A muse of fire: art, society and revolution

Art has accompanied us throughout the history of our species. And while it has its own laws of development, the history of art also reflects the fundamental, revolutionary changes that have shaped human society. In this article, Alan Woods examines some of the great revolutions in art and society, and the role of art in the emancipation of the working class.

This article was published as part of issue 46 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscriptions and physical copies are available here.

Human art is much older than you might think. The oldest cave art in Europe is said to be at least 30,000 years old, and an even earlier example has been found in Indonesia, dated to roughly 45,000 years ago. But more recent research claims to have discovered evidence of even older art cave paintings and shell beads from about 65,000 years ago, possibly the work of Neanderthal people before the arrival of modern Homo sapiens in Europe.

Be that as it may, what is indisputable is that art is as old as the human species itself. This cannot be an accident. There appears to be something within us that is hard-wired into our psychology at a most fundamental level. It must therefore be taken into account in any serious study of human evolution and history.

Historical materialism

However, the precise relationship between art and human evolution is a difficult question. The link between art and the development of the productive forces is indirect and complex.

Schools of art constantly change and these changes reflect in great measure the profound processes of change in society, the ultimate roots of which can be traced back to changes in the mode of production and their corresponding class relations, with all the myriad legal, political, religious, philosophical and aesthetic manifestations.

Marx explains that art, like religion, has its roots in prehistory. Ideas, styles, schools of art can survive in the minds of men long after the concrete socio-economic context in which they arose has been consigned to oblivion. The human mind, after all, is characterised by its innate conservatism.

Ideas which have long since lost their raison d’etre, remain stubbornly entrenched in the human psyche and continue to play a role – even a determining role in human development. This is most clear in the field of religion. But it is also present in the realm of art and literature.

In his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, Marx writes: “As regards art, it is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure.”^[1]

Thus, we may say that art has its own immanent laws of development which must be studied as a specific field of investigation. Economic and social development clearly impinges on the development of art in a most important way. But the one cannot be mechanically reduced to the other.

Engels explained that it would be pedantic to try to trace the link between art and economics, which, at best, is indirect and convoluted. Art follows its own complex laws of development that are not directly dependent on other social developments. But at certain decisive points the two lines intersect.

The study of the history of art must proceed empirically, attempting to draw out the immanent laws that determine its development. Only in this way can the real relationship between art and society be brought out into the light of day.

The origins of art

The precise causes behind the origins of art are necessarily difficult to establish. They remain shrouded in the darkness of the caves where they were painted by the dim light of flickering animal fat lamps.

Our earliest ancestors left no written record of their thoughts and beliefs and it is therefore impossible for us to look at those extraordinary productions through the eyes of the people who created them.

Painting of a bison in the Cave of Altamira, Spain, c. 20-34,000 BC / Image: Museo de Altamira, D. Rodriguez

Nevertheless, it is possible to form certain general conclusions from the study of the content of this art, which continues to amaze us by its irresistible freshness and realism.

The most striking feature of the early cave art was the fact that it was not usually painted in the outer parts of caves where it would be easily accessible. Most frequently it was to be found in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the cave. Whatever the purpose of this art may have been, it was certainly not for decoration. Nor was it in any sense ‘art for art’s sake’.

The first thing that one notices about this art is what it does not show. There are no plants, trees or flowers. It consists mainly of representations of animals. And the choice of animals depicted is clearly not accidental.

These animals are depicted with amazing accuracy and attention to detail. By contrast, human beings, who appear quite rarely, are depicted in a very sketchy way, almost like the kind of matchstick men drawn by little children.

Art as a social activity

In early human art, science and religion are indissolubly mixed up in the form of 'sympathetic magic'. The aim of early art was to give people power over the animals they hunted.

These hunter-gatherers lived in a constant, unremitting struggle for survival in a hostile environment. They had to measure their strength against that of powerful beasts for food and mastery of the earth.

Tribal dances are usually closely related to ritual. They represent an attempt to come to terms with the natural environment, to understand the world and to gain mastery over it.

But this limited understanding found its expression in the mystical language of religion and magic. The celebrated anthropologist James George Frazer in his most famous work The Golden Bough and numerous other studies, explains sympathetic magic as the association of relations between things and beings that do not really exist. This is a case in point.

The purpose of these remarkable paintings was probably twofold: to increase the power and skills of the hunters and to give them power over the creatures depicted. In some cases, the associated rituals were designed to increase the fertility of the tribe or clan.

The hunting of large and dangerous mammals like mammoths could only be successful if a number of hunters combined to drive the animals into traps or over cliffs.

This would require co-operation to build traps, dig deep pits, or construct corrals made of palisades. All this would imply co-operative labour on a large scale.

