celebrated a naive proletarian harmony but also concerned themselves with the daily mechanisms of racial and gender divisions installed by ruling classes that resulted in discrimination and serious hostility among proletarians. Proletarian writers strived to expose the divisive ramifications of the multi-layered unevenness among proletarians in East Asia and with help of cultural movements explored options to facilitate exchange among proletarians both in their storylines and through social activities. Proletarian literature focusing on international encounters and interaction between proletarians in East Asia to unfold along the lines of ethnic differences such as Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese. Understanding solidarity with others as such would not merely assume and reproduce a certain logic of identity produced in capitalist states and nation states but also significantly limit our understanding of proletarian solidarity was and could have been. Solidarity in proletarian literature is not so much writing about others stemming from ethnic national differences but rather about a shared yet uneven relationship of capitalist alienation eclipsing and obsequiating self and other inner proletarian alterity. Put differently proletarian writers responded to an increasing inequality worldwide by writing about concerns of proletarian struggles even through the nature of these struggles is often irreducibly different and incommensurable while trying to find ways how to interconnect and de-fragment innumerable narratives of suffering and exploitation. Enhancing and reconfiguring notions of proletarian class solidarity proletarian writers and arts joined these debates by questioning how ideas of solidarity could be weaved into literary and artistic narratives to unfold a proletarian praxis of international solidarity. For example Miyamoto Yuriko addressed this question directly highlighting ways to write about solidarity. For Miyamoto political struggles are not divided by identities such as race as there are quote no blacks and whites among proletarian classes but only delineated by quote one land border between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie. Literature then must account for such borders and how they affect various proletarian communities. Miyamoto expressed her worry that if proletarian writers feel to do so popular narratives of bourgeois exotic taste celebrating ethno-nationalism will gain the upper hand dividing peoples in national camps. She warned proletarian writers not to reproduce the imperial nation state logic of categorizing peoples that could be detrimental to the assembling of solidarity among proletarians instead to account for quote colonial exploitation as a necessity of the capitalist ideology. She proposes a proletarian literature that describes the mutual possibilities contradictions difficulties and advances of various proletarian collectives while also accounting its relation to domestic and international events. Although Miyamoto's requirements might seem ambitious and perhaps difficult to realize in a single work she hoped that such a writing style would diversify proletarian literature nonetheless the problem that lingered in Miyamoto's theorization is how to reconfigure these very ethno-national modifiers essentialized in bourgeois literature. Reading through proletarian theoretical texts we learned that to understand solidarity which then often in general is translated as renta or yonde in these Asian languages as merely an equivalent of solidarity would limit our analysis and filter grasp by the ease and practices of solidarity in proletarian cultural movements. In order to grasp the practice of proletarian solidarity I'm informed by a range of related terms taken from East Asian languages surrounding solidarity and human association which are frequently used in proletarian theory criticism media and literature used to various degrees in East Asian languages some of these terms are redefinitions of existing words while others are neologisms through translingual practices. Taken together these terms reveal that proletarian solidarity was never a presupposed given based on some natural order but rather a continuous process of assembling of proletarian struggles into synthesized reconfigurations of solidarity through practice in an experience of contingent events. Theoretical practical manifestations of proletarian solidarity occurred then through linking joining and combining what I call assembling solidarity. Now to show you how such assembling of solidarity took place I'll now turn to Mayday and discuss some of the cultural production where I locate such assembling of of solidarity through the idea of a synthesis making synthesis between the very proletarian space times. So among the first texts that introduced Mayday to a Chinese language audience are those by Li Dajiao co-founder of the Communist Chinese Communist Party. They dealt with Mayday labor issues and imperial oppression in 1920 the day before the first official Mayday in East Asia which was celebrated in the urban areas of Japan and coastal China the industrial heartlands. Li wrote a piece titled the light movement of Asian youth in it he notes that Asian youth should not be misled by imposed and fabricated differences which nurture antagonistic feelings against one another but should instead focus on what interests could bring them together. Li urged the youth in East Asia to cooperate and form a resistance against privileged classes referring to Japanese militarism and capitalist encroachment. He warns against the racial and ethnic division produced by capitalist nation states. If intellectuals and proletarians fail to nurture an awareness of these divisions they will end up believing the propaganda of nation states and nationalists thus producing a strong jingoism which can only lead to hatred among peoples in East Asia or Asian general. Rather according to Li the youth in Asia must understand