The Marxist Theory Of Art

An Introductory Survey

Dave Laing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000303230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is intended as a structured presentation of the major ideas of the most important trends of thought in the Marxist theory of art and is constructed as a map of the field of Marxist aesthetics.

Chapter One
Origins of an Aesthetic

IN a 1967 account of his own intellectual development, Georg Lukacs wrote that it was not until the 1930s that 'an independent and integral Marxist aesthetic' was expounded. Earlier communist writers had not 'thought of aesthetics as a vital part of the Marxist system'. They had drawn instead on other, non-Marxist ideas as the source of their view of art.¹

For Lukacs, the decisive factor which made a Marxist aesthetic now possible was the publication of certain of Marx's early writings for the first time, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

'While most of the leaders of the Second International saw him exclusively, or at least primarily, as the man who revolutionised economics, we now started to understand that a new era had begun with him in the whole history of human thought.'²

During the early 1930s, Lukacs worked in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute. It was one of his fellow-workers there, Mikhail Lifshitz, who first edited a selection of material by Marx and Engels on art and literature, as well as producing the first study of Marx's aesthetics, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1973). It concentrated principally on those newly published works of the 1840s which were particularly rich in the discussion of aesthetic issues. In these early writings, Marx was considering and criticising the philosophical influences of the German tradition, in whose work aesthetic questions were frequently of central significance.

Many subsequent reconstructions of an aesthetic from within the works of Marx and Engels have followed Lifshitz in focusing on formulations within these early works and arguing for a continuity between them and the less frequent and more fragmentary references to artistic issues as the focus of Marx's attention shifted from philosophy to political economy in the later writings. Stefan Morawski (in Marx & Engels, 1974) has usefully divided the scattered comments on aesthetics into 'themes', 'observations' and 'remarks', where the second and third categories denote half-finished or hardly begun discussions of artistic issues.³ In both the earlier and later works, art is frequently accorded a special status amongst social activity in general. In the philosophical writings of the 1840s, it tends to assume a privileged role in discussions of 'Man' in general as a 'species-being', where the aesthetic sense, or the creativity of the artist prefigures or acts as a guide to the nature of an unalienated existence. As Marx turns from philosophy to theory, this sense of the special character of art is subsumed into key test cases for the explanatory range of Marxist theory, notably in the area of the relations between the economic base and the superstructure of the social formation.

For Marxist authors who consider the earlier works to be discontinuous with the mature theory, it is here that the starting point for an exposition of artistic issues is to be found. Art is then seen as a particular sector of the ideological level of the superstructure, whose relations of dependence and independence are to be discovered. A third chronological phase of aesthetic comment, belonging entirely to Engels, has also been influential among later Marxists. This comprised his prescriptive remarks on the character of'realist' art in letters written during the 1880s. These remarks would later come to occupy a central place in the doctrine of socialist realism in the Soviet Union.

The anthologies of Marx and Engels On Literature And Art available in English have tended to group the material according to categories of aesthetic thought determined by the anthologists and their own view of Marxism. They range from the orthodox socialist realist position, which organises the material along historical lines, from 'Origins of Art' to 'Literary History', (Marx & Engels, Bombay, 1956), to selections aimed at locating a Utopian dimension in art (Solomon, 1973). The first type stresses the implication of art in the epoch of its production, while the second emphasises the qualities of art which enable it to point beyond that epoch.

Both, nevertheless, share the view that there is an integral aesthetic to be found in Marx and Engels, and that it can, finally, be read off from what the anthologist in question considers to be the principal features of the general theoretical work of the founders of Marxism, The subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics (not to mention marxist thought in general) suggests, however, that the importance of these aesthetic texts may lie more in their signalling of problematic areas to be worked on further, rather than the exposition of a consistent system. Furthermore, since few of these texts are themselves discrete essays or letters, but interpolations into texts primarily concerned with other issues, the context of the utterance becomes of major importance in determining its significance. In order to survey the texts of Marx and Engels, I have therefore adopted a chronological approach.

