Warwick socialists decry ‘cultural appropriation’ of Rootes sculpture
You would think that the strange red sculpture located between Old Rootes and the SU would be uncontroversial.
Puzzling perhaps, as is a requirement of all public art commissioned by our beloved overlords, but certainly not offensive.
You would be wrong.
This week the Moderately Radical Socialist Students of Warwick (Left of Jeremy Corbyn But Right of Hugo Chávez), more commonly known as the MRSSW(LJCBRHC), launched a campaign against what they see as the sculpture’s cultural appropriation of Socialist red.
“Red has always been a deeply rooted symbol of Socialism,” said MRSSW(LICBRHC) senior spokes-comrade Len Introt.
“One only has to look to the iconic verses of The Red Flag: ‘The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead’. This use of red by the University of Warwick — an institution infamous for its support of neoliberal capitalist imperialism — is highly inappropriate. We demand that the sculpture is repainted a more suitable colour such as imperial purple or black like the hearts of our capitalist masters.”
Support for the campaign is not universal amongst the Warwick student left. Warwick Anarcho-Revolutionary Socialists (WARS) said in a statement, “Lenin always said that the capitalists would sell us the rope with which we hang them. They’ve shot themselves in the foot again with this sculpture. Every student who walks past the sculpture will see the red and come to the realisation that capitalism is a corpse sustained only by apathy and a crumbling military regime.”
Representatives of the Labour Party were approached for comment but were too busy defaming each other to respond.
Elsewhere in the student body the campaign appears to have had little impact. Second year accounting and finance undergraduate Amelia Worthington-Pike said “There’s a sculpture near Old Rootes? How long has that been there?”
When informed it had been installed in 1968 and has listed building status from Historic England she replied “Well I lived in Sherbourne in first year so I guess I never went down that way.”