This, and not religion or magic, is what gave our ancestors a serious advantage in the struggle for survival. Social co-operation, not individual competition, was the key to our evolutionary success.

Class society

Today the defenders of the existing order are eager to prove that class society has always existed and that there have always been rich and poor.

They seek to show that society can only be run by a special class of ‘clever’ people who are the only ones able to work with their brains, whereas the ignorant multitude – the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” described in the Bible, are just too stupid to perform the complex task of ruling.

They claim that this has always been the case. But this is very far from the truth. Art was originally the property of the whole community, not a specialised activity of a privileged elite. This art was essentially social and collective, and not personal.

Vitruvian Man (c. 1492), Leonardo da Vinci / Image: public domain

In fact, the division between mental and manual labour is a relatively recent development in human evolution. A precise description of the process by which this revolution took place is impossible since there are no written records, but that such a change did occur is beyond all question.

Roughly 12,000 years ago, arguably the greatest transformation in all human history began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. I refer to what the great Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (who was also a Marxist) called the Neolithic Revolution.

This is what Engels, following Lewis Henry Morgan, called the transition from savagery to barbarism – the transition from hunter-gathering to a more settled way of life based on agriculture and stock-breeding.

This revolution vastly expanded the productive powers of society and therefore increased the control of men and women over nature. However, it also eventually laid the material basis for the emergence of inequality, private property and the usurpation of power by a minority.

From roughly 6,000 years ago, the surplus produced by the farming population was concentrated in the hands of a privileged elite, usually under the control of the temple – that is, the priest caste. This gave rise to fundamental changes in religious beliefs and a consequent cultural revolution.

The rise of a privileged priest caste expressed itself in the creation of huge temples and monuments to the gods dedicated to the success of agriculture, the fertility of the crops, the sun, rain and so on. The White Temple in Uruk, which stood on a platform 12 metres high and 50 metres wide, is a striking example of this phenomenon.

Here we have for the first time the division between mental and manual labour, which became elevated to a principle for all succeeding societies.

Religion, art and all other manifestations of cultural and intellectual life cease to be the common property of all and become the private mysteries of a minority, which takes upon itself the ‘God-given’ right to interpret these mysteries for the common mass of humanity.

The transformation of religion was expressed by new forms of art. The estrangement of the product of the labouring classes was accompanied by their spiritual and cultural dispossession.

Egypt

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes that philosophy begins when the necessities of life are provided. He adds that astronomy and geometry were invented in Egypt because the priests did not have to work. Here we already have a brilliant anticipation of the materialist conception of history.

The favourable conditions in the Nile Valley were the prior condition for a high level of labour productivity. On the other hand, the state had access to enormous reserves of manpower.

The population was relatively small and the soil was sufficiently fertile to supply food for the people and a surplus for the ruling elite. The existence of this surplus product is the secret of Egyptian civilization.

When centralised and organised on a vast scale, this made possible such amazing feats as the building of the pyramids. These enormous monuments are generally considered to be the greatest achievements of ancient Egypt because they capture our imagination.

However, far more impressive and infinitely more important than the pyramids was the system of irrigation. This is what permitted the creation of a leisure class, which in turn was responsible for all the dazzling achievements of Egyptian art, science and culture.

The division of labour

On the basis of this exploitation, the Egyptian ruling class pushed back the frontiers of human knowledge and accelerated the development of the productive forces – the real basis of the development of culture and civilization.

Colossal statue of Ramses II, created c. 1213 BC / Image: Adelbayoumi

In the last analysis, all these wonderful achievements rested on the backs of the Egyptian fellaheen. A decisive moment for the division between mental and manual labour was the invention of writing, which occurred late in the 4th millennium BC – further evidence of society’s rapid advance.

The secret of writing was jealously guarded by the scribes, who originally belonged to the priest caste. Their attitude to manual labour is strikingly expressed in the advice of a well-to-do Egyptian to his son:

“Since I have seen those who have been beaten, it is to writings that you must set your mind. See for yourself, it saves one from work. Behold, there is nothing that surpasses writings...

“I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the mouth of his furnace. His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank more than fish eggs...

“The potter is covered with earth... He burrows in the field more than swine to bake his cooking vessels. His clothes being stiff with mud...

“The weapon maker, completely worn out, goes into the desert. Greater (than his own pay) is what he has to spend for his she-ass for its work afterwards...

“The washerman launders at the riverbank in the vicinity of the crocodile...

"See, there is no office free from supervisors, except the scribe's. He is the supervisor..."

"See, there is no scribe lacking sustenance, the provisions of the royal house... Honor (your) father and mother who have placed you on the path of the living. Mark this, which I have placed before your eyes, and the children of your children."” ^[2]

This is an extract from an Egyptian text known as The Satire on the Trades, written about 2000 BC. It is supposed to consist of a father’s exhortation to his son, whom he is sending to the Writing School to train as a scribe.