1. Marx and Engels on Art

As students and until 1844, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) worked strictly within the domain of German classical philosophy, where art and philosophy were intimately bound up with the movement of history as a whole. Both the romanticism of Schiller and Fichte and the Hegelian system contrasted the organic unity of classical Greece with the atomised, egotistical character of contemporary bourgeois society, which was inimical to great art. In 1842, Marx wrote: "If we consider the gods and heroes of Greek art without religious or aesthetic prejudices, we find in them nothing which could not exist in the pulsations of nature. Indeed, these images are artistic only as they portray beautiful human mores in a splendid integrated form.'⁴

This observation recurs in a famous crux of Marx's writing fifteen years later, when he had shifted decisively away from his early philosophical positions. By 1842, however, Marx had already moved beyond the Romanticism which influenced his youthful attempts at poetry to a Left Hegelian standpoint, which accepted the outlines of Hegel's system but rejected its author's political conservatism. Marx's dissertation on the Greek philosopher Epicurus maintained the contrast between the art of Greece and Rome (which is characterised in much the same terms as contemporary Germany), but regarded the Epicurean notion of atomism in a positive light. For Hegel, this idea marked the collapse of the social cohesion of Greece, while Marx found in it an enlightened self-interest which was the real basis of communality.

At this period, too, Marx encountered the idea of fetishism in a critique of Christian art by the art historian Grund. In contrast to the reflection of nature and 'beautiful human mores' in Greek sculpture, 'the fetishistic character of religion is demonstrated by the fact that it worships the material aspect of things, endowing them with the qualities of man himself.'⁵ This aesthetic concept of fetishism is clearly one source of the later concept of alienation, which would, in 1844, be central to Marx's political philosophy.

In 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, in which he wrote a series of articles on censorship, the freedom of the press and the writer's craft. With considerable polemical skill, he ridiculed the censor's distinction between 'competent' and 'incompetent' writing, and argued that 'the first freedom of the press consists in its not being a business.' The writer, furthermore, is distinguished by the fact that in no sense does he 'regard his works as a means. They are ends in themselves; so little are they means for him and others that, when necessary, he sacrifices his existence to theirs . . .'.⁶ By 'writing as a means' Marx is here referring to writing as simply a way of making a living, with the implicit corollory that such writers become hired hacks, willing to accept censorship. His statement can then be read as an endorsement of committed writing in the most general sense, and also as claiming a 'free' independent status for the genuine writer, a notion his later work would implicitly repudiate.

1844 found Marx working on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the first great watershed in his development, where he used the humanist materialism of Feuerbach to emancipate his thought from Hegelian idealism. In these fragmentary texts, Marx argues persistently that the elements of human society and of man's consciousness are the product of human activity itself and not some external force. And, since the concept of beauty and artistic practice itself are among those elements which distinguish man as a species, it is crucial to establish their origins in human activity itself. The following is a key passage:

Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form — in short, senses capable of human gratifications, senses confirming themselves as essential power of man) either cultivated or brought into being . . . The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.⁷

But this humanist paean is counterpointed by the awareness that 'the sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense'. In a class society under the domination of money (it is here that Marx quotes copiously from Shakespeare and Goethe on the power of money to estrange men from themselves), the full development of the five senses is impossible: 'The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play.'

In the same year, 1844, Engels was writing a contrasting piece of aesthetics. In an article for the English Chartist newspaper, New Moral World, on "Rapid Progress Of Communism In Germany', he described in detail the painting The Silesian Weavers by Hubner, 'which has made a more effectual Socialist agitation than a hundred pamphlets might have done'.⁸ The Holy Family (1845) was the major collaboration of Marx and Engels, and included an extended piece of literary criticism which combined the specificity of Engels' 1844 article with a more general philosophical critique. The object of the text was to analyse an essay by the Young Hegelian Szeliga praising Eugéne Sue's novel Mysteries Of Paris for its portrayal of lower-class life. Marx and Engels set out to show how both author and critic share an ideology of bourgeois romanticism which dominates and determines the supposed realism of the melodramatic novel. They show how Rudolph, the book's hero, remains entirely within the moral world of the bourgeoisie: 'Rudolph captures this criminal. He wants to reform him critically and set him as an example for the world of law. He quarrels with the world of law not over 'punishment' itself, but over kinds and methods of punishment . . .'.⁹ There is a similar fatal limitation in the portrayal of the character of Rigoletto:

