Review
Andrew Hemingway (ed), Marxism and the History of Art, Pluto Press, London 2006.
As a discipline art history has long been characterized by snobbery and elitism. For the ruling class it has been seen as a soft (harmless?) option for its less able sons and daughters. In this it has mirrored the elitism of the art world generally, which an ‘anti- philistine’ section of the bourgeoisie has made it its business to hegemonise, partly through big money (Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Saatchi etc) and partly through a small detachment of genuine ‘experts’ or ‘ connoisseurs’ ( Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Brian Sewell, even Anthony Blunt in his way).
Despite this the twentieth century saw a number of highly sophisticated Marxist scholars make a major contribution to the development of the subject. Inevitably they tended to be marginalized and neglected, frequently having to work in very difficult circumstances , both East and West. The radicalization of academia in the sixties and seventies brought the emergence and reemergence of some of them to a temporary prominence, but the swing to the right in the eighties and after, with the collapse of communism and the turn to postmodernism , has sidelined them once again.
With this book, and a series of other initiatives, Andrew Hemingway ( working in concert with other contemporary Marxist art historians) is seeking to ensure that this rich legacy is not thrown on the scrap heap but survives to contribute to the debates of today an tomorrow.
The book is a collection of essays, all written by people at least very sympathetic to Marxism, on such figures as Lifshits, Antal, Klingender, Raphael, Lukacs, Hauser, Schapiro, Lefebvre, Benjamin, Adorno and others. Most of the essays present their subject by means of a combination of biographical material with an overview of their main ideas. Some, such as John Roberts’ discussion of ‘the ideal spectator’ and Hemingway’s account of ‘New Left Art History’ are more thematic in approach.
The central issue covered, from a variety of angles, is the debate, which ran through Marxist art history as through the wider society, over modernism – modernism versus classicism, versus bourgeois or social realism, and versus socialist realism. On balance the book comes down – just about, I think – on the side of modernism. Particularly interesting in this context are Stanley Mitchell’s contributions on the ‘Marxist conservative’ Mikhail Lifshits and the humanist, somewhat mystical, Max Raphael.
Slightly out of kilter with the rest of the collection, but very welcome (to me), is Caroline Arscott’s chapter on William Morris which discusses his engagement with so-called ‘primitive’ art. Morris is not usually considered in such company, but I consider that his ideas on art, especially his notion of ‘pleasure in labour’ as the fount of art, are one of the most valuable elements in his multi-faceted work and deserve more attention.
One of the stated aims of this book is to ‘plug a gap’ by providing, in a single volume, an overview of the Marxist art history tradition for students who wish to study it and lecturers who wish to teach it. Overall it succeeds in its aim and will undoubtedly prove useful to its intended readers. Nevertheless I have some reservations.
First, the general reader should be warned that the focus is heavily methodological ( though the language is not too obscure) and one learns relatively little about art as such. Second , there are some surprising omissions – for example, no account of John Berger, and T.J. Clark discussed only in passing – perhaps the result of the exaggerated academic prestige in some quarters of the continental Europeans. Third, there is a tendency to an attitude of ‘beleaguered pessimism’ which is reflective of the milieu of the contributors more than the state of the movement and resistance in the wider world.
Finally I was left with the conclusion that artists influenced by Marxism and socialism – there have been many – have generally been considerably ahead of the Marxist art historians. But perhaps that is as it should be.
John Molyneux
September 2006
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The Meaning of Class
As we saw in the last of these columns the concept of class struggle played a crucial role in Marx’s theory of history. For Marx class struggle was the main driving force in history and the means by which one mode of production is transformed into another, for example feudalism into capitalism or capitalism into socialism. But what is meant by class?
In modern capitalist society this question has become very confused, and not accidentally so. On the one hand the term is very widely used – in the media, in literature and in daily life – because the existence of layers of people with very unequal amounts of wealth, and widely differing life styles and opportunities is so obvious that it cannot be denied. On the other hand our rulers have a massive interest in ensuring that people, especially working people, do not develop a clear understanding of it, do not, in other words, develop class consciousness.
Consequently, for more than a century, the ruling class has been happy to fund academics (particularly sociologists) and pundits to come up with a variety of theories and concepts of class. They have not minded very much about the content of these theories on one condition – that they disputed and ‘refuted’ the Marxist theory of class, the only one they really feared.
The principal strategy in this ideological mystification has been to treat class as essentially a subjective matter, a question of how people see their own and others’ position in the social structure and how they define their own class identity. Max Weber, the early 20th century sociologist who is the key intellectual figure in much of this debate, focused primarily on ‘status’ and ‘status groups’, rather than economic class, as being the main factors in social action, with status defined as prestige in the eyes of others.
Even when class is defined by occupation, as is the case in many governmental and sociological statistics, which appears to be an objective criterion, the ranking of the occupations – for example teachers as middle class, mechanics as working class – is done on the subjective basis of presumed status.
Treating class as subjective makes the concept highly unstable, varying from year to year, decade to decade, country to country, and also opens the door to regular claims that class divisions have disappeared or are no longer important, and that viewing politics in class terms is out of date.
By contrast Marxism, though obviously concerned with class consciousness, insists that class divisions are objective – they exist in the structure of society independently of people’s awareness or conception of them. For Marx, class divisions derive from and are based on the relations of production in society. Often this is expressed in the phrase ‘class is defined by relationship to the means of production’, usually with the rider that ‘it is a question of ownership or non- ownership’. But, although it points in the right direction, this formulation is inadequate and can be misleading. Slave owners, feudal lords and capitalists are all owners of the means of production but they are three different classes. Similarly, in modern society, neither a middle manager in Samsung nor a shop floor worker are owners of the means of production but they are not both members of the same class.
A fuller understanding of the Marxist theory of class requires a grasp of three points. First, that the relations of production of society form a totality, a definite system of production, and classes are defined by the roles they play in the system as a whole. It is necessary to start from the system as a whole, not from individual cases.
Second, that classes are a matter not only of relations between people and things (means of production – land, machines, factories etc.) but also of social relations between people; classes are formed in conflict with one another.
Third, that what drives the conflict is not envy or different life styles or even just inequality, but exploitative relations of production, that is the systematic extraction of a surplus (profit) by one group of people from the labour of another group. Class struggle derives from exploitation in the process of production and from there extends to every aspect of social life.
It is the concept of exploitation ( to be explained further in my next column) which differentiates the Marxist theory of class and which is absent from all the bourgeois, liberal and sociological accounts. Exploitation creates an objective conflict of interests – first over pay, hours of work, conditions etc. and then over housing, health, education, law and order, foreign policy (warfare versus welfare) and so on.
Apply this analysis to modern capitalist society and, with some important local variations, we find essentially the same class structure in all developed countries.
At the top, stands the ruling or capitalist class, which owns or controls the major means of production, and lives on the profits it makes from the employment of wage labour. Not every member of the ruling class, e.g .some top politicians and state officials, is personally involved in the employment and profit making, but they are all tied into it and depend on it.
In opposition to them stands the majority, the working class, who live by the sale of their labour power and are exploited by the capitalist class. The working class includes both manual and white collar workers – nurses and teachers as well as dockers and car workers. If people live primarily by the sale of their labour power they are part of the working class whether they work in mines and factories or call centers and colleges.
Between these two main classes stand various intermediate strata, commonly called the middle class, who shade into the ruling class at their upper levels and the working class at their lower levels. There are two strands in the middle class, both hierarchically organized. On the one hand, small business owners, the petty bourgeoisie, who are either self employed or employ a few workers. On the other, managers. Managers may appear to be working class in that they do not own the means of production and are paid wages or salaries, but in fact they are not paid to work as such and are not exploited, they are paid to manage and enforce the exploitation of the workers under their control. Such managers exist not only in private companies, but also in schools, hospitals, and the state bureaucracy.
It is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class that shapes the basic political terrain in modern society. The middle classes play an important role – the ruling class cannot run society without them – but politically they tend to vacillate between the two main classes according to which is exerting the stronger ‘gravitational pull’.
In many less developed countries there is another large class, the peasantry, which plays a significant role in production and politics, but even where the peasantry are still a majority, it is usually the battle between capitalists and workers which is decisive. And on a world scale it is absolutely clear that it is the struggle between the international bourgeoisie and the international proletariat that will determine the fate of humanity,
John Molyneux
September 13, 2006
In modern capitalist society this question has become very confused, and not accidentally so. On the one hand the term is very widely used – in the media, in literature and in daily life – because the existence of layers of people with very unequal amounts of wealth, and widely differing life styles and opportunities is so obvious that it cannot be denied. On the other hand our rulers have a massive interest in ensuring that people, especially working people, do not develop a clear understanding of it, do not, in other words, develop class consciousness.
Consequently, for more than a century, the ruling class has been happy to fund academics (particularly sociologists) and pundits to come up with a variety of theories and concepts of class. They have not minded very much about the content of these theories on one condition – that they disputed and ‘refuted’ the Marxist theory of class, the only one they really feared.
The principal strategy in this ideological mystification has been to treat class as essentially a subjective matter, a question of how people see their own and others’ position in the social structure and how they define their own class identity. Max Weber, the early 20th century sociologist who is the key intellectual figure in much of this debate, focused primarily on ‘status’ and ‘status groups’, rather than economic class, as being the main factors in social action, with status defined as prestige in the eyes of others.
Even when class is defined by occupation, as is the case in many governmental and sociological statistics, which appears to be an objective criterion, the ranking of the occupations – for example teachers as middle class, mechanics as working class – is done on the subjective basis of presumed status.
Treating class as subjective makes the concept highly unstable, varying from year to year, decade to decade, country to country, and also opens the door to regular claims that class divisions have disappeared or are no longer important, and that viewing politics in class terms is out of date.
By contrast Marxism, though obviously concerned with class consciousness, insists that class divisions are objective – they exist in the structure of society independently of people’s awareness or conception of them. For Marx, class divisions derive from and are based on the relations of production in society. Often this is expressed in the phrase ‘class is defined by relationship to the means of production’, usually with the rider that ‘it is a question of ownership or non- ownership’. But, although it points in the right direction, this formulation is inadequate and can be misleading. Slave owners, feudal lords and capitalists are all owners of the means of production but they are three different classes. Similarly, in modern society, neither a middle manager in Samsung nor a shop floor worker are owners of the means of production but they are not both members of the same class.
A fuller understanding of the Marxist theory of class requires a grasp of three points. First, that the relations of production of society form a totality, a definite system of production, and classes are defined by the roles they play in the system as a whole. It is necessary to start from the system as a whole, not from individual cases.
Second, that classes are a matter not only of relations between people and things (means of production – land, machines, factories etc.) but also of social relations between people; classes are formed in conflict with one another.
Third, that what drives the conflict is not envy or different life styles or even just inequality, but exploitative relations of production, that is the systematic extraction of a surplus (profit) by one group of people from the labour of another group. Class struggle derives from exploitation in the process of production and from there extends to every aspect of social life.
It is the concept of exploitation ( to be explained further in my next column) which differentiates the Marxist theory of class and which is absent from all the bourgeois, liberal and sociological accounts. Exploitation creates an objective conflict of interests – first over pay, hours of work, conditions etc. and then over housing, health, education, law and order, foreign policy (warfare versus welfare) and so on.
Apply this analysis to modern capitalist society and, with some important local variations, we find essentially the same class structure in all developed countries.
At the top, stands the ruling or capitalist class, which owns or controls the major means of production, and lives on the profits it makes from the employment of wage labour. Not every member of the ruling class, e.g .some top politicians and state officials, is personally involved in the employment and profit making, but they are all tied into it and depend on it.
In opposition to them stands the majority, the working class, who live by the sale of their labour power and are exploited by the capitalist class. The working class includes both manual and white collar workers – nurses and teachers as well as dockers and car workers. If people live primarily by the sale of their labour power they are part of the working class whether they work in mines and factories or call centers and colleges.
Between these two main classes stand various intermediate strata, commonly called the middle class, who shade into the ruling class at their upper levels and the working class at their lower levels. There are two strands in the middle class, both hierarchically organized. On the one hand, small business owners, the petty bourgeoisie, who are either self employed or employ a few workers. On the other, managers. Managers may appear to be working class in that they do not own the means of production and are paid wages or salaries, but in fact they are not paid to work as such and are not exploited, they are paid to manage and enforce the exploitation of the workers under their control. Such managers exist not only in private companies, but also in schools, hospitals, and the state bureaucracy.
It is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class that shapes the basic political terrain in modern society. The middle classes play an important role – the ruling class cannot run society without them – but politically they tend to vacillate between the two main classes according to which is exerting the stronger ‘gravitational pull’.
In many less developed countries there is another large class, the peasantry, which plays a significant role in production and politics, but even where the peasantry are still a majority, it is usually the battle between capitalists and workers which is decisive. And on a world scale it is absolutely clear that it is the struggle between the international bourgeoisie and the international proletariat that will determine the fate of humanity,
John Molyneux
September 13, 2006
How Society Changes
As I explained in the last column Marx’s theory of history centred on production. The way a society organizes the production of the necessities of life constitutes its mode of production, the economic base which shapes its superstructure- its law, politics, religion, philosophy, morality, art etc.
But how does one mode of production change into another? For Marx, himself, and for us today, for everyone who is anti-capitalist, i.e. wants to get rid of the capitalist mode of production, this is the crucial question.
To answer it we must go back to the fact that Marx distinguished two aspects of production: the forces and relations of production. It is the interaction and conflict between these which lays the basis for fundamental social change.
The forces of production are the capacity of a society to produce goods: its resources, labour, knowledge and technology. Examples include: the spears and bows and arrows of stone age hunters; the ox or horse drawn ploughs of the medieval farmer; the textile mills, spinning jennies and steam trains of the industrial revolution; the production lines, power stations and computers of modern industry.
The relations of production are the social relation people enter into in the process of producing. They range from the primitive communist clan of hunters and gatherers, to slave owners and slaves of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, to landlords and serfs or peasants, to capitalist employers and wage workers today.
Marx argues that it is the level of development of the forces of production that shapes the relations of production. ‘ The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist’. The forces of production, however, tend to grow, by no means evenly or at a uniform rate, but over time they tend to advance as human beings discover ways to produce more effectively. At a certain stage in their development the forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production (which are also society’s property relations). While at first these relations had assisted the growth of the productive forces, they now become an obstacle, a ‘ fetter’ on their further development. Then , says Marx, ‘ there begins an epoch of social revolution’.
When this contradiction sets in the whole of society is thrown into prolonged crisis. The old ways of doing things no longer work. The old ideas and established institutions start to lose their authority. New critical and revolutionary ideas start to emerge. The crisis is only resolved when a new mode of production with new relations of production is established and society is able to move forward.
This, in essence, was what happened in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and is what lies behind the general crisis of capitalism today, now operating on a world scale. It is why, despite the existence of productive forces easily capable of supplying everyone on the planet with a decent living, thousands of millions suffer poverty, malnutrition and homelessness. It is why we are beset with endless conflict and wars and why we are threatened with environmental catastrophe. It is a crisis that will be ended only with the establishment of a new mode of production – socialism.