The contempt conveyed by these lines towards manual labour is an accurate reflection of the psychology of the ruling class to this very day.

This alienation found its expression in art. The huge statues of pharaohs in Egypt speak to us and deliver a very clear message: the message of power.

Irrespective of whether we understand their language, these colossal statues speak to us very clearly. They are telling us:

I am mighty, you are weak.

I am big, you are small.

I am powerful, you are powerless.

Ever since, art has been the monopoly of the ruling class and a powerful weapon in its hands. Since the gods and goddesses are all powerful, their servants on earth must be equally powerful and must be feared and respected like no other men and women.

The masses now found themselves totally excluded from the world of culture. They were expropriated, not only economically, but mentally and spiritually. And this expropriation has persisted right up to the present time.

Early Egyptian art

The early period of Egyptian art is almost entirely totemic in character. It depicts gods and goddesses, most often in semi-animal forms.

At a later date, human forms emerge, but they are very frequently depicted in a stiff and unrealistic pose.

The formula for men was always the same: the head and neck are shown in profile, while the body is depicted from the front, showing off broad shoulders.

The representation of the human figure remained substantially the same for the whole of Egyptian history, although there are exceptions.

Egyptian artists were artisans, enjoying no special social status. Very few of their names have come down to us. Their task was to faithfully serve their masters – the priest caste, the state officials and, ultimately, the God-king, the Pharaoh.

The most noticeable feature in this art is its conservatism and resistance to change. That reflects the fact that this art was not free, but subject to the unbending tutelage of religion and the rigid demands of the priest caste.

This fact helps us to understand the nature and spirit of Egyptian art, which, despite its brilliant achievements, never reached the heights of Greek art.

Greece

When we leave behind the mysterious, alienated world of Egyptian art and step into the world of ancient Greece, it is like stepping out of a dimly lit room, illuminated by flickering flashes of colour, into an atmosphere filled with pure air and radiant sunshine.

Aphrodite of Knidos – Roman copy after a Greek original from the 4th century BC by Praxiteles of Athens / Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons

Here at last we feel solid ground beneath our feet. In place of gods and goddesses that are part-human, part-beast, we have the presence of genuine, recognisable human forms.

In many ways this art has never been surpassed, except perhaps in the Renaissance period. It never fails to amaze us to behold these forms, fashioned out of cold stone that are so realistic that they seem to be living and breathing beings.

So much so, that one believes that the bodies must feel warm to the touch. Yet this perfection was not achieved immediately. The earliest Greek statues are of young males, now known as the Kouros, dating from the 7th to the 6th century BC. They are clearly inspired by Egyptian models.

They show the same rigidity and the same stiff pose, frontal, broad-shouldered, and narrow-waisted. The arms held close to the sides, fists clenched, knees rigid, with the left foot slightly advanced.

But by the end of this period, the rigidity began to disappear, giving way to a new sense of flexibility and movement. This new school of art reflected a new spirit. It was the new spirit of free Greeks, especially in Athens, where a democratic revolution had taken place.

In 508-507 BC, the people of Athens rose up against the ruling aristocracy, establishing a democracy, in which all male citizens had the right to participate.

Athenian democracy provided a stimulus to the development of art. It was expressed in many ways, from the paintings on vases that were one of the city’s most important exports, to the statues and monuments, wall paintings, and many other things.

But this democracy was not for everybody. It excluded slaves, who made up a sizable portion of society, as well as women and foreigners.

Nowadays, it has become fashionable to criticise the art of past societies on the grounds that they do not match up to present-day moral standards. But that is an entirely unscientific manner of approaching history.

Hegel once said that it is not so much from slavery as through slavery that man becomes free. At first sight, this appears to be a most peculiar paradox. But in fact, it contains a very profound thought.

Today we consider slavery to be something absolutely contrary to all morality. But if we ask where our modern science and philosophy comes from, many people will answer that it originates in Greece and Rome.

However, those were precisely societies based upon slavery and in the last analysis, all the great achievements of these civilizations were based on the labour of slaves.

But we must add that, under class society, all art, science and culture in general has always been based on the exploitation of human labour – whether it be that of the slaves in Greece and Rome, the serfs suffering under the heavy yoke of feudalism, or modern wage slavery.

The ruling ideas of society have always been the ideas of the ruling class. Whoever does not understand this will forever be unable to understand anything about history.

Collapse

Culture has a material base. The collapse of slavery led to the decline of Roman society and a lapse into barbarism. The destruction of the productive base was followed by the eclipse of civilisation for a period of centuries.

