Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’

Jun
11
2010

Marxism, Art and the Artist

Marxism, Art and the Artist

In his anthology, Marxism and Art, Maynard Solomon recounted that although both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were interested in the literary arts early in their respective careers, they both were distracted by philosophy.  As a result, “There is no ‘original’ Marxist aesthetics for later Marxists to apply.  The history of Marxist aesthetics has been the history of the unfolding of the possible application of Marxist ideas and categories to art and to the theory of art.”  The same can be said of art history, which has also applied the Marxist idea of a critique of the social and economic system by utilizing a Marxist analysis of a work of art to show the workings of the mode of production upon the artist.  In contrast to the fragments written by both men, what is more interesting is how the ideas of Marx could be used in relation to art.

According to Karl Marx, art is part of the superstructure and is inescapably determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  Capitalism produces commodities, each one of which is a “fetish,” or an object with abstract value.  Fetishism is the projection of human nature and of human desires projected upon an external object.  If one accepts the proposition that all art is commodified, (and art must be a commodity in a capitalist society), then certain consequences logically follow.  All artists are cultural producers, laboring in a capitalist system for the benefits of the market.  All art made within this system is a commodity to be bought and sold as objects of desire upon which human feelings are projected. The work of art in a capitalist society must be a consumer object and therefore must also be an object of desire, a fetish.

The ideology of the market, a place where commodities are bought and sold, is a lived experience in the consciousness of every artist. The mind of the artist is imprinted with History and cannot escape his or her own time. Marxism would   oppose the thesis of a transcendent avant-garde that projects to the future and detaches itself from society.  From a Marxist point of view, art is always about society and the artist is always a part of the culture, art is never independent or absolute. Because the artist has been abandoned by God, modern art can only be ironic in the sense suggested by Friedrich Schiller. In the contemporary era, modern art can exhibit only human alienation.  With nothing left to symbolize, symbolism gives way to allegory.  The use of symbols directly communicates meaning, but allegory is an indirect cluster or collection of meanings.  As a result of the break down of the union of humans with a sense of spirituality, modern art is always indirect and referential because modern art is tied to capitalist ideology, which is merely bourgeois thought, an illusion that conceals the facts of construction of beliefs.

In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde Art and Kitsch,” the American art writer, Clement Greenberg, proposed that socialism would provide the freedom the avant-garde artist needs, because the capitalist system rewards the artist for responding to the demands of society, which is under the influence of ideology.  The ruling classes produce an ideology in its own self-interest but put the ideology forward in a way to make ideology seem “real.”  We refer to this operation of reification as the naturalizing effects.  Far from being “natural,” what ideology constructs, whether beliefs or art, is cultural. Through the mechanisms of ideology, that which is cultural becomes natural.

Social relations are presumed to be “natural,” and, hence, people do not recognize or even realize that the ways they interact are “cultural.” Ideology remains unseen.  A work of visual culture expresses the prevailing ideology, not just in terms of what a work of art expresses but also what the work of art does not say. Art bears an imprint of the history of its own time and is not timeless and transcendent.  Far from being free or independent, the avant-garde artist is reconstructed, from a Marxist perspective, is an intellectual servant in the pay of the system.  As Marx remarked,

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.  It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-laborers…(intellectuals) live only as long as they find work, and…find work only as long as their labor increases capital.  These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market…”

Far from being a rebel, the artist is a cultural worker without a “halo.”  The artist who does not recognize the workings of ideology is complicit with an oppressive system.  From a socialist perspective, what is the role of the informed and aware artist?  According to Auguste Comte, art rises from the study of nature and should facilitate the contemplation of moral values.  The position of Comte, that art is the ideal representation of reality, is essentially the academic perspective that prevailed in his era.  Writing decades later, Proudhon suggested a more specific role for the artist in Du principe de l’art of 1865.  Realism and naturalism had overtaken Romanticism in the 1860s and Proudhon saw art as having a social role, which should subordinate art to political and social ends.  What distinguishes Proudhon’s position is that these “ends” were those of a critique of society and its unjust practices.