Put just like this ( and, for various reasons, Marx did sometimes put it this way) the whole process can sound mechanical and automatic – economically determined and independent of human action. But nothing could be further from the truth and nothing further from Marx’s real meaning. This is because the conflict between the forces and relations of production is also a conflict between social classes.
Ever since the end of primitive communist hunter-gatherer society, the relations of production have been, at the same time, class relations, relations of exploitation and oppression in which one class ( the class which owns and controls the main means of production) is the dominant or ruling class – in Ancient Society the slave owners, in feudalism the landed aristocracy, in capitalism the bourgeoisie. This class has a vested interest in the existing order which is the basis of its power and privileges. Faced with a challenge from developing productive forces it does not at all say ‘ Our time is up. Let us vacate the stage gracefully’. On the contrary it fights bitterly to defend the status quo - ‘ our way of life’ or ‘ civilisation as we know it’, as they say.
The developing forces of production are also linked to and produce a definite class – under feudalism the growth of manufacture and trade gave rise to the bourgeoisie, under capitalism modern industry gives birth to the working class or proletariat. The resolution of the crisis, and the fate of humanity, depends on the outcome of the struggle between the old ruling class and the new rising class.
This is anything but pre-determined.. In Europe the failure of the bourgeois revolution in Italy and Germany in the 16th century set those countries back three hundred years – they did not even achieve national unification until the 19th century. In China ( and by extension Korea) the old imperial order was able to suppress the development of capitalism with the consequence that they entered the 20th century as deeply impoverished, perennial victims of imperialism. The defeat of the workers’ revolution in Germany in 1918-23 led to the rise of Stalin and Hitler and was paid for in blood by more than 70 million people.
The ruling class has much on its side, wealth, tradition, ideology and in particular state power, which has been fashioned specifically for the purpose of holding down the oppressed classes. The struggle of the revolutionary class has to be both an economic and a political struggle, a struggle for state power. Victory in the struggle depends on political consciousness, mobilization and organization. A significant part of that is what we, as activists, do now.
John Molyneux
19 August 2006
But how does one mode of production change into another? For Marx, himself, and for us today, for everyone who is anti-capitalist, i.e. wants to get rid of the capitalist mode of production, this is the crucial question.
To answer it we must go back to the fact that Marx distinguished two aspects of production: the forces and relations of production. It is the interaction and conflict between these which lays the basis for fundamental social change.
The forces of production are the capacity of a society to produce goods: its resources, labour, knowledge and technology. Examples include: the spears and bows and arrows of stone age hunters; the ox or horse drawn ploughs of the medieval farmer; the textile mills, spinning jennies and steam trains of the industrial revolution; the production lines, power stations and computers of modern industry.
The relations of production are the social relation people enter into in the process of producing. They range from the primitive communist clan of hunters and gatherers, to slave owners and slaves of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, to landlords and serfs or peasants, to capitalist employers and wage workers today.
Marx argues that it is the level of development of the forces of production that shapes the relations of production. ‘ The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist’. The forces of production, however, tend to grow, by no means evenly or at a uniform rate, but over time they tend to advance as human beings discover ways to produce more effectively. At a certain stage in their development the forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production (which are also society’s property relations). While at first these relations had assisted the growth of the productive forces, they now become an obstacle, a ‘ fetter’ on their further development. Then , says Marx, ‘ there begins an epoch of social revolution’.
When this contradiction sets in the whole of society is thrown into prolonged crisis. The old ways of doing things no longer work. The old ideas and established institutions start to lose their authority. New critical and revolutionary ideas start to emerge. The crisis is only resolved when a new mode of production with new relations of production is established and society is able to move forward.
This, in essence, was what happened in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and is what lies behind the general crisis of capitalism today, now operating on a world scale. It is why, despite the existence of productive forces easily capable of supplying everyone on the planet with a decent living, thousands of millions suffer poverty, malnutrition and homelessness. It is why we are beset with endless conflict and wars and why we are threatened with environmental catastrophe. It is a crisis that will be ended only with the establishment of a new mode of production – socialism.
Put just like this ( and, for various reasons, Marx did sometimes put it this way) the whole process can sound mechanical and automatic – economically determined and independent of human action. But nothing could be further from the truth and nothing further from Marx’s real meaning. This is because the conflict between the forces and relations of production is also a conflict between social classes.
Ever since the end of primitive communist hunter-gatherer society, the relations of production have been, at the same time, class relations, relations of exploitation and oppression in which one class ( the class which owns and controls the main means of production) is the dominant or ruling class – in Ancient Society the slave owners, in feudalism the landed aristocracy, in capitalism the bourgeoisie. This class has a vested interest in the existing order which is the basis of its power and privileges. Faced with a challenge from developing productive forces it does not at all say ‘ Our time is up. Let us vacate the stage gracefully’. On the contrary it fights bitterly to defend the status quo - ‘ our way of life’ or ‘ civilisation as we know it’, as they say.
The developing forces of production are also linked to and produce a definite class – under feudalism the growth of manufacture and trade gave rise to the bourgeoisie, under capitalism modern industry gives birth to the working class or proletariat. The resolution of the crisis, and the fate of humanity, depends on the outcome of the struggle between the old ruling class and the new rising class.
This is anything but pre-determined.. In Europe the failure of the bourgeois revolution in Italy and Germany in the 16th century set those countries back three hundred years – they did not even achieve national unification until the 19th century. In China ( and by extension Korea) the old imperial order was able to suppress the development of capitalism with the consequence that they entered the 20th century as deeply impoverished, perennial victims of imperialism. The defeat of the workers’ revolution in Germany in 1918-23 led to the rise of Stalin and Hitler and was paid for in blood by more than 70 million people.
The ruling class has much on its side, wealth, tradition, ideology and in particular state power, which has been fashioned specifically for the purpose of holding down the oppressed classes. The struggle of the revolutionary class has to be both an economic and a political struggle, a struggle for state power. Victory in the struggle depends on political consciousness, mobilization and organization. A significant part of that is what we, as activists, do now.
John Molyneux
19 August 2006
Their History and Ours
In the first five of these columns I have set out some of Marx’s key political ideas on the working class, capitalism, revolution and internationalism. Although these ideas are important in themselves, they also form part of a wider system of thought, Marx’s theory of history which is usually called ‘historical materialism’.
Historical materialism is the backbone of Marxism as a whole. It provides an overview of the whole of human history from the Old Stone Age to the modern era and it is the method used by Marxists to analyse not only past events like the French Revolution and the Second World War, but also current developments such as the rise of China and the Lebanon War. And its not just a theory but also a guide to action.
Some people will say why bother with a theory of history at all, why not just stick to the facts. But this is an illusion. In history, indeed on any day in history, there are an infinite number of ‘facts’, of things that happen. ANY account of history, whether it admits or not, depends on a general theory in order to decide which facts are important for human development and which are not and what are the likely relations between these facts.
Mainstream history, the kind that dominates in the media and in school, is mainly based on the ‘theory’ that what shapes history is, first and foremost, the actions of powerful individuals – emperors, kings, politicians, generals and the like – particularly the battles they fought, the policies they pursued and the laws they passed. This theory, fairly obviously, expresses the standpoint of the ruling classes who naturally assume that it is they who make history.
An alternative theory, popular with intellectuals, is that history is shaped primarily by ideas – either the ideas of great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle , Confucius etc. or disembodied ideas like ‘order’, ‘nationalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘economic growth’ which mysteriously capture society at various times and express the ‘spirit of the age’. The great weakness of this approach is that it fails to explain where these ideas come from or why they arise when they do.
Then there is an approach which appeals especially to academics. It denies that history is driven by any single factor. Rather it says that history is shaped by various different ‘factors’ – a bit of economics, a bit of politics, an element of class, an element of religion and so on. In recent years ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are often added to the list. This method, sometimes called ‘pluralism’, sometimes ‘postmodernism’, suits those who do not want to make up their minds or take sides, but want to present their ideas as unbiased, sophisticated and profound. Its defect is that it explains neither how the different ‘factors’ arise nor how they interact – it simultaneously explains everything and nothing.
What unites all these approaches is that they tend to view society and history from the top down. Marx’s theory of history is quite different: it is history from below, from the standpoint of the working class, and openly acknowledges itself to be so. It does not deny that the deeds and ideas of powerful individuals play a role in history but it does not begin with them. It begins with the everyday actions, the work, of the many millions of ordinary working people struggling to make a life for themselves.
Historical materialism is not only more radical than the various mainstream, i.e. bourgeois, theories, it is also more coherent and more scientific. This is because it starts where history has to start, with real human individuals and their needs and what they do to meet those needs. ‘ The first premise of all history’, writes Marx, ‘ is that men must be in a position to live in order to “make history”. But life involves before anything else eating, drinking, clothing, a habitation and many other things.’ Of course animals also have material needs but the difference is that humans produce their means of subsistence through social labour.
Historical materialism, therefore, focuses first on production: on the technical means through which it is achieved, which Marx calls the forces of production, and the social relations between which it involves, which Marx calls the relations of production. Together the forces and relations of production form definite modes of production or economic systems, such as ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism.
The mode of production, Marx argues, constitutes the ‘real foundation’ or economic base of society ‘on which arises a legal and political superstructure’ and which ‘conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’.
Marx’s insight here turns upside down the way these things are usually put. To give some examples: we do not live in a capitalist society because people believe in capitalist ideas, people believe in capitalism because we live in a capitalist society (which began to develop spontaneously out of the soil of feudalism long before it was conceptualized by anyone); the Atlantic slave trade and western imperialism were not caused by racism, rather racism was caused by the slave trade and imperialism, which were part of the expansion of capitalism. Or, to be absolutely contemporary, Islamophobia is not the cause but the consequence of US imperialism’s desire to control Middle Eastern and Central Asian energy supplies.
It is important to point out that Marx was able to have these insights – so invaluable for understanding both past history and current politics – because he had already grasped the revolutionary potential of the working class. How he developed them into a full blown theory of social change and revolution will be discussed in the next column.
John Molyneux
Historical materialism is the backbone of Marxism as a whole. It provides an overview of the whole of human history from the Old Stone Age to the modern era and it is the method used by Marxists to analyse not only past events like the French Revolution and the Second World War, but also current developments such as the rise of China and the Lebanon War. And its not just a theory but also a guide to action.
Some people will say why bother with a theory of history at all, why not just stick to the facts. But this is an illusion. In history, indeed on any day in history, there are an infinite number of ‘facts’, of things that happen. ANY account of history, whether it admits or not, depends on a general theory in order to decide which facts are important for human development and which are not and what are the likely relations between these facts.
Mainstream history, the kind that dominates in the media and in school, is mainly based on the ‘theory’ that what shapes history is, first and foremost, the actions of powerful individuals – emperors, kings, politicians, generals and the like – particularly the battles they fought, the policies they pursued and the laws they passed. This theory, fairly obviously, expresses the standpoint of the ruling classes who naturally assume that it is they who make history.
An alternative theory, popular with intellectuals, is that history is shaped primarily by ideas – either the ideas of great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle , Confucius etc. or disembodied ideas like ‘order’, ‘nationalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘economic growth’ which mysteriously capture society at various times and express the ‘spirit of the age’. The great weakness of this approach is that it fails to explain where these ideas come from or why they arise when they do.
Then there is an approach which appeals especially to academics. It denies that history is driven by any single factor. Rather it says that history is shaped by various different ‘factors’ – a bit of economics, a bit of politics, an element of class, an element of religion and so on. In recent years ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are often added to the list. This method, sometimes called ‘pluralism’, sometimes ‘postmodernism’, suits those who do not want to make up their minds or take sides, but want to present their ideas as unbiased, sophisticated and profound. Its defect is that it explains neither how the different ‘factors’ arise nor how they interact – it simultaneously explains everything and nothing.
What unites all these approaches is that they tend to view society and history from the top down. Marx’s theory of history is quite different: it is history from below, from the standpoint of the working class, and openly acknowledges itself to be so. It does not deny that the deeds and ideas of powerful individuals play a role in history but it does not begin with them. It begins with the everyday actions, the work, of the many millions of ordinary working people struggling to make a life for themselves.
Historical materialism is not only more radical than the various mainstream, i.e. bourgeois, theories, it is also more coherent and more scientific. This is because it starts where history has to start, with real human individuals and their needs and what they do to meet those needs. ‘ The first premise of all history’, writes Marx, ‘ is that men must be in a position to live in order to “make history”. But life involves before anything else eating, drinking, clothing, a habitation and many other things.’ Of course animals also have material needs but the difference is that humans produce their means of subsistence through social labour.
Historical materialism, therefore, focuses first on production: on the technical means through which it is achieved, which Marx calls the forces of production, and the social relations between which it involves, which Marx calls the relations of production. Together the forces and relations of production form definite modes of production or economic systems, such as ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism.
The mode of production, Marx argues, constitutes the ‘real foundation’ or economic base of society ‘on which arises a legal and political superstructure’ and which ‘conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’.
Marx’s insight here turns upside down the way these things are usually put. To give some examples: we do not live in a capitalist society because people believe in capitalist ideas, people believe in capitalism because we live in a capitalist society (which began to develop spontaneously out of the soil of feudalism long before it was conceptualized by anyone); the Atlantic slave trade and western imperialism were not caused by racism, rather racism was caused by the slave trade and imperialism, which were part of the expansion of capitalism. Or, to be absolutely contemporary, Islamophobia is not the cause but the consequence of US imperialism’s desire to control Middle Eastern and Central Asian energy supplies.
It is important to point out that Marx was able to have these insights – so invaluable for understanding both past history and current politics – because he had already grasped the revolutionary potential of the working class. How he developed them into a full blown theory of social change and revolution will be discussed in the next column.
John Molyneux
Trotsky Slandered
Review of Trotsky, by Geoffrey Swain, published by Pearson Longman, 2006
‘Readers of this biography,’ writes Geoffrey Swain, Professor in Russian and East European Studies at Glasgow University, ‘will not find their way to Trotskyism.’ Well, some might despite the author’s best intentions, but this cannot be regarded as an overstatement. There are now many books on the life and politics of Leon Trotsky (1) and this is one the worst. It casually, but outrageously and repeatedly, slanders Trotsky. Perhaps such slander should be ignored, but I, for one, am fed up with the casual ‘academic’ slandering of great revolutionaries. Such books do real damage. They find their way on to university booklists, especially the booklists for the author’s courses, and exercise an influence on some students. They say, with the full weight of academic authority behind them, ‘Don’t even begin to look to Trotsky (or Marx or Lenin – Lenin is a favourite for this kind of treatment) for an intellectual alternative to the present system,’ and, inevitably, many of the students lack the resources to reply or even to discern the fraud that is being perpetrated. I, therefore, intend to respond – without academic diplomacy.
Swain does not hang about. On page 3 of his introduction he offers the following assessment of Trotsky’s intellectual capacity and theoretical contribution.
