My aim for this blog is not necessarily to make a fresh theoretical contribution (although I won’t rule it out). My purpose is to pull together the diverse strands of Marxist thought in general to explore its implications for art in particular — thus building a comprehensive theory.
This should be a useful resource for readers who want to know more but have neither the time nor the means to negotiate the huge body of literature available, or who seek a starting point from which to explore further. After all, there is no single work to which people can be directed. This blog cannot of course study everything, and won’t attempt a full historical overview either of art or of Marxism.
The danger of compression can be over-simplification: art, like any other aspect of human society, is full of contradictions and subject to many different forces. I hope to avoid this danger while remaining comprehensible to readers who have not studied Marxist theory. Some readers won’t fully understand all the terms that are used, but in one post or another their meaning will be explained.
In traditional Marxist cultural analysis, the emphasis has overwhelmingly been on literature — I will try to overcome this limitation by considering all forms of art. Another of my aims is to try and clarify some of the persistent misconceptions in Marxist art theory, many of which — the theory of ‘decadent art’, the imposition of ‘socialist realism’, etc — have little or no basis in Marx’s work.
Marxist theory is not a unified whole. There are differing perspectives and outright disagreements, just as there are within bourgeois theory, and debate is a constructive thing. Inevitably I will be selective. I seek to create a consistent argument based upon the best Marxist thought, while commenting upon disagreements. Where I quote a writer, it is because that particular passage is useful — it does not necessarily mean I endorse everything else the writer said, even in the same work, and occasionally I use quotes to illustrate faults rather than merits. One may for example reasonably agree with Lukács in some matters while objecting to his critique of modernism. It is of course possible to interpret some of Marx’s ideas in different ways, but it would be misleading to claim that there are as many Marxes as readers: he is far more consistent than that. My hope is that the great majority of Marxists will find little to object to here. The blog is non-sectarian: I do not write as the representative of any organisation and will criticise specific groups or individuals only if and when it is necessary in order to clarify artistic questions.
Italics used in quotes are in the original unless otherwise stated. I use the Common Era designation for dates, preferring ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’ over the traditional ‘BC’ and ‘AD’, as this is more sensitive to non-Christians and academically neutral. Millions of people of all faiths use the Gregorian calendar out of convenience and the Common Era notation is more broadly acceptable. Of course the dates are still based upon the calendar’s Christian origins, and the system’s pre-eminence derives from the West’s imperialist history, but no realistic alternative is on offer.
Just as reality and theory are not static, neither is this blog. I welcome contributions from readers that help to advance its quality and accuracy, and will amend or expand posts where necessary. My aim is simply to achieve the highest theoretical standard.
Please note that although I avoid gender bias in my own language, I can’t undo it in the words of people I have quoted, or in translations made of them. The practise of using ‘man’ as a synonym for ‘human being’ is the result of thousands of years of sexism, and even among progressives it is not yet dead.
A final note on this blog’s epigraph, “to tell the truth is revolutionary” (the relevance of which will become clearer as we go on). This quote is regularly misattributed to Gramsci. The first number in 1921 of the daily edition of L’Ordine Nuovo, a socialist journal founded in 1919 and edited by Gramsci when it became a daily, had this motto by Lassalle on the front page. Gramsci had however already written something very similar: “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act” (from the article ‘Workers’ Democracy’, in L’Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919).
Update 30-10-10: I have altered the site’s motto to the present one, ‘Humanity makes itself’, as I think it better captures my general theoretical position.
Showing posts with label Introduction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Introduction. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Saturday, 18 October 2008
A defence of Marxist theory
Marxism has been proclaimed dead many times since 1989. We may fairly paraphrase Mark Twain to say its death has been greatly exaggerated. But it is perhaps necessary to explain why it remains a powerful philosophy that has something relevant to say about art.
When the Soviet bloc broke up in 1989–91, the bourgeoisie trumpeted it as the end of socialism. Since the 1920s, the Soviet Union had come under the control of a bureaucratic regime that set back the international struggle by decades. Despite this degeneration, it remained a workers’ state [1], whose eventual overthrow was a deeply disorientating defeat for the international working class. Wrongly equating Stalinist doctrine with Marxism, many interpreted it as evidence that Marxism was no longer relevant.
In reality, Stalinism reduced the rich and complex theory of Marx to something crude and mechanical which was easily refuted by both true Marxists and anti-socialists. In any case, there will be defeats in any long-term struggle, some of them severe, but they are no excuse for abandoning an objective historical perspective. As Trotsky pointed out in In Defence of Marxism (writing in 1939),
The defeat of several — not all — workers’ states notwithstanding, the Marxist insistence upon materialism and the analysis of social processes is mainstream today. The main challenge to it comes from post-modernism, whose rejection of the basic scientific tenets of the Enlightenment greatly limits its usefulness to most scientists and historians. The fatuous arguments about the death of Marxism go unchallenged in the Western mainstream, because the media in the capitalist world provide no platform for Marxist analysis. Liberal or social democratic viewpoints are permitted, but these do not fundamentally challenge the system. Instead, we are repeatedly told that there is no alternative to a neo-liberal capitalist viewpoint.
Yet reality marches on despite the spin. A particular defeat does not invalidate an entire system. If it did, then the fall of Byzantium would have meant the end of feudalism, and the defeat of Hitler the end of monopoly capitalism. One billion people continue to live under governments inspired by Marxism, and the most dynamic economy in the world — China — is a workers’ state. Millions continue to fight to create new revolutions, particularly in Latin America, and in Venezuela they have succeeded. Thus the declarations of the ‘death of Marxism’ are nonsense, on the most basic factual level.
Over the last thirty years, the working class has suffered a series of defeats. These began with the election of Thatcher and Reagan, and peaked with the overthrow of the Soviet workers’ state. But these are battles within the context of an ongoing war. The socialist states of Eastern Europe fell in 1989–91 because of the mistakes of Stalinism, not because Marxism itself was wrong. On the contrary, there was always a cogent Marxist critique of the Stalinist system, beginning with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and the recent economic crisis has proved yet again that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was correct.
Developments such as the growth of the socialist economies, resistance to imperialism in the Middle East, the huge leftwards shift in Latin America, and the final discrediting of neo-liberalism through the so-called ‘credit crunch’ are all contributing to a shift in the global balance of forces. Very slowly, Marx’s ideas on the emancipation of humanity are reasserting themselves. Despite reverses, socialism is never going to go away, because it is the politics that represents the interests of the proletariat: a class that will be here for centuries yet, and whose numbers continue to grow rapidly. The class struggle, for the same reason, will never go away. This does not necessarily mean that world socialism is around the corner, but it does mean that the struggle for emancipation is never lost.