In acting as a critic of his or her own time, the artist becomes a prophet for humanity who must condemn current society and who can foresee a better future.  From a socialist standpoint, the artist is a servant of society who has the moral role to reveal the workings of ideology by pointing to the truth.  While it is not correct to state that all Realist artists and writers were socialists, it is correct to say that the mission of the Realists in France and England was to show contemporary life.  Revelations of the realities of modern times would often be considered political by the forces that functioned best when these “truths” were kept veiled by ideology.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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May
28
2010

Marx, Engels, and Property

Marx, Engels, and Property

For centuries, philosophers had been trying to determine the origin of property.  Almost without exception, from Rousseau to Hobbs, property was the equivalent to the apple in the Garden of Eden.  Property was the cause of the fall of the human raced from grace.  In 1884 Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Like the Utopian socialists before him, Engels imagined the end of the state and the coming of a communal equality, but the barrier is property.  So fundamental to human nature that it was hard to eliminate, property had to start at some point in society and the question was why and how?  Engels located the origin of property in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.  Once tribes settled onto a specific piece of land in order to farm it, the urge to claim the land and the fruits of the land evolved.  Property ceased to be tribal and became individual over time and began to include the domesticated animals that assisted in the process of cultivation.  But people were also crucial in the planting and tending and harvesting and agriculture was labor intensive.  At some point, men emerged or put themselves forward as “owners” of “property” that was theirs along with “their” animals and “their” people, including “their” wives and “their” children.

Property became private; society became unequal; people became property. Just as Rousseau had trouble in explaining why free humans would voluntarily come together under the control of a social system, Engels had difficulty in explaining why women allowed men to become the owners of the very property they worked on.  The transformation of women into property was undoubtedly facilitated by marriage in which a woman was exchanged between two men, her father, who “gives” her to her husband.  Property, as land, objects, animals and people, was crucial to capitalism.  Property, under capitalism, was transformed from its traditional form of land into commodities that could be purchased and owned.  Marx said,

“…the product is an objectification of labor…”

“…new fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want…”

The “want” that Marx spoke of was a function of capitalism, which needed the mechanism of projection of desire upon the object.  Thus desire became “reified” or solidified.  Marx was writing just on the edge of the establishment of the department store and its vast array of tempting goods, but his insights were prophetic.  He could not have known how the process of reification would work in the future, but he was aware of the connection between desire and the object, which was a “symptom” of the desire.  Reification is a mental process and is part of the exchange value of an object.  For example, people are convinced to act out their desired identities through the acquisition of an object.  The more desirable the fantasy identity, the more expensive the object, and the more money a person is willing to pay for a Porsche, for example. However, reification on the commodity level is trivial in comparison to how reification acts on the level of the total society.

Reification is used to further the interests of the ruling class.  The desire to acquire certain commodities was based upon an ideology of “success,” expressed through objects.  The property purchased reinforced the capitalist system, which is dependent upon constant buying which, in turn, supports the power position of those who control the mode of production.   The desire to own property is legitimated through ideology, encouraging consumption.  To counter arguments that capitalism exploits the working class,  the real consequence of  desire is falsified, hidden, or denied in a process called “dissimulation.”

Dissimulation, which is a form of misdirection or lying, is an important function of ideology. Reification, then, is the denial of the power relations by placing these relations outside of time.  The rich are not rich because of the capitalist system, the worker is not exploited because of the capitalist system, the unequal power relations are “natural.”  The rich are rich because they “naturally” deserve to be in power and the poor are poor because they are “naturally” inferior.   Property, while part of the ideology of capitalism, is an old and alien practice that has been absorbed into and transformed by the moneyed economy.

Echoing Hegel, Marx said, “…everything seems pregnant with its contrary…” Capitalism has a strange internal contradiction. The means of production, that is the entire labor-manufacture system, is socialized. Property, in contrast, refuses socialization in order to remain private, and yet the entire socialized capitalist system strives to accumulate private property.  In other words, private property or ownership or profits remains individual or private, while workers and the practices and customs that allow their labor to be appropriated so that private property can be accumulated are socialized through laws. The rules and laws of the superstructure produce circumstances favorable to private ownership and property and lead to and result in the exploitation of laborers—all of which is made to seem both logical and natural, through the workings of ideology.

In order for the spell of ideology to be broken, the consciousnesses of the workers had to be raised though a revelation of the true state of affairs, leading to a revolution and an overthrow of the social system.  To counteract this situation of appropriation and exploitation, Marx and Engels believed that property must be socialized and come under communal ownership.  Contrary to today’s beliefs about socialism, Nineteenth Century socialists did not believe in “big government,” but looked forward to the day when the “will of the people” would supersede the state, which would, in Marx’s words, “Wither away.”

