Leon Trotsky

Art and politics in class society

Posted by

1

.
Book review:

Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket. Chicago, IL: 2013)

.
.
The following review was originally published by the CUNY Grad Center’s journal The Advocate. It is available in print and online, and I’d encourage anyone who’s interested to pick up a copy.

.
Ben Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class has clearly struck a chord with contemporary artistic communities, critics and practitioners alike. Not all have responded the same way, however. While most applaud the admirable clarity of its arguments and readily acknowledge Davis’ gifts as a writer, some have lamented the book’s “rather bleak” tone and the seeming despondency of its conclusions. One review went so far as to accuse Davis of drawing “lazy caricatures” of his opponents, panning Art and Class as “crudely reductive” and given to “smug, self-righteous dismissals.” Yet others have welcomed its challenge to the conventional image of artists as born radicals, and praise Davis’ sober reassessment of the lofty political ambitions often claimed for their work.

Despite a few cautious endorsements from figures like Molly Crabapple and William Powhida, the book’s reception among actual producers of art has likewise been mixed. At a recent talk held at Housing Works in downtown Manhattan, Davis invited to the stage a group of practicing artists with whom he’d been in close dialogue while writing Art and Class. The discussion that followed was polite enough, touching on some of the book’s central themes, but there were moments in which the panelists could be seen practically squirming with discomfort at the language Davis used to characterize their vocation. Even though they’d all read it before, and were thus familiar with the text’s provocations, it was as if the wound was still fresh.

So what is it about Davis’ thesis that makes it such a bitter pill to swallow? Part of it is semantic. Though the sociological framework he employs throughout his investigation into art under capitalism is generally sound, Davis encounters terminological difficulties as soon as he tries to conceptualize class. How does one talk about a mode of creative activity that doesn’t neatly fit the division of society into workers and capitalists? What accounts for this peculiar survival of quasi-artisanal forms of labor within such a rarefied commercial sphere as today’s art market? Art and Class approaches these questions from an avowedly Marxist angle. But this presents problems of another sort. For although classical Marxism had at its disposal an arsenal of readymade categories with which to comprehend the position of the artist, Davis finds terms like “petit-bourgeois” (probably the most fitting designation for artists at one time) irretrievably démodé. Looking for a more accessible word that might replace it, he arrives at “middle-class.” Davis emphatically asserts that “the contemporary artist is the representative of middle-class creative labor par excellence.”1

This nomenclature is unfortunate for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the confusing cluster of connotations that already surrounds notions of “middle-class.” Class is commonly (mis)understood as a purely quantitative relation, a function of “pay scale” or “income bracket.” As Davis points out, this distorts the more precise definition offered by Marxist theory, which sees class as a specific relationship to the means of production — namely of ownership or non-ownership, combined with some owners’ ability to hire others to operate them. Beyond such bland technicalities, however, Davis anticipates a more basic objection artists might raise to his analysis. “The issue of class has moral overtones,” he recognizes.2 Artists, who tend to sympathize with vaguely leftist political ideas and issues of social justice, bristle at the suggestion that they are somehow “middle-class.”

Gustav Klutsis, Multilingual propaganda machine (1923)

Once one gets past this initial allergic response, and accepts the meaning assigned to “middle-class,” the rest of the book’s contentions about art in class society fall into place. Davis is hardly indifferent to artists’ plight, either. Quite the opposite: the narrative he unfolds in Art and Class has profound implications for the way artists orient their politics. “The upshot is that artists’ middle-class position is not merely a limit on their relation to larger social struggle but also on their ability to organize to transform their own conditions,” Davis writes. He goes over some of the efforts to orchestrate artists’ strikes in the 1960s and 1970s, virtually none of which could be considered a success. “From whom would the artists be withholding their art if they did go on strike?” the book asks, quoting Carl Andre. “Alas, from no one but themselves.”3 By contrast, the closer artists get to wage-labor — those instances where they actually constitute a paid workforce, as with studio animators or industrial designers — the more effectively they can unionize and leverage demands. Continue reading →

Internationalism fails

Posted by

4

Chris Cutrone

.
This article is reposted from Platypus Review no. 60. Generally, I agree with its assertions about “anti-imperialist” politics in the present. Nevertheless, this should not be taken to mean that I support US military aggression overseas (not that I have any say in the matter). On Facebook, a heated exchange between James Heartfield, Chris Cutrone, Spencer Leonard, and Reid Kotlas followed. If they don’t mind, I might repost snippets of that argument as a supplement.