The need for a Marxist theory of art
One of the most compelling reasons why Marxism is needed is that bourgeois opinion, even today, customarily presents art as something mysterious that can never be satisfactorily explained. Art is reduced to ‘the expression of feeling’, or to ‘form and content’, or an attempt to emotionally ‘infect’ the viewer, or is art ‘because it is made by artists’. Bourgeois theory tends to either take a single aspect of art and elevate it into a system, or at its most feeble to simply throw up its hands in bewilderment and conclude that a definition is impossible. In fact, art can to some extent be explained, but the bourgeoisie finds it difficult to analyse society without being confronted with uncomfortable truths about itself. This does not mean that bourgeois theory cannot provide us with excellent insights into art — only that it is limited in how fully it can penetrate the question. To quote Trotsky again:
The seminal epic of Western art history, E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, manages to discuss 10,000 years of art without even mentioning the powerful social forces that shaped its story. This is like observing that the sea level rises and falls, without noting the existence of tides. Marxism always seeks the underlying forces as well as the surface features, and knows that they will inform the present as well as the past. For this reason the art of the past appears not as dead and academic but as part of a dynamic relationship. If Trotsky’s belief that ‘only Marxism’ can provide such explanation seems a little stretched today, it is because progressive materialism has had such an influence on the development of modern archaeology and other sciences since he was writing in 1924.
The best Marxist criticism seeks a total view of a work of art — not limiting itself to any one aspect, but trying to pull together every influence and recognise which factors are the most powerful, for the most complete and evidence-based understanding. This understanding is not set in stone, because a work of art is itself part of a dialectical reality, in which its meaning will never be static (a Christian artist of the Renaissance for example saw the sculpture of ancient Greece very differently to an early Christian zealot). Marxism sweeps away fixed ideas, outdated hierarchies, and stasis. Many of the assumptions of pre-Marxist aesthetics are pulled off their pedestals and forced to justify themselves. At the same time, art is restored from the magical and mysterious, or the eternal idea, to where it belongs, namely the social life of human beings.
The real Marxism
Many in the West, raised on a bourgeois diet of distortions and anti-socialist insults, would be surprised to learn what Marxism really is. The goal of Marxism is free human beings — unalienated, unexploited, free to develop themselves creatively. The economy, currently controlled by a minority, should be used for the equal benefit of everyone and governed by direct democracy. This is not a utopia or a dream, as the bourgeoisie would like us to think, but something that is realisable.
Understanding Marxism as just another ‘-ism’ limits its breadth: it is the investigation of the objective world through the method of dialectical materialism, and its aim is to discover the most precise attainable truth. Its method is scientific because it derives theory from experience — where experience teaches us that the theory no longer holds true, theory must change to more accurately explain the world, not vice versa. Marx did not get everything right. For example, his belief that socialist revolutions would first take place in the most advanced capitalist countries overlooked the strength of the apparatus of consent and coercion that could be created in those countries. Political experience demonstrated that breakthroughs actually came where the bourgeoisie was weak, as in Russia and China. The working class observed this, revised the theory [4], and continued the struggle on an improved basis. Nobody gains from defending Marx or his successors blindly; what matters is to be as close as possible to demonstrable reality.
Objectivity, of course, is not the same as neutrality. Objective conditions — global poverty, war, etc — confirm the need for the radical change of society. Marxism does not apologise for siding with the working class: for all its media’s pretence of impartiality, the capitalist class too sides with its own interests.
Marxism therefore is routinely misrepresented by the bourgeoisie: it is hardly going to be represented fairly by those who would be overthrown by it. As we shall see, parts of the left have also been guilty of misreadings. To cite Allen Wood, author of the respected study Karl Marx:
Most of the arguments against Marxist aesthetics are flung against straw men, without reference to major texts in which they have already been refuted. Marxist theory is accused of economic determinism — which it does not advocate in a hard form. It is crudely equated with Stalinism — a degenerated discourse which principled Marxists opposed. At best it is conceded to have ‘good intentions’, but to contradict ‘human nature’ — a nature which is apparently synonymous with bourgeois values, though capitalism has existed for just 500 of our species’ 150,000 or more years! Nothing delights the bourgeois more than to liken Marxism to a religion — yet it is a strange religion that corrects its texts according to empirical evidence. It is accused of seeking to proscribe what work artists are allowed to create, and yes, there has been bureaucratic repression — but by contrast Trotsky, who was foremost in carrying the torch of true Marxism during the worst years of Stalinism, wrote:
Far from being dogmatic, true Marxism is open-minded, flexible and highly tolerant of change. Indeed, if it refuses to accept change, Marxism is in contradiction with itself. This refutes Foucault’s claim that “Marx out of the nineteenth century is like a fish out of water”. An essential part of this flexibility is that no Marxist worthy of the name should ever reduce art to a social document, from which a ‘political line’ must be extracted. Whether or not particular artists or works receive a ‘stamp of approval’ from Marxist criticism, art will continue regardless, just as it did for thousands of years before Marxism was even conceived. Art is first and foremost an affirmation of human powers and experience, that is there to be appreciated on its own terms and for which Marxism is simply a tool to a fuller understanding.
Why the Marxist perspective is important today
Lenin and Trotsky both understood that we must assimilate bourgeois culture before we can attempt to build a new, socialist one. If we want to understand how art fits into that process we need the best possible theoretical and historical perspective. Marxists are generally very interested in art and culture, but busy cadre engaged in activism against ills such as war or fascism often see the study of art as a low priority. Strictly they are correct. But human society without art, as the expression of our humanity in concrete, sensuous images, is unthinkable. If we are to understand Marxism in its totality we need to study its art theory too — through it we will encounter some of Marx’s most profound ideas.
The point is not to peddle endless quotations by Marx as if they were sufficient in themselves — what matters is that your theory should fit the facts. Identifying facts, of course, is less straightforward than it sounds. No scientific test exists outside of social and historical conditions, outside of ideology. The present-day debate between genetic determinism and the more plastic, socially mediated view of human nature is a case in point. And it is easy to forget that many of the scientific norms we take for granted were unknown to the vast majority of humans who have lived. Until the 17th century, the existence of bacteria was unknown; until the 19th century, Europeans mostly assumed that human beings were created ready-made by a creator God. The Newtonian model of physics seemed incontrovertible until new ideas by Einstein forced a revision, and even the Industrial Revolution is only 200 years old. We too will have assumptions overturned, and be sent in new directions by new discoveries — like anyone else, Marxists can only go on the best of current data, which makes claiming a definitive ‘final’ theory inadviseable. There is no Marxist magic wand that can conjure up answers to complex topics that the world’s best scientists are still puzzling over. But I would argue that it does put our researches into a powerful framework — materialist, penetrating, dialectical, embracing of change, viewing events as the products of complex totalities of causes rather than reductive ones, unafraid to seek underlying causes — that helps steer us through the debates of the day.
In achieving a better perspective, we must expose not only the distortions that capitalism has imposed upon art, but also the theoretical abuses that have been propagated by parts of the left, above all Stalinism. One reason why I quote so copiously from Marxist writers — apart from there being no need to reinvent the wheel — is to prove that an open-minded and humane approach to art is supported by primary texts. The attempts by the likes of Zhdanov to dictate content to artists was not only wrong in itself but contrary to the philosophy of Marx.
It was when confronted with an attempt to present bad politics in his name that Marx made his comment that if that was Marxism, then “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”.[7] When the leader of the world’s most recent socialist revolution, Hugo Chávez, talks about “twenty-first century socialism”, he does so for good reason — to draw a line between the worst models of the twentieth century and the new ones of today and tomorrow.