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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May
21
2010

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution.  Marx re-wrote Schiller’s psychological alienation, as the estrangement of workers in industrial capitalist society from the products of their labor.  Capitalism is based upon money and money is abstract.  If money is abstract, then value is abstract.  Barter for goods and services ceases to exist and is replaced by exchange of money and thus the value of both labor and goods become arbitrary.  Once the worker is alienated from the product produced then the value of his or her labor is rendered arbitrary.  According to Marx,

“…devaluation of human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things…” and “…labor does not only create goods’ it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…” therefore  “…his labor becomes an object…”

Marx’s concept of alienation was worked out in his 1844 essay, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” which set up a triad of alienation: the state is an alienated form of social life, social life is an alienation of labor, and the wage laborer is alienated from the product of his/her labor.  The cause of the alienation of the worker is the unfortunate discovery of surplus value.  As Marx’s writing partner, Friedrich Engels, stated,  “…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…” Surplus values pocketed by the owner as profit.  What the owner refers to, as “profit” is also, according to Marxist theory, the fundamental incompatibility between mode of production and mode of appropriation.  When the worker was in control of his/her own product, all such “surplus value”, or “profit” accrued directly and only to him/her.

But, as Marx pointed out, surplus labor creates surplus value,  and surplus labor allows exploitation.  Surplus labor is the result of two major factors: an increase in population and the development and use of labor saving machinery increases profits for the owner of the mode of production.  Although the initial capital investment in the machinery was substantial, this investment was finite, compared to ongoing or infinite costs of hiring extra workers.

Under capitalism, the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.  The worker is alienated from the product because his/her actions are performed in relation to the desires of the capitalist.  The laborer becomes a “tool” for the owner and is robbed of “humanity” or of the potential for human development.  Working in a state of “illiteracy”, the wage laborer is trained in one operation and cannot participate in the benefits and achievement of society that is progressing…but only for the middle class.  The products are objects of desire, which the laborer must labor to purchase in a viscous circle of desire and debt and powerlessness.  All workers are competitors with each other because their choice is between work and starvation.  Thus all workers are alienated from each other.

These are the facts of productive life, the fundamental factors that influence the ways in which all other aspects of all human affairs will develop. The question is why are the workers complicit with a system that enslaves them?  The answer is that their consciousness has been determined by the economic system.  Ideology or the belief system put forward by the ruling classes teaches the laborers to work on employer’s premises and on employer’s terms.

Ideology is a powerful mixture of truth and lies.  Capitalism requires capital or money to invest in a business.  A laboring family may take generations to accumulate the capital necessary to become bourgeoisie. A person from the working class encounters a system that is monopolistic and works to eliminate or bar competitors. The workers are made to believe that their alternative is no job and no wages, and they are made to hope that some day their condition will improve if they are cooperative.

The laborers believe the dreams of success and wealth that capitalism keeps alive and count on the positive effects of social mobility.  The owners of the mode of production, after all, were once lower class people who were rewarded for their hard work.  Surely, the worker thinks, me and my family will also receive the benefits of capitalism.  Laborers labor on, not realizing that fortunes are made within a network of privileges, invisible to the workers, and not upon merit.  Because the workers are in the thrall of an ideology of social and economic improvement, the owners of the mode of production are able to buy labor cheaply and sell goods dearly.

But Marx predicted that the consciousness of the workers will be “raised” and they will see past the veil of ideology, or “false consciousness,” and the proletariat will become aware of itself.  The workers will rise up against the owners and the two classes, the thesis, and the anti-thesis will clash.  The destiny of the proletariat is the truth of dialectical materialism and destruction of capitalism.  The class revolution is inevitable when “false consciousness” is dispelled and proletariat recognizes the exploitation and recaptures its own labor from the masters and institutes a classless society that Marx called the “Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s dialectical model of change is the revolution and the destruction of one class by another.  According to this model, violence and conflict between classes are fundamental.