Leaving aside the merits of Knei-Paz (2), this is, by any standards, a monstrous, in legal terms ‘perverse’, judgment. I am well aware that journalism can be an honourable profession – one thinks of John Reed, Paul Foot, John Pilger, Eamonn McCann, Robert Fisk (all of them more than journalists)- but to describe the author of The History of the Russian Revolution as just a ‘jobbing journalist’ is laughable, no it is slander of the first order. For those who have read The History further comment is superfluous; for those who have not it is in three volumes, runs to more than 1200 pages, and combines in one majestic whole a broad theoretical analysis of the Revolution’s place in history and an exposition of its internal dynamic as it unfolded day by day in the deeds and thoughts of the different classes and parties and their leading, and not so leading, spokespersons. It is widely considered to be the greatest historical work of the twentieth century. Nor does The History stand alone: Trotsky’s other major theoretical works include Results and Prospects ( which sets out the theory of permanent revolution), The Third International After Lenin, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (which to date remains the foremost Marxist analysis of Nazism and how to fight it), The Revolution Betrayed and Literature and Revolution. Swain ‘deals’ with this large body of inconvenient evidence by simply ignoring it. Not a single one of the works I have cited, nor the theoretical analyses they contain, is either summarized or discussed anywhere in Swain’s book.
Instead Swain offers as corroboration a quotation from the esteemed Ziv (whose own contribution to Marxist theory stands at zero) , who only knew Trotsky as a youth and whose last, fleeting, contact with him appears to have been in New York in early 1917, by which time Ziv had become a supporter of the First World War. This is backed by a quote from Lunarcharskii , which dates from 1923 (before most of Trotsky’s main theoretical works were written), which is unrepresentative of Lunarcharskii’s overall assessment of Trotsky and which is any way palpably false; Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is clearly one the most important innovations in Marxist theory since Marx, likewise his analysis of fascism. This is a bit like saying Shakespeare was good comic dramatist but couldn’t handle tragedy and then writing a book about him which doesn’t mention Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Even worse, because it denies one of the central principles of Trotsky’s entire life, is the following assertion, also in the introduction but repeated in the conclusion:
Here only the first sentence is true. The rest is arrogant garbage. Reading the comment on the Bolsheviks I could not avoid thinking of Professor Swain secure in his Chair at Glasgow University and wondering whether this man had ever in his life held a principle for which he was required to make a serious sacrifice. The Bolsheviks were men and women who risked their liberty and their lives for their ideas, who suffered, not by way of exception, but virtually as a rule imprisonment, Siberia and exile and who, almost alone among Europe’s socialist parties, took an internationalist position in August 1914. And he has the gall to say they were not serious about their beliefs.
As for Trotsky the evidence for the centrality of internationalism to his theory and practice long before 1933 is so abundant that to present even the main body of it would fill this whole journal. In 1904 Trotsky opposed the Russo- Japanese War on an internationalist basis.(3) The theory of permanent revolution developed in 1905-6 is internationalist in its premise – Russia’s combined and uneven development is a product of its relationship to international capitalism – and in its conclusion – that a victorious socialist revolution in Russia would be able to sustain itself only if the revolution spread to Europe. (4) In his years of exile prior to 1917 Trotsky was actively engaged with the revolutionary movement in a number of countries, including Austria, the Balkans, France and the USA. In 1914 he, with the Bolsheviks and Luxemburg and Liebknecht, was one of the few to remain loyal to internationalism and played a leading role in the famous anti-war Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. After October he was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in part because of his internationalism and at Brest-Litovsk he, at first, refused (mistakenly) to sign a peace with the Germans on internationalist grounds. From 1919 –1922 he played an active and leading part in the Communist International.(5)
Swain knows all this and mentions much of it but only as isolated individual ‘facts’ and he does not allow these facts to affect his argument. He even claims that Trotsky really supported Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country. He bases this claim on Trotsky’s silence on the question in 1925-26 (which was for tactical reasons and did not at all signify agreement) and a couple of quotes taken out of context from Trotsky’s discussions of economic construction. (6) He completely ignores a) that Trotsky had opposed socialism in one country in advance in Results and Prospects, and b) Trotsky’s major theoretical critiques of socialism in one country in The Third International After Lenin ( which runs to 72 pages and predicts with striking accuracy the affect the doctrine will have on the international communist movement), Permanent Revolution and Appendix II of The History of the Russian Revolution – all of which were written before 1933.
Faced with the undeniable importance of international questions (principally Germany 1923, Britain 1926, and China 1925-27) for Trotsky in these years Swain has a neat solution.
Swain is trading, for this cheap slur, on his audience not having read the texts in question, for it is hard to imagine how anyone who had read them, with their combination of passionate polemic and theoretical acuity ( I wish I had space to quote them ) could accept his cynical interpretation. Nevertheless it is obviously a line of argument with a future. How about, ‘The anti- Vietnam war protestors didn’t care about Vietnam, they just had a grudge against LBJ over the draft.’ Or, ‘The SWP only opposed the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon because of what Blair was doing on privatisation and the Labour Party’. Nearer the mark might be, ‘Swain has no real interest in Trotsky, he has only written this book for the money and another entry on his publication list’.
Sadly, refuting slanders takes much longer than issuing them and it is therefore impossible in the space of a review to pursue any but the grossest of Swain’s falsehoods and misrepresentations. One that has to be noted, however, is his insistent repetition of the old Stalinist charge that Trotsky ‘underestimated the peasantry’. Swain tells us that , ‘Trotsky’s attitude to the peasantry was his Achilles’ heel’(p.216). In fact Trotsky never denied, in theory or in practice, that the peasants would play a crucial role in the Russian Revolution. What he argued was that the peasantry was unable to play an independent role, i.e. independent of the leadership of one of the main urban classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. In this Trotsky based himself on Marx’s famous analysis of the peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire and the whole history of peasant revolt in Russia and internationally (7), moreover he was vindicated by the actual course of the Russian Revolution.
What the Stalinists did in accusing Trotsky of ‘underestimating the peasantry’ was run together, in a single demagogic phrase, Trotsky’s attitude to the peasantry before and after the October Revolution. Prior to the Revolution the ‘underestimation’ consisted of rejecting Lenin’s view that the existence of a large peasant majority in Russia excluded the establishment of workers’ power.(In this Trotsky was proved right). After the Revolution it consisted of overestimating the obstacle the peasants constituted to the construction of socialism and exaggerating the threat of kulak (rich peasant) inspired counter revolution. If Trotsky did exaggerate the kulak threat it was not because he was wrong about the peasants but because underestimated the threat posed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Swain sheds no light on this question , but simply echoes the Stalinist line.
Swain’s book also contains an absolutely astonishing omission.. There is no mention of, not a single sentence on, Trotsky’s campaign in 1930-33, from exile in Prinkipo, to alert the German Communist Party to danger posed by Hitler, to criticize the strategy imposed by Stalin, and to urge the formation of a united front against the Nazis. Given the brilliance of Trotsky’s writings on the subject and the extreme importance of the events this omission amounts virtually to historical censorship. How can it possibly be justified? Not, I assume, by ignorance, nor by considerations of space – Swain manages to devote a couple of pages to Trotsky’s affair with Freda Kahlo ( the priorities of The News of the World at work here, I suspect), and whole sections to the relatively minor episodes such as the Vienna Pravda of 1908-10 and the Vienna Conference of !912(8). Presumably Swain did not think he could get away with claiming that for Trotsky Hitler was just a ‘metaphor’.
The book also says next to nothing about such minor matters as the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials, the international slander and persecution of Trotsky as a fascist agent, Stalin’s purges and gulag, or the little question of whether socialism was actually built in the USSR. Trotsky’s spats with Victor Serge and Ante Ciliga are, however, featured, while the struggle for the Fourth International is. of course, dismissed as a trivial irrelevance.
All these slanders, distortions and omissions do serve a purpose, however. Swain’s avowed focus is on the period when Trotsky was in power or near to power, the decade of 1917- 1927 and the years of Trotsky’s direct struggle with Stalin.(9) What they enable Swain to do is to treat that struggle in largely personal terms, as a battle for power between rival individuals, devoid of real principles and in isolation from wider social forces.( I imagine he thinks of it as something like the rivalry between Blair and Brown).He attributes Trotsky’s defeat partly to partly to ‘personality failings’, characteristic of Trotsky from his youth, partly to a ‘disagreement about how the party should operate’, with Lenin as much as with Stalin, and partly to his ‘ideological obsession with the kulak danger’.(p.4) I doubt Swain realizes it but this is all taken more or less directly from Stalin. It is not only factually false but also a miserably inadequate methodology – a species of the long discredited ‘great man’ theory of history.
‘History’, wrote Marx, ‘is the history of class struggle.’ This applies as much to Russia in the twenties as it does to everywhere else. Trotsky lost to Stalin because, at the time in question the social force he represented – the working class – was weaker than the social force Stalin represented – the rising bureaucracy. There were two ways in which Trotsky could have won : through the victory of the international revolution or, possibly, through abandoning the working class to engage in an unprincipled personal power struggle – in that case he would have ceased to be Trotsky. That the first option did not materialize is Trotsky’s and humanity’s tragedy; that he rejected the second , despite extraordinary difficulties and pressures, is his greatness. Swain’s inability or unwillingness to comprehend any of this leaves him with the distinction of having produced what is probably the most mendacious account of Trotsky since the days of high Stalinism.
1. These include: Isaac Deutscher’s magnificent trilogy, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast; Tony Cliff’s Trotsky (4 Vols); Pierre Broue, Trotsky; Victor Serge and Natalya Sedova, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky ; Ernest Mandel’s Trotsky – a Study in the Unity of his Thought and Trotsky as Alternative; Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky; Ian Thatcher, Trotsky; Dimitry Volkogonov, Trotsky: the Eternal Revolutionary; John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution; Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism. Of these Deutscher’s is the finest literary-historical achievement, Cliff’s the best and most detailed politically, and Hallas the best introduction. Unsurprisingly Cliff, Mandel, Hallas and Molyneux receive no mention in either Swain’s book or his bibliography – presumably lest the readers might find their way to Trotskyism !
2. Long ago I wrote a highly critical review of Knei-Paz’s book for the Critique journal. Unfortunately I cannot find a reference for it, but it was reprinted in Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox (eds), The Ideas of Leon Trotsky, London 1995.
3. Bizarrely for his own argument Swain actually records this fact (p.18) but presumably fails to notice the contradiction.
4. Again Swain quotes Trotsky to this effect (p.29).
5. Trotsky’s articles and speeches fill two volumes, see Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vols 1 and 2, New York ,1972.
6. Trotsky’s silence in 1925-6 was one of a number of hesitations and tactical compromises he made in order to avoid an irrevocable split. In my view these were mistakes and derived ultimately from Trotsky failure , because his of lack of a theory of state capitalism, to see that the Stalinist bureaucracy could become a new ruling class. These matters are discussed in some detail in John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution and Tony Cliff, Trotsky (Vol.3):Resisting the Stalinist Degeneration. What Swain does is exploit these hesitations to misrepresent Trotsky’s fundamental views.
7. There is a basic Marxist principle at stake here. Until very recently the overwhelming majority of the world’s exploited and oppressed were peasants not workers. If it were not for this political weakness, produced by their objective economic and social circumstances, they and not the proletariat would be the main revolutionary class, as was argued by the Narodniks in Russia and by various third wordlists in the sixties.
8. What these events do show is Trotsky at odds with Lenin, and Swain follows the Stalinist practice of highlighting every disagreement with Lenin no matter how minor or superceded by history.
9. Swain claims that ‘The decision to concentrate on the years in power enabled me to do justice for the first time to Trotsky and Russia’s Civil War.’(p.2) Our ideas of justice obviously differ, but, once again, this is not even factually true. Tony Cliff, unmentioned by Swain, dealt with the Civil War and Trotsky’s role in it, at greater length and in greater detail ( and with much greater political understanding) in Trotsky (Vol.2): the Sword of the Revolution.
John Molyneux
August 2006
‘Readers of this biography,’ writes Geoffrey Swain, Professor in Russian and East European Studies at Glasgow University, ‘will not find their way to Trotskyism.’ Well, some might despite the author’s best intentions, but this cannot be regarded as an overstatement. There are now many books on the life and politics of Leon Trotsky (1) and this is one the worst. It casually, but outrageously and repeatedly, slanders Trotsky. Perhaps such slander should be ignored, but I, for one, am fed up with the casual ‘academic’ slandering of great revolutionaries. Such books do real damage. They find their way on to university booklists, especially the booklists for the author’s courses, and exercise an influence on some students. They say, with the full weight of academic authority behind them, ‘Don’t even begin to look to Trotsky (or Marx or Lenin – Lenin is a favourite for this kind of treatment) for an intellectual alternative to the present system,’ and, inevitably, many of the students lack the resources to reply or even to discern the fraud that is being perpetrated. I, therefore, intend to respond – without academic diplomacy.
Swain does not hang about. On page 3 of his introduction he offers the following assessment of Trotsky’s intellectual capacity and theoretical contribution.
Trotsky scholars might be surprised to find in this biography that there are no references to Baruch Knei-Paz’s great study The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky...[his] approach makes Trotsky a far greater thinker than he was in reality. Trotsky wrote an enormous amount and , as a journalist was always happy to write on subjects about which he knew very little. Trotsky could write beautifully, but he was no philosopher. Knei-Paz does a better job than Trotsky himself in synthesizing his ideas. Trotsky was jobbing journalist and revolutionary activist and his writings cannot be divorced from their context. Trotsky’s first revolutionary comrade, Grigorii Ziv, doubted that Trotsky had the patience to fully engage with Marxism as an intellectual tool. A similar verdict came from Lunarcharskii …[who] concluded…” he is as bold as can be in opposing liberalism and semi-socialism, but he is no innovator.
Leaving aside the merits of Knei-Paz (2), this is, by any standards, a monstrous, in legal terms ‘perverse’, judgment. I am well aware that journalism can be an honourable profession – one thinks of John Reed, Paul Foot, John Pilger, Eamonn McCann, Robert Fisk (all of them more than journalists)- but to describe the author of The History of the Russian Revolution as just a ‘jobbing journalist’ is laughable, no it is slander of the first order. For those who have read The History further comment is superfluous; for those who have not it is in three volumes, runs to more than 1200 pages, and combines in one majestic whole a broad theoretical analysis of the Revolution’s place in history and an exposition of its internal dynamic as it unfolded day by day in the deeds and thoughts of the different classes and parties and their leading, and not so leading, spokespersons. It is widely considered to be the greatest historical work of the twentieth century. Nor does The History stand alone: Trotsky’s other major theoretical works include Results and Prospects ( which sets out the theory of permanent revolution), The Third International After Lenin, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (which to date remains the foremost Marxist analysis of Nazism and how to fight it), The Revolution Betrayed and Literature and Revolution. Swain ‘deals’ with this large body of inconvenient evidence by simply ignoring it. Not a single one of the works I have cited, nor the theoretical analyses they contain, is either summarized or discussed anywhere in Swain’s book.