The “anti-imperialist Left” considers itself opposed to all U.S. government action as “imperialist” on principle. But, as Trotsky wrote to his followers in 1938, “Learn to think!” while one may oppose the government politically, to oppose the government putting out a fire, especially when there is no alternative agency for doing so, is nonsense. But the “Left” today is not the inheritor of Trotsky, but rather of what he pitilessly assailed, the policy of the Stalinist “Popular Front Against War and Fascism” of the 1930s, for which the shibboleth was, “Which side are you on?”

The idea is that the defeat of imperialist policy creates possibility for an alternative, and therefore one must always be against imperialism to be on the side of an alternative to it. Historically, Marxists have understood such a strategy in terms of either “revolutionary defeatism” or “revolutionary defensism.” Simply put, the defeat of an imperialist power is seen as providing the possibility for a political alternative to the government of the imperialist country; whereas the defense of a country against imperialist attack is seen as providing the possibility for a political alternative in the subaltern country. Importantly, these are not pacifist positions against war, but rather political military strategies in time of war, moreover with the aim of revolution.

Pivertistes, Mai 1938: Royan, Daniel Guérin

Pivertistes, Mai 1938: Royan, Daniel Guérin

Historically, there are two examples of success of these strategies of revolutionary defeatism and revolutionary defensism: the role of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution is regarded as a success of revolutionary defeatism, in which the defeat of the Tsarist Russian Empire undermined the government and gave rise to political and social revolution; and Mao’s Communists in the Chinese Revolution, in which the defense of China against Japanese imperialist attack undermined the nationalist Kuomintang and allowed for Communist-led revolution. Continue reading →

The humanization of nature

Posted by

6

A sorely-needed corrective 


.

The socialist revolution calls for terrifying windowless towers, desolated lots and plazas, massive concrete slabs thrown into the earth.

It goes without saying that people ought only live in buildings that they might once have feared. Someday we may all feel so free and at ease in the world we have built as to dwell in buildings that would have formerly dwarfed and intimidated us.

This requires absolute atmospheric agency: the conquest of gravity, victory over the sun, fantastic weather machines, a translucent vault or dome to seal off the heavens (when need be). Inside the enclosed space, an architecture of the well-tempered environment, with universal ventilation and air purification [respiration exacte] to accommodate the human lung. Mosquitoes will have been abolished.

Not only this, however. The socialist reconstruction of nature [социалистической реконструкции природы] also demands total geological dominion: vast terraforming projects that effortlessly tunnel through tough silicate and shruggingly shear off the sides of mountains, complete orthogonality, a Vernean clockwork at the center of the Earth. No longer Níðhöggr gnawing at the roots of the world-tree — the wyrm instead replaced by gears and wires stemming from the centrifuge. Tectonic plates will still shift following the revolution, but only when they are compelled or granted permission.

004a

From this it clearly follows that the dictatorship of the proletariat [Diktatur des Proletariats] heralded by Marx would at the same time simultaneously constitute the dictatorship of the right angle [dictature de l’angle droit] attributed to Corbusier by Lefebvre. A common demiurgic impulse thus seems to underlie both the Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo envisioned by the Italian futurists (future fascists) Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero and some of Trotsky’s closing lines in Literature and Revolution: Continue reading →

Reflections on resistance, reform, and revolution

Posted by

5

The problematic forms of
contemporary anticapitalism

Untitled.
Image: Cover to Rosa Luxemburg’s
Sozialreform oder Revolution? (1899)
untitled2

The following are the prepared remarks to a Platypus panel on “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and Resistance” with 1960s activist Todd Gitlin and WIL organizer Tom Trottier, held last March at NYU. A considerably expanded and improved version of this essay has been published by Upping the Anti (which I encourage everyone interested to buy):

Almost five years have passed since Platypus hosted its first panel on “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and Resistance.” At the time, many of us were trying to come to terms with the profound sense of disorientation we’d felt during our involvement in the antiwar movement, which was then in a process of rapid disintegration. We hoped to explore the relationship between these three categories, both to each other and to the greater project of human freedom, in order to determine whether an emancipatory politics was still even possible. How can the respective political modes of resistance, reform, and revolution be deployed to advance social and individual freedom? How might they reinforce each other on a reciprocal basis? Today, with the recent upsurge in global activism, we stand on the precipice of what promises to herald the rebirth of such a politics. These questions have acquired a renewed sense of urgency in this light. Now more than ever, they demand our attention if we are to forge a way forward without repeating the mistakes of the past.