that the only observable real division for him was then produced by capitalism which is class division. Against the class division Li proclaimed that youth movements in Asia should be capable of finding common ground in establishing a world mentality as he called it and initiating resistance against capitalism and imperialism as well as improving labor and human rights. Li's notably international view was imperative for proletarian movements emerging throughout the 1920s in general and for major celebrations in particular. He had already articulated a crucial challenge for proletarian solidarity namely the fascistic manifestations of Japanese imperialism through the dispersal of national and racial identities which could drive wedges among the proletarians. Mayday celebrations in coastal China and urban Japan immediately resonated throughout the Japanese empire. Colonial proletarians joined Mayday processions and strikes in industrial centers in Japan proper and tried to celebrate Mayday in the colonies Korea and Taiwan. Proletarian art artists from Korea residing in Japan such as Red Fist actively produced Korean language materials as shown here which introduced Mayday to proletarians who had migrated from the Korean peninsula. While proletarians were able to celebrate Mayday in Japan and China proper to some extent those living in Japanese colonies faced fierce restrictions and oppression by authorities. This did not mean however that colonial proletarians could not engage in Mayday for example in colonial Taiwan proletarians also attempted to celebrate Mayday in one of the few remaining sources on Mayday the 1931 June issue of New Taiwan mass newspaper. Half of the pages were dedicated to Mayday. Contributors argued that striking was one of the few weapons the proletarians had in Taiwan. This issue gives a unique insight into the workers organizations and their activities across the island as well as a brief history of Mayday in Taiwan. In an article called the situation of labor in Taiwan Labor Day in Taiwan the author who was not mentioned by name gives an overview of Mayday in the various regions of Taiwan. Among the slogans of Mayday in each region there are those speaking out for support of China calling for a retreat of foreign soldiers from China support for the Soviet Union and the international proletariat and gender labor equality among proletarians. Together these slogans show that proletarian groups in Taiwan envisioned a multi-layered organization from the grassroots grassroots level to the regional and worldwide levels debunking the idea that these groups were minor players in a larger national in this case Japanese proletarian movement. A clear and well articulated program of slogans and strikes by workers peasants and sympathizes assemble Taiwanese proletarians with overseas Chinese and Japanese workers in Taiwan stressing regional alliances among workers and reconfiguring imperial borders. Taken together these texts revealed that Mayday in East Asia was not merely about reforming the capitalist working day the initial Mayday demand was the eight-hour working day but from its inception proletarian intellectuals in East Asia rebaptized the festival into an annual commemoration against Japanese imperialism. Proletarian cultural movements in East Asia were divided in organizations along genres such as film, photography, literature, music, and theater. Although separated in various subgroups these disciplines often created art together combining and mixing art forms in their media. Organizing cinematic and theoretical theatrical shows as well as reading and singing groups for proletarians to prepare and celebrate Mayday these cultural producers amplified the corporal and sensorial experience of participants by affecting multiple senses proletarian artists rendered expressive, formerly invisible, inaudible, and intangible realities to mark proletarian territories during Mayday strikes and demonstrations. In this way art was not so much representational as effective and sensational and instead invoked a synthesized longing among proletarians worldwide for a different society. Moreover proletarian artists strived to create proletarian artists strived to have proletarians actively engage in producing Mayday art transforming them into artists. This not only included the production of different art but was also seen in the repurposing of everyday objects such as cloth or paper into flags, banners, badges, posters, or leaflets. In doing so proletarian artists attempted to undo hierarchies in the production of art and equip proletarians with expressive strategies and territorial markers to bolster support for resistance available whenever and wherever. Crucial to the cultural production of Mayday was the artistic and machinic synthesis of multiple spaces in Mayday celebrations in relation to the human perception of space and time. In other words it is the mental exercise to synthesize singular spatial temporal events into coherent multiplicities. In the case of Mayday these were for example the Haymarket riot in 1886, the first Mayday in Paris in 1890, a Mayday Tea Party in Tokyo in 1905 by Hayminsha, and the first Mayday in the Soviet Union 1918. These events created a coherent unity of heterogeneous elements that would become an animal proletarian festival celebrated worldwide. While celebrating Mayday on the same day worldwide created a sense of simultaneity and unison among various proletarian milieus, it was art technology and machinery that helped interlock the spatial gaps between the direct experience of local events and events elsewhere. National festivals were informed by the linearity of capitalist clock time in a chronological sequence of past, present, and future. In contrast Mayday countered such understandings of space time with a patchwork of disparate events made possible by various technological innovations such as montage. Proletarian movements created memories of proletarian struggles worldwide where