Although he understood that the economic system determined human consciousness, Marx could not predict is how deeply ideology was embedded in society.  The lower classes continued to reinforce the needs and the dominance of the upper classes who proved to be adept at misleading the workers through misinformation and gaining their cooperation to work against their own interests.  The consciousness of the lower classes was structured to obey the dominant class and no amount of information could release or “raise” the consciousness of the exploited class.  Those who attempted to advise the workers of the “truth” were rejected as elitist oppressors and the familiar and real owners of the mode of production were embraced and defended.  Labor unions could easily be co-opted by management be entangling the worker with the fate and profit of a company.  The poor would reject the very social policies designed to aid them, preferring the known and the familiar, no matter how badly they were treated.

For Marx, ideas and theories are epiphenomena or byproducts of economic forces, which are the real determinants of change.  Marx stated that “Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness…” and that “…man makes religion, religion does no make man…” Although these statements sound idealist, they are actually materialist.  Yes, Marx understood and accepted that the mind constructs reality, and he asserted that social relations are bound up in material production, which become forms of perception or particular ways of seeing the world related to dominant way of seeing or social mentality.  Marx remarked,

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises on a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness…”

The ideology of the age is the product of concrete social relations, in other words, materialism.  Actual lived class relations are experienced, legitimized and become perpetuated.  The dialectical method accommodates itself to fundamental changes of reality due to constant change, resulting from oppositional forces. Marx was opposed to the formalism of Kant who sought the transcendental.  According to Marx, it is life that determines consciousness and the resulting consciousness is understood as “natural.” This unseen set of beliefs is unrealized or so accepted the ideology is invisible.  The lower classes are trained to believe in an ideology of inferiority, which is internalized and forces them to accept their lower status in society.   They are poor because they “deserve” to be poor.  The poor are poor, not because the system is designed to work against success for the many, but because they lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival.  Ideology is the ultimate form of alienation because the workers will work against themselves.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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May
14
2010

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Today it is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss Karl Marx because of his apparently “failed” theory of an inevitable revolution in which the lower classes, realizing their exploitation, would rebel against those who owned the means of production.  Witnessing the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said, “Marx was wrong.”   This rather anachronistic judgment fails to take into account that Marx was not an economist but a philosopher and that he could not see into a future in which capitalism would create a dazzling world of commodities that would tempt the working class to become consumers, buying into the very system that enslaved them.

In many ways, Hegel established a way of analyzing the past and set up a method by which Nineteenth Century historians could work.  Karl Marx adapted Hegel’s idea of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis into what he called “dialectical materialism.” Instead of appealing to ideas, Marx appealed to historical forces, a theory of history or a theory of things.  In contrast to Hegel’s “absolute” synthesis of categories, Marx was critical of “ideas,” which are empty and produce ideology.  Like Hegel, Marx claimed scientific precision for his philosophy with history as measurable record of clear progress. History, for Hegel, consisted of opposing forces: thesis and anti-thesis that over time would evolve into a synthesis that would, in its turn, become the new thesis.  Through these colliding forces, new stages would be reached and progress would occur. Marx was deeply concerned with social process/progress.  As a materialist, Marx’s ideas were phenomenological and not transcendental but he gave a great deal of attention to Hegel’s philosophy of history.  As Marx commented,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when men seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…”

Marx was also aware of the ideas of Kant and knew that Kant’s Copernican Revolution needed to be taken into account.  Kant, Hegel, and Marx were Determinists, that is, they all created philosophical systems that had a high explanatory value—each system could answer all the questions.  The difference in the thinking of these philosophers rested upon what forces determined their particular structure.  For Kant, the a priori workings of the human mind determined his system of knowledge, for Hegel it was the dialectic, and for Marx, it was the economic system.  Marx asserted that people are not free to choose social relations but are constrained by material reality, which is determined by economic production.

The key to Marx’s system is dialectical materialism, and his dialectic was the class system created by the capitalist system.  The creation of a privileged upper moneyed class and a dispossessed underclass resulted in a clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  The basis of society or the skeleton of society is economics.  Marx created a social model that distinguished between base and superstructure.  The base is the mode of production, which in Marx’s time is capitalism; and the superstructure can be defined as the social structures produced by human consciousness.  The superstructure is the laws and politics that define the form of social consciousness.  Consisting of education, cultural customs, political and legal practices, the superstructure both produces and reinforces an ideology, which functions to legitimate the power of the ruling class.