Gradually, a new economic system, the feudal system, arose on the ruins of the old slave society. But the main characteristic of the Middle Ages was economic and cultural stagnation, as William Manchester writes:

“In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of waterwheels in the 800s and windmills in the late 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared, no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember.” ^[3]

The collapse of culture was reflected in a general indifference to, and a disdainful attitude towards learning among the ruling class.

David (1504), Michelangelo / Image: Jörg Bittner Unna

The Emperor Sigismund – Charlemagne’s forty-seventh successor, famously said: “Ego sum rex Romanus et super grammatica”^[4] – I am the king of Rome and above grammar. The same words could well be spoken today by more than one President of the United States of America! But we shall not dwell on that subject...

The medieval Church exercised an absolute spiritual dictatorship over men’s souls. Its dead hand suffocated all free thought for centuries. And it paralysed the free development of art.

Rebirth

In this static world, it seemed that nothing would, or could, ever change. But by the early 1400s, a new spirit was stirring in Europe. Even before then, it was anticipated by men like Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto, and even Saint Francis of Assisi.

It is no accident that these men came from Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest. The rise of the bourgeoisie presented a challenge to the feudal order, beginning with criticisms of the established Church dogmas that eventually led to the rise of Protestantism and the Reformation in Northern Europe.

The early Renaissance saw the birth of a flourishing European literature, increasingly written in the vernacular, to cater for a new, bourgeois public who did not read Latin.

Chaucer marks the beginning of a new literature and a new language in England. In Italy, Machiavelli, whose negative reputation is entirely undeserved , was the towering intellect of the age.

In painting the new style of art involved revolutionary techniques of great sophistication, which enabled the artist to depict details never seen before – the gold thread in a dress, the folds of a cloak, the gleaming of sunbeams on armour, the reflection on a polished mirror, which pose special technical difficulties.

From about 1420, portraits become much more realistic. The faces are recognisable individuals. This was a genuine revolution in art, emerging first in Italy and Flanders.

Above all, it allowed for the depiction of individuals as individuals: real men and women, not stylised abstractions. The marvellous statue of David, which is one of the high points of the art of Michelangelo, represents a return to the world of Greek art that celebrated the beauty of the naked human body. This idea had been brutally suppressed by the Church, which regarded the human body – and especially the female body – as an object of abhorrence and the fountainhead of all sin.

This was an expression in art of the individualistic psychology of the bourgeois in the period of the primitive accumulation of capital. The new art is connected with the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Here we have the early stirrings of revolt that culminated in the bourgeois revolutions in the Netherlands and England. This great revolution in turn produced a revolution in art and culture.

Art and the bourgeois revolution

It was Luther who led the charge against the old world. When he translated the bible into German, he started a revolution, the extent of which he himself could not have had the vaguest idea.

One might say that he invented the modern German language. He was the author of numerous poems, which, given the nature of the period, necessarily had the form of religious hymns.

These hymns are full of revolutionary fervour, notably Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God), which Engels described as the Marseillaise of the sixteenth century.

A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654), Rembrandt / Image: public domain

And when he attacked the Pope and Papism, he did so in the earthy language of a German peasant:

“Because of God’s wrath, the devil has beshitted us with the Great Fat Arse of Rome.”

The bourgeois revolution, which was aborted in Germany, attained its first great success with the victory of the Dutch people in their long and bloody struggle against Catholic Spain.

The birth of the Dutch Republic created the conditions not only for a great new economic power in Europe, but also for a great cultural and artistic revolution.

A new class of prosperous merchants was consolidating its leading position in society and was prepared to spend money on works of art, in order to embellish their homes.

The new freedoms won by revolutionary struggle opened the door to new and fresh approaches to art. It enabled the rise of an outstanding generation of painters, including Vermeer, Frans Hals, and last but not least, Rembrandt van Rijn.

Only in 17th century Holland could a miller’s son like Rembrandt aspire to be a famous painter. He had a wild streak and a stubborn, rebellious nature, which comes across clearly in his paintings.

Rembrandt’s models are not goddesses but real women, many of them taken from the streets and brothels. Though disguised as Biblical characters like Potiphar’s wife or Bathsheba, they are just naked women. This did not make him any friends amongst the hypocritical Pharisees of the Calvinist establishment.

One of his chief models was Hendrickje, his housekeeper and mistress. She is shown in a series of provocative poses, lifting up her skirt in the celebrated A Woman Bathing in a Stream.

Rembrandt soon incurred the wrath of the religious authorities. He was persecuted and reviled. In his old age he fell into great hardship.

His last self-portraits are perhaps his greatest masterpieces. They are depictions of an old man upon whose face is etched deep lines of suffering. They present a painful contrast with the earlier portraits of a prosperous young painter, confidently embarking on the road to success.

In 1658 he was reduced to filing for bankruptcy. Like Vermeer and many other great artists, he died in conditions of the direst poverty.