Reform, revolution, and resistance — each of these concepts exercises a certain hold over the popular imagination of the Left. While they need not be conceived as mutually exclusive, the three have often sat in uneasy tension with one another over the course of the last century, however. The Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg famously counterposed the first two in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution?, written over a hundred years ago. In her view, this ultimately turned out to be a false dichotomy. Nevertheless, Luxemburg was addressing a real dilemma that had emerged along with the formation of the Second International and the development of mass working-class politics in the late nineteenth century. Even if she was able to conclude that reforms could still be pursued within the framework of a revolutionary program — that is, without falling into reformism — this was by no means an obvious position to take.

Still less should we consider the matter done and settled with respect to our current context, simply because a great figure like Luxemburg dealt with it in her own day. We do not have the luxury of resting on the accomplishments or insights of past thinkers. It is unclear whether the solution at which she arrived then holds true any longer. History can help us understand the momentum of the present carried over from the past, as well as possible futures toward which it may be tending. But it offers no prefabricated formulae for interpreting the present, no readymade guides to action. Continue reading →

Cubo-futurist rendering of Trotsky, uncredited (probably Annenkov, 1922)

Trotskiana

Posted by

5

1920s Trotsky memorabilia

.
.

Back in 2008, Mansur Mirovalev wrote a piece for NBC News on a curious leftover from the late Cold War era:

The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there’s one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace.

And no, Mirovalev wasn’t talking about this blog, or Richard Seymour’s Lenin’s Tomb, Roland Boer’s Stalin’s Moustache, or Martin Gittins’ magnificent Kosmograd website.

He had something quite different in mind. Continue reading →

“What would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?” (Guest post by Paul Brennan)

Posted by

1

El Lissitzky - Sketch for PROUN 6B

by Paul Brennan

Like revolution, socialism, communism, and Marxism, like any conception that would have it that there is an alternative to capitalist ontology, today the avant-garde is as extinct as the proverbial dodo. The age of militant artistic publicity seems a long, long century ago. Back then there was still a future, one that could be determined by the productive, social imagination. The historical avant-gardes, pitting themselves against the demarcation that separated the creative from the social and political, were natural allies of revolution. Not always the right kind of revolution, of course, as the example of Italian Futurism, with its militarism and misogyny, and later fascism, shows. And not always, or even often, without a large quantity of crankery and self-indulgence to go with the inspiration. Still, surveying the early twentieth century scene, it is striking how different was the conception and practice of art compared to today. True, there were painters and writers and composers for whom art remained a trade, a form of petty commodity production, but there were others, many others, at work on projects which they pursued with an idealism that would make them a laughing stock today. These could be those like Breton or Maiakovskii, for whom the creative was inseparable from the idea of a new society, or those like Joyce or Pound, politically equivocal or even downright reactionary, but who made it so intensely new that to imagine proper readers for their works was to imagine an entirely different order. Today, figures like Joyce and Pound seem to belong to an entirely different world.

Last year Penguin Books published 100 Artists’ Manifestoes: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. It is an enthralling read, at least initially; after the excerpts from Situationist writings — and surely Situationism is the moment when the avant-garde achieves its most fully realized conception of the need to erase the boundary between life and art — the sad truth begins to sink in that the avant-garde has become a joke. The movements that define the boundaries of the text tell a story. Marinetti’s Futurists represent the Ur-form of the avant-garde — the moment when it was possible to declare that “time and space died yesterday” on the front page of Figaro and not only become a subject of mockery. By the time of the Stuckists any mockery one can imagine the artist’s tracts receiving seems completely justified. It is avant-gardism — or at least an avant-garde gesture — against the avant-garde, a silly, merely reactive whinge against conceptualism and a call for a return to figuration in painting.

