Prompt
Does Kodansha's policy violate "the logic of the arts"?
Today I found a video by Chibi Reviews complaining that the manga publisher Kodansha had adopted part of a particular set of United Nations equality goals: "gender equality, inclusivity, and climate action is part of Kodansha's messaging". This particular creator does not have a good track record on social issues; he fell for the slightest suggestion from who knows what news channel that imperialists are fully allowed to designate whatever warlike actions they find scary as natural crimes and so Israel is completely in the right to clear out Palestine because of Palestine containing "terrorists". But, that said, I think the issue this channel brought up about publishers and UN equality goals is genuinely interesting by itself because of all the complexities it brings up when I imagine it happening in a workers' state instead of right now.
Say hypothetically that we lived in a world almost exactly like this one, including the lack of a Soviet Union today and all the turmoil in the post-Soviet states after 1991, but that at some point after 1991 worldwide revolution started and the United States, China, and Japan became workers' republics and were part of Trotskyism. The UN is not necessarily relevant within this scenario. But, workers' organizations in Japan put together some kind of program applying to the overall country that looks approximately like the UN equality goals and mentions gender equality, inclusivity, and climate action. Kodansha exists and adopts this nationwide or international program, just like in the news article. Japan's workers would have agreed to this program, but the program could conceivably cause real problems for the industry.
At times, Trotskyists have maintained that the arts as an industry progress by their own logic. When the Soviet Union put forth an initiative to create proletarian culture, the purpose was to fulfill a perceived need and set a basic example for later authors, but Trotsky dismissed it, as far as I know because he could not promote literature being the creation of the Soviet bureaucracy and because authors of representational art would produce accurate representational art in time if workers simply controlled society long enough for everyone to experience that state of things as normal.
In my understanding what it means to say "the arts have their own logic" is that industries have a particular purpose toward society and they achieve their purpose as long as people are good at them. Whatever art does, proletarian revolution only aims to remove from that the incentives to distort art toward glorifying or biasing itself toward the bourgeoisie (and other archaic classes in the event they still exist); whatever art was before, nearly all of it will remain unless it was affected by those incentives.
Today, fans of Japanese anime and manga like to point out that these industries are characterized by experimental stories and low censorship or regulation — occasionally anime and manga produce surprisingly deep, "literary" kinds of stories compared with United States works influenced by popular anime or manga, and these "literary" stories are said to come out of authors operating without constraint, according to their own skill and vision, and overall, deeply within the logic of the arts and what makes good art as opposed to within the logic of a particular market or the logic of a group of capitalists. Thus, there is an argument going around today within manga, animated series, story-driven video games, and other forms of art that any attempt to make artists fit into what a publisher wants or an audience wants is bad, as opposed to simply telling artists to "fit into" what a skilled artist would recognize as good art. If a publisher so much as promotes particular demographic identities being represented in media more, there could be unintended consequences of it ending up with a lot of shallow and uninteresting works which happen to feature an identity but fail to reach the higher "literary" tier of producing good art regardless of level of social prejudices and social knowledge. This doesn't inherently get rid of any other works (as much as some people want to act like it does just because a foreign translation might be edited slightly), it mostly only adds new works that are noise and makes it more difficult to discover older works that were good.
But today, anime and manga are also characterized by coming from a particular layer of people who are highly skilled and highly trained and can basically choose to sell a product themselves or to be employed as a show director creating projects within the territory of a company. These people are not average working-class people, but a distinct layer above ordinary people who will always enjoy an inherently privileged position in that they alone will have adequate knowledge of what is an "inherently" good product and what is an invalid objection while the people who are unsatisfied with their products might never fully know the difference between a valid objection and an invalid objection. So, it's trivial for these people to see that someone is calling them out for accidental expressions of their own misogyny but dismiss those people just because they happen not to be any good at writing a story and don't know how to appreciate the good parts of the work.
Within the scenario of Japan being a workers' state, is it helpful or destructive for a publisher to have a policy of requiring particular equality goals? On one hand, the purpose of a workers' state is to put the people of each industry in control of society so they can pursue the actual goals of their industry, and manga authors have insight into the craft of their industry, regardless of what class they really are. On the other hand, the workers of other industries would have agreed to this policy, and the purpose of a workers' state is not to make people feel like only the most elite rungs of each industry have any say in that industry. What does it mean for an industry to operate "under its own logic" and when is that in conflict with having a functioning workers' state?