space times are a contingent of overlapping of pasts, presents, and futures happening simultaneously. Instead of a chronological time alone experiences exist as events each of which produce a particular space time. By synthesizing or ostracizing events proletarian movements joined memories together into their own spatial temporal calendar. For example in an article called Mayday First recalls April 12th, Chen Tao wrote how Mayday reminded the proletariat of all the suffering they have endured so far. This included April 12th incident also known as the second Shanghai massacre purged by the Guo Mingdong on communists in 1927. Concretely then the proletarian calendar in East Asia unfolded as a synthesis of events such as the May 1st 1919 demonstrations in colonial Korea, March 15, 1928, April 16, 29 which were the mass arrests of leftist activists in Japan, May 30, 1925, the Shanghai massacre the first one, and then June 17, 1895 the annexation of Taiwan to just name a few. These were all events linked directly and indirectly to Japanese imperialism or imperialism at large. While these events could easily be exploited to essentialize ethno-nationalism proletarian movements strived to commemorate these events as a shared proletarian calendar combined with annual international days like January 15 which was the 3L Day, the Lennon, Luxembourg, and Liebnecht, March 8th International Women's Day, March 1st International Workday and August 1st the International Anti-War Day. In synthesizing proletarian memories and experiences worldwide of which May Day was arguably the most compelling platform, proletarian movements coined a counter-memory which challenged the homogenous and linear time of the ruling classes. Photography was one medium used to celebrate media proletarian achievements and to inspire proletarians who did not participate to join the year after. Made possible by printing press proletarian journals explored the possibilities of photo montage. Although the lack of technological resources among some proletarian cultural movements did not always allow complicated compositions on the same page or successive pages, editors tried to create visual narratives by placing pictures together. They did so to tell a story of one May Day demonstration held at different locations or combined pictures of multiple dated May Day processions which created a sense of omnipresence and interconnections while downplaying distances between May Day events. In a special May Day issue of Battleflag, a Japanese proletarian journal, there was a May Day photo montage printed over several pages immediately after the table of contents. The photographs shot at various May Day celebrations in Tokyo in 1927 and 1929 are caught out of the frame and glued over each other, synthesizing disparate events. On the left demonstrators liberated from the photographic frame march to the right on the page. The static transforms into movement. This movement is further amplified by mixing several photographs and various perspectives. The moving demonstrators appear to march from afar, gradually increasing in size as they move towards the viewer. Eventually they emerge with another group of demonstrators on the right bottom while heading towards the gathering the left bottom at Shibuya Ura, Shiba Ura Park, which is the location the May Day processions commences. Then on the right, on the next page, May Day celebrations in Tokyo are linked with the May Day celebrations worldwide through montage. It is after Tokyo demonstrators continue to march and merge with foreign comrades towards the Red Square in Moscow. In Japanese colonies where May Day demonstrations were completely banned, editors had to find creative ways to show their readers May Day celebrations within the rules of the cultural policy. In the left-leaning journal 3000 Lee, the editors combined photos of May Day taken in Osaka together with photos from Children's Day in Gyeongsang. The photo montage juxtaposes a May Day celebration, demonstration in Osaka, which included Korean female workers, with Children's Day in Gyeongsang celebrated on the first Sunday of May, close to May Day. Children's Day was also re-baptized in a proletarian festival resembling May Day where, quote, worker and farmer children in Chosun march in lines with red flags in their hands to intimidate the bourgeois children who normally act big, end quote. Like the photo montage in Battle Flag, it grouped photographs depicting spatially separated events in hopes of inventing a relationship between them, transcending geographical distances and national boundaries. Despite May Day being prohibited in colonial Korea, editors managed to interconnect colonial spaces to the resistance of the world proletariat and bring distant proletarian milieus in a relational unity of shared goals through photo montage. Photo montage allowed photographs with various perspectives to be detached and rearranged in order to bring heterogeneous milieus among the worldwide proletariat together in an assemblage. As an result, raw material from the living present in multiple space times is framed together and overlaps various past, present and futures to form a consolidated unity intended to show viewers how these events are related. While the photographs depicted depict the repetition of annual May Day celebrations, it is the in-between of overlapping photographs for a relationality between different singularities that emerge. The marriage of photographs was an artistic forging of solidarity among proletarians who were spatially apart. These montage techniques became crucial in various proletarian arts forms to render visible relations between disparate proletarian struggles worldwide. In addition to photographic montage, proletarian cultural workers experimented with new media such as film. Among the emerging proletarian film units in East Asia was Prokino, the proletarian filmmaker's league. Founded in Tokyo in 1921, which commenced filming May Day demonstrations