Art and revolution

It has been said that when the cannons roar the Muses are silent. If this is true, then it is only true very partially. The Muse has often derived inspiration from the sound of cannons and has been fired by the revolutionary fervour of the masses.

And the revolutionary awakening of the masses cannot but find an echo in the hearts and minds of the intellectuals, or at least the best elements among them.

The English Revolution produced an immense popular literature in the form of books and pamphlets, notably the outstanding polemical works of Gerrard Winstanley.

In the person of John Milton, the revolution found its most outstanding advocate. He served the new regime loyally and was only saved from execution after the restoration of Charles II because of his great fame.

In the sublime poetry of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the war between Heaven and Hell is only a reflection of the revolutionary war between Puritans and Monarchists:

“And when Night

Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons

Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.” ^[5]

Here we have the despairing cry of an old blind man, protesting against the insolence of the drunken Cavaliers (the sons of Belial) who roam the streets at night, insulting and beating up the defeated revolutionaries.

The restoration of Charles II ushered in a period of unbridled reaction that found its reflection in a dissolute and amoral art, notably in the theatre.

The French Revolution

An even greater impact on world culture was made a century later by the great French Revolution of 1789-93. We tend to forget that the road to that Revolution was paved by the French Enlightenment.

The revolution was a fount of inspiration for the new generation of artists whose finest representative was the painter Jacques-Louis David. Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed La Marseillaise, that great insurrectionary anthem, which went on to become the worldwide hymn to revolution.

The Rout of the Rebel Angels (1807), one of William Blake’s illustrations to John Milton’s Paradise Lost / Image: public domain

With the French revolution, as Plekhanov observed, the sansculottes set art “on the path which the art of the upper classes had been unable to follow; it became a matter for the whole people.”^[6]

But the victory of the Thermidorian counter-revolution marked the beginning of a period of ebb, in which one by one the old ideals and enthusiasm were displaced by philistine conservatism that corresponded to the mentality of the new caste of bourgeois parvenus and bureaucrats who now ruled the roost.

The French Revolution had a colossal effect, not only in France, but on an international scale. It acted like a gigantic boulder hurled onto a great lake.

Overnight it shattered the old static classical models favoured by the aristocracy and opened the door for the great Romantic Revolution that created an entirely new literary, artistic and musical school in Europe.

Some of the greatest English poets, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, as well as Robert Burns in Scotland, were inspired by it. William Blake, an extremely original writer and artist, was yet another fervent supporter of the revolution.

The impact of the Revolution was brilliantly expressed by William Wordsworth, who was present at the time in France. In his great poem, The Prelude, he wrote the following inspiring words:

“Bliss t’was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” ^[7]

In Germany, many artists and intellectuals enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, including the great poet, Schiller. But the greatest impact was on the world of music. The greatest musical genius in history, Ludwig van Beethoven, was an ardent admirer of the French Revolution.

He was appalled at the fact that Austria was the leading force in the counter-revolutionary coalition against France. Suffocating in the bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna he wrote a despairing comment: “As long as the Austrians have their brown beer and little sausages, they will never revolt.”^[8]

Beethoven boldly swept aside all existing musical conventions, just as the French Revolution swept aside all the accumulated rubbish of feudalism and the absolute monarchy.

The symphonies of Beethoven represent a fundamental break with the past. They erupted like a thunderbolt on the musical world, which was never the same again. This transformation begins with his third symphony, the Eroica.

It is a monumental work, which scandalised many who were accustomed to the genteel kind of music favoured by aristocratic audiences. The first movement alone is longer than any symphony known at the time.

The story of its composition takes us right to the heart of the French Revolution. Beethoven was initially impressed by what he had heard of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he identified with the Revolution.

But when Beethoven heard that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, he was beside himself with rage. He crossed out his dedication to Napoleon with such violence that the manuscript, which still exists, has a hole torn through it.

He renamed it the Eroica Symphony. Its two crashing opening bars remind one of a fist smashing down on a desk, demanding attention in a stormy meeting, immediately followed by an irresistible cavalry charge. The second movement is a funeral march – in memory of a dead hero.

Beethoven never vacillated in his support for the ideals of the French Revolution to the end of his life. His last great symphony, the Ninth – written at a time of black reaction in Europe – was a triumphant hymn to revolution.

Art as protest

The famous Spanish painter Goya provides a most striking example of how great art can become a most powerful weapon of struggle.

The work of the young Goya stands in complete contrast with that of his old age. It is as if we are in the presence of two different artists, or two different worlds.

The paintings of the young Goya are full of the joys of life. Here we have carefree scenes of young ladies with parasols and their young male admirers in dashing attire, the majos and majas.

But the paintings of Goya’s old age set us into another world – a world of darkness and black shadows, peopled by monsters, whores, witches, corrupt priests, murderers and crippled beggars. This transformation is a faithful reflection of the fate of Spain at that time, when it found itself occupied by the armies of Napoleon.