Human consciousness is determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  According to Marx, material relations between things are part of universal laws of history.  Marx wrote of the fatal evolution of capitalism, which is characterized by the domination of the bourgeoisie or middle class society who owns the mode of production and its necessary exploitation of the lower classes who produce the wealth.  The Bourgeoisie created a new social class, the urban poor, or the proletariat, that was collected into urban centers and concentrated in masses that could be exploited by the new system.  In contrast to the previous system, feudalism, value-in-exchange, capitalism is an abstract system, based upon an abstract concept called “money” and is not attached to the external qualities of things. Feudalism was a system based upon barter and upon a system of responsibilities.  Thing was exchanged for thing, obligation was exchanged for obligation.  A peasant could exchange a cow for a pig and give a portion of the harvest to the feudal lord who, in turn would protect the peasant who took care of the land he owned.

Within capitalism, a thing, an object is priced abstractly on the open market and will be sold according to what “the market will bear,” or according to what people will pay for it.  The end “value” of the object on the market has no relation to what those who own the means of producing the thing pay the workers for their labor.  Human  “labor” is embedded in goods and becomes abstracted.  In capitalism, the worker is alienated from the object and the difference between what s/he is paid and what the object sells for creates “surplus value,” which is appropriated by owner of capital who has exploited the laborer’s lack of alternatives. The excessive supply of labor drives wages down.  The minimum cost of making the product is covered by the laborer in a few hours, while the surplus or excess “value” goes to the employers.  According to Engels, “The appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker….”

When the surplus value, created by the worker, is appropriated by the owner of capital, a dialectic is created between “labor and management,” and management’s exploitation of the helpless laborers leads to a class struggle.  The competition among the capitalists functions according to the law of capital accumulation or the concentration of wealth in a few hands.  The capitalist impulse is towards monopoly control of production, such as seen currently in the business model of Microsoft. The end result is that capital becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, and unemployment grows as production becomes more technologically efficient. The result is overproduction and a crisis, such as seen in the American automotive industry.

The crisis of overproduction is resolved by opening new markets, which become new centers of production.  The old markets are limited in ability to absorb goods, which increases stress on the producers who must sell commodities.  Theoretically, the consumer needs only one television set but to resolve the stress a new and false need must be created, such as a television set for every member of the family.  The problem of overproduction is solved by manufactured desires that engender new demands for the new commodities, which are absorbed into the community. Marx and Engels stated,

“…the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them all the relations of society…constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones…”

Marx and Engels wrote a theory of social causation or historical determinism and understood history to be a history of class struggles with every epoch having a prevailing mode of economic production and exchange.  The human being and human consciousness and social organization necessarily followed from this basis of political and intellectual history.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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May
07
2010

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

The post-Revolutionary philosophers of the early Nineteenth Century were prescient in foreseeing the social problems of the Industrial Age.  By mid-century, the philosophical emphasis had shifted from social reform to epistemological reform of philosophy itself, shifting philosophy away from idealism to materialism. New philosophers began to base their ideas upon empirical ideas and objective reasoning borrowed from science.  Even Hegel, one of the last of the idealist philosophers, stated that, “Philosophy must assume a regular structure as teachable as geometry,” and he wanted philosophy to be based upon a “definite methodical procedure.”

Auguste Comte was a disciple of Saint-Simon who shifted from Utopian thinking about society to a scientific study of society.   As the founder of “sociology,” Comte rationalized the study of human behavior by using scientific methodology.  People and their actions could be examined, facts could be gathered, hypothesis could be formed, and theories could be put forward and tested.  The goal was to study society as it was and not to imagine society, as it should be.  The importance of the Positivism of Comte is that the philosopher stressed actual observation and careful study of society.  In contrast to Comte’s more scientific approach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was more political in his critique of society in his What is Property? (1840) and The Philosophy of Poverty (1846).   Rather than putting forward utopian ideals, Proudhon anticipated Marx by examining society and expressing outrage (“Property is theft.”) at the growing class stratification, as the industrialist class enjoyed runaway wealth and the lower classes enjoyed endless repetitive labor.  Like Saint-Simon, Proudhon imagined the disappearance of the state, but he wanted to substitute the authority of the state with the direct participation of the people who would decide their own affairs.