or other topics suitable for May Day screenings. Each year, organized May Day film events to show their movies to proletarians and supporters across Japan. Prokino was among the first in East Asia to experiment with new styles and cameras during 1921 to 1934. One of its members, Sasa Genju, argued in his essay, Toy Weapon Camera, in favor of using the called bourgeois toy, a 9.5 millimeter petit baby, as a weapon of class struggle. The size and mobility of the petit baby allowed filmmakers such as Sasa to bring cameras into daily life, to film demonstrations from nearby and even in the midst of crowds. Film could transform, Sasa explains, quote, the unorganized masses in conscious participants, end quote. Sasa was convinced that film, especially when taking when taking using portable cameras, had the expressive power to consolidate fragments of daily life, captured separately into a cohesive whole, not unlike montage photography. Sasa Genju shot one of the first amateur films of May Day 1927, initiating a reoccurring theme of proletarian film movements. Among the extant films of proletarian film in East Asia, there is only one incomplete May Day silent movie titled 12th annual Tokyo May Day. Different from studio movies, Prokino shot the movie outside, documenting May Day participants from their standing point at Siba Uda Park and walking by a show arrow towards Ueno Park. This route passes the Imperial Palace in Hibiya, where two days earlier the annual celebration of the emperor's birthday, so-called Tencho Setsu, had taken place. This highlighted the stark contrast between Tencho Setsu's right wing nationalism and May Day's left internationalism. The montage of a celluloid was a way for proletarian filmmakers to train, aid and augment the mental perception of synthesizing fragmented realities. A specific note is how Prokino actively used filmic machinery to transform spectators' viewpoints, aiding the human eye with the camera eye. This is not unlike Walter Benjamin's sentiment as he wrote, quote, what film and new realm of consciousness comes into being, end quote. Granted, the seven minute May Day movie itself is not spectacular for its montage as compared to other contemporary movies and proletarian movies as well. Instead, it serves to expand this discussion of synthesis as a method of forging relations of solidarity within the proletarian cultural production of May Day. Prokino frequently showed these movies during proletarian film nights. These film screenings were rare events for proletarians to see themselves on the silver screen. By seeing themselves, Prokino detached the living present out of a particular space time through the mechanical reproduction of film. Prokino's filmmakers then coupled the content of the film with the audience's own experiences, creating a link between a virtual and an actual. In doing so, filmmakers created a register of recognition and enumerated a singular experiences into a multiplicity of collective consciousness, resembling the sutured nature of film montage. They rendered the chaos of the living present visible on the silver screen and in the merging of heterogeneity components created a unity of proletarians. Proletarian film directors tried to create strategic images of political formation in order to trigger viewers' sensory motor system, hopefully linking these images to thought. Then among Japanese proletarian and bourgeois writers, China and especially Shanghai was a popular topic for their stories. While bourgeois writers were fascinated by Shanghai's cosmopolitanism and exhilarating nightlife, proletarian writers strived to write about the exploitation by imperialists and capitalists, both domestic and foreign. They also wrote about the revolutionary potential presented in the city and beyond. And immediately after the Manchurian incident in 1931, proletarian activist Hwadi Nrenjin interviewed proletarian writers in Japan Akita Ujaku Kubokawa, Ineko Fujireda, Takeo, and also Muriyama Tomoyoshi, whose works were translated and read in China. By interviewing proletarian intellectuals and artists, Hwadi Nrenjin aimed to show that not all Japanese were the enemy and that many Japanese proletarian writers opposed the Japanese invasion in Manchuria. In the interview with Muriyama, Hwadi asked him why he wrote two works, Record of Gang Violence and Record of Victory, about China. Muriyama stressed the cross-spatial relations between proletarians beyond national borders. Moreover, he argued that certain subject matter of unique events can be made visible with the help of art and be made legible through writing to distant audiences. This could bring disparate proletarian milieus together in a shared consciousness, not unlike the methods of montage and linkage discussed earlier. Muriyama's choice of writing a record of the May Day Victory in Shanghai functioned as a mononic device which increased common awareness and shared memories among East Asian proletarians. And then the story that I discussed at length in my manuscript, Record of Victory, is divided among three acts and seven scenes. And starting on April 19, 1930, the play Record of Victory tells the story of proletarian couple Hwang Alio and Zhang Guo-Rui, who live in the worker's district, Jiabei Shanghai. Alio works as a train driver for the Shanghai train company and acts as the head of the Jiabei Picket Faction. And Zhang is a conductor for a bus company and the captain of the new paper, Park the Po Faction. The two are actively involved in organizing and preparing for May Day, communicating with leaders of various unions and labor sectors, as well as delegating tasks such as handing out flyers and informing proletarians about the upcoming strikes. And they also include a lot of the unorganized workers and so to create the alliances in the events of a unity to be celebrated and made visible during May Day strikes. And so the first half of the play covers the organization of May Day, while the second half deals with the