Instead Swain offers as corroboration a quotation from the esteemed Ziv (whose own contribution to Marxist theory stands at zero) , who only knew Trotsky as a youth and whose last, fleeting, contact with him appears to have been in New York in early 1917, by which time Ziv had become a supporter of the First World War. This is backed by a quote from Lunarcharskii , which dates from 1923 (before most of Trotsky’s main theoretical works were written), which is unrepresentative of Lunarcharskii’s overall assessment of Trotsky and which is any way palpably false; Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is clearly one the most important innovations in Marxist theory since Marx, likewise his analysis of fascism. This is a bit like saying Shakespeare was good comic dramatist but couldn’t handle tragedy and then writing a book about him which doesn’t mention Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Even worse, because it denies one of the central principles of Trotsky’s entire life, is the following assertion, also in the introduction but repeated in the conclusion:
There is little [in this book-JM] about world revolution. Trotsky believed in world revolution but no more and no less than every other Bolshevik, and like all other Bolsheviks this belief was largely rhetorical…It was only in exile in 1933 that internationalism actually became central to Trotsky’s purpose.(p2-3)
Here only the first sentence is true. The rest is arrogant garbage. Reading the comment on the Bolsheviks I could not avoid thinking of Professor Swain secure in his Chair at Glasgow University and wondering whether this man had ever in his life held a principle for which he was required to make a serious sacrifice. The Bolsheviks were men and women who risked their liberty and their lives for their ideas, who suffered, not by way of exception, but virtually as a rule imprisonment, Siberia and exile and who, almost alone among Europe’s socialist parties, took an internationalist position in August 1914. And he has the gall to say they were not serious about their beliefs.
As for Trotsky the evidence for the centrality of internationalism to his theory and practice long before 1933 is so abundant that to present even the main body of it would fill this whole journal. In 1904 Trotsky opposed the Russo- Japanese War on an internationalist basis.(3) The theory of permanent revolution developed in 1905-6 is internationalist in its premise – Russia’s combined and uneven development is a product of its relationship to international capitalism – and in its conclusion – that a victorious socialist revolution in Russia would be able to sustain itself only if the revolution spread to Europe. (4) In his years of exile prior to 1917 Trotsky was actively engaged with the revolutionary movement in a number of countries, including Austria, the Balkans, France and the USA. In 1914 he, with the Bolsheviks and Luxemburg and Liebknecht, was one of the few to remain loyal to internationalism and played a leading role in the famous anti-war Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. After October he was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in part because of his internationalism and at Brest-Litovsk he, at first, refused (mistakenly) to sign a peace with the Germans on internationalist grounds. From 1919 –1922 he played an active and leading part in the Communist International.(5)
Swain knows all this and mentions much of it but only as isolated individual ‘facts’ and he does not allow these facts to affect his argument. He even claims that Trotsky really supported Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country. He bases this claim on Trotsky’s silence on the question in 1925-26 (which was for tactical reasons and did not at all signify agreement) and a couple of quotes taken out of context from Trotsky’s discussions of economic construction. (6) He completely ignores a) that Trotsky had opposed socialism in one country in advance in Results and Prospects, and b) Trotsky’s major theoretical critiques of socialism in one country in The Third International After Lenin ( which runs to 72 pages and predicts with striking accuracy the affect the doctrine will have on the international communist movement), Permanent Revolution and Appendix II of The History of the Russian Revolution – all of which were written before 1933.
Faced with the undeniable importance of international questions (principally Germany 1923, Britain 1926, and China 1925-27) for Trotsky in these years Swain has a neat solution.
His critique of the failed German Revolution on in 1923 was simply camouflage for an attack on his then domestic opponents Zinoviev and Kamenev. It was the same with his writings on the British General Strike, although here his opponents were Bukharin and Stalin. As to his enthusiasm for China in !927, that too was essentially domestic in focus, for Chiang Kai- shek’s destruction of the Chinese Communist Party was simply a metaphor for Thermidor, for what would happen in Russia if the kulaks ever found a general. (p.3)
Swain is trading, for this cheap slur, on his audience not having read the texts in question, for it is hard to imagine how anyone who had read them, with their combination of passionate polemic and theoretical acuity ( I wish I had space to quote them ) could accept his cynical interpretation. Nevertheless it is obviously a line of argument with a future. How about, ‘The anti- Vietnam war protestors didn’t care about Vietnam, they just had a grudge against LBJ over the draft.’ Or, ‘The SWP only opposed the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon because of what Blair was doing on privatisation and the Labour Party’. Nearer the mark might be, ‘Swain has no real interest in Trotsky, he has only written this book for the money and another entry on his publication list’.
Sadly, refuting slanders takes much longer than issuing them and it is therefore impossible in the space of a review to pursue any but the grossest of Swain’s falsehoods and misrepresentations. One that has to be noted, however, is his insistent repetition of the old Stalinist charge that Trotsky ‘underestimated the peasantry’. Swain tells us that , ‘Trotsky’s attitude to the peasantry was his Achilles’ heel’(p.216). In fact Trotsky never denied, in theory or in practice, that the peasants would play a crucial role in the Russian Revolution. What he argued was that the peasantry was unable to play an independent role, i.e. independent of the leadership of one of the main urban classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. In this Trotsky based himself on Marx’s famous analysis of the peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire and the whole history of peasant revolt in Russia and internationally (7), moreover he was vindicated by the actual course of the Russian Revolution.
What the Stalinists did in accusing Trotsky of ‘underestimating the peasantry’ was run together, in a single demagogic phrase, Trotsky’s attitude to the peasantry before and after the October Revolution. Prior to the Revolution the ‘underestimation’ consisted of rejecting Lenin’s view that the existence of a large peasant majority in Russia excluded the establishment of workers’ power.(In this Trotsky was proved right). After the Revolution it consisted of overestimating the obstacle the peasants constituted to the construction of socialism and exaggerating the threat of kulak (rich peasant) inspired counter revolution. If Trotsky did exaggerate the kulak threat it was not because he was wrong about the peasants but because underestimated the threat posed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Swain sheds no light on this question , but simply echoes the Stalinist line.
Swain’s book also contains an absolutely astonishing omission.. There is no mention of, not a single sentence on, Trotsky’s campaign in 1930-33, from exile in Prinkipo, to alert the German Communist Party to danger posed by Hitler, to criticize the strategy imposed by Stalin, and to urge the formation of a united front against the Nazis. Given the brilliance of Trotsky’s writings on the subject and the extreme importance of the events this omission amounts virtually to historical censorship. How can it possibly be justified? Not, I assume, by ignorance, nor by considerations of space – Swain manages to devote a couple of pages to Trotsky’s affair with Freda Kahlo ( the priorities of The News of the World at work here, I suspect), and whole sections to the relatively minor episodes such as the Vienna Pravda of 1908-10 and the Vienna Conference of !912(8). Presumably Swain did not think he could get away with claiming that for Trotsky Hitler was just a ‘metaphor’.
The book also says next to nothing about such minor matters as the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials, the international slander and persecution of Trotsky as a fascist agent, Stalin’s purges and gulag, or the little question of whether socialism was actually built in the USSR. Trotsky’s spats with Victor Serge and Ante Ciliga are, however, featured, while the struggle for the Fourth International is. of course, dismissed as a trivial irrelevance.
All these slanders, distortions and omissions do serve a purpose, however. Swain’s avowed focus is on the period when Trotsky was in power or near to power, the decade of 1917- 1927 and the years of Trotsky’s direct struggle with Stalin.(9) What they enable Swain to do is to treat that struggle in largely personal terms, as a battle for power between rival individuals, devoid of real principles and in isolation from wider social forces.( I imagine he thinks of it as something like the rivalry between Blair and Brown).He attributes Trotsky’s defeat partly to partly to ‘personality failings’, characteristic of Trotsky from his youth, partly to a ‘disagreement about how the party should operate’, with Lenin as much as with Stalin, and partly to his ‘ideological obsession with the kulak danger’.(p.4) I doubt Swain realizes it but this is all taken more or less directly from Stalin. It is not only factually false but also a miserably inadequate methodology – a species of the long discredited ‘great man’ theory of history.
‘History’, wrote Marx, ‘is the history of class struggle.’ This applies as much to Russia in the twenties as it does to everywhere else. Trotsky lost to Stalin because, at the time in question the social force he represented – the working class – was weaker than the social force Stalin represented – the rising bureaucracy. There were two ways in which Trotsky could have won : through the victory of the international revolution or, possibly, through abandoning the working class to engage in an unprincipled personal power struggle – in that case he would have ceased to be Trotsky. That the first option did not materialize is Trotsky’s and humanity’s tragedy; that he rejected the second , despite extraordinary difficulties and pressures, is his greatness. Swain’s inability or unwillingness to comprehend any of this leaves him with the distinction of having produced what is probably the most mendacious account of Trotsky since the days of high Stalinism.
1. These include: Isaac Deutscher’s magnificent trilogy, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast; Tony Cliff’s Trotsky (4 Vols); Pierre Broue, Trotsky; Victor Serge and Natalya Sedova, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky ; Ernest Mandel’s Trotsky – a Study in the Unity of his Thought and Trotsky as Alternative; Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky; Ian Thatcher, Trotsky; Dimitry Volkogonov, Trotsky: the Eternal Revolutionary; John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution; Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism. Of these Deutscher’s is the finest literary-historical achievement, Cliff’s the best and most detailed politically, and Hallas the best introduction. Unsurprisingly Cliff, Mandel, Hallas and Molyneux receive no mention in either Swain’s book or his bibliography – presumably lest the readers might find their way to Trotskyism !
2. Long ago I wrote a highly critical review of Knei-Paz’s book for the Critique journal. Unfortunately I cannot find a reference for it, but it was reprinted in Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox (eds), The Ideas of Leon Trotsky, London 1995.
3. Bizarrely for his own argument Swain actually records this fact (p.18) but presumably fails to notice the contradiction.
4. Again Swain quotes Trotsky to this effect (p.29).
5. Trotsky’s articles and speeches fill two volumes, see Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vols 1 and 2, New York ,1972.
6. Trotsky’s silence in 1925-6 was one of a number of hesitations and tactical compromises he made in order to avoid an irrevocable split. In my view these were mistakes and derived ultimately from Trotsky failure , because his of lack of a theory of state capitalism, to see that the Stalinist bureaucracy could become a new ruling class. These matters are discussed in some detail in John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution and Tony Cliff, Trotsky (Vol.3):Resisting the Stalinist Degeneration. What Swain does is exploit these hesitations to misrepresent Trotsky’s fundamental views.
7. There is a basic Marxist principle at stake here. Until very recently the overwhelming majority of the world’s exploited and oppressed were peasants not workers. If it were not for this political weakness, produced by their objective economic and social circumstances, they and not the proletariat would be the main revolutionary class, as was argued by the Narodniks in Russia and by various third wordlists in the sixties.
8. What these events do show is Trotsky at odds with Lenin, and Swain follows the Stalinist practice of highlighting every disagreement with Lenin no matter how minor or superceded by history.
9. Swain claims that ‘The decision to concentrate on the years in power enabled me to do justice for the first time to Trotsky and Russia’s Civil War.’(p.2) Our ideas of justice obviously differ, but, once again, this is not even factually true. Tony Cliff, unmentioned by Swain, dealt with the Civil War and Trotsky’s role in it, at greater length and in greater detail ( and with much greater political understanding) in Trotsky (Vol.2): the Sword of the Revolution.
John Molyneux
August 2006
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Rubens — His Brush was the Sword of Counter Revolution
A new exhibition of paintings by Rubens needs to be illuminated with some history, writes John Molyneux
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a great painter. Anyone who enjoys painting or is interested in the history of art will gain pleasure, and perhaps inspiration, from the exhibition of his work, Rubens: A Master in the Making, now showing at the National Gallery in London.
Nevertheless, this exhibition is a good example of how the art establishment and its traditional approach to art acts as a barrier to the understanding and real appreciation of that art.
The exhibition focuses on the artistic influences that shaped Rubens’ style. This is the “art connoisseur” approach, which isolates art history from the rest of human history. It contains valuable information but the problem is what it leaves out.
In this show it means the absence of Rubens’ best work, which dates from later in his life, and of any attempt to locate his art in its social and political context. Where Rubens is concerned this is particularly damaging.
To understand his art it is necessary both to be aware of the basic facts of European history at the time and to have some understanding of the real social meaning of those facts.
Rubens’ life coincided with a momentous struggle waged right across Europe. In traditional history, and especially in art history, this is treated as simply a religious struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, Reformation and Counter Reformation.
In essence, however, it was a struggle between the rising middle class or bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy — a battle between capitalism and feudalism, fought out under the banner of religion. It was a struggle that in the long run was to determine the destiny of Europe and the world.
One of the front lines of this conflict was in the Netherlands where Rubens spent most of his life.
The Netherlands were initially not a nation but merely provinces of the vehemently Catholic and feudal Habsburg empire, based in Spain, and at that time the dominant military power in Europe.
The Netherlands, however, were a centre of early capitalist economic development and of Calvinism, the most militant and revolutionary wing of Protestantism.
In 1566 the Netherlands rose in revolt against Habsburg rule, and the Spanish king, Philip II, responded by sending an army to crush this revolution.
In the southern Netherlands this counter revolutionary repression was successful, and this area (later to become Belgium) remained under Spanish rule.
But in the north the revolution held out. This area was to emerge as the Dutch Republic, the world’s first capitalist state.
Rubens’ father was a lawyer in Antwerp and a strong Calvinist. In 1568, to escape repression, he fled to Westphalia in Germany, where Rubens was born.
In 1587 Rubens’ father died. In 1589 he and his mother returned to Antwerp, where Rubens converted to Catholicism. In the circumstances that meant joining the counter revolution.
This had a massive impact on Rubens’ art, for it was a time when the Catholic church was consciously mobilising art as a cultural weapon of the Counter Reformation. It meant that Rubens went to Italy as a court painter to the Duke of Mantua and studied the art of ancient Rome and of the Renaissance masters (and of the rebel, Carravaggio).
It meant that he received innumerable commissions to paint vast canvasses of dramatically swirling figures to adorn the walls of churches and palaces.
It meant that while Dutch artists such as Rembrandt and Hals died in poverty, and Carravaggio died on the run, Rubens died the richest and most famous artist in Europe — honoured by the kings of France, Spain and England.
Does the fact that Rubens was the artist of counter revolution make his art poor or of no interest?
No, he was immensely skilled and talented and expressed with great vigour the values appropriate to his cause — the power and glory of his church and religion. At the same time his work celebrated (under the cover of classical mythology) the sensuous pleasures of the flesh.
But his politics did damage and restrict his art. It made it tend to the overly grandiose and ensured that the life of the people and the insight, sympathy and solidarity, so evident in Hals and Rembrandt, were lacking.