Marxism’s contribution to analysing a painting or a novel may seem of minor importance next to the goal of freeing the oppressed people of the world, but the application of Marxism is universal. It is not only interested in economics, class or revolutions but in anthropology, archaeology, history, psychology, culture, and indeed everything else. We should not see Marxism as one among several interesting tools in a toolbox, for its implications are felt across the whole of society. You cannot, as some academics want to, cherry-pick the bits you like and ignore its revolutionary politics. Marx and Engels never lost sight of their philosophy as a programme of proletarian revolutionary action. It is not enough to theorise in isolation from political practice. As Marx famously said in the last of his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For a Marxist, political intervention, with no interests other than those of the international working class, is a must.
The goal of Marxism is to reduce human suffering by building a world of democracy and hope in which everybody has food, shelter, education, healthcare and the other benefits of civilisation, not according to their social status, sex or the colour of their skin, but on an equal basis. It is this powerful and optimistic human message, this belief in a far better way of organising society, that drives all Marxists and which makes Marxism essential today.
[1] As theorised by Trotsky in, for example, The Revolution Betrayed. There is an alternative theory popular with the ultra-left that the USSR was in fact ‘state capitalist’. This theory has various forms, the most prominent contending that the bureaucracy was a new class — a position that excused the ultra-left from defending the Soviet Union and led them to see the regression from workers’ state to capitalism as at worst a ‘step sideways’. This gave us the grotesque spectacle of some socialist forces applauding the biggest defeat the working class has suffered since the Second World War: capitalist restoration halved the former USSR’s GDP and devastated the living standards of its working class.
[2] Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War’ from In Defence of Marxism (1942).
[3] Trotsky, ‘The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism’ from Literature and Revolution (1924). This work was part of Trotsky’s opposition to the Stalinist orthodoxy that dominated communist parties across the world. Eclipsed for decades, it deserves to take its proper place as one of the finest works of Marxist aesthetic theory.
[4] For example, in Lenin’s State and Revolution and Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.
[5] Allen Wood, Preface to the second edition of Karl Marx (2004).
[6] Trotsky, op. cit.
[7] Reported by Engels in his letter to Eduard Bernstein (November 1882). Marx was talking about the French leaders Guesde and Lafargue, whom he accused of “phrase-mongering” in their rejection of reformist struggle.
When the Soviet bloc broke up in 1989–91, the bourgeoisie trumpeted it as the end of socialism. Since the 1920s, the Soviet Union had come under the control of a bureaucratic regime that set back the international struggle by decades. Despite this degeneration, it remained a workers’ state [1], whose eventual overthrow was a deeply disorientating defeat for the international working class. Wrongly equating Stalinist doctrine with Marxism, many interpreted it as evidence that Marxism was no longer relevant.
In reality, Stalinism reduced the rich and complex theory of Marx to something crude and mechanical which was easily refuted by both true Marxists and anti-socialists. In any case, there will be defeats in any long-term struggle, some of them severe, but they are no excuse for abandoning an objective historical perspective. As Trotsky pointed out in In Defence of Marxism (writing in 1939),
Marxists do not have the slightest right (if disillusionment and fatigue are not considered “rights”) to draw the conclusion that the proletariat has forfeited its revolutionary possibilities and must renounce all aspirations to hegemony in an era immediately ahead. Twenty-five years in the scales of history, when it is a question of profoundest changes in economic and cultural systems, weigh less than an hour in the life of man. What good is the individual who, because of empirical failures in the course of an hour or a day, renounces a goal that he set for himself on the basis of the experience and analysis of his entire previous life-time?[2]
The defeat of several — not all — workers’ states notwithstanding, the Marxist insistence upon materialism and the analysis of social processes is mainstream today. The main challenge to it comes from post-modernism, whose rejection of the basic scientific tenets of the Enlightenment greatly limits its usefulness to most scientists and historians. The fatuous arguments about the death of Marxism go unchallenged in the Western mainstream, because the media in the capitalist world provide no platform for Marxist analysis. Liberal or social democratic viewpoints are permitted, but these do not fundamentally challenge the system. Instead, we are repeatedly told that there is no alternative to a neo-liberal capitalist viewpoint.
Yet reality marches on despite the spin. A particular defeat does not invalidate an entire system. If it did, then the fall of Byzantium would have meant the end of feudalism, and the defeat of Hitler the end of monopoly capitalism. One billion people continue to live under governments inspired by Marxism, and the most dynamic economy in the world — China — is a workers’ state. Millions continue to fight to create new revolutions, particularly in Latin America, and in Venezuela they have succeeded. Thus the declarations of the ‘death of Marxism’ are nonsense, on the most basic factual level.
Over the last thirty years, the working class has suffered a series of defeats. These began with the election of Thatcher and Reagan, and peaked with the overthrow of the Soviet workers’ state. But these are battles within the context of an ongoing war. The socialist states of Eastern Europe fell in 1989–91 because of the mistakes of Stalinism, not because Marxism itself was wrong. On the contrary, there was always a cogent Marxist critique of the Stalinist system, beginning with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and the recent economic crisis has proved yet again that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was correct.
Developments such as the growth of the socialist economies, resistance to imperialism in the Middle East, the huge leftwards shift in Latin America, and the final discrediting of neo-liberalism through the so-called ‘credit crunch’ are all contributing to a shift in the global balance of forces. Very slowly, Marx’s ideas on the emancipation of humanity are reasserting themselves. Despite reverses, socialism is never going to go away, because it is the politics that represents the interests of the proletariat: a class that will be here for centuries yet, and whose numbers continue to grow rapidly. The class struggle, for the same reason, will never go away. This does not necessarily mean that world socialism is around the corner, but it does mean that the struggle for emancipation is never lost.
The need for a Marxist theory of art
One of the most compelling reasons why Marxism is needed is that bourgeois opinion, even today, customarily presents art as something mysterious that can never be satisfactorily explained. Art is reduced to ‘the expression of feeling’, or to ‘form and content’, or an attempt to emotionally ‘infect’ the viewer, or is art ‘because it is made by artists’. Bourgeois theory tends to either take a single aspect of art and elevate it into a system, or at its most feeble to simply throw up its hands in bewilderment and conclude that a definition is impossible. In fact, art can to some extent be explained, but the bourgeoisie finds it difficult to analyse society without being confronted with uncomfortable truths about itself. This does not mean that bourgeois theory cannot provide us with excellent insights into art — only that it is limited in how fully it can penetrate the question. To quote Trotsky again:
It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.[3]
The seminal epic of Western art history, E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, manages to discuss 10,000 years of art without even mentioning the powerful social forces that shaped its story. This is like observing that the sea level rises and falls, without noting the existence of tides. Marxism always seeks the underlying forces as well as the surface features, and knows that they will inform the present as well as the past. For this reason the art of the past appears not as dead and academic but as part of a dynamic relationship. If Trotsky’s belief that ‘only Marxism’ can provide such explanation seems a little stretched today, it is because progressive materialism has had such an influence on the development of modern archaeology and other sciences since he was writing in 1924.
