Marxist Views

 

Marxists believe that economic and social conditions determine religious beliefs, legal systems and cultural frameworks. Art should not only represent such conditions truthfully, but seek to improve them. Marxist aesthetics is not flourishing in today's consumerist society, but continues to ask responsible questions.

Though the Marxist is one of the most vigorous and varied of twentieth century schools of aesthetics, its bases of evaluation are difficult to establish. Neither Marx nor Engels supposed that the superstructure of the state — political, legal, artistic — simply reflected its economic constitution, but insisted that such a constitution was still the ultimate reality. How men worked defined their existence and aspirations. All other aspects of human life — love, fraternity, nationalism, honesty, etc. — had eventually to be translated into economic terms, and these judged against Marxist orthodoxy.

 

Then there is the cultural life of communist countries. Marx stressed praxis, the practical, relative and culturally determined. Regardless of what liberalism claimed in theory, the reality in nineteenth century Europe was inequality and exploitation. Lenin, who had spent long years in exile struggling with the theoretical aspects of Marxism, had clear notions of what theory implied and needed. Artistic freedom may have been equated with social liberation in the heady days of the Bolshevik take-over, but cultural diversity would only weaken a state fighting for its life. Experimentation was stigmatized as decadently bourgeois, and the debate polarized between communist (good) and noncommunist (bad). Artists were either for or against progressive ideology: there was no in-between.

 

So the social realism. Yet the trouble was not the stereotyping — the tireless factory manager, the smiling peasants — but that the stereotyping was untrue. The communist world was very different from what artists were allowed to show. Control was very crude. Art must provide appropriate models for behaviour since what people read they would act upon, and criticism had therefore to be curtailed or stifled. And art which the west might appraise on several grounds — flowering of tradition, depth of feeling, subtlety and expressiveness, keenness of observation, wealth of inventiveness — came to be judged on one criterion alone: political correctness.

 

There are more fundamental problems. Literature is broad and richly diversified: Marxism is not. How can the second encompass the first? Of course if Marxism were a scientific theory, a small number of laws would serve to explain a wide range of effects. But Marxism is not a scientific theory. Deductions from its generalizations have been spectacularly inaccurate. The rise in living standards of capitalist working class; revolution in Russia of all places; the Russian-Chinese conflict; the repression under Lenin, Stalin and all Soviet leaders to Gorbachev himself, the uprisings in Berlin, Budapest, and Prague. Marxist theory "explained" all these events, but only by cooking up suspect subsidiary hypotheses. If Marxism fails intellectually, do not its aesthetics fall to the ground? Similarly, where supported by them, is not Marxist aesthetics open to the objections levelled at Structuralism and Lacanian theory?

 

Not so, say modern Marxists. Possibly, at least outside China and North Korea, the communist world has crumbled away, but events do not necessarily invalidate Marxism. We should study political thought and the circulation and reproduction of capital in the modern state without the presuppositions of class struggle. Moreover, totalitarian Russia under Stalin was very far from anything Marx envisaged, and it has seemed to some western economists that market economies succeed in spite of the farrago of unproved and mutually conflicting theories they are taken as representing.

 

Perhaps there is no one, coherent Marxist philosophy. The attempts outlined above to rehabilitate Marx have drastically revised or even rewritten him. The same can be said of analytical Marxism, which has combined analytical philosophy with economics and game theory. Both it and Marxist thought generally (i.e. produced in western bourgeois societies: little was allowed inside communist countries) is excessively theoretical and rarefied. It thrives in university departments of literature but not in the workplace. Prominently, it fails in its first requirement, which is not simply to analyze society, but to change it.

 

But western apologists have answers. One is to take the line of Terry Eagleton's: "When Shakespeare's texts cease to make us think, when we get nothing out of them, they will cease to have value. But why they ´make us think´, why we ´get something out of them´ (if only for the present) is a question which must be referred at once to the ideological matrix of our reading and the ideological matrix of their production. It is in the articulation of these distinct moments that the question of value resides."

 

A second line is to postpone aesthetic discussion until bourgeois society is replaced by a more egalitarian, Marxist society. Then perhaps the arts can enjoy a more independent role, and questions of political subservience will fade away. Little in the world now encourages this hope, but no doubt history has taken stranger turnings.

 

A fuller article, with references, can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Marxist Views

 

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