execution of May Day strikes. Each scene of the play is set on a particular time before, during or after May Day. Mu Riam aimed to show a full account of all that is involved surrounding May Day, the preparation, the actual strike, and the afterlife of May Day. Ultimately, similar to artistic modes, methods of montage and linkage, seen in May Day artifacts, Mu Riam laid out a diagram of how to assemble distant struggles among proletarians into a shared agenda. This corresponds to the dispersed groups of demonstrators consolidated under the banner of May Day. One of the innovations Mu Riam added to the record of, victory stage, was film footage projected as part of the stage, which supplemented the decor and the actress performances. Although playwrights had used existing film footage in previous years, for record of victory, Mu Riam made a special request to Prokino to produce new footage. Mixing new footage with the actual play, Mu Riam aimed to produce what he called a rensa or linkage in order to assemble dispersed events, which not unlike montage, strongly reflects the attempts of proletarian artists to practice techniques of synthesis. Besides film footage, Mu Riam also asked the Proletarian Music Alliance, which had a substantial repertoire to sing May Day songs live on stage, solving a problem in cinema at the moment, at that time at least, which lacked color and sound. Considering May Day the ultimate subject matter on which to practice the synthesis, Mu Riam emphasized the length of scenes in his discussion of record of victory first and foremost. He stated that the length of scenes in proletarian theater is significantly shorter than in bourgeois theater due to the proletarian audiences having less time because of long working hours. This was of course contrasted with the bourgeoisie, who have plenty of time to enjoy hours of theater according to Mu Riam. He calculated that a play can be 200 pages long at most, but was often shorter as proletarian theater shows usually multiple plays and mobile theater shows were short in general. Between acts, the curtains were dropped and the stage was brightened in the theater to provide a break for the audience, whereas scenes required a theatrical blackout to change the stage. These breaks and changes operated the spatial temporal contractions and relaxants to ensure the relation between spectators and the performers. According to Mu Riam, this was quite different from cinema where one cuts made transitions between scenes unnecessary and camera angles can change perspective. This flexibility in cinema was opposed to the fixed distance in theater between spectators in the stage. If the playwright found it difficult to balance two scenes and failed to make the transition smoothly, spectators who have established an intimacy with a particular scene might lose attention and patience. In his methodology, Mu Riamas emphasized that when a transition between scenes remains unclear, the relation among its components would seize, making it difficult for spectators to understand. It then follows that it was important that a playwright established a relation between the allotting of scenes and the content of the play. In the case of Record of Victory, Mu Riamas did this by having all scenes take place in small rooms. He also created synthesis with the help of music, film, and decor between the characters on stage and in the imagined crowds outside during May Day celebrations. If the play failed to show the correlation between events played in successive scenes, then prior training of mental perception which helped spectators synthesize distant spaces of struggles would not succeed. Ultimately, from Mu Riamas and other proletarian playwrights, proletarian theater took up different worlds where various elements coagulated dialectically into unity and decide their own future. In scene four, before the start of the third annual, of the third and final act, four intertitles are lowered onto the stage. As a countdown towards May Day, the intertitles show dispersed strikes preceding May Day, which are happening at various moments in different locations across Shanghai. They seriously disrupt the chronological and metric time of continuously clicking factory clocks, forming a web of interconnected and expanding nodes, striking workers, sabotage the perpetuated commodity production. They replace the homogenous and articulated time of capitalism with the spesmodic and absorbing time of a general strike. Building up the climax through successive intertitles, the stage description tells the reader how a, quote, great number of people, including the audience, sing the May Day songs in chorus from a pianissimo and gradually changing into fortissimo. Mu Riamas not only uses the actors on stage, but also invites spectators to become active participants in and create us off expressive matters, breaking the brettian fourth wall, the play blurs, the borders between art and quotidian live, and between author, producer, and audience consumer. In doing so, the play allows proletarians to experiment with methods designed to express proletarian milieus, markers of territory emerged and are needed to territorialize capitalist refrains, such as the working day. The day after May Day, Awu and Alio reflect on the grouping of proletarians, acknowledging the international importance of May Day for the worldwide proletariat. Awu reads a manifesto printed with drawings that were circulated in preparation for May Day. The manifesto notes the relationship between the strikes of various proletarian groups in Shanghai and the unemployment struggles of proletarians elsewhere, such as in Germany and America. The interconnection between these proletarian milieus formed the assemblage of the world proletariat that consolidates the size of battle in the fight with imperial power east and west of China. In joining hands and unifying distant components, proletarians aim to liberate themselves from the iron shackles of imperial