The best Marxist criticism seeks a total view of a work of art — not limiting itself to any one aspect, but trying to pull together every influence and recognise which factors are the most powerful, for the most complete and evidence-based understanding. This understanding is not set in stone, because a work of art is itself part of a dialectical reality, in which its meaning will never be static (a Christian artist of the Renaissance for example saw the sculpture of ancient Greece very differently to an early Christian zealot). Marxism sweeps away fixed ideas, outdated hierarchies, and stasis. Many of the assumptions of pre-Marxist aesthetics are pulled off their pedestals and forced to justify themselves. At the same time, art is restored from the magical and mysterious, or the eternal idea, to where it belongs, namely the social life of human beings.
The real Marxism
Many in the West, raised on a bourgeois diet of distortions and anti-socialist insults, would be surprised to learn what Marxism really is. The goal of Marxism is free human beings — unalienated, unexploited, free to develop themselves creatively. The economy, currently controlled by a minority, should be used for the equal benefit of everyone and governed by direct democracy. This is not a utopia or a dream, as the bourgeoisie would like us to think, but something that is realisable.
Understanding Marxism as just another ‘-ism’ limits its breadth: it is the investigation of the objective world through the method of dialectical materialism, and its aim is to discover the most precise attainable truth. Its method is scientific because it derives theory from experience — where experience teaches us that the theory no longer holds true, theory must change to more accurately explain the world, not vice versa. Marx did not get everything right. For example, his belief that socialist revolutions would first take place in the most advanced capitalist countries overlooked the strength of the apparatus of consent and coercion that could be created in those countries. Political experience demonstrated that breakthroughs actually came where the bourgeoisie was weak, as in Russia and China. The working class observed this, revised the theory [4], and continued the struggle on an improved basis. Nobody gains from defending Marx or his successors blindly; what matters is to be as close as possible to demonstrable reality.
Objectivity, of course, is not the same as neutrality. Objective conditions — global poverty, war, etc — confirm the need for the radical change of society. Marxism does not apologise for siding with the working class: for all its media’s pretence of impartiality, the capitalist class too sides with its own interests.
Marxism therefore is routinely misrepresented by the bourgeoisie: it is hardly going to be represented fairly by those who would be overthrown by it. As we shall see, parts of the left have also been guilty of misreadings. To cite Allen Wood, author of the respected study Karl Marx:
There are probably no texts ever written, with the sole exception of scriptures purporting to convey divine revelation, that have been read with more consistent intellectual dishonesty than the works of Marx... Misreading is almost guaranteed when it proceeds from agendas that preclude either reading a text sympathetically or reading it critically.[5]
Most of the arguments against Marxist aesthetics are flung against straw men, without reference to major texts in which they have already been refuted. Marxist theory is accused of economic determinism — which it does not advocate in a hard form. It is crudely equated with Stalinism — a degenerated discourse which principled Marxists opposed. At best it is conceded to have ‘good intentions’, but to contradict ‘human nature’ — a nature which is apparently synonymous with bourgeois values, though capitalism has existed for just 500 of our species’ 150,000 or more years! Nothing delights the bourgeois more than to liken Marxism to a religion — yet it is a strange religion that corrects its texts according to empirical evidence. It is accused of seeking to proscribe what work artists are allowed to create, and yes, there has been bureaucratic repression — but by contrast Trotsky, who was foremost in carrying the torch of true Marxism during the worst years of Stalinism, wrote:
Our Marxist conception of the objective social dependence and social utility of art, when translated into the language of politics, does not at all mean a desire to dominate art by means of decrees and orders. It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital![6]
Far from being dogmatic, true Marxism is open-minded, flexible and highly tolerant of change. Indeed, if it refuses to accept change, Marxism is in contradiction with itself. This refutes Foucault’s claim that “Marx out of the nineteenth century is like a fish out of water”. An essential part of this flexibility is that no Marxist worthy of the name should ever reduce art to a social document, from which a ‘political line’ must be extracted. Whether or not particular artists or works receive a ‘stamp of approval’ from Marxist criticism, art will continue regardless, just as it did for thousands of years before Marxism was even conceived. Art is first and foremost an affirmation of human powers and experience, that is there to be appreciated on its own terms and for which Marxism is simply a tool to a fuller understanding.
Why the Marxist perspective is important today
Lenin and Trotsky both understood that we must assimilate bourgeois culture before we can attempt to build a new, socialist one. If we want to understand how art fits into that process we need the best possible theoretical and historical perspective. Marxists are generally very interested in art and culture, but busy cadre engaged in activism against ills such as war or fascism often see the study of art as a low priority. Strictly they are correct. But human society without art, as the expression of our humanity in concrete, sensuous images, is unthinkable. If we are to understand Marxism in its totality we need to study its art theory too — through it we will encounter some of Marx’s most profound ideas.
The point is not to peddle endless quotations by Marx as if they were sufficient in themselves — what matters is that your theory should fit the facts. Identifying facts, of course, is less straightforward than it sounds. No scientific test exists outside of social and historical conditions, outside of ideology. The present-day debate between genetic determinism and the more plastic, socially mediated view of human nature is a case in point. And it is easy to forget that many of the scientific norms we take for granted were unknown to the vast majority of humans who have lived. Until the 17th century, the existence of bacteria was unknown; until the 19th century, Europeans mostly assumed that human beings were created ready-made by a creator God. The Newtonian model of physics seemed incontrovertible until new ideas by Einstein forced a revision, and even the Industrial Revolution is only 200 years old. We too will have assumptions overturned, and be sent in new directions by new discoveries — like anyone else, Marxists can only go on the best of current data, which makes claiming a definitive ‘final’ theory inadviseable. There is no Marxist magic wand that can conjure up answers to complex topics that the world’s best scientists are still puzzling over. But I would argue that it does put our researches into a powerful framework — materialist, penetrating, dialectical, embracing of change, viewing events as the products of complex totalities of causes rather than reductive ones, unafraid to seek underlying causes — that helps steer us through the debates of the day.
In achieving a better perspective, we must expose not only the distortions that capitalism has imposed upon art, but also the theoretical abuses that have been propagated by parts of the left, above all Stalinism. One reason why I quote so copiously from Marxist writers — apart from there being no need to reinvent the wheel — is to prove that an open-minded and humane approach to art is supported by primary texts. The attempts by the likes of Zhdanov to dictate content to artists was not only wrong in itself but contrary to the philosophy of Marx.
It was when confronted with an attempt to present bad politics in his name that Marx made his comment that if that was Marxism, then “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”.[7] When the leader of the world’s most recent socialist revolution, Hugo Chávez, talks about “twenty-first century socialism”, he does so for good reason — to draw a line between the worst models of the twentieth century and the new ones of today and tomorrow.
Marxism’s contribution to analysing a painting or a novel may seem of minor importance next to the goal of freeing the oppressed people of the world, but the application of Marxism is universal. It is not only interested in economics, class or revolutions but in anthropology, archaeology, history, psychology, culture, and indeed everything else. We should not see Marxism as one among several interesting tools in a toolbox, for its implications are felt across the whole of society. You cannot, as some academics want to, cherry-pick the bits you like and ignore its revolutionary politics. Marx and Engels never lost sight of their philosophy as a programme of proletarian revolutionary action. It is not enough to theorise in isolation from political practice. As Marx famously said in the last of his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For a Marxist, political intervention, with no interests other than those of the international working class, is a must.