On 2 May 1808, the people of Madrid rose up against the occupying forces in a heroic but doomed insurrection. The French ordered an all-out assault that crushed the insurgents, who were massacred without quarter.

The uprising is described in two famous paintings by Goya. It is said that, accompanied by his maid clutching a lantern, the artist visited the scenes of slaughter, where every monstrous detail was engraved on his memory.

Whether this is true or not, the paintings portray the events with the most violent realism. The first shows the terrible events of the second of May. The second painting is a staggering depiction of the shootings of that night.

This powerful painting presents a scene of unrelieved horror, unfolding in utter darkness, broken only by the fantastic figure of a man in a white shirt holding his arms up to heaven in protest at his fate, while the ranks of the French soldiers take aim at his unprotected breast.

The executioners are shown from the rear, so that no human face is visible. These are no longer humans but only a dumb military machine, blindly obeying the order to kill.

By contrast the faces of the victims are movingly human, with the Christ-like white-shirted figure as the focal point of a painting full of raw drama and pathos. The pools of blood on the ground are so real one can almost smell them. Here is committed art at its most powerful: not just a depiction of events but a passionate cry of protest.

The Third of May (1814), Francisco Goya / Image: public domain

There now began what became known as the Peninsular War, perhaps the first example in relatively modern times of what we call a guerrilla war (indeed the term was invented by the Spaniards, meaning a ‘little war’).

The bloody events of that war were captured in a series of black-and-white etchings by Goya entitled The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra). As depictions of the unrelieved horror of war, they have never been equaled.

Finally, we enter what is called Goya’s black period. Here we are in the presence of a different artist and a different world. It is a vision of a world torn apart by years of war, revolution and counter-revolution, a world that has been stood on its head.

It is a vision of old age, of a man who has witnessed too much human suffering and has no idea how it will all end. It is a bleak and pessimistic vision of reality. It is a cry of despair that comes straight from the heart of a broken man.

To find anything comparable to these artistic masterpieces, we have to fast forward to a comparable period in Spanish history – the period of the bloody Civil War, waged by Franco’s fascist armies against the people of Spain in the 1930s.

In this context, Pablo Picasso created what is rightly considered one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century: the painting known as Guernica.

Here, as in the paintings of Goya, war is depicted in its full horror. The painting is in black-and-white, which serves to give it an even greater dramatic impact. The imagery is stark and terrifying.

In the midst of total blackness, an electric lightbulb sheds its light on the scene of destruction. But this is not the comforting light of day, but the kind of light one identifies with a torture chamber in a dark and airless dungeon.

On all sides there is violence, suffering and death. A horse is pierced through with a lance and its shrieks can somehow be heard, although the painting itself is dumb.

A woman is clutching the dead body of a child in her arms and is uttering a deafening scream of protest directed at the heavens, which are indifferent to her sufferings.

And dominating this scene of horror we see the head of a raging bull, a truly frightening portrayal of savagery and violence, which personifies the essence of fascism.

Bombs are exploding and the ground is covered with the shattered bodies of warriors clutching broken swords in their hands. But all these terrifying sounds are reduced to an even more disturbing silence. It is the silence of a nightmare.

The art of hypocrisy

In our modern hypocritical world, the postmodernist fraternity wishes to soothe our nerves by eliminating all offensive language from our vocabulary.

One photomontage from a series produced by Yuri Rozhkov for the Mayakovsky poem, ‘To the Workers of Kursk’, in 1924 / Image: public domain

And since war causes greater discomfort among this fraternity than almost anything else, the vocabulary surrounding it has been suitably amended to reduce its harmful effects on sensitive souls.

Thus, nobody is ever killed in wars nowadays. They are merely “taken out.” And the innocent victims of war are merely “collateral damage.”

Here hypocrisy is raised to the level of an art form. But Pablo Picasso, who was a real artist, told the truth about war. As in all true art, a mirror is held up before us to reveal a faithful image of our times, in all their repulsive ugliness.

Some people may claim that this is not art, but only propaganda. True art does not aim to reproduce any message that is external to itself, but only a truthful expression of what the artist feels in their heart and soul.

That is true. Propaganda can never rise to the level of great art. But real art does not shut itself off from the reality of the world outside. It does not live in an ivory tower, ”sipping life through a straw.”

A true artist is a living human being, who shares in the joys and the miseries of all human existence, as expressed in the famous motto of the Roman playwright, Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am human, and I consider that nothing human is alien to me). ^[9]

Like Goya before him, Picasso was expressing the sense of burning indignation and outrage that was seething in his breast.