One reviewer of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes suggested that Alex Danchev could have improved his book by including a selection of the documents published by a group that appeared in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, which threw down its marker by publishing its first manifesto, in an homage to Marinetti, on the front page of the London Times (http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html). The INS deserves attention; not at all because it has rekindled the true flame of the avant-garde, impossible anyway, but because it at least evinces some ambition and does represent a focused, immersed response to the historical avant-gardes and their place in modern cultural and political history.

The INS is a “parodic” or “ironic” avant-garde, indeed it styles itself a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network,” but it is not the self-consciousness of this organization that distinguishes it from the historical avant-gardes. Self-consciousness was a built-in, preconditional quality of those movements. The classic account of this may be Peter Bürger’s, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972). In this now somewhat derided text (it flatters no one and is hostile to any claim that there can be a valid “tradition” of the avant-garde) Bürger charts the history of modern art as a story of autonomy achieved (in the moment of the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century) and then relinquished, when artistic self-consciousness, by the time of the late nineteenth century found itself dissatisfied with the available alternatives of artistic practice as either petty commodity production or aestheticism. The avant-gardes, for Bürger, wished to surrender their autonomy in return for an art rejuvenated by social relevance — hence the radical politicizations of art of the early twentieth century.

The self-consciousness, the reflexivity, of the INS is different. It is a organization that at once holds itself aloof from the narrowness of (particularly) contemporary British art and literature, but seems equally incapable of taking seriously the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes. For this reason it presents itself as a kind of parody of a totalitarian state or party, merged with the attributes of movements like Surrealism and Situationism. Members can be expelled for the slightest infraction, if not shot. There are committees and sub-committees, communiques, and “agents.” The military aspect of the avant-garde is maintained, but with acknowledgment that it is more appropriate today, in our society of spectacular capitalism, to think of such activity as a kind of espionage. All of this with tongue firmly in cheek.

More striking is the death-obsession of the INS. Its members conceive of themselves as “necronauts,” travels or voyagers into death. This seems to me symptomatic of the place that the avant-garde has arrived at. It is no longer possible to think of an expansive, adventurous artistic activity, one outside of the Culture Industry, other than as life placed in a relation of perpetual adjacency to death. Its “General Secretary,” the now well-known novelist Tom McCarthy (http://www.surplusmatter.com/) gives special importance to the Freud of the Death Drive, to Heidegger, Bataille, and to Blanchot. The philosophical stance of the group (Simon Critchley is the INS “Philosopher in Chief”) is decidedly anti-humanist, with a particular hostility to Hegel and Marx. The emphasis falls on the post-structuralist “textual” author, on literature and art as networks, and on technology.

If the near-corpse of the Left is to be revived, then art will have to be revived with it. In the past leftists argued over what a healthy form for a radical art might be. In the age of great realistic fiction, Engels criticized novelists too quick to believe that they had to sacrifice verisimilitude for the sake of propaganda. Trotskii, in Literature and Revolution (1924) endorsed the idea of the avant-garde, but had many cogent criticisms to make of the artistic and cultural schools of this day. Lukács provided a defense of the realist novel against modernism in The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno conducted a seminal discussion over the questions raised in the former’s “Artwork” essay (1936). Benjamin argued for an art appropriate to the “environment” which was “being prepared for us by technology” and advocated a practice that would seek to hurry along the extinction of the “aura” and that would be, at the very least, “completely useless” to fascism and its “aestheticization of politics.” Radical art would be a marriage of technology and tendency. Adorno responded by insisting on the value of artistic autonomy, emphasizing artistic technique over technology, as a last-line resistance to the onslaught of commodification. Examples could be multiplied, for Marxism has a rich legacy of aesthetic debate and discussion. (One place to look is the Fredric Jameson-edited anthology, Aesthetics and Politics, which contains writings by and exchanges between Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Sartre.)

Today art and literature mostly seem to be a business. One could be forgiven for characterizing them as merely a niche industry supplying a rather snooty form of entertainment commodity. The situation vis–à–vis the critical understanding of art is little better. Who cares, you may say, there are other priorities. But the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of the imagination and the imagination is in turn inseparable from the idea of another world, and so I ask, what would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?