The goal of Marxism is to reduce human suffering by building a world of democracy and hope in which everybody has food, shelter, education, healthcare and the other benefits of civilisation, not according to their social status, sex or the colour of their skin, but on an equal basis. It is this powerful and optimistic human message, this belief in a far better way of organising society, that drives all Marxists and which makes Marxism essential today.
[1] As theorised by Trotsky in, for example, The Revolution Betrayed. There is an alternative theory popular with the ultra-left that the USSR was in fact ‘state capitalist’. This theory has various forms, the most prominent contending that the bureaucracy was a new class — a position that excused the ultra-left from defending the Soviet Union and led them to see the regression from workers’ state to capitalism as at worst a ‘step sideways’. This gave us the grotesque spectacle of some socialist forces applauding the biggest defeat the working class has suffered since the Second World War: capitalist restoration halved the former USSR’s GDP and devastated the living standards of its working class.
[2] Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War’ from In Defence of Marxism (1942).
[3] Trotsky, ‘The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism’ from Literature and Revolution (1924). This work was part of Trotsky’s opposition to the Stalinist orthodoxy that dominated communist parties across the world. Eclipsed for decades, it deserves to take its proper place as one of the finest works of Marxist aesthetic theory.
[4] For example, in Lenin’s State and Revolution and Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.
[5] Allen Wood, Preface to the second edition of Karl Marx (2004).
[6] Trotsky, op. cit.
[7] Reported by Engels in his letter to Eduard Bernstein (November 1882). Marx was talking about the French leaders Guesde and Lafargue, whom he accused of “phrase-mongering” in their rejection of reformist struggle.
Marxists’ interest in the arts
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other prominent Marxists are renowned for their revolutionary theory. Only a handful, such as György Lukács and Max Raphael, are primarily known for their contribution to aesthetics. But in fact, many of Marxism’s major figures had a serious appreciation of the arts. For now, let us take a brief look at four leading theorists.
Marx himself originally hoped to be a poet, and studied aesthetics and literature in his university days, reading Schiller, Vischer, Lessing and other prominent writers on the subject. His literary reading encompassed Aeschylus, Cervantes, Heine, Dickens, Balzac, Diderot and many others, and his own writing style, at its best, is powerful and finely composed. We get a taste of his cultural interests from Paul Lafargue, a fellow socialist who knew Marx personally:
If Marx’s planned treatises and articles on aesthetic questions — on religious art, on romanticism, on Balzac’s Human Comedy — never saw fruition, this was down to the pressure of time, not lack of interest. He was a highly cultured intellectual for whom art was meat and drink, and this is why cultural questions and references arise even in his writings on economics.[2]
Engels too had hoped to be a poet and critic. Maynard Solomon tells us:
Engels’ comments on Hübner’s painting of the Silesian weavers demonstrate clearly — however limited his judgement of a mediocre work — his belief in the social importance of art. Only reluctantly did Engels, like Marx, prioritise political economy and the work of building a revolutionary movement. Even with so many projects on artistic questions left frustratingly incomplete, their collected comments upon art — letters, reviews, notes scribbled in books, unfinished manuscripts, etc — form a large body of work, which includes a debate on tragedy with Lassalle, critical comments on Eugène Sue’s novel Les Mystères de Paris, and many other contributions.
One of the least-known characteristics of Lenin, the great revolutionary leader, was his particular sensitivity to music. This seems to have caused him both pleasure and distress. As a child he had a great affinity for the piano, and later regretted giving it up. According to Gorky he said, after a domestic performance of one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas:
Lunacharsky too reported that music had such an effect upon Lenin that he would deliberately avoid hearing it. Lenin refused to be distracted from the revolutionary struggle. He told Clara Zetkin, “the revolution demands of the masses and the individual concentration, the straining of every nerve. It does not tolerate orgiastic states.”[5] As the principal leader of the Russian working class, he turned his back on musicality for the sake of a struggle that was bigger than himself. Nonetheless, his articles on Tolstoy are excellent pieces of art criticism that showed he could be sensitive to an artist’s achievements even when despising their politics. Despite feeling ambivalent about works of modern art (“I do not understand them. I experience no joy from them”) he never tried to stand in artists’ way.
As for Leon Trotsky, one of the main architects of the Russian Revolution and commander of the Red Army, he had an enduring love of literature. As Paul N. Siegel observed:
Beside his political theory Trotsky wrote reviews of works from Futurist poetry to the historical writing of Churchill, intervened into the early Soviet debate about ‘proletarian culture’, and with his book Literature and Revolution made one of the most significant contributions to Marxist theory on art. His critical approach was always honest and fair: he never allowed political sympathy to detract from his discrimination as a critic, finding praise not only for left-wing writers such as Ignazio Silone but also for the right-wing Céline. He was also one of the staunchest defenders of freedom for the arts, as in the manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, signed by Diego Rivera and André Breton but mostly written by Trotsky.
Trotsky has been criticised for spending so much energy on Literature and Revolution at a time when, with Lenin dead, the bureaucracy was beginning to crush the democratic life out of the Revolution. Surely, the criticism went, Trotsky should have been organising the opposition and defending true Marxism, instead of writing about fiction and poetry? But Trotsky did not see these as separate tasks. By intervening against the reductive movement for ‘proletarian culture’ touted by the ultra-left, he was making a serious political intervention — refuting its ideas about art also meant exposing its politics.
This is just a brief look at four of Marxism’s most prominent theorists. But the number of writers both Marxist-influenced and Marxist who have contributed to the theory of art and culture is immense. To list just a few: Gordon Childe, Franz Mehring, William Morris, Georgi Plekhanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin, Christopher Caudwell, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord, Pierre Macherey, John Berger and Terry Eagleton [7]. We shall be exploring these and many other figures in this blog.
It is not necessary to take an intense interest in art before one’s theoretical work may be applicable to it. My point is simply that the philistine ‘communist’ apparatchik, a type drawn from the worst specimens from the bureaucracies, bears no relation to the best Marxist tradition. The most prominent Marxist thinkers have never limited themselves to politics alone but instead embraced a vision of society in which human beings were completely liberated — it was unthinkable to them that art and culture in such a society would not be of the greatest importance.
[1] Paul Lafargue, Reminiscences of Karl Marx (1890).
[2] For an excellent detailed study of Marx’s many literary influences and allusions, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (1978).
[3] Ed. Maynard Solomon, Marxism and Art (1973). Solomon’s is in my view the best single anthology of Marxist writings on art and culture.
[4] Recounted in Maxim Gorky, V. I. Lenin (1924).
[5] Clara Zetkin, My Memorandum Book.
[6] Paul N. Siegel, Introduction to Art and Revolution, an anthology of Trotsky’s writings on art (1970).
[7] Almost all of the writers listed are white men. This is the regrettable fact of a world that has been dominated by the West since the 16th century, and of a society that prioritised male education far above women’s. There are plenty of female and non-white writers however who have contributed to materialist art theory, as we see as this blog progresses.