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
- Q618/Q618 gender equality, inclusivity, and climate action is part of Kodansha's messaging -> interesting statement, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. "inclusivity" could mean, like, Japanese people, Koreans, and Indic people but no gay or transgender people. "gender equality" could mean men and women being treated more evenly than in feudal society but still subject to Stalin's government suddenly getting rid of industries women actually work in. "climate action" could mean a range of things, some of them not being very big at all. so to me, this statement reads as a smokescreen to get readers to shut up rather than an actual commitment to anything.
- Q618/Q618 Kodansha bringing down an equality agenda will fill anime with a lot of superficial Media Representation works at the cost of drowning out or preventing deeper literary works that happen to lack Media Representation but rely more on technique or concept / gender stereotypes, sexualization, and violence against women as things that need to be tackled in Japanese manga ... less fanservice ... themes that fly in the face of the unusual, unapologetic, uncensored, and sometimes dark stories (ChibiReviews) [1] ->
I had to edit this claim to make it sound smarter before it felt worth adding, but I can vaguely see what's being said. there's value in having "literature" as opposed to just sheer Media Representation, particularly inasmuch as a lot of Media Representation often doesn't actually succeed in teaching people the experiences it's supposed to teach (just look at all the people who didn't learn Kris and Frisk's pronouns despite their demographic identities being very simple and only marginally different from any viewer's identity).
so, with that in mind, there's actually a decent argument that a publisher adopting an "equality agenda" could be a case of trying to solve material problems with Idealism. I'm not actually sure about this though. I haven't seen how this policy is actually applied or what it was created in response to. if it's censoring something like Beastars that would be bad, but there could be other cases where things get edited that were unimportant to the story.
Motifs or claims from response
- Corporate diversity policies are unhelpful to the creative process -> wow, so the articles basically are aligned with what I suggested here
- Backlashes against corporate diversity policies are not necessarily pro-art -> all right, that's true
- A Trotskyist state would attempt to abolish the need for corporate diversity policies with respect to artistic projects before they happen -> this kind of thing fascinates and frustrates me. whenever I manage to form an actually good question it says 'oh, no, Marxism is to make daily life better', but whenever I phrase things in terms of people instead of industrial products it says, 'Marxism isn't meant to talk about that, it says nothing about daily life'. this bot is.... weirdly biased in terms of churning out industrial products, and against the notion of Marxists replacing Idealism and Idealist self-help garbage with Materialism.
- A Trotskyist state attempts to free art creation from the need for democratic-republicanism (democracy; democracy passing Idealist policies onto industries)
- The party cannot, not for one day, follow the liberal principle of laisser faire and laisser passer, even in the field of art. The question is only ... what should be its limits (Trotsky 1924) [2] / a watchful revolutionary censorship (motif)
- Develop the overall international population toward producing inclusive art with skill (sense) / The proletariat must pass through the entire history of artistic culture before it can produce its own art (Trotsky) -> "the entire history" sounds a little excessive, but 'enough of it to collect all the influences you could possibly need for the art you want to produce' is the minimum I think
- Develop the international population to break down barriers around industries -> oh that is beautiful. I'm now thinking about the fake theme song I was trying to make for 'Starry Roads'. and about how the Starlight episode was wrong because she actually should have taught them all to do each other's talents just as they couldn't do in that one Discord episode. I wanna write a song about this
- Anime and manga installments are often simply churned out to make money -> yes, that is very true, I just forgot to say it because I didn't think it was relevant to this scenario.
- The quality of anime and manga writing will increase after installments stop being commodities -> I love that this is a real Trotskyist proposition now. this is crazy. we need more stupid predictions that are perfectly mundane of all the ordinary things that would improve if Marxists actually figured out how to end capitalism, like "Mother 3 getting officially localized" and "a Pokémon game with every region because that's also great symbolism". that would be a great use of this Ontology project
Subjective themes (no AI)
Usage notes
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Ideologies, fields, topics, or search engines
- Q4699/Q46,99 IV / Socialism AI