His greatest works, such as his landscape, Het Steen, and his nude portrait of Helene Fourment in fur, came at the end of his life when he was painting for himself not his patrons. But these are not the focus of this exhibition.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a great painter. Anyone who enjoys painting or is interested in the history of art will gain pleasure, and perhaps inspiration, from the exhibition of his work, Rubens: A Master in the Making, now showing at the National Gallery in London.
Nevertheless, this exhibition is a good example of how the art establishment and its traditional approach to art acts as a barrier to the understanding and real appreciation of that art.
The exhibition focuses on the artistic influences that shaped Rubens’ style. This is the “art connoisseur” approach, which isolates art history from the rest of human history. It contains valuable information but the problem is what it leaves out.
In this show it means the absence of Rubens’ best work, which dates from later in his life, and of any attempt to locate his art in its social and political context. Where Rubens is concerned this is particularly damaging.
To understand his art it is necessary both to be aware of the basic facts of European history at the time and to have some understanding of the real social meaning of those facts.
Rubens’ life coincided with a momentous struggle waged right across Europe. In traditional history, and especially in art history, this is treated as simply a religious struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, Reformation and Counter Reformation.
In essence, however, it was a struggle between the rising middle class or bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy — a battle between capitalism and feudalism, fought out under the banner of religion. It was a struggle that in the long run was to determine the destiny of Europe and the world.
One of the front lines of this conflict was in the Netherlands where Rubens spent most of his life.
The Netherlands were initially not a nation but merely provinces of the vehemently Catholic and feudal Habsburg empire, based in Spain, and at that time the dominant military power in Europe.
The Netherlands, however, were a centre of early capitalist economic development and of Calvinism, the most militant and revolutionary wing of Protestantism.
In 1566 the Netherlands rose in revolt against Habsburg rule, and the Spanish king, Philip II, responded by sending an army to crush this revolution.
In the southern Netherlands this counter revolutionary repression was successful, and this area (later to become Belgium) remained under Spanish rule.
But in the north the revolution held out. This area was to emerge as the Dutch Republic, the world’s first capitalist state.
Rubens’ father was a lawyer in Antwerp and a strong Calvinist. In 1568, to escape repression, he fled to Westphalia in Germany, where Rubens was born.
In 1587 Rubens’ father died. In 1589 he and his mother returned to Antwerp, where Rubens converted to Catholicism. In the circumstances that meant joining the counter revolution.
This had a massive impact on Rubens’ art, for it was a time when the Catholic church was consciously mobilising art as a cultural weapon of the Counter Reformation. It meant that Rubens went to Italy as a court painter to the Duke of Mantua and studied the art of ancient Rome and of the Renaissance masters (and of the rebel, Carravaggio).
It meant that he received innumerable commissions to paint vast canvasses of dramatically swirling figures to adorn the walls of churches and palaces.
It meant that while Dutch artists such as Rembrandt and Hals died in poverty, and Carravaggio died on the run, Rubens died the richest and most famous artist in Europe — honoured by the kings of France, Spain and England.
Does the fact that Rubens was the artist of counter revolution make his art poor or of no interest?
No, he was immensely skilled and talented and expressed with great vigour the values appropriate to his cause — the power and glory of his church and religion. At the same time his work celebrated (under the cover of classical mythology) the sensuous pleasures of the flesh.
But his politics did damage and restrict his art. It made it tend to the overly grandiose and ensured that the life of the people and the insight, sympathy and solidarity, so evident in Hals and Rembrandt, were lacking.
His greatest works, such as his landscape, Het Steen, and his nude portrait of Helene Fourment in fur, came at the end of his life when he was painting for himself not his patrons. But these are not the focus of this exhibition.
Revolt that shaped a new kind of art
THE NEW film Girl With A Pearl Earring about the Dutch artist Vermeer has provoked interest in the life and society of the great Dutch painters. JOHN MOLYNEUX looks at the reasons why Dutch society produced a flowering of great art in the 17th century.
WE ARE not used to thinking of Holland, or rather the Netherlands, as a leading player on the world stage. With a population one quarter of Britain's and a land area one eighth that of France, the Dutch have tended to be seen as playing only supporting roles in the main dramas of the last two centuries.
Nevertheless there was a time, a brief period of less than a century, when the Netherlands was in the vanguard of world history-in a number of important respects the leading country in the world. This was the so called "Golden Age", roughly from 1600 to 1675. Today it is remembered mainly for its art.
This is not surprising when you think what this short span of time yielded. Three of the greatest of the "old masters"-Franz Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer (whose Girl with a Pearl Earring is the starting point for the novel and newly released film). Innumerable portraits and portrait painters, superb landscapes (this was really the beginning of landscape painting).
Whole schools of domestic interiors, of still life and "trick of the eye" works, another of sea battles and what were called "genre" paintings-depictions of low-life, the poor, tavern scenes. All of it was significantly different from any art that had gone before.
It is one of the most remarkable episodes in the entire story of art. There is probably no period in which such a high proportion of the population had their portrait painted or owned an original painting. The work of the supreme artist of the time, Rembrandt, has never been surpassed. Art historians and critics often describe the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer as "timeless". If by this is meant simply that they have retained their appeal up to the present time, then this is clearly true. But if the suggestion is that they are the product of purely individual inspiration existing outside of any historical or social context, then nothing could be further from the truth.
The exceptional vitality of Dutch art was just one aspect of the exceptional vitality of Dutch society in the 17th century. This was founded on the enormous dynamism of the Dutch economy. Dutch agriculture was the most productive in Europe. It also led the field in industrial production. The textiles industry grew fivefold between 1600 and 1664.
Dutch warships were the best in the world and their merchant fleet was equally outstanding. In 1670 Dutch tonnage exceeded that of England, France, Portugal and Spain combined. The Dutch Republic dominated herring fishing in the North Sea, cod fishing off Iceland and whaling at Spitzbergen in the Arctic.
In less than 60 years they built a seaborne empire that stretched from the Moluccas (Indonesia) in the east to New Amsterdam (New York) and Pernambuco (Brazil) in the west and from Spitzbergen to Cape Town in the south. Alongside this economic growth went a spectacular process of urbanisation. In the 16th century the north Netherlands already had 11 cities with a population of over 10,000 compared to only four in much larger Britain.
In the Golden Age these cities expanded rapidly in number and size. Amsterdam rose from 30,000 in 1570 to 200,000 in 1672. Right through history, from Egypt, Greece and Rome in the ancient world to Florence and Venice in the 15th century flowerings of art have, alas, been associated with accumulations of wealth. Dutch art was no exception to this rule.
But what accounts for this extraordinary economic development in this small country? The answer is simple and clear. Dutch society was the product of a successful revolution. This is usually missed or avoided by "mainstream" historians. The revolution began in 1565 when a year of famine provoked the Netherlanders into revolt against their rulers, the Spanish Habsburgs.
This led to 40 years of fighting on land and sea. The Dutch Republic emerged victorious as a new and independent nation. It was the first modern war of national liberation. The Dutch nation came into being in the course of the war rather than existing before it. Even more important was that in the course of this struggle a social revolution occurred. The Habsburg Empire was a bastion of feudal reaction and the Catholic Counter-Reformation which ruled over a vast range of Europe.
Hand in hand with the defeat of the Habsburg armies came the rise to power of a new social class, the Dutch burghers or bourgeoisie. The result was the establishment of the first bourgeois, or capitalist, state. This liberated the productive forces held back by feudalism and gave the Dutch economy, for a period, a decisive advantage over the rest of Europe. Once England also took the capitalist road after the English Revolution of the 1640s it soon outpaced its smaller rival.
The Dutch Revolution made the Netherlands the freest, most enlightened, most socially advanced country in Europe. First, it was a republic with a stadholder as head of state, not a monarchy or empire like almost everywhere else. Second, it practised religious tolerance, including for Catholics and Jews.
This was of crucial importance in the 17th century. It derived directly from the revolutionary need for unity in the struggle against Spain.
It led to a remarkable degree of freedom of speech, thought and scientific inquiry and to a relatively emancipated position for women. The combination of freedom and prosperity made the Dutch Republic a focus for large-scale immigration from its more repressive neighbours. People came especially from the southern Netherlands (today's Belgium) which remained under Habsburg rule, and Germany during the Thirty Years War.
The Netherlands attracted many of Europe's leading dissenters and freethinkers-the English Leveller John Lilburne and the great philosophers Descartes, Spinoza and Locke all lived or spent time there. These conditions shaped the development of Dutch art. The overthrow of feudalism and the end of Catholic dominance meant a sharp decline in commissions for vast canvasses full of swirling figures such as Rubens had painted, to adorn churches and palaces.
But it gave rise to a huge market for smaller paintings to hang on the private walls of the rising middle classes. The role of seapower in the revolt and after generated the marine painting of van de Velde the Younger and others. The still lifes of flowers, vases and food reflected the new bourgeois domesticity and its preoccupation with possessions. The role of civic guards or shooting companies in defending cities led to a specific genre of group portraits of militia of which Rembrandt's The Night Watch is the most famous. Landscape painting arose precisely in reaction to the rapid urbanisation. The depictions of tavern low-life embodied the Dutch burghers' concern for order and respectability.
The three outstanding artists-Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer-were all products of these conditions but responded to them in different ways. Hals painted, with great vigour and freshness, a wide variety of representative social types of the new order. These included The Laughing Cavalier, The Merry Drinker, The Gypsy Girl, The Regents and Regentesses of the Alms House. Hals's mood ranged from affectionate amusement to bitter critique. Rembrandt also depicted the people of his times from the top of society to the lower depths but with greater emotional depth and power.
He gave expression to the underlying contradictions of the new age-the conflicts between wealth for some and pauperisation for others, love and freedom on one side, alienation and tragedy on the other. Vermeer took the bourgeois dream of domestic tranquillity and raised it to the level of the sublime.
This was done largely through interior scenes of great simplicity-a young woman sewing or reading a letter, or sat at a virginal (early harpsichord)-bathed in delicate light. The middle classes still cherish this dream, hence the enormous popularity Vermeer retains today.
It is too mechanical to claim that great art is always linked to political and social revolution or vice versa, but in the case of Dutch art it certainly was. It was a classic example of the revolutionary liberation of the productive and cultural forces of a society hitherto fettered by a reactionary social and political order.
WE ARE not used to thinking of Holland, or rather the Netherlands, as a leading player on the world stage. With a population one quarter of Britain's and a land area one eighth that of France, the Dutch have tended to be seen as playing only supporting roles in the main dramas of the last two centuries.
Nevertheless there was a time, a brief period of less than a century, when the Netherlands was in the vanguard of world history-in a number of important respects the leading country in the world. This was the so called "Golden Age", roughly from 1600 to 1675. Today it is remembered mainly for its art.
This is not surprising when you think what this short span of time yielded. Three of the greatest of the "old masters"-Franz Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer (whose Girl with a Pearl Earring is the starting point for the novel and newly released film). Innumerable portraits and portrait painters, superb landscapes (this was really the beginning of landscape painting).
Whole schools of domestic interiors, of still life and "trick of the eye" works, another of sea battles and what were called "genre" paintings-depictions of low-life, the poor, tavern scenes. All of it was significantly different from any art that had gone before.
It is one of the most remarkable episodes in the entire story of art. There is probably no period in which such a high proportion of the population had their portrait painted or owned an original painting. The work of the supreme artist of the time, Rembrandt, has never been surpassed. Art historians and critics often describe the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer as "timeless". If by this is meant simply that they have retained their appeal up to the present time, then this is clearly true. But if the suggestion is that they are the product of purely individual inspiration existing outside of any historical or social context, then nothing could be further from the truth.
The exceptional vitality of Dutch art was just one aspect of the exceptional vitality of Dutch society in the 17th century. This was founded on the enormous dynamism of the Dutch economy. Dutch agriculture was the most productive in Europe. It also led the field in industrial production. The textiles industry grew fivefold between 1600 and 1664.
Dutch warships were the best in the world and their merchant fleet was equally outstanding. In 1670 Dutch tonnage exceeded that of England, France, Portugal and Spain combined. The Dutch Republic dominated herring fishing in the North Sea, cod fishing off Iceland and whaling at Spitzbergen in the Arctic.
In less than 60 years they built a seaborne empire that stretched from the Moluccas (Indonesia) in the east to New Amsterdam (New York) and Pernambuco (Brazil) in the west and from Spitzbergen to Cape Town in the south. Alongside this economic growth went a spectacular process of urbanisation. In the 16th century the north Netherlands already had 11 cities with a population of over 10,000 compared to only four in much larger Britain.
In the Golden Age these cities expanded rapidly in number and size. Amsterdam rose from 30,000 in 1570 to 200,000 in 1672. Right through history, from Egypt, Greece and Rome in the ancient world to Florence and Venice in the 15th century flowerings of art have, alas, been associated with accumulations of wealth. Dutch art was no exception to this rule.
But what accounts for this extraordinary economic development in this small country? The answer is simple and clear. Dutch society was the product of a successful revolution. This is usually missed or avoided by "mainstream" historians. The revolution began in 1565 when a year of famine provoked the Netherlanders into revolt against their rulers, the Spanish Habsburgs.
This led to 40 years of fighting on land and sea. The Dutch Republic emerged victorious as a new and independent nation. It was the first modern war of national liberation. The Dutch nation came into being in the course of the war rather than existing before it. Even more important was that in the course of this struggle a social revolution occurred. The Habsburg Empire was a bastion of feudal reaction and the Catholic Counter-Reformation which ruled over a vast range of Europe.
Hand in hand with the defeat of the Habsburg armies came the rise to power of a new social class, the Dutch burghers or bourgeoisie. The result was the establishment of the first bourgeois, or capitalist, state. This liberated the productive forces held back by feudalism and gave the Dutch economy, for a period, a decisive advantage over the rest of Europe. Once England also took the capitalist road after the English Revolution of the 1640s it soon outpaced its smaller rival.
The Dutch Revolution made the Netherlands the freest, most enlightened, most socially advanced country in Europe. First, it was a republic with a stadholder as head of state, not a monarchy or empire like almost everywhere else. Second, it practised religious tolerance, including for Catholics and Jews.
This was of crucial importance in the 17th century. It derived directly from the revolutionary need for unity in the struggle against Spain.
It led to a remarkable degree of freedom of speech, thought and scientific inquiry and to a relatively emancipated position for women. The combination of freedom and prosperity made the Dutch Republic a focus for large-scale immigration from its more repressive neighbours. People came especially from the southern Netherlands (today's Belgium) which remained under Habsburg rule, and Germany during the Thirty Years War.
The Netherlands attracted many of Europe's leading dissenters and freethinkers-the English Leveller John Lilburne and the great philosophers Descartes, Spinoza and Locke all lived or spent time there. These conditions shaped the development of Dutch art. The overthrow of feudalism and the end of Catholic dominance meant a sharp decline in commissions for vast canvasses full of swirling figures such as Rubens had painted, to adorn churches and palaces.