capitalism. The proletarians in record of victory are well aware of their fragile center, linking their semi-stable milieus and thus warrant their constituents to be vigilant against enemy threats, which would undermine their victories. Proletarians gather at the courtyard of the honey textile factory on May 7th to hold a disbandment ceremony. The disbandment demonstrates the proletarians' understanding of the need for flexibility as they respond adequately to changes in their environment. Alio throws hundreds of leaflets out of the window, which are received by a shouting crowd. The leaflet praises the heroic fights of proletarians of May Day, but also urges proletarians to prepare for their next campaign protesting war on August 1st. Pudianma's record of victory urges readers to understand how in preparing and celebrating May Day, the production of proletarian territories should never be finished nor final. They require vigilance and flexibility in order to make alloplastic changes and synthesis among different groups possible. Today I tried to demonstrate that May Day celebrations contributed to the consolidation of numerous proletarian milieus, both in East Asia and worldwide. Crucial was the development of expressive matters found particularly in art. This expressivity in art was able to synthesize and unify heterogeneous components associated with the proletarian struggle and develop useful rituals for planned and spontaneous strikes other than May Day. Proletarian artists utilized various techniques such as montage, linkage, and connecting to resist the homogenous space-time of the imperialist capitalist order. They insist that they instead constructed multi-directional space-times of international proletarian solidarity through photography, film, theater, singing, and literature, proletarian cultural movements aimed to reach an as wide as an audience as possible, taking into account various levels of literacy among proletarians. They organized cultural May Day events not only to inform proletarians of how to celebrate and strike on May Day, but also to redefine the entire producer-consumer relation of art. They did this by incorporating proletarians in the production of May Day art and art effects. The commitment to proletarian solidarity was not merely then an enterprise orchestrated by proletarian vanguards and intellectuals, but more importantly what was forced with proletarians in the practice, experience and memory of May Day. Muriyama affirms this practice in record of victory that displayed the emergence of proletarian solidarity in direct action and cooperation at the grassroots level. Altogether, the May Day Festival and its cultural production strived for unity among proletarians in East Asia in order to overcome divisive identifications of the capitalist, imperialist world order. Thank you so much for listening. Okay. Well, thank you very much for this very interesting talk. One of the things that's special about capitalism or at least the socialist critique of capitalism is impersonal domination, that it's the abstractions of commodity fetishism and whatnot that in some sense are the enemy. It's not going to do the job just to get rid of one or two capitalists. So actually a strange, I feel uncomfortable sort of referring to him in a way, but Zizek pointed out that for art this poses a bit of a problem because if you want to sort of portray the enemy, in his words, then suddenly you become an anti-Semite because you have the capitalist who's the enemy. So I'm just sort of curious if you can talk about the portrayal of the enemy of the bourgeoisie of capitalists in the art you've been looking at and how people struggled with this question of portraying an abstraction. Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for your question. That's indeed an important and complicated question in the sense that also indeed proletarian writers struggled very much with some kind of sometimes creating too much of stereotypes of the bourgeois capitalist figures. So in record of victory, the interesting thing is that actually when the media starts, they switch to perspective and they discuss media unfolding from the capitalist perspective and very much show how the capitalists are worried that the Shanghai is being taken over from all sides. Well, the typical representation is of course the bit kind of overfed male kind of factory owner with a cigar. And so that's the typical representation, but the proletarian writers of course had to somewhat accommodate that they themselves are come sometimes from petite bourgeois or bourgeois backgrounds and they had very much the question, can we represent the proletariat ourselves? And so that's where you see the investment to try to invite proletarians to also be part of the production process of arts. But obviously, it was a lot of accusation back and forth that, well, you yourself are from the bourgeois background or you yourself, your parents have way too much money. So what do you know? And even to an extent that rather writer like Hayashi Fusau, you like dancing or somehow. And then they would say, that's way too bourgeois, that type of dancing. And so in the private accounts, you get very much nitty gritty of how they accuse one another of all kinds of things. And so that's one thing that becomes an endless problem. I think Marcin Anderson in his limits of realism for the Chinese literature also showed very much sometimes the debates and the limits of to what extent they could really identify with proletarian figures. But I think another important point to put out is the very production process of art that indeed their journals were also linked to publishers. And in the Japanese case, for example, major publisher houses like Kaizo and Chuo Kodon were very much invested in the 1920s to publish proletarian literature because it was somehow a trend among students, right? They called it the Marxist boy and the Engels girl. And so a journal like Battle Flag also praised itself, we