Picasso was certainly committed politically. Though it is scarcely ever mentioned today, he joined the Communist Party in 1944 while in exile in German-occupied Paris. It is said that when a visiting German officer, after examining Picasso’s painting, asked him, “Did you do this?”, he replied: “No, you did.”

However, in Guernica he was not expressing any specific political message but only what came directly from his heart and soul.

In so doing, he nevertheless courageously took his place on the barricades. He wielded his paintbrush in the revolutionary cause, and it proved to be a far more effective weapon than a rifle or machine gun.

It is a condemnation of the art of our own times that the massacre of men women and children in Gaza, paraded on our television screens every day, finds no adequate expression.

Our attention is focused on far more significant objects, such as unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde. It is sufficient to compare our art with that of Picasso and Goya to realise just how low the human spirit is sunk in the present age. But there have been other ages where art and artists proved to be worthy of their calling.

Art and the October Revolution

The October Revolution in Russia produced a great outpouring of art and literature, which was later crushed, like so much else, under the leaden rump of Stalinist political counter-revolution.

The bourgeois critics of October like to portray the Bolsheviks as bloodthirsty monsters, bent on the destruction of all civilised human values. They attempt to identify the art of the Revolution with the stilted bureaucratic art of Stalinist ‘Socialist Realism’.

That is a lie. The years immediately after October released the colossal pent-up creative potential of the Russian people – not just the working people, but also the best layers of the intelligentsia.

Names like Tatlin, Meyerhold, Shostakovich and Mayakovsky form part of a galaxy of talent, the likes of which had not been seen before or after in the twentieth century.

The drama of the revolution was played out on a truly vast scale, but also in a million households and human hearts and minds.

The revolution struck a note that resonated deeply in the masses, arousing a thirst for knowledge and culture that had long been repressed under class society.

Here was a stage more colossal than any that had witnessed the tragedies of Aeschylus and Shakespeare. The poetry of Mayakovsky was listened to in rapt attention by workers and soldiers who were beginning to discover a new dimension to life and to their own individual personality.

Poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1928 film, October: Ten Days That Shook the World / Image: public domain

In those stormy years, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow – formerly the preserve of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ‘cultured classes’ – was suddenly filled to overflowing with workers in their overalls and the grey coats of soldiers, all eager to discover a new world of music that had been closed to them until now.

They listened and watched spellbound to the spectacular operas of Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov, and the marvellous ballets of Tchaikovsky.

They entered a new world that they scarcely knew existed and were carried away by new feelings that they had never experienced before. At this point, the dividing line between art and life itself becomes blurred and almost ceases to exist.

This was a period of endless debate and discussion. Many new schools of art were born and passed away just as rapidly. Some of the new ideas were fruitful. Others were profoundly mistaken. But all were discussed openly and with complete freedom.

Trotsky, with his brilliant style and masterly use of the dialectic, tackled the Soviet artists and writers on their own terrain and answered them in their own language.

In this way, he consolidated the authority of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution, and helped to attract the best of the artists and writers to the revolutionary cause. Bureaucratic bullying and hectoring did not enter into it, much less administrative violence.

‘Socialist realism’

But all that changed when the democratic regime established by Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917 was overthrown by the Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution.

That had a most destructive effect on art and on all original and creative thought in general. The new official doctrine, called ‘Socialist Realism’, consisted principally in the art of praising the bureaucracy in language it could understand.

The purpose of this art was to present the Party – the collective political expression of the bureaucracy – as all-knowing and all-powerful.

And at the apex of the Party stood the all-knowing and all-powerful Boss, Stalin, who, alone out of all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, was a man completely devoid of culture and indifferent, or even openly hostile, towards it.

Routine exists in art and literature, as anywhere else. The Revolution broke down the old conservative routinism and opened the doors to new and exciting ideas. But that was the last thing Stalin and the bureaucracy required.

The history of art and literature has many heroes but also has its fair share of second-raters, time-servers and plodding philistines. These creatures now rushed to serve Stalin’s dictatorship, acting as faithful watchdogs to control and censor art, music and literature.

The doors that had been opened by the Revolution were quickly slammed shut. Those who objected soon found themselves in prison or in a Siberian labour camp.

Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, at the age of 36, was an early protest against the suffocating, conservative and repressive atmosphere of the Stalin regime, which was the exact antithesis of everything that Mayakovsky and Bolshevism represented.

It is a tribute to the boundless artistic spirit of the Soviet people that the great traditions of Russian literature, art and music were kept alive despite all the odds.

The flame was kept burning, and with it, the fierce loyalty of the people to Lenin and the memory of October that enabled them to defeat the Nazi hordes of Hitler with all the combined wealth of Europe behind them.

Capitalism and art

In its period of ascent, the bourgeoisie played a progressive role in developing the productive forces and pushing the bounds of civilisation and culture forward.