But it gave rise to a huge market for smaller paintings to hang on the private walls of the rising middle classes. The role of seapower in the revolt and after generated the marine painting of van de Velde the Younger and others. The still lifes of flowers, vases and food reflected the new bourgeois domesticity and its preoccupation with possessions. The role of civic guards or shooting companies in defending cities led to a specific genre of group portraits of militia of which Rembrandt's The Night Watch is the most famous. Landscape painting arose precisely in reaction to the rapid urbanisation. The depictions of tavern low-life embodied the Dutch burghers' concern for order and respectability.
The three outstanding artists-Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer-were all products of these conditions but responded to them in different ways. Hals painted, with great vigour and freshness, a wide variety of representative social types of the new order. These included The Laughing Cavalier, The Merry Drinker, The Gypsy Girl, The Regents and Regentesses of the Alms House. Hals's mood ranged from affectionate amusement to bitter critique. Rembrandt also depicted the people of his times from the top of society to the lower depths but with greater emotional depth and power.
He gave expression to the underlying contradictions of the new age-the conflicts between wealth for some and pauperisation for others, love and freedom on one side, alienation and tragedy on the other. Vermeer took the bourgeois dream of domestic tranquillity and raised it to the level of the sublime.
This was done largely through interior scenes of great simplicity-a young woman sewing or reading a letter, or sat at a virginal (early harpsichord)-bathed in delicate light. The middle classes still cherish this dream, hence the enormous popularity Vermeer retains today.
It is too mechanical to claim that great art is always linked to political and social revolution or vice versa, but in the case of Dutch art it certainly was. It was a classic example of the revolutionary liberation of the productive and cultural forces of a society hitherto fettered by a reactionary social and political order.
Review of "Rembrandt's Eyes"
Rembrandt's Eyes
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 1999, 750pp, ISBN 0-713-99384-7
Simon Schama
Reviewed by: John Molyneux
PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL
The title of this book reminded me that I was first introduced to Rembrandt's eyes when I was a boy. "For Rembrandt", my mother said, as we stood in front of the great portraits of Jacob Trip and Margaretha de Geer in the National Gallery, "the eyes a re the windows of the soul". If I remember rightly my school art teacher told me the same thing a few years later. But Rembrandt's art remains remarkably untainted by the clichés that have attached to it in a way that is not true of all great art. The Mona Lisa ('the eyes follow you round the room'), for example, has certainly been damaged by its over exposure and The Hay Wain barely survives its endless biscuit tin projection as the essence of Englishness. In contrast The Staalmeeste rs or the great self portraits exhibited in London last year slough off all traces of sentimentalism and banalization and confront us with extraordinary living power.
This creates a problem for Simon Schama and for anyone aspiring to write about Rembrandt (including the author of this review), namely the likelihood that the writing will be grossly inadequate in the face of the painting. Of course this is a problem for all writing about art but it is intensified where Rembrandt is concerned because of his peculiar 'eloquence': his work speaks to us - emotionally, psychologically - with a directness unmatched even by masters such as Holbein, Durer and Titian.
The difficulty is compounded by the paucity of documentary information about Rembrandt's life combined with the abundance of pictorial material. On the one hand, no diaries, memoirs, interviews, manifestos and almost no letters. On the other, nearly eighty self-portraits - an utterly unprecedented and unmatched visual autobiography - and a large, if indeterminate, number of family portraits (his father, his mother, his brother, Saskia, Hendrickje, Titus, even baby Rumbartus).
So what is writing about Rembrandt doing? What function, exactly, is it performing and is that function necessary or justifiable? If its function is conceived in terms of 'explanation' or 'interpretation' of the meaning of the work it seems to me it is likely to fail, not because the work is mysterious or inexplicable but because it explains itself so much better than the writing can. Thus if we take Rembrandt's Bathsheba or Woman Bathing in a Stream both paintings for which the model was almost certainly his lover, Hendrickje Stoffels, and we start writing about the feelings of the artist towards Hendrickje which the paintings express we need to know that any words we choose - tenderness, love, affection, sympathy, sensuality, desire etc. - are less expressive, less precise and less powerful than the paintings themselves. If the function of the writing is conceived in terms of persuading the reader of the merits of the work, then however necessary this task may be in relation to much contemporary work or even some neglected figure from the past, it is largely pushing at an open door where Rembrandt is concerned. Again the work has already done the job better than any writing can.
Having wrestled with this problem somewhat, I am persuaded or have persuaded myself, that two kinds of art writing remain necessary and - just about - defensible. The first acts as a signpost. It is akin to the humble but vital guidebook or museum p lan and is also the main function of criticism as performed by someone like Clement Greenberg (or F R Leavis in literature). It says, "Here lies an important visual experience", and "I, who know something about these matters, recommend you go and have a look". It is useful and needed because we are all bombarded with so many images, so many sights, that we pay little or not attention to most of them or the attention we pay is very one sided - as when walking through the streets we frequently attend only to getting where we have to go and not to most of the buildings or people - and therefore it helps if someone says in a loud voice "Look, really look, at this!"
The second performs a function similar to the gallery itself or perhaps to a viewing platform from which to survey a natural or urban panorama, that is it provides a context or vantage point favourable to seeing the artwork clearly. Writing does this primarily by providing technical, biographical and socio-historical information relevant to the work's production and reception. For example, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa is a mighty painting in and of itself but it is easier to 'see' it properl y, to grasp its power, if one is provided with the information that it was painted in response to an actual shipwreck which was controversial in the way that the recent Paddington rail crash and the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge we re controversial. (Contextual information which would have been available to everyone at the time and which Géricault would have taken for granted.)
Of these two kinds of art writing the first is particularly relevant to contemporary work and the second to work from the past but in both cases the writing must remain strictly and humbly subordinate to the actual visual experience of the art.(1)
The fundamental problem with Schama's book is that it is completely lacking in this necessary humility. Despite beginning by quoting Paul Valéry's injunction that "We should apologize for daring to speak about painting", Schama proceeds to ignore the warning and speaks about painting and everything else without apology and without restraint for seven hundred pages. How does he fill these seven hundred pages? Not by providing a systematic account of the history of the times or the structure of the so ciety, nor a rigorous biography, nor a location of Rembrandt's work in its artistic and cultural context. Rather Schama offers a strange hybrid of history, biography and art history yoked together into an apparently seamless though jerky and incomplete n arrative. The whole unwieldy structure is sustained by three main procedures each of which seems to me highly dubious.
The first is the piling up of adjective upon adjective, phrase upon phrase, (in)significant detail upon (in)significant detail so as to generate the illusion of seeing, in the words of the dust jacket "through Rembrandt's own eyes". Thus we are offere d this description of Amsterdam:
Followed by:
Which, in turn, is followed by two pages on Amsterdam's supposed smells, three pages on its sounds, two pages on its tastes, another two on its 'straight edges' and 'flowing curves' and three more on its sights. The merits of such prose are doubtless a matter of opinion. Peter Conrad in The Observer (31.10.99) called it "ravenously gustatory" and said it left him "pining for a dose of Alka Seltzer". Jonathan Israel, in an otherwise highly critical review in the TLS (5.10.99), referred to "his facility with words" and "renowned rhetorical skills" as "Schama's great strength". Personally I find it extremely unappealing. More importantly, the whole exercise is a misguided venture, based on dreadful hubris, for it is not Schama but Rembr andt who has enabled us to see "through Rembrandt's eyes".
Schama's second procedure is to leave no digression unpursued. His two hundred page digression on Rubens, leads to a sub-digression on Rubens' parents, Jan and Maria, and Jan's bedding of Anna of Saxony, and even a sub-sub-digression on Jan's father ' Bartholomeus, the apothecary' who 'had died when Jan was still a child' [p.42]. His description of Leiden leads to a discussion of the town's textile industry and thence to the state of 'the raw wool, dense, greasy and matted [which] came to the city in hanks of sheared fleece', and that in turn to 'the plank floors of workshops (often the front parlour of the smaller houses) where the raw wool was washed, carded, combed and spun' and to how 'the doors of these little houses were left open to the street so that on breezy days the fluff hung over the streets like dandelion seeds' until at last the cloth emerges 'as lengths of serge, baize (not the green stuff of our billiard tables but a fine twill cloth), or worsted, depending on how the fibres were laid and twisted and what merchants said the clothiers in Paris, Frankfurt and Cologne were currently seeking' [p.200]. Schama continues in this vein down every nook and cranny throughout his immense book and in the process displays a truly staggering quanti ty of knowledge, but to what point? The job of the historian, as E H Carr argued in What is History? is to distinguish between 'facts' that are historically relevant and those that are not and this Schama repeatedly fails to do.
Thirdly, wherever there is a gap in the narrative or there is insufficient evidence for the dramatic effect Schama desires, he simply makes things up. He imagines what 'perhaps' was the case, what 'must have' or 'might have' taken place and inserts th e fantasy scenario into the story in such a way that the distinction between fact and fiction is repeatedly blurred. The book's first paragraph reads:
After thirty salvos the cannon were obliged to cool off. So perhaps it was then that Constantijn Huygens thought he heard nightingales fluting over the artillery! The windows in the headquarters of Frederik Hendrik, the Pri nce of Orange, commanded a remote but panoramic prospect of the stege. Had he been asked, Huygens would have been in a perfect position to draft one of those grandiose bird's-eye views of the operations of war, engraved to document the commander's genius , his worthiness to be remembered as the equal of Alexander or Scipio. Some like to describe such scenes as theatres of valour. And to an eye as literary as Huygens's, the distant view from his tower chamber might well have seemed like a great masque, b lazing with pyrotechnics and noisy with the work of contraptions; a flamboyance of banners. But he also knew that for all its appearance of a rout, such festive parades were actually conducted according to a strict program: first the pipers and drummers; then horses, fantastically comparisoned; then mountebanks and men in lion skins; the pasteboard dolphins and dragons; and finally triumphal cars à l'antique, pulled by garlanded oxen or the occasional camel. [p.3].
Already in these opening lines we have a 'perhaps', a 'had he been', a 'would have been' and a 'might well have'. The overall effect of the passage is to make it almost impossible to tell what is real history here and what is the product of Schama's a ll too vivid imagination. Nor is this just some opening rhetorical flourish. Schama continues in the same vein right to the closing paragraphs where he 'imagines' Rembrandt's daughter Cornelia in Batavia 'on that December day' looking at her sleeping ch ild 'as if he were silently, seriously conversing with himself as to how he had come to be baptized with so peculiar a name as Rembrandt' [p.702]. In between the technique is put to work creating the impression that Schama has a hot line to the mind of R embrandt nearly four centuries ago. Thus:
Rembrandt was giving his full attention to the matter of painting, and in particular to a small patch of plaster in a corner of the walk-up studio. At the point where the wall met the upright beam of the doorjamb, projecting into the room, plaster had begun to flake and lift, exposing a triangle of rosy brick... Rembrandt liked this. From the beginning he was powerfully drawn to ruin He enjoyed tracing the marks left by the bite of worldly experience He liked to toy with th e poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides In the corner of his room, Rembrandt's eye ran over the fishtail triangle of decomposing wall. [p.12-13].
Peter Ackroyd in The Times (28.10.99) finds this stuff convincing, "[Schama] is able to enter his subject with his own imagination so that we seem to be standing beside the artist as he places his brush upon the canvas". I find it false, border ing on the dishonest. For me it tends to destroy my confidence in the book as a whole and to undermine its genuine merits.
Such merits do exist. On the one hand, as I have already said, there is the prodigious amount of information that has been absorbed and processed. Even if the facts are not one hundred per cent reliable - Jonathan Israel, who has infinitely more expe rtise in the matter than I do, says there are "numerous astounding inaccuracies" and identified seven or eight of them (TLS 5.10.99) - this remains a considerable achievement. On the other hand there are a number of cogent, closely argued and inte resting readings of individual works - the exceptionally detailed analysis of The Night Watch [pp.480-500], especially the exposition of its compositional structure [p.496] is outstanding, but I also have in mind his discussions of the Danaë and th e nude etchings [pp.383-401] and of the wondrous Jewish Bride [pp.663-68]. By the time I reached these passages I was so out of sorts with Rembrandt's Eyes that it took a while to realize that a qualitative improvement had occurred. But it was as if having a definite image in front of him to work on temporarily relives him of the necessity to invent and fantasize and word spin. This does not mean I regard Schama's interpretations as definitive or even necessarily correct, for example I se e a critical element in The Night Watch he would deny, but they are serious and challenging contributions.
But enough of the merits and demerits of Rembrandt's Eyes structure, prose and research, what of its general case about Rembrandt, its overall intellectual argument? In fact, for a book of this size, there is remarkable little of such argument. There is, of course, the contention that the example of Rubens was of overwhelming importance for Rembrandt's development. To say that this point is stressed is an understatement since it is asserted and built into the structure, woven into the narrati ve, for hundreds of pages, but it is not really argued for. That is to say it is not argued for in the way that a historian or art historian should argue, considering counter arguments and alternative possibilities and the views of other authorities. In the end one is left with the feeling that while Rubens must have been a significant influence (like Cézanne on Picasso or Picasso on Pollock) Schama is overstating and rather forcing his case. What is not offered, however, is any general consideration o f the relationship between Rembrandt's work and the rest of Dutch art in the 17th century (Hals, van Ruysdael, de Hooch, Vermeer etc. are conspicuous by their virtual absence). Nor is there a general argument about the relation between Rembrandt and Dutc h society. This might seem strange in view of the obsession with the infinitesimal details of the physical environment but it is as if the unending focus on the trees substitutes for an overview of the wood. Then again, there is a sense in which the ass ertion of the non-existence, in the final analysis, of a relation between Dutch society and Rembrandt's art (except as 'background' or 'context') is the book's central theoretical proposition.
This is the point Schama emphasizes in his interview in The Times (2) and in the key theoretical section of the book entitled 'New York 1998'. He is at war with 'fashionable' determinism (3) and his battle-cry is 'Rembrandt as genius'.
Now the concept of 'genius' has long played a major role in cultural history and criticism and has been much debated in the last thirty years or so. My own view is that the word itself is not a problem. If it is taken to mean simply 'someone who is e xceptionally, outstandingly good at something' then Shakespeare was a genius at writing plays, Einstein was a genius at theoretical physics, Marx was a genius at social theory, Kasparov is a genius at chess and Cézanne and Rembrandt were geniuses at paint ing. Fine! But genius is frequently taken to mean much more than this. It carries with it connotations of belonging to a higher order of humanity than ordinary mortals, of divine inspiration, of innate superiority, of asocial, supra-historical transcen dence. And with this concept of genius there most certainly is a problem. To put the matter bluntly it is both mystical and not far removed from the idea that some people are born to rule. Yet it is precisely this latter meaning that Schama chooses to adopt and apply to Rembrandt.