have 5,000 journals sold or we have 10,000 journals sold, they had advertisements in their journals too, right? And so to maybe echo Zizek then somehow to kind of try to critique your object, sometimes you are slipped into your object of critique, right? You become sometimes your own object of critique. And so I think that is the difficult tension. How do we disconnect our modes of production? I think that somehow is analogous to maybe YouTube, Facebook, and those kind of platforms that are being used for socialist activism or other forms of political activism. We still need to use the circuits of capitalist kind of agglomerates, right? And so that's definitely a challenge, yes. Yeah, thank you so much. I think some of the two points that you raised somewhat are interconnected, right? The class relation or the class struggle that needs to be worked through and then another border, which is indeed a very important border, the urban farmer. And there's still many more borders that we can think of too. I take also try to take up the question of indigeneity, for example, as another question, but to stick to the urban farmer. So yeah, in the historical debates, we see of course an endless kind of defining and redefining of who actually constitutes the proletariat, right? And so we have a kind of a narrow vision that it needs to be the industrial worker from the factory, right? But in the case of East Asia, as you also know, the majority of East Asia was maybe very much in the rule, right? Where the industrialization had not taken place yet or was just centered and centralized in the metropoles. And so as I'm invested to create kind of these larger kind of constructs of what the proletariat could have been, I keep the relationship somewhat open. So I take the idea of maybe a proletarian unnameable, and so that to see class not so much as an identity as maybe some studies do, but to see class as a relationship. And so therefore, that relationship keeps shifting and being redefined. And so, but that allows me to have a certain open avenue for who the proletariat could have been. And I think that somewhat rhymes also historically with some, a lot of the works that try to keep introducing new figures that somehow they see also as part of the proletarian struggle. That openness allowed for indeed, whether it was sex workers, farmers, indigenous struggles, that all could somewhat be connected through the proletariat. And I thought this was very much the strength of what the proletariat could have been, that it is this open system to interconnect struggles, I think that somehow maybe in our current moment we sometimes miss by too much of a great investment in identities. And I think the proletariat by resisting a certain identity, rather maybe a non-identitarian politics or a multiplicity of identities. But the urban farmer then, so yeah, indeed. I think a lot of the works that I also discussed take place in rural areas. The Manchurian, of course, is a particular one because that's where a lot of East Asians are brought together in interesting relationships. And so there is this maybe tension where I at the one moment look more at the trans-regional expressions of solidarity, more form of East Asian solidarity. But that immediately often the rider or somehow the figures maybe sometimes a little forced because they sometimes put some kind of the IDs or a certain form of literacy onto their figures that you would say, wow, I'm not sure if someone in a Manchurian village was very much invested in certain kind of global struggles. So the rider sometimes intervenes there. What you definitely see, so for example, I have a couple of works to talk about the Wambao Shan incident that are taken up by Chinese and Japanese riders. And that brings together a lot of East Asians in struggles. They rewrite some of the historical outcome of the Wambao Shan incident, which was an incident where a struggle between Koreans creating the irrigation canal and the Chinese farmers getting upset. The Japanese military comes in to try to settle and they protect their Koreans as imperial subjects, some they do. And so this maybe has a kind of an airy resonation with our current moment. But what Chinese and Japanese riders try to redo in the historical outcome is to show how these East Asians come together actually in solidarity and see the mutual kind of exploitation and how they're being used by capitalist imperial order. Obviously, then the characters somehow express that this is what they do should also be done at the greater international level. And maybe that's where you feel that the authors come in a bit too much. But I look at Esperanto, for example, the international auxiliary language. And then I look at also people in rural areas who are able to write letters to fellow proletarian Esperantists in Germany, in Russia, elsewhere in the world. And that's a form of still, I think, international connectivity where they can somewhat express the local connected through the global. And so that's where you definitely, I think, see somewhat interconnections between this. But the urban farm was definitely a challenge, especially as most of the proletarian riders were all kind of cozy in their proletarian, in their urban settlements, right? So it's definitely an important border to address for sure, yes. Not a direct name comes to mind by now, but I've seen multiple times, of course, the discussions in Japan, the Marxist debates in the 1920s reflecting on the Meiji restoration was it a pure bourgeois revolution or not? Very much thought through the questions, like, well, but we still have so much agrarian labor that continues as if nothing has changed. So do we have remnants of feudalism, et cetera, et cetera? Taiwan, who might have been mostly used for a sugar industrialization, but also remain very much so the few proletarian writers we know from Taiwan are also mostly writing about the countryside. And so and in Korea, the same thing. So I definitely think that