But in the period of its senile decay, it is no longer interested in developing the productive forces. The narrow limits of capitalism cannot even contain the productive forces that have been already created.

The ruling class in these times lacks any broad horizon, any deep philosophy or vision of the future. Its entire being is centred on money-grubbing in its narrowest and most repulsive sense.

It is as if the bourgeoisie has suffered a collective childhood regression to the stage of the primitive accumulation of capital. Narrowness as a condition of existence and stinginess as the only moral virtue.

In its senile decrepitude, capitalism displays all the repulsive features that were strikingly characterised by Shakespeare:

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”^[10]

Real art is revolutionary

The most negative effects of this degeneration are to be found in the world of culture. Wherever we look we see that bourgeois art is dying on its feet.

The symptoms of decay are too numerous to list. The situation of the vast majority of the visual arts is frankly lamentable, and that of what used to be called ‘classical’ music still worse.

But the forces needed to challenge the existing decrepit and senile regime of capitalism cannot be found within the limits of the world of the artistic intelligentsia.

Artists indeed can and must play a role in the socialist revolution. But they can only succeed by uniting with the revolutionary proletariat.

Vladimir Tatlin’s design for his proposed Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin’s Tower, in 1920 / Image: public domain

Just as in the period of the decline of feudalism, the tyranny of the church and the monarchy could only be overthrown by the efforts of a rising revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie, so now, the stagnant and repressive regime of capitalism can only be overthrown by a power that is greater than itself.

That can only be the class that constitutes the majority of society, that class which holds the reins of economic power in its hands and, once it is mobilised to change society, cannot fail to succeed.

What is needed is an outburst of the class struggle that will challenge the status quo and shatter the suffocating atmosphere of smugness and complacency that is the death of art.

When the working class enters the road of struggle, the fresh winds of the class struggle will sweep away all the dust and cobwebs that have settled on the minds of men and women, dulled their consciousness and numbed their sensibility.

Once the masses begin to stir, they will not be satisfied with the tenth-rate miserable excuse for ‘culture’ with which they are currently stultified. They will look for something better than what they have so far put up with: they will look for new books, new ideas, new music.

In rejecting all that is decayed and rotten in the present-day culture, they will embrace the best ideas and culture of the past with enthusiasm.

The struggle for the social emancipation of the working class is unthinkable without also bringing about its intellectual and cultural emancipation.

Art and communism

Real art is always revolutionary by its very nature.

Art must oppose the yoke of tyranny in all its forms, not just the policeman with his baton and handcuffs, not only the soulless bureaucrat with rule-book in hand, and not only the spiritual policemen of the Church, but also the dictatorship of Capital, both material and spiritual.

Artists and writers cannot remain indifferent to the terrible sufferings of the human race. They, too, must decide which side they are on and take their place on the barricades.

When men and women are really free to develop themselves, and to realise their true potential as human beings, when the working day is reduced to a minimum expression and want is abolished, there will be no shortage of Shakespeares, Rembrandts and Beethovens, just as there will be no shortage of Einsteins and Darwins.

The rise of class society signified the total alienation of the masses from the world of art and culture. Its overthrow will establish the material conditions for the abolition of the stultifying division between mental and manual labour.

After millenia of slavery, the ivory towers of isolationism will be torn down. The doors that barred all access to culture will be thrown open.New schools of art, music and literature will flourish, unhindered by the censorship of the state, the church or the market.

But communism will signify a far deeper and more important transformation.

Under communism, art will become once again the possession of the whole people. It will no longer be an unattainable dream, something strange and alien that is wholly separate from real life.

Art will merge with everyday life, eventually becoming an indissoluble part of it. For the highest art of all is the art of living.

That is the real meaning of Engels’ famous definition of communism: “Humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”^[11]

References

[1] K Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1861’, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 28, Progress Publishers, 1986, pg 46

[2] W K Simpson (ed.), ‘The Satire on the Trades: The Instruction of Dua-Khety’, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, Yale University Press, 2003, pg 432-437

[3] W R Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, Little, Brown and Co., 1993, pg 26

[4] Quoted in ibid. pg 3

[5] J Milton, Paradise Lost, Oxford University Press, 1998, pg 15

[6] G Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 5, Progress Publishers 1981, pg 395

[7] W Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: Poems, Faber and Faber, 2001,  pg 127

[8] L v Beethoven, ‘An den Musikverleger N Simrock in Bonn’, Beethovens sämtliche Briefe, Schuster und Loeffler, 1906, pg 17-18, our translation

[9] N H Dole (ed.), The Latin Poets: an Anthology, Thomas Y Crowell and Co., 1905, pg xi

[10] W Shakespeare, As You Like It, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1975, pg 57

[11] F Engels, Anti-Dühring, Wellred Books, 2017, pg 336