There was a time, not so very long ago, before the anachronism police had been sent out on monograph patrol, when "genius" and "Rembrandt" seemed to belong in the same sentence. For the unnumbered millions who respond intuit ively to his painting applying the G word to Rembrandt seems no more incongruous than awarding it to Shakespeare, Raphael, Cervantes, Milton or Bernini, all of whom predate the Romantic recoining of the word. It was the way in which Michelangelo was refe rred to both inside Italy and beyond. Not long after his death, biographies of artists made a habit of identifying those who were inexplicably exceptional as prodigies whose gifts seemed so incommensurably greater than those of their contemporarie s that they must have been marked by a touch of divinity. [p.24my emphasis - JM]
In making his case that Rembrandt is a genius in this sense Schama commits, I believe, two intellectual errors. The first is to equate the evident uniqueness of Rembrandt's art with its social inexplicability.[pp25-26]. This misses the fact th at we are all of us, in certain respects, unique and that what makes the work of a particular artist uniquely 'great' is not that it is asocial but that it gives especially intense and powerful expression to profoundly social themes. This is what happens in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, in Michelangelo's David, in Picasso's Guernica, in Eliot's Waste Land and in Rembrandt's Staalmeesters. (4) The second is to identify conformity with being a product of society and rebellion wi th being outside or above society. The theoretical error here was exposed by Marx when he wrote, "The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class". (5) Conformists and rebels, Manchester Libe rals and Chartists, Versaillese and Communards, fascists and communists, Edmund Burke and Tom Paine, Ingres and Manet are equally products of their given society.
Underlying these confusions is Schama's failure to grasp, failure even to attempt to grasp, the contradictions in Dutch society. That would involve dealing with the structure and nature of that society as a totality, something Schama never does either in Rembrandt's Eyes or in his earlier, much superior, work The Embarrassment of Riches. In my opinion the starting point for understanding both the nature of Dutch society in the Golden Age (its amazing dynamic novelty and its cold cruelty ) and the nature of Rembrandt's art (its no less amazing humanity and originality and its profound sadness) is that the Dutch Republic was the world's first properly capitalist society and state, the result of the first successful bourgeois revolution. S ubjectively, the birth of capitalism, emerging from the interstices of feudal society, was experienced by society's most sensitive antennae, and perhaps also by the mass of its population, as both an immense liberation and a profound loss, a profound increase in alienation. This is what lies at the root of Shakespeare's tragedies and Michelangelo's sculptures, both David and the slaves. It is what permits us to understand how Rembrandt could be both enthusiast for Dutch socie ty and rebel against it, painter of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp and etcher of himself as beggar.
Schama would reject this starting point out of hand as old fashioned Marxist dogma (or would it be fashionable determinism). Indeed he has already cut himself off from the most minimal use of insights derived from a Marxist perspective when he denies at the start of The Embarrassment of Riches that the Dutch burgher was a bourgeois on the spurious grounds that 'the burgher was a citizen first and homo oeconomicus second'. (6)
It is this rejection which prevents Schama, for all his labours, from producing a coherent or convincing account of Rembrandt's art as a whole and which, combined with his overwhelming ambition to be a historian superstar, results in him filling his pa ges with lists of every fowl to be found in Amsterdam game pie and every smell he can imagine rising from the Amsterdam canals. Fortunately Rembrandt's art rises effortlessly above the cacophony.
Endnotes:
1. There is another kind of writing about art which is quite widespread and, I think, legitimate, where art is mentioned as part of a wider historical, sociological or philosophical analysis of a period, theme or issue. But this is different in that t he aim is not to illuminate the art but to use the art to illustrate the wider argument. Thus Marx's observation that, 'Rembrandt painted the Mother of God as a Dutch peasant woman', (L Baxandall and S Morawski eds, Marx, Engels: On Literature and Art ; New York 1977 p.60) was designed to make a point about ideology and material conditions in a debate about freedom of the press.
2. "I've moved back to a more old-fashioned view of Rembrandt that, while requiring substantial amounts of history, wants to say that there are limits to what history can explain. It's a view that looks at how paint lands on the canvas and leaves mor e space for the pure powers of original invention. History doesn't really have any explanatory forms for that, I believe". The Times (28.10.99)
3. Personally, determinism strikes me as profoundly unfashionable at the moment but conservative ideologists always like to present themselves as rebels against dominant left wing orthodoxies.
4. Seeing all art, great and mediocre alike, as social, does not involve embracing as mechanical or absolute determinism. For a discussion of determinism in general and its application to art in particular, see John Molyneux, 'Is Marxism Deterministic ?' International Socialism 68, Autumn 1995.
5. K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology, London 1985 p.65.
6. S Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, London 1987, p.7.
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 1999, 750pp, ISBN 0-713-99384-7
Simon Schama
Reviewed by: John Molyneux
PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL
The title of this book reminded me that I was first introduced to Rembrandt's eyes when I was a boy. "For Rembrandt", my mother said, as we stood in front of the great portraits of Jacob Trip and Margaretha de Geer in the National Gallery, "the eyes a re the windows of the soul". If I remember rightly my school art teacher told me the same thing a few years later. But Rembrandt's art remains remarkably untainted by the clichés that have attached to it in a way that is not true of all great art. The Mona Lisa ('the eyes follow you round the room'), for example, has certainly been damaged by its over exposure and The Hay Wain barely survives its endless biscuit tin projection as the essence of Englishness. In contrast The Staalmeeste rs or the great self portraits exhibited in London last year slough off all traces of sentimentalism and banalization and confront us with extraordinary living power.
This creates a problem for Simon Schama and for anyone aspiring to write about Rembrandt (including the author of this review), namely the likelihood that the writing will be grossly inadequate in the face of the painting. Of course this is a problem for all writing about art but it is intensified where Rembrandt is concerned because of his peculiar 'eloquence': his work speaks to us - emotionally, psychologically - with a directness unmatched even by masters such as Holbein, Durer and Titian.
The difficulty is compounded by the paucity of documentary information about Rembrandt's life combined with the abundance of pictorial material. On the one hand, no diaries, memoirs, interviews, manifestos and almost no letters. On the other, nearly eighty self-portraits - an utterly unprecedented and unmatched visual autobiography - and a large, if indeterminate, number of family portraits (his father, his mother, his brother, Saskia, Hendrickje, Titus, even baby Rumbartus).
So what is writing about Rembrandt doing? What function, exactly, is it performing and is that function necessary or justifiable? If its function is conceived in terms of 'explanation' or 'interpretation' of the meaning of the work it seems to me it is likely to fail, not because the work is mysterious or inexplicable but because it explains itself so much better than the writing can. Thus if we take Rembrandt's Bathsheba or Woman Bathing in a Stream both paintings for which the model was almost certainly his lover, Hendrickje Stoffels, and we start writing about the feelings of the artist towards Hendrickje which the paintings express we need to know that any words we choose - tenderness, love, affection, sympathy, sensuality, desire etc. - are less expressive, less precise and less powerful than the paintings themselves. If the function of the writing is conceived in terms of persuading the reader of the merits of the work, then however necessary this task may be in relation to much contemporary work or even some neglected figure from the past, it is largely pushing at an open door where Rembrandt is concerned. Again the work has already done the job better than any writing can.
Having wrestled with this problem somewhat, I am persuaded or have persuaded myself, that two kinds of art writing remain necessary and - just about - defensible. The first acts as a signpost. It is akin to the humble but vital guidebook or museum p lan and is also the main function of criticism as performed by someone like Clement Greenberg (or F R Leavis in literature). It says, "Here lies an important visual experience", and "I, who know something about these matters, recommend you go and have a look". It is useful and needed because we are all bombarded with so many images, so many sights, that we pay little or not attention to most of them or the attention we pay is very one sided - as when walking through the streets we frequently attend only to getting where we have to go and not to most of the buildings or people - and therefore it helps if someone says in a loud voice "Look, really look, at this!"
The second performs a function similar to the gallery itself or perhaps to a viewing platform from which to survey a natural or urban panorama, that is it provides a context or vantage point favourable to seeing the artwork clearly. Writing does this primarily by providing technical, biographical and socio-historical information relevant to the work's production and reception. For example, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa is a mighty painting in and of itself but it is easier to 'see' it properl y, to grasp its power, if one is provided with the information that it was painted in response to an actual shipwreck which was controversial in the way that the recent Paddington rail crash and the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge we re controversial. (Contextual information which would have been available to everyone at the time and which Géricault would have taken for granted.)
Of these two kinds of art writing the first is particularly relevant to contemporary work and the second to work from the past but in both cases the writing must remain strictly and humbly subordinate to the actual visual experience of the art.(1)
The fundamental problem with Schama's book is that it is completely lacking in this necessary humility. Despite beginning by quoting Paul Valéry's injunction that "We should apologize for daring to speak about painting", Schama proceeds to ignore the warning and speaks about painting and everything else without apology and without restraint for seven hundred pages. How does he fill these seven hundred pages? Not by providing a systematic account of the history of the times or the structure of the so ciety, nor a rigorous biography, nor a location of Rembrandt's work in its artistic and cultural context. Rather Schama offers a strange hybrid of history, biography and art history yoked together into an apparently seamless though jerky and incomplete n arrative. The whole unwieldy structure is sustained by three main procedures each of which seems to me highly dubious.
The first is the piling up of adjective upon adjective, phrase upon phrase, (in)significant detail upon (in)significant detail so as to generate the illusion of seeing, in the words of the dust jacket "through Rembrandt's own eyes". Thus we are offere d this description of Amsterdam:
From a seagull's gliding attitude, the great city resembled a half moon; a rat-gnawed cheese; a cradle lying with its base to the southern meadows, the top open to the dark waters of the IJ; the tubby hull of a noorvaarder aw aiting masts and sail, sheets and shrouds, so that it might be off a about its business; a straw-filled bolster indented with the weight of heavy heads. [p.311]
Followed by:
First, the Zuider Zee itself, sucked through the inlet of the IJ, washing against the slimy double row of palings separating the inner from the outer harbour, carrying with it a load of tangled wrack and weed, worthlessly sma ll fish, and minute crustaceans generating a briny aroma of salt, rotting wood, bilge-water and the tide-rinsed remains of countless gristly little creatures housed within the shells of periwinkles and barnacles. [p.311]
Which, in turn, is followed by two pages on Amsterdam's supposed smells, three pages on its sounds, two pages on its tastes, another two on its 'straight edges' and 'flowing curves' and three more on its sights. The merits of such prose are doubtless a matter of opinion. Peter Conrad in The Observer (31.10.99) called it "ravenously gustatory" and said it left him "pining for a dose of Alka Seltzer". Jonathan Israel, in an otherwise highly critical review in the TLS (5.10.99), referred to "his facility with words" and "renowned rhetorical skills" as "Schama's great strength". Personally I find it extremely unappealing. More importantly, the whole exercise is a misguided venture, based on dreadful hubris, for it is not Schama but Rembr andt who has enabled us to see "through Rembrandt's eyes".
Schama's second procedure is to leave no digression unpursued. His two hundred page digression on Rubens, leads to a sub-digression on Rubens' parents, Jan and Maria, and Jan's bedding of Anna of Saxony, and even a sub-sub-digression on Jan's father ' Bartholomeus, the apothecary' who 'had died when Jan was still a child' [p.42]. His description of Leiden leads to a discussion of the town's textile industry and thence to the state of 'the raw wool, dense, greasy and matted [which] came to the city in hanks of sheared fleece', and that in turn to 'the plank floors of workshops (often the front parlour of the smaller houses) where the raw wool was washed, carded, combed and spun' and to how 'the doors of these little houses were left open to the street so that on breezy days the fluff hung over the streets like dandelion seeds' until at last the cloth emerges 'as lengths of serge, baize (not the green stuff of our billiard tables but a fine twill cloth), or worsted, depending on how the fibres were laid and twisted and what merchants said the clothiers in Paris, Frankfurt and Cologne were currently seeking' [p.200]. Schama continues in this vein down every nook and cranny throughout his immense book and in the process displays a truly staggering quanti ty of knowledge, but to what point? The job of the historian, as E H Carr argued in What is History? is to distinguish between 'facts' that are historically relevant and those that are not and this Schama repeatedly fails to do.
Thirdly, wherever there is a gap in the narrative or there is insufficient evidence for the dramatic effect Schama desires, he simply makes things up. He imagines what 'perhaps' was the case, what 'must have' or 'might have' taken place and inserts th e fantasy scenario into the story in such a way that the distinction between fact and fiction is repeatedly blurred. The book's first paragraph reads:
After thirty salvos the cannon were obliged to cool off. So perhaps it was then that Constantijn Huygens thought he heard nightingales fluting over the artillery! The windows in the headquarters of Frederik Hendrik, the Pri nce of Orange, commanded a remote but panoramic prospect of the stege. Had he been asked, Huygens would have been in a perfect position to draft one of those grandiose bird's-eye views of the operations of war, engraved to document the commander's genius , his worthiness to be remembered as the equal of Alexander or Scipio. Some like to describe such scenes as theatres of valour. And to an eye as literary as Huygens's, the distant view from his tower chamber might well have seemed like a great masque, b lazing with pyrotechnics and noisy with the work of contraptions; a flamboyance of banners. But he also knew that for all its appearance of a rout, such festive parades were actually conducted according to a strict program: first the pipers and drummers; then horses, fantastically comparisoned; then mountebanks and men in lion skins; the pasteboard dolphins and dragons; and finally triumphal cars à l'antique, pulled by garlanded oxen or the occasional camel. [p.3].
Already in these opening lines we have a 'perhaps', a 'had he been', a 'would have been' and a 'might well have'. The overall effect of the passage is to make it almost impossible to tell what is real history here and what is the product of Schama's a ll too vivid imagination. Nor is this just some opening rhetorical flourish. Schama continues in the same vein right to the closing paragraphs where he 'imagines' Rembrandt's daughter Cornelia in Batavia 'on that December day' looking at her sleeping ch ild 'as if he were silently, seriously conversing with himself as to how he had come to be baptized with so peculiar a name as Rembrandt' [p.702]. In between the technique is put to work creating the impression that Schama has a hot line to the mind of R embrandt nearly four centuries ago. Thus:
Rembrandt was giving his full attention to the matter of painting, and in particular to a small patch of plaster in a corner of the walk-up studio. At the point where the wall met the upright beam of the doorjamb, projecting into the room, plaster had begun to flake and lift, exposing a triangle of rosy brick... Rembrandt liked this. From the beginning he was powerfully drawn to ruin He enjoyed tracing the marks left by the bite of worldly experience He liked to toy with th e poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides In the corner of his room, Rembrandt's eye ran over the fishtail triangle of decomposing wall. [p.12-13].
Peter Ackroyd in The Times (28.10.99) finds this stuff convincing, "[Schama] is able to enter his subject with his own imagination so that we seem to be standing beside the artist as he places his brush upon the canvas". I find it false, border ing on the dishonest. For me it tends to destroy my confidence in the book as a whole and to undermine its genuine merits.