Marx himself originally hoped to be a poet, and studied aesthetics and literature in his university days, reading Schiller, Vischer, Lessing and other prominent writers on the subject. His literary reading encompassed Aeschylus, Cervantes, Heine, Dickens, Balzac, Diderot and many others, and his own writing style, at its best, is powerful and finely composed. We get a taste of his cultural interests from Paul Lafargue, a fellow socialist who knew Marx personally:He knew Heine and Goethe by heart and often quoted them in his conversations; he was an assiduous reader of poets in all European languages. Every year he read Aeschylus in the Greek original. He considered him and Shakespeare as the greatest dramatic geniuses humanity ever gave birth to. His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters... He ranked Cervantes and Balzac above all other novelists. In Don Quixote he saw the epic of dying-out chivalry whose virtues were ridiculed and scoffed at in the emerging bourgeois world. He admired Balzac so much that he wished to write a review of his great work La Comédie Humaine as soon as he had finished his book on economics.[1]
If Marx’s planned treatises and articles on aesthetic questions — on religious art, on romanticism, on Balzac’s Human Comedy — never saw fruition, this was down to the pressure of time, not lack of interest. He was a highly cultured intellectual for whom art was meat and drink, and this is why cultural questions and references arise even in his writings on economics.[2]
Engels too had hoped to be a poet and critic. Maynard Solomon tells us:[Engels] dreamed, according to his biographer, Gustav Mayer, of “preaching through poetry the new ideas which were revolutionising his inner world.” He wrote poetic cycles to humanity in the style of Shelley, and he began a translation of Queen Mab; he composed choral pieces for the musical society in his native Bremen, in which he had served as a chorister. His writings on literary (and occasionally musical) subjects from 1838 to 1842 fill 150 pages of his collected works. [3]
Engels’ comments on Hübner’s painting of the Silesian weavers demonstrate clearly — however limited his judgement of a mediocre work — his belief in the social importance of art. Only reluctantly did Engels, like Marx, prioritise political economy and the work of building a revolutionary movement. Even with so many projects on artistic questions left frustratingly incomplete, their collected comments upon art — letters, reviews, notes scribbled in books, unfinished manuscripts, etc — form a large body of work, which includes a debate on tragedy with Lassalle, critical comments on Eugène Sue’s novel Les Mystères de Paris, and many other contributions.
One of the least-known characteristics of Lenin, the great revolutionary leader, was his particular sensitivity to music. This seems to have caused him both pleasure and distress. As a child he had a great affinity for the piano, and later regretted giving it up. According to Gorky he said, after a domestic performance of one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas:I know nothing greater than the Appassionata, I’d like to listen to it every day. It’s beautiful, super-human music. I always think proudly — it may be naive — what marvellous things people can do... But I can’t listen to music too often, it affects the nerves, makes you want to say kind, silly things, to stroke the heads of the people who, living in a terrible hell, can create such a beauty.[4]
Lunacharsky too reported that music had such an effect upon Lenin that he would deliberately avoid hearing it. Lenin refused to be distracted from the revolutionary struggle. He told Clara Zetkin, “the revolution demands of the masses and the individual concentration, the straining of every nerve. It does not tolerate orgiastic states.”[5] As the principal leader of the Russian working class, he turned his back on musicality for the sake of a struggle that was bigger than himself. Nonetheless, his articles on Tolstoy are excellent pieces of art criticism that showed he could be sensitive to an artist’s achievements even when despising their politics. Despite feeling ambivalent about works of modern art (“I do not understand them. I experience no joy from them”) he never tried to stand in artists’ way.
As for Leon Trotsky, one of the main architects of the Russian Revolution and commander of the Red Army, he had an enduring love of literature. As Paul N. Siegel observed:Almost as remarkable in its way as Trotsky’s military accomplishments is the fact that, as he was speeding from one front to another in his famous armoured train, he was reading recently published French novels... And just as his military feats won, as Lenin noted, the respect of experts in that field, so did the literary criticism of this professional revolutionist win the respect of professional men of letters.[6]
Beside his political theory Trotsky wrote reviews of works from Futurist poetry to the historical writing of Churchill, intervened into the early Soviet debate about ‘proletarian culture’, and with his book Literature and Revolution made one of the most significant contributions to Marxist theory on art. His critical approach was always honest and fair: he never allowed political sympathy to detract from his discrimination as a critic, finding praise not only for left-wing writers such as Ignazio Silone but also for the right-wing Céline. He was also one of the staunchest defenders of freedom for the arts, as in the manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, signed by Diego Rivera and André Breton but mostly written by Trotsky.
Trotsky has been criticised for spending so much energy on Literature and Revolution at a time when, with Lenin dead, the bureaucracy was beginning to crush the democratic life out of the Revolution. Surely, the criticism went, Trotsky should have been organising the opposition and defending true Marxism, instead of writing about fiction and poetry? But Trotsky did not see these as separate tasks. By intervening against the reductive movement for ‘proletarian culture’ touted by the ultra-left, he was making a serious political intervention — refuting its ideas about art also meant exposing its politics.
This is just a brief look at four of Marxism’s most prominent theorists. But the number of writers both Marxist-influenced and Marxist who have contributed to the theory of art and culture is immense. To list just a few: Gordon Childe, Franz Mehring, William Morris, Georgi Plekhanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin, Christopher Caudwell, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord, Pierre Macherey, John Berger and Terry Eagleton [7]. We shall be exploring these and many other figures in this blog.
It is not necessary to take an intense interest in art before one’s theoretical work may be applicable to it. My point is simply that the philistine ‘communist’ apparatchik, a type drawn from the worst specimens from the bureaucracies, bears no relation to the best Marxist tradition. The most prominent Marxist thinkers have never limited themselves to politics alone but instead embraced a vision of society in which human beings were completely liberated — it was unthinkable to them that art and culture in such a society would not be of the greatest importance.
[1] Paul Lafargue, Reminiscences of Karl Marx (1890).
[2] For an excellent detailed study of Marx’s many literary influences and allusions, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (1978).
[3] Ed. Maynard Solomon, Marxism and Art (1973). Solomon’s is in my view the best single anthology of Marxist writings on art and culture.
[4] Recounted in Maxim Gorky, V. I. Lenin (1924).
[5] Clara Zetkin, My Memorandum Book.
[6] Paul N. Siegel, Introduction to Art and Revolution, an anthology of Trotsky’s writings on art (1970).
[7] Almost all of the writers listed are white men. This is the regrettable fact of a world that has been dominated by the West since the 16th century, and of a society that prioritised male education far above women’s. There are plenty of female and non-white writers however who have contributed to materialist art theory, as we see as this blog progresses.
Introduction
This blog is an exploration of how Marxism, from Marx and Engels until the present, can help to explain the origins and nature of art — be it music, literature, architecture, theatre, the visual arts or other branches.[1] Its aim is to answer the most important questions about art. Why does art exist? Is it necessary? Are there universal standards by which all art can be judged? Does ‘beauty’ exist, and what is it? Can, and should, art play a political or even revolutionary role? Is it the creation of great individuals, or of social forces outside our control? How has capitalism affected art? What makes art ‘great’ — or is the term even legitimate? Is there such a thing as ‘genius’?
