Posts Tagged ‘Socialism’

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 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 the 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 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.”

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
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.

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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Apr
30
2010

Early Nineteeth Century Utopian Philosophy

Early Nineteenth Century Utopian Philosophy

The largest issue of the second half of the Nineteenth Century was the containment of people.  The problem of how to control a growing population in  Europe and an alien population in colonized lands occupied the century’s philosophical minds.  In contrast to the Enlightenment philosophers who wrote in abstract absolutes, the mid-century philosophers were more concerned with the particular and the pragmatic. The materialist philosophers and socialist writers had been farsighted in their discussions of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. These early Nineteenth Century thinkers were more utopian than practical but they were moved by the plight of the workers who were being dehumanized and alienated in an industrial system based upon the demands of the machine.

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and his follower, Charles Fourier, in France and Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen in England (and later in America) were products of the Eighteenth Century and disciples of the Enlightenment.  They envisioned a better way of life, based upon shared responsibility and rewarding and fulfilling labor.  These utopians were not revolutionaries but reformers.  From a practical point of view, they were ineffectual, but from a philosophical and social perspective, their ideas of equality and open-mindedness, especially towards the equality of women and tolerance of sex, are still advanced to this day.  However, there is a dark side to this early socialism.  In comparison to today’s socialists and socialism as practiced in Europe, the Nineteenth Century utopian socialists were closer to Twentieth Century totalitarian rulers than their benign-sounding classification would suggest.

According to Paul Taylor in The Birth of the Modern, Saint-Simon was a witness to the French Revolution but he felt that the Industrial Revolution was the most important.  It was he who coined the terms “industrialization” and “industrialist” as terms of admiration. Saint-Simon saw these “new” men as those who would improve society and thus elevate the standard of living by all people and raise the lower classes to a higher level.  It was Saint-Simon, not Marx, who coined the phrase, “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”   Like Marx, Saint-Simon saw society in a fundamentally new way: people were not  “citizens” or individuals but as part of a class.  His remarks about needs and abilities can be construed as benefiting the “industrial class,” which had the ability but then would have to assist the lower class which had needs that should be met.  Certainly Saint-Simon’s reputation as the “first socialist” is probably justified, due to his idea of social responsibility, for his favored industrialists were expected to repay the less fortunate and to spread the benefits of their wealth.

Obviously, Saint-Simon’s theories would have been an effective way to free the creative hands of the “new men” and to control the teeming masses of the poor, and his follower Charles Fourier was quite explicit in how people should behave in modern society.  He was gifted with a vivid imagination and saw a future when the Mediterranean Sea would turn to lemonade and women would have four men in her life at the same time.  While the world is still waiting for the lemonade stage, many of Fourier’s ideas have been attempted by people who wished to experiment with a communal way of life.  Fourier’s idea of a garden city became one of the long lasting dreams of city planners, such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

The English utopian socialist, Robert Owen, also attempted to build actual communal settlements, which were inspired by the idea of improving the living conditions industrial society.  However, like many of the socialists of the early part of the Nineteenth Century, Owen’s ideas were centered upon control of the very people who had a history of being unruly demanders for their basic rights.  His communal villages, from New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana, were marred by his authoritarian rule over his “human machines.”   Although it was in Owen’s new organization, All Classes of All Nations, that the term “socialism” was first used, like all the so-called radical socialists, Robert Owen created systems of dominance and subordination.

Perhaps the best-known practitioner of control over those who needed to be controlled, Jeremy Bentham imagined the most famous building never built, the Panopticon, a model prison that allowed for maximum surveillance with minimum staffing.  As a social architect, Bentham, who witnessed the worst of the British Industrial Revolution, recommended rounding up the poor and the criminal and incarcerating them.   His ideas sound positively Twenty-first Century in his demands that people be taken care of before they committed a crime and that these social undesirables should be part of a universal registry of names, a sort of national ID. Writing in Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault used Bentham’s unbuilt Utopian prison as the starting place for what turned into a society of surveillance or a “carceral” society.

Utopian socialists, then, were visionary but their visions were at odds with “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and more in line with totalitarian social engineering that included, not freeing individuals for self-actualization, but in cataloguing them for future reference.  The distance between Saint-Simon and Bentham can be measured by their projections for a future society.  Saint-Simon sounds almost conservative today in his dream of the shrinking state.  In the future, there would be no poverty and ignorance, and, therefore, no need for government.  On the other hand, the vision of Bentham necessitated greater government, the kind of government that would patrol the streets, actively seeking the poor and future criminals.

What makes the arguments of the early socialists interesting is that they were taking place against a backdrop of monarchies, constitutional and otherwise. Reading between the lines, it is possible to hear the voices of men of privilege, suspicious of the lower classes, called, by Marx, the Roman name, the “proletariat” and trusting of the power of the ruling class. True communal equality was hard to imagine.  Communism had been a concept ever since the French Revolution and by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and ideas of communal equality and the redistribution of wealth throughout society were well established. Those in charge who were being enriched by the capitalist system liked it the way it was saw and no reason to be kinder or gentler to their workers.  The assembly line might result in alienation, the repetitive motions required by factory labor might be boring, and the safety and health conditions under industrialization might be dangerous, but the industrialists saw only profit, which trumped the needs of the workers.  At Mid-Century, Karl Marx would take the dialectical method of Hegel and turn it into Dialectical Materialism, taking Hegel’s idealism into the realm of materialism.  The ideas of utopian and positivist thinkers filtered down to the Realist artists who began to look carefully and critically at what the “modern” had wrought.

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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