many thought through that. And that's why I take the proletariat also as a broader term, because I not necessarily follow the line of that they need to be industrial factory workers. I like to keep it open, because then indeed, you can include so much many more stories. And these stories often discuss just the quotidian challenges of the Japanese police officers in their village. Other those kind of tiny instances of the larger structures of imperialism, if you will, but also kind of, as I just said, with the Wang Baoshan incident, these kind of small places were sometimes then also integrated by imperialist structures at large. And I definitely think that many thought through and many writers themselves came maybe also from rural backgrounds, but definitely there was a kind of a broad consensus, I would say that they cannot ignore the agrarian because they would lose way too much. The Russian Revolution was somewhat, of course, also maybe a peasant uprising. So they were very much supported by that by that kind of thing. So many stories, yeah, tried to depict how farmers, peasants, smaller rural communities are very much invested in proletarian struggles, if you will, yeah. In Rebecca Carl's book, I think the economist she was looking at is named Wang Yanan, I think that was the name, that in the actual sort of economics literature, there was a lot of consideration of how do we understand China's mode of production and its place in feudalism versus global capitalism. And so that would be, I mean, I don't remember the details of what Wang Yanan's particular perspective was, but that would be a place I would look for thinkers who were dealing with that as well. The strength of Carl and also Heritunian's arguments is very much to show how kind of the late development of capitalism in Japan and East Asia was very much capable of integrating the agrarian economy without changing too much so that the lines of distribution and the food production could somewhat remain, even the spinning of wool somewhat could still all stay, but was already somewhat connected still to the capitalist chains of production. That's the formal subsumption, right? Last week, Viren Merti was talking about, this isn't maybe a fair characterization of what he was talking about, but it's a good way of introducing my question, kind of how, at the moment, we're, I don't know who I mean by that, but we're having the problem that this notion of international solidarity can itself have a really kind of cosmopolitan, urban, you know, deracinated kind of sense where the whole point is to overcome the alienation of capitalism and yet somehow culturally it feels like this, you know, internationalism is kind of in cahoots with alienation, yeah? And that the right is much better at saying, you know, here's how not to be alienated, feel French, yeah? Can you talk a little bit about appeals to overcoming alienation and a sort of sense of rootedness, belonging, maybe reappropriations of elements of traditional society along the lines of, you know, letter to Vera Zasulich and that sort of thing, yeah? Well, I think this photo that I ended with in my presentation is somewhat interesting because it's a made in a rule, a kanazawa, but on the outskirts of kanazawa and you see on down below the people still working, wearing their happy, the kind of local clothes and it's very much seems like if you wouldn't know, it's a made, it might just be a random local festival, but yeah, the question of, I think interestingly is that, for example, figures like Gramsci critique that cosmopolitanism is a bourgeois kind of thing, denying the fact that proletarians can also live a somewhat cosmopolitan life by forced migration or voluntary migration and working in the metropoles and being exposed to all kinds of things, but I think the way how to maybe just stick to the case of Mayday, but we can also think of Esperanto, but I think how they produced the form of belonging and rootedness was to integrate them in the processes again, so that the fact that they could produce their art that somewhat allowed the sense of agency to get back the agency that they would somehow have lost with the displacement of their communities and also being dragged into these larger constructs of the nation states, and so you can imagine a small community in Poloku, the north of Japan, writing an Esperanto letter together to a community in the Soviet Union created a new sense of belonging, but there was, of course, of imperialism itself produced the necessity of internationalism among the proletarians too, right, by displacement and the destruction of roots, so a returning back was not maybe always possible, right, so the question maybe that Marx raises, how can we reconnect the question of our means of production with the lands, and I think as Marx warns us there's, we cannot go back to a romantic kind of appeal of the feudalism, and so the investment was very much how can we create new worker communities, right, and so that's where the class relationship created a new relation of belonging. In practice, of course, we have to admit that if Korean day laborers would hit the work site with Japanese workers that that was not always a peaceful and harmonious kind of get together, but it was often also, for example, created by different wages, right, that the day labor in Korea would get paid less and various restrictions through the production of a Korean identity on behalf, and that's the tension that they had to deal with, right, and so we have to admit maybe that that didn't work out as much, but I think the appeal that the proletarian kind of has had as an international community can still be of importance maybe for today of how we can interconnect struggles. Yes, thank you. Okay, well thank you so much for this, yeah, thank you so much for this talk. Yeah, so, you know, thank you for waking up so early. And thank you for having me, it was great to see everyone, and hopefully we have another chance to meet someone.