Karl Marx, though of bourgeois origins himself, was the greatest thinker of the working class movement — of the proletariat. In modern Western society art is often seen as an elite activity, baffling to the masses. Yet across human history, all layers of society have engaged in the making of art. Art is for every human being, because it is a fundamental human activity, and creativity imbues everything we make, from the spires of a Gothic cathedral to the shape of a button, from Stone Age handaxes to mobile phones. To fail to be interested in such creations is a tragic limitation on ourselves as human beings. It is to fail to be interested in our humanity.
For this reason we must dismiss from the outset the misguided notion that rigorous analysis destroys the effect of art. If we are to try to understand art, we must study it as scientifically as any other subject, basing our conclusions upon evidence. This approach poses no threat to art. Science will never completely unravel the infinitude of causes and combinations that influence our creativity. Art will always therefore be a little evasive and mysterious, just like the human mind that creates it — this does not mean we cannot investigate it as far as our means allow. Of course, as the art historian Arnold Hauser put it:
In the process of studying art, we will encounter archaeology, economics, history, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines, because the division of areas of study into fixed categories is artificial. Art, like everything that exists, is in a constantly changing relationship with, and is inseparable from, other processes. Most of this research is currently undertaken by bourgeois specialists, i.e. people who are not Marxists, but I refer to their work upon the strength of their arguments as science — the best materialist analysis can be readily embraced by Marxism.
The need for this breadth of reference should be obvious. Further topics analysed by this blog will include: how art originated, how it has changed across different societies, what beauty is, why we still appreciate the art of cultures utterly unlike our own, the relationship between art and society, the nature of artistic cognition, form and content, Marxist criticism and aesthetic value, the impact of capitalism upon art, romanticism, alienation, racism and sexism, women in art, cultural imperialism, mass culture, postmodernism, art and propaganda, socialist realism, the debate over proletarian culture... and much more. By the end, I shall also offer some speculation about what art can look forward to in a socialist society.
The aesthetic theory of Marx and Engels
Despite their immense level of culture, Marx and Engels were usually busy with economic theory and practical political work and never wrote a theory of art or aesthetics, nor did they encourage a school of followers on the question. Some of the writings they did leave have been published in anthologies like Baxandall and Morawski’s Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art; or see the www.marxists.org online archive Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Such anthologies are not a substitute for the treatise that neither Marx nor Engels wrote. However, brief as some of their remarks are, they should not be seen as throwaway or accidental, as they are consistent and arise from a highly-developed system of ideas: a scientific world view centred upon the liberated and whole human being. Their thought was so ground-breaking, and universal in its implications, that no field, from art to zoology, has remained untouched by it.
In the absence of a rounded aesthetic theory by Marx and Engels themselves, their successors must construct one, based upon their remarks on art and general philosophy. This may be done with confidence, and has resulted in an incredibly rich body of theory, but such extrapolation does require care. Engels for example praised realism [3], but this does not mean that he advocated it in preference to all other styles, or that socialist artists must therefore limit themselves dogmatically to realism at the expense of other movements. Engels said nothing about modernism because he did not live long enough to see it, nor do we know what he would have said about it. There are also all sorts of questions upon which he and Marx offered no opinion at all. What we have is a profound philosophy that would have influenced aesthetics whether or not Marx and Engels had written comments upon art, and which provides a basis for further exploration.
There should be no place in this exploration for reductionism, decrees upon ‘official’ styles, or other dead-ends and distortions. We can agree with the Spanish-Mexican Marxist, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, when he criticised dogmatic and one-sided applications of Marxism, and concluded:
The work on extending Marxist theory into the huge and complex area of the arts — into psychology, the imagination, the origins of creativity, and countless other issues — is still far from complete, and can never be complete. New forms arise (e.g. cinema in the 1900s, and virtual reality today) and demand new theory; aesthetics becomes sub-divided and specialised. It is essential however to return always, though never uncritically, to the writings of Marx and Engels. Firstly, because they are scientists, who sought the dialectical totality of things and scorned academic cul-de-sacs. Secondly, because they believed in the complete human being, with the artist exemplifying a creativity which is an innate part of being human. Thirdly, because the worst excesses of some workers’ states — like the Soviet Union after the rise of Stalin — were possible because of their divergence from and distortion of Marx’s ideas, and these mistakes must never be repeated. The fourth reason is simple: contemporary developments consistently prove them right in the main points of their theory.
In the same spirit, we should not take something as fact simply because Marx or Engels said it. Today we have access to a mass of archaeological, anthropological, neuroscientific and other information that Marx and Engels could not consider. We need to test their ideas against contemporary levels of knowledge — without forgetting that current knowledge will itself in some respects be superceded. It would be absurd, for example, to insist upon the pattern of early civilisation laid out by Engels in The Origin of the Family, with all its limitations of 19th century archaeology, and thereby refuse to learn from over one hundred subsequent years of scientific study.
This includes learning from the bad example often set in the old ‘communist’ bloc, particularly regarding artistic freedoms. Marx himself was in no doubt as to the relative autonomy of art and the importance of its freedom from political interference. In his very first articles he fiercely defends the freedom of the press against the Prussian censorship:
“The real, radical cure for the censorship,” writes Marx after his dissection of the decree, “would be its abolition; for the institution itself is a bad one”. Marx never changed this position. His articles on the freedom of the press, along with other writings that we will study, bear witness to his concern for freedom of expression and freedom for the arts, goals which have motivated the revolutionary working class movement from the beginning. If Marx had lived to witness the twentieth-century bureaucrats’ abuse of the arts in his name, he would have stood side by side with artists in opposing it.
[1] I prefer the terms ‘Marxist’ and ‘Marxism’ in this blog, for two reasons. Firstly, ‘socialism’ existed before Marxism, and the term today covers a range of political positions — some of them, e.g. social democracy, not Marxist. Secondly, ‘communism’ has been crudely equated with Stalinism in popular discourse and I see no advantage in using it here.
[2] Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (1958). Hauser was a British writer, born in Hungary, whose major work The Social History of Art has a materialist perspective strongly influenced by Marxism.
[3] See for example his letter to Margaret Harkness (April 1888). This, along with many other of the primary texts cited, is available for free at the excellent www.marxists.org.
[4] Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (1965, English transl. 1973). Born in Spain, Sánchez Vázquez emigrated to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War, where he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This book is a superb theoretical contribution.
[5] Marx, Comments on The Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction (1842).
Karl Marx, though of bourgeois origins himself, was the greatest thinker of the working class movement — of the proletariat. In modern Western society art is often seen as an elite activity, baffling to the masses. Yet across human history, all layers of society have engaged in the making of art. Art is for every human being, because it is a fundamental human activity, and creativity imbues everything we make, from the spires of a Gothic cathedral to the shape of a button, from Stone Age handaxes to mobile phones. To fail to be interested in such creations is a tragic limitation on ourselves as human beings. It is to fail to be interested in our humanity.