In her Eugéne Sue portrayed that admirable human character, the Parisian grisette. However, out of his devotion to the bourgeoisie and his own transcendentalism, he was forced to idealise her from a moral standpoint. He had to extenuate the salient trait of Rigoletto's character and situation: her disdain of marriage, her naive relations with the student and the worker. Yet it is precisely these naive relations which place her in truly human contrast with the hypocritical, avaricious, egotistical bourgeois wife, and the entire bourgeois world, that is to say, the entire official world.¹⁰

The Holy Family, of course, is a polemical political pamphlet, not principally a work of aesthetics. Nevertheless, these passages indicate how it contains, in practical form, a concept of the relationship between art and authorial ideology which Engels would return to in later years and which would preoccupy later writers on the subject. In particular the Rigoletto passage indicates the existence of a contradiction between the text (the actions and relationships of the character) and the author's conscious attempts to 'explain' it.

The German Ideology (1846) marks a decisive shirt from the critique of philosophy to a preliminary statement of Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism in which 'life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life' and 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas'. It also brings to the fore the concept of the division of labour in class societies, whose origin is in the split between physical and mental work. One of the aims of communism is the abolition of this division of labour and of specialisation, in the artistic field as well as elsewhere. "In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities.'¹¹

Two 1847 texts by Engels on individual writers indicate the changing nature of his and Marx's thought at this period. A section of his German Socialism in Verse and Prose analyses Goethe's 'double relation to the German society of his time'. It is a restless passage, defining this contradiction at the heart of Goethe's work in different ways, but fundamentally as a split between his artistic genius and his conservative life in making peace with the status quo in the Germany of his time. But in an article on a lesser writer, the French politician Lamartine, Engels employs the terminology of class analysis to locate precisely the source of the subject's ideology:

M. de Lamartine proves himself, both under a social and political point of view, the faithful representative of the small tradesman, the inferior bourgeoisie, and who shares in the illusion particular to this class: that he represents the working people.¹²

In a famous formulation from The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx fully developed this relation between ideology and class, thereby inaugurating a whole strand of Marxist cultural analysis. He argued that the French Social Democrats of the time held a petty bourgeois ideology, even though they were not necessarily shopkeepers or 'enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers'. Instead:

what makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are constantly driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.¹³

The importance of this remark is that it offers, for the first time, an account of the structure of the connection between ideology and social class, superstructure and base. The connection suggested is one of an homology between the two, rather than a simple reflection or expression of base by superstructure.

A year earlier, in an article for the New York Times, Engels had introduced into the Marxist oeuvre another term which would reverberate through later Marxist debates: the notion of 'tendency' writing. He uses it here to describe an inferior trend in German literature during the 1840s: 'It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sort of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their productions by political allusions which were sure to attract attention.'¹⁴ 'Tendency' is here implicitly opposed to genuine or great art, the nature of which is elucidated in an exchange of letters between Marx and Engels and the German communist, Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1859. Lassalle had written a tragic drama, Franz von Sickingen, dealing with a major uprising during the Reformation in Germany. The insurgent peasants were led by the petty nobility, personified in the tragic hero, von Sickingen.

Frederick Jameson (1971) has pointed out the influential natur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ORIGINS OF AN AESTHETIC
• 2. SOCIALIST REALISM AND THE SOCIAL COMMAND
• 3. THE GERMAN DEBATES
• 4. SOCIALIST REALISM IN CHINA
• 5. POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS
• 6. MARXISM AND POPULAR CULTURE
• 7. BRITISH AND AMERICAN DEVELOPMENTS
• Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Index