Although Proudhon sounded a bit less totalitarian than Hegel who believed that the nation and the state were one and the same and morally superseded the community, he, too, was an authoritarian.  Women, he believed, should be submissive to men and take care of them, and while, serving men, women should also should have children and nurture them as well.  He was typical of men of his age in his ideas about women and the use of authority.  Proudhon, as a non-too-successful professional publisher and writer, also had strong opinions about accumulated wealth.  He equated slavery with murder and property with robbery.  As Proudhon stated in What is Property? “..property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded or rather usurped in the name of superior talent or service, in inequality and extortion…”

Most socialists (and anarchists) defined socialism as direct government achieved through suffrage.  Putting aside the fact that women and people of color could not vote, suffrage had its problems, because the mass of people were not well-educated or informed, they would not know how to vote for their own interests.  Proudhon preferred to create a form of government that would create an equilibrium between freedom of the people and the role of the government.  Arrested during the Revolution of 1848, sent into exile to Belgium during the Second Empire, Proudhon took the idea of equilibrium and applied it to war, advocating force to bring about equilibrium among nations, much to the dismay of his admirers.  “Reforms always,” he stated, “Utopias never,” announcing pragmatism and positivism.  A prolific letter writer and self-publisher of his many works, Proudhon was a native of Besançon, in Franche-Comté, the territory of Gustave Courbet.  Sometimes writing as an art critic, Proudhon published his ideas about Courbet’s paintings of a region that was very familiar to him.   Proudhon is perhaps better known for his association with Courbet than for his philosophical ideas today, because he was overshadowed by his one-time colleague, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx brushed Proudhon aside as a “bourgeois socialist” who would not advocate revolution.  It is difficult today to ascertain Proudhon’s knowledge of German philosophy.   Hegel had yet to be translated into French, however, Victor Cousin was teaching about Kant, for example, at the Sorbonne, and, from Proudhon’s own words, it would seem Cousin would have been his source of German thought.  However, the main difference between Kant, Hegel and Marx and the socialists was that the Germans created structured models for their philosophical thought and the socialists were less systematic.

The social philosophers were futurist; they looked forward, envisioning a better life.  They were less idealist than materialist in that they dealt with real social problems in a relatively practical fashion.  Hegel and Marx, in contrast, were determinists.  The future they posited was determined by the triadic forces of the dialectic.  It was Marx, who dominates the discussion of social theory and philosophy today with his application of the Hegelian dialectic to economics, to the “secret engine” of culture. As Marx stated,

“…New relations in production, superior to the former ones, never come into being before their material reason for existence has developed in the womb of old society.  Humanity puts to itself only the riddles that it can solve, for on looking closely at the matter, one will find that the riddle is put only when the material conditions of its solution already exists…”

Although Karl Marx 1818 – 1883) wrote often with Frederic Engels, (1820 –95) it is Marx who is the better-known philosopher.  Together Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, 1846 and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1846.  On his own, Marx wrote Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, Wage-Labor and Capital, (usually referred to as Das Capital) 1849, The Eighteenth Brumarie of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Grundrisse, 1857-88, Wages, Price and Profit, 1865, The Civil War in France, 1871, and Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.  Although Marx would live in bourgeois comfort in suburban London, his place of exile, and spent his days writing in seat G7 in the British Museum Library, he wrote movingly on the plight of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.  By the time Marx was forced out of his native Prussia for his revolutionary ideas, industry and capitalism had been the basis of modern society for over one hundred years and its consequences were plain to see.

Vast new wealth had been accumulated by the new commercial class, and an abyss of poverty subjugated the lower classes.  Like many observers of his time, Marx foresaw a pending social and economic revolution—for human misery can be contained only so long.  As a German national living in England, Marx would have witnessed the activities of Reformists, politicians and writers, such as Charles Dickens, and philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham.  The British thinkers repeatedly warned of the consequences of the environmental and social horrors that had descended upon the so-called “advanced” industrial nations.

Kant and Hegel are considered idealists, reaching towards some kind of absolute or universal.  Marx, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing materialist: for him, reality was grounded in existence, knowledge was the result of reality, and therefore the mind could never be independent of history.  If the mind constructed reality, then the constructions must always be changing, along with history.  If this was the case, then consciousness could never be absolute or universal and must be subjected to changing conditions.  For Marx, these conditions were capitalism, the greatest social change since the breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudalism, and the middle class, the first new class since the beginning of human history.  Capitalism had created a society based upon the abstraction of money, labor, goods, value, and, ultimately—human beings.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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