For this reason we must dismiss from the outset the misguided notion that rigorous analysis destroys the effect of art. If we are to try to understand art, we must study it as scientifically as any other subject, basing our conclusions upon evidence. This approach poses no threat to art. Science will never completely unravel the infinitude of causes and combinations that influence our creativity. Art will always therefore be a little evasive and mysterious, just like the human mind that creates it — this does not mean we cannot investigate it as far as our means allow. Of course, as the art historian Arnold Hauser put it:
There are still people who do not feel quite happy when spiritual phenomena, or, as they prefer to call them, the higher spiritual values, are in any way brought into connection with the struggle for existence, class conflict, competition, prestige, and the like... Requiring the spiritual to be preserved from all contact with the material frequently turns out to be a way of defending a position of privilege.[2]
In the process of studying art, we will encounter archaeology, economics, history, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines, because the division of areas of study into fixed categories is artificial. Art, like everything that exists, is in a constantly changing relationship with, and is inseparable from, other processes. Most of this research is currently undertaken by bourgeois specialists, i.e. people who are not Marxists, but I refer to their work upon the strength of their arguments as science — the best materialist analysis can be readily embraced by Marxism.
The need for this breadth of reference should be obvious. Further topics analysed by this blog will include: how art originated, how it has changed across different societies, what beauty is, why we still appreciate the art of cultures utterly unlike our own, the relationship between art and society, the nature of artistic cognition, form and content, Marxist criticism and aesthetic value, the impact of capitalism upon art, romanticism, alienation, racism and sexism, women in art, cultural imperialism, mass culture, postmodernism, art and propaganda, socialist realism, the debate over proletarian culture... and much more. By the end, I shall also offer some speculation about what art can look forward to in a socialist society.
The aesthetic theory of Marx and Engels
Despite their immense level of culture, Marx and Engels were usually busy with economic theory and practical political work and never wrote a theory of art or aesthetics, nor did they encourage a school of followers on the question. Some of the writings they did leave have been published in anthologies like Baxandall and Morawski’s Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art; or see the www.marxists.org online archive Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Such anthologies are not a substitute for the treatise that neither Marx nor Engels wrote. However, brief as some of their remarks are, they should not be seen as throwaway or accidental, as they are consistent and arise from a highly-developed system of ideas: a scientific world view centred upon the liberated and whole human being. Their thought was so ground-breaking, and universal in its implications, that no field, from art to zoology, has remained untouched by it.
In the absence of a rounded aesthetic theory by Marx and Engels themselves, their successors must construct one, based upon their remarks on art and general philosophy. This may be done with confidence, and has resulted in an incredibly rich body of theory, but such extrapolation does require care. Engels for example praised realism [3], but this does not mean that he advocated it in preference to all other styles, or that socialist artists must therefore limit themselves dogmatically to realism at the expense of other movements. Engels said nothing about modernism because he did not live long enough to see it, nor do we know what he would have said about it. There are also all sorts of questions upon which he and Marx offered no opinion at all. What we have is a profound philosophy that would have influenced aesthetics whether or not Marx and Engels had written comments upon art, and which provides a basis for further exploration.
There should be no place in this exploration for reductionism, decrees upon ‘official’ styles, or other dead-ends and distortions. We can agree with the Spanish-Mexican Marxist, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, when he criticised dogmatic and one-sided applications of Marxism, and concluded:
All this obliges us to bring to the fore the true nature of Marx’s aesthetic ideas, not in order to limit ourselves to an exegesis and reiteration of them, but to develop them creatively, in a living and constant relationship with life itself, with artistic experience, and thus to lay the foundations for a true Marxist aesthetic. We can find in Marx the roots for a conception of aesthetics in general, and of art in particular, which in my view allows us to deal successfully with the most complex artistic problems.[4]
The work on extending Marxist theory into the huge and complex area of the arts — into psychology, the imagination, the origins of creativity, and countless other issues — is still far from complete, and can never be complete. New forms arise (e.g. cinema in the 1900s, and virtual reality today) and demand new theory; aesthetics becomes sub-divided and specialised. It is essential however to return always, though never uncritically, to the writings of Marx and Engels. Firstly, because they are scientists, who sought the dialectical totality of things and scorned academic cul-de-sacs. Secondly, because they believed in the complete human being, with the artist exemplifying a creativity which is an innate part of being human. Thirdly, because the worst excesses of some workers’ states — like the Soviet Union after the rise of Stalin — were possible because of their divergence from and distortion of Marx’s ideas, and these mistakes must never be repeated. The fourth reason is simple: contemporary developments consistently prove them right in the main points of their theory.
In the same spirit, we should not take something as fact simply because Marx or Engels said it. Today we have access to a mass of archaeological, anthropological, neuroscientific and other information that Marx and Engels could not consider. We need to test their ideas against contemporary levels of knowledge — without forgetting that current knowledge will itself in some respects be superceded. It would be absurd, for example, to insist upon the pattern of early civilisation laid out by Engels in The Origin of the Family, with all its limitations of 19th century archaeology, and thereby refuse to learn from over one hundred subsequent years of scientific study.
This includes learning from the bad example often set in the old ‘communist’ bloc, particularly regarding artistic freedoms. Marx himself was in no doubt as to the relative autonomy of art and the importance of its freedom from political interference. In his very first articles he fiercely defends the freedom of the press against the Prussian censorship:
The law permits me to write; it asks only that I write in a style other than my own! I am allowed to show the face of my mind, but, first, I must give it a prescribed expression! Where is the man of honour who would not crimson at this imposition... You admire nature’s enchanting multiplicity, its inexhaustible richness. You do not demand that the rose smell like the violet; and yet, the mind, which is richest of all, is to be allowed to exist in but a single mode? I am inclined to humouristic writing, but the law bids me be serious. My style is bold, but the law orders moderation. The sole permissible colour of freedom is grey on grey. An inexhaustible play of colours glitters from each dewdrop in which the sun shines; and yet the mind’s sun is to engender but one colour, the official colour, no matter how many individuals or which objects may be refracted![5]
“The real, radical cure for the censorship,” writes Marx after his dissection of the decree, “would be its abolition; for the institution itself is a bad one”. Marx never changed this position. His articles on the freedom of the press, along with other writings that we will study, bear witness to his concern for freedom of expression and freedom for the arts, goals which have motivated the revolutionary working class movement from the beginning. If Marx had lived to witness the twentieth-century bureaucrats’ abuse of the arts in his name, he would have stood side by side with artists in opposing it.
[1] I prefer the terms ‘Marxist’ and ‘Marxism’ in this blog, for two reasons. Firstly, ‘socialism’ existed before Marxism, and the term today covers a range of political positions — some of them, e.g. social democracy, not Marxist. Secondly, ‘communism’ has been crudely equated with Stalinism in popular discourse and I see no advantage in using it here.
[2] Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (1958). Hauser was a British writer, born in Hungary, whose major work The Social History of Art has a materialist perspective strongly influenced by Marxism.
[3] See for example his letter to Margaret Harkness (April 1888). This, along with many other of the primary texts cited, is available for free at the excellent www.marxists.org.
[4] Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (1965, English transl. 1973). Born in Spain, Sánchez Vázquez emigrated to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War, where he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This book is a superb theoretical contribution.
[5] Marx, Comments on The Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction (1842).