Such merits do exist. On the one hand, as I have already said, there is the prodigious amount of information that has been absorbed and processed. Even if the facts are not one hundred per cent reliable - Jonathan Israel, who has infinitely more expe rtise in the matter than I do, says there are "numerous astounding inaccuracies" and identified seven or eight of them (TLS 5.10.99) - this remains a considerable achievement. On the other hand there are a number of cogent, closely argued and inte resting readings of individual works - the exceptionally detailed analysis of The Night Watch [pp.480-500], especially the exposition of its compositional structure [p.496] is outstanding, but I also have in mind his discussions of the Danaë and th e nude etchings [pp.383-401] and of the wondrous Jewish Bride [pp.663-68]. By the time I reached these passages I was so out of sorts with Rembrandt's Eyes that it took a while to realize that a qualitative improvement had occurred. But it was as if having a definite image in front of him to work on temporarily relives him of the necessity to invent and fantasize and word spin. This does not mean I regard Schama's interpretations as definitive or even necessarily correct, for example I se e a critical element in The Night Watch he would deny, but they are serious and challenging contributions.
But enough of the merits and demerits of Rembrandt's Eyes structure, prose and research, what of its general case about Rembrandt, its overall intellectual argument? In fact, for a book of this size, there is remarkable little of such argument. There is, of course, the contention that the example of Rubens was of overwhelming importance for Rembrandt's development. To say that this point is stressed is an understatement since it is asserted and built into the structure, woven into the narrati ve, for hundreds of pages, but it is not really argued for. That is to say it is not argued for in the way that a historian or art historian should argue, considering counter arguments and alternative possibilities and the views of other authorities. In the end one is left with the feeling that while Rubens must have been a significant influence (like Cézanne on Picasso or Picasso on Pollock) Schama is overstating and rather forcing his case. What is not offered, however, is any general consideration o f the relationship between Rembrandt's work and the rest of Dutch art in the 17th century (Hals, van Ruysdael, de Hooch, Vermeer etc. are conspicuous by their virtual absence). Nor is there a general argument about the relation between Rembrandt and Dutc h society. This might seem strange in view of the obsession with the infinitesimal details of the physical environment but it is as if the unending focus on the trees substitutes for an overview of the wood. Then again, there is a sense in which the ass ertion of the non-existence, in the final analysis, of a relation between Dutch society and Rembrandt's art (except as 'background' or 'context') is the book's central theoretical proposition.
This is the point Schama emphasizes in his interview in The Times (2) and in the key theoretical section of the book entitled 'New York 1998'. He is at war with 'fashionable' determinism (3) and his battle-cry is 'Rembrandt as genius'.
Now the concept of 'genius' has long played a major role in cultural history and criticism and has been much debated in the last thirty years or so. My own view is that the word itself is not a problem. If it is taken to mean simply 'someone who is e xceptionally, outstandingly good at something' then Shakespeare was a genius at writing plays, Einstein was a genius at theoretical physics, Marx was a genius at social theory, Kasparov is a genius at chess and Cézanne and Rembrandt were geniuses at paint ing. Fine! But genius is frequently taken to mean much more than this. It carries with it connotations of belonging to a higher order of humanity than ordinary mortals, of divine inspiration, of innate superiority, of asocial, supra-historical transcen dence. And with this concept of genius there most certainly is a problem. To put the matter bluntly it is both mystical and not far removed from the idea that some people are born to rule. Yet it is precisely this latter meaning that Schama chooses to adopt and apply to Rembrandt.
There was a time, not so very long ago, before the anachronism police had been sent out on monograph patrol, when "genius" and "Rembrandt" seemed to belong in the same sentence. For the unnumbered millions who respond intuit ively to his painting applying the G word to Rembrandt seems no more incongruous than awarding it to Shakespeare, Raphael, Cervantes, Milton or Bernini, all of whom predate the Romantic recoining of the word. It was the way in which Michelangelo was refe rred to both inside Italy and beyond. Not long after his death, biographies of artists made a habit of identifying those who were inexplicably exceptional as prodigies whose gifts seemed so incommensurably greater than those of their contemporarie s that they must have been marked by a touch of divinity. [p.24my emphasis - JM]
In making his case that Rembrandt is a genius in this sense Schama commits, I believe, two intellectual errors. The first is to equate the evident uniqueness of Rembrandt's art with its social inexplicability.[pp25-26]. This misses the fact th at we are all of us, in certain respects, unique and that what makes the work of a particular artist uniquely 'great' is not that it is asocial but that it gives especially intense and powerful expression to profoundly social themes. This is what happens in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, in Michelangelo's David, in Picasso's Guernica, in Eliot's Waste Land and in Rembrandt's Staalmeesters. (4) The second is to identify conformity with being a product of society and rebellion wi th being outside or above society. The theoretical error here was exposed by Marx when he wrote, "The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class". (5) Conformists and rebels, Manchester Libe rals and Chartists, Versaillese and Communards, fascists and communists, Edmund Burke and Tom Paine, Ingres and Manet are equally products of their given society.
Underlying these confusions is Schama's failure to grasp, failure even to attempt to grasp, the contradictions in Dutch society. That would involve dealing with the structure and nature of that society as a totality, something Schama never does either in Rembrandt's Eyes or in his earlier, much superior, work The Embarrassment of Riches. In my opinion the starting point for understanding both the nature of Dutch society in the Golden Age (its amazing dynamic novelty and its cold cruelty ) and the nature of Rembrandt's art (its no less amazing humanity and originality and its profound sadness) is that the Dutch Republic was the world's first properly capitalist society and state, the result of the first successful bourgeois revolution. S ubjectively, the birth of capitalism, emerging from the interstices of feudal society, was experienced by society's most sensitive antennae, and perhaps also by the mass of its population, as both an immense liberation and a profound loss, a profound increase in alienation. This is what lies at the root of Shakespeare's tragedies and Michelangelo's sculptures, both David and the slaves. It is what permits us to understand how Rembrandt could be both enthusiast for Dutch socie ty and rebel against it, painter of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp and etcher of himself as beggar.
Schama would reject this starting point out of hand as old fashioned Marxist dogma (or would it be fashionable determinism). Indeed he has already cut himself off from the most minimal use of insights derived from a Marxist perspective when he denies at the start of The Embarrassment of Riches that the Dutch burgher was a bourgeois on the spurious grounds that 'the burgher was a citizen first and homo oeconomicus second'. (6)
It is this rejection which prevents Schama, for all his labours, from producing a coherent or convincing account of Rembrandt's art as a whole and which, combined with his overwhelming ambition to be a historian superstar, results in him filling his pa ges with lists of every fowl to be found in Amsterdam game pie and every smell he can imagine rising from the Amsterdam canals. Fortunately Rembrandt's art rises effortlessly above the cacophony.
Endnotes:
1. There is another kind of writing about art which is quite widespread and, I think, legitimate, where art is mentioned as part of a wider historical, sociological or philosophical analysis of a period, theme or issue. But this is different in that t he aim is not to illuminate the art but to use the art to illustrate the wider argument. Thus Marx's observation that, 'Rembrandt painted the Mother of God as a Dutch peasant woman', (L Baxandall and S Morawski eds, Marx, Engels: On Literature and Art ; New York 1977 p.60) was designed to make a point about ideology and material conditions in a debate about freedom of the press.
2. "I've moved back to a more old-fashioned view of Rembrandt that, while requiring substantial amounts of history, wants to say that there are limits to what history can explain. It's a view that looks at how paint lands on the canvas and leaves mor e space for the pure powers of original invention. History doesn't really have any explanatory forms for that, I believe". The Times (28.10.99)
3. Personally, determinism strikes me as profoundly unfashionable at the moment but conservative ideologists always like to present themselves as rebels against dominant left wing orthodoxies.
4. Seeing all art, great and mediocre alike, as social, does not involve embracing as mechanical or absolute determinism. For a discussion of determinism in general and its application to art in particular, see John Molyneux, 'Is Marxism Deterministic ?' International Socialism 68, Autumn 1995.
5. K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology, London 1985 p.65.
6. S Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, London 1987, p.7.
Preface to "Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism"
This booklet consists of a selection of articles written as a weekly column for the British left wing newspaper, Socialist Worker. The column , which lasted from 1983 – 97, was variously called ‘Teach Yourself Marxism’ and ‘What Socialists Say’; most of the material included here was written in the 1980s.
The column was written with a reader in mind who, according to the mainstream culture, does not exist, namely a thinking, critically minded working class activist. The standard view of working class militants is that they are more or less mindless thugs, motivated by greed and the politics of envy. Not a few middle class intellectuals, even those sympathetic to the working class in the abstract, still accept the the notion of militant workers as people only interested in immediate bred and butter issues and crude slogans.
My experience, which is now a long one, is the exact opposite. Worker militants are in general the most intellectually developed - and cultured – representatives of their class. This is partly because invovement in struggle raises consciousness and broadens horizons,but also because they need to be. The worker militant is engaged in a continuous battle of ideas with his or her workmates to combat the equally continuous efforts of the ruling class, via its politicians and media, to impose its view of the world - on everything from current events to human nature – on the working class.
The column was written, therefore, with the intention of assisting this notional reader ( though obviously there would be other readers too) in this day to day process of argument and persuasion. Its language had to be as staight forward and clear as possible – lack of formal education was absolutely not to be a barrier to reading it – but its content was deadly serious and sometimes had to be quite complex.
The typical method was to start from ‘common sense’, i.e. from the commonplce assumptions and attitudes (in reality shaped by bourgeois ideology) that the socialist worker would meet wth from their fellow workers and to set out the socialist view in relation to this. In the process the column also attempted to build up the the main elements of the Marxist world outlook as a whole.
That fifteen years later and on the other side of the world, the publishers of this booklet should deem it of relevanceto the workers and socialists of Korea testifies to a very important fact about the modern world, namely that the issues and debates faced by workers in aall countries, though not of course identical , are nonetheless remarkably similar.
One such issue which is truly global and is of immense, almost overriding significance, is climate change or global warming. This was not discussed in ‘Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism’ because at the time it had barely crossed my political radar. Today one must be blind not to see it. All the scientific evidence points to yhe fact that climate change threatens the world with environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. All the political evidence points to the fact that our rulers are either sleep walking to disaster or, more likely, consciously gambling with humanity,s future for the sake of profit (see the excellent article by Paul McGarr ‘On the Road to Catastrophe’, International Socialism 107). The combination of these two facts constitutes another powerful, indeed compelling, argument for revolutionary socialism: for working totake power out of the hands of their respective ruling classes and establish international planned production for human need.
This was written in July 2005 for the Korean translation of of the long article "Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism".
The column was written with a reader in mind who, according to the mainstream culture, does not exist, namely a thinking, critically minded working class activist. The standard view of working class militants is that they are more or less mindless thugs, motivated by greed and the politics of envy. Not a few middle class intellectuals, even those sympathetic to the working class in the abstract, still accept the the notion of militant workers as people only interested in immediate bred and butter issues and crude slogans.
My experience, which is now a long one, is the exact opposite. Worker militants are in general the most intellectually developed - and cultured – representatives of their class. This is partly because invovement in struggle raises consciousness and broadens horizons,but also because they need to be. The worker militant is engaged in a continuous battle of ideas with his or her workmates to combat the equally continuous efforts of the ruling class, via its politicians and media, to impose its view of the world - on everything from current events to human nature – on the working class.
The column was written, therefore, with the intention of assisting this notional reader ( though obviously there would be other readers too) in this day to day process of argument and persuasion. Its language had to be as staight forward and clear as possible – lack of formal education was absolutely not to be a barrier to reading it – but its content was deadly serious and sometimes had to be quite complex.
The typical method was to start from ‘common sense’, i.e. from the commonplce assumptions and attitudes (in reality shaped by bourgeois ideology) that the socialist worker would meet wth from their fellow workers and to set out the socialist view in relation to this. In the process the column also attempted to build up the the main elements of the Marxist world outlook as a whole.
That fifteen years later and on the other side of the world, the publishers of this booklet should deem it of relevanceto the workers and socialists of Korea testifies to a very important fact about the modern world, namely that the issues and debates faced by workers in aall countries, though not of course identical , are nonetheless remarkably similar.
One such issue which is truly global and is of immense, almost overriding significance, is climate change or global warming. This was not discussed in ‘Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism’ because at the time it had barely crossed my political radar. Today one must be blind not to see it. All the scientific evidence points to yhe fact that climate change threatens the world with environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. All the political evidence points to the fact that our rulers are either sleep walking to disaster or, more likely, consciously gambling with humanity,s future for the sake of profit (see the excellent article by Paul McGarr ‘On the Road to Catastrophe’, International Socialism 107). The combination of these two facts constitutes another powerful, indeed compelling, argument for revolutionary socialism: for working totake power out of the hands of their respective ruling classes and establish international planned production for human need.
This was written in July 2005 for the Korean translation of of the long article "Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism".
Picasso and African Art
In debates about racism and multiculturaliosm questions of civilization and the development of “culture” are never slow to surface.
Underpinning much racist ideology is the notion that the development of civilization was basically a European or western phenomenon. In reality, civilization – living in cities, literacy, law etc. – developed first in three main areas, none of them in Europe: the middle eastern fertile crescent (Iraq to Egypt), northwestern India and southeast China. Moreover Europe in the middle ages remained pitifully backward compared to China or the Islamic civilization in the middle east and north Africa.
But even those who accept these basic historical facts often still cling to the idea that “modern culture” and “modernism” are a uniquely European (and thus “white”) creation.
Then again in the anti-racist camp there are those who see different cultures as equal or “equally valid” but still think of them as separate and inherently linked to distinct ethnic or racial groups. Therefore they talk of preserving different cultures and maintaining their authenticity, resisting their contamination by external influences (for example by opposing mixed race adoptions).
A striking challenge to all these views of how culture develops is provided by the work and career of the greatest of all modern artists, Pablo Picasso.
At the beginning of the 20th century Picasso was already a rising star of the art world on the basis of the works of his so-called “Blue” and “Rose” periods, mainly powerful, if sentimental, depictions of the poor and the marginalized. Then in 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicting five prostitutes in a Spanish brothel displaying themselves to their prospective clients and staring implacably out of the canvass at the viewer. This painting opened the door to the development of cubism and the whole of modernist art. At the time it was deeply shocking not only to the establishment but also to all Picasso’s avant garde artist friends like Braque and Matisse. Among its many shocking features was the fact that two of the women’s heads were painted to resemble African masks while the other three were based on images from ancient Iberian culture.
The art critic John Berger describes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as “a raging frontal attack against life as Picasso found it” (The Success and Failure of Picasso, p72) and the African mask images are part of this. But if we look at how Picasso’s work develops we find that his use of African art also has a deeper significance.
What Picasso found in African art was the key, or one of the keys, to a new way of seeing and representing the world and a profoundly new conception of art, which broke more decisively than ever before – the break had been building for decades - with the dominant European art tradition.
Since the 15th century, that is in the era of the rise of capitalism, European painting and sculpture had focused on achieving a naturalistic representation of the physical world. In other words it tried to make more or less accurate copies of things, people and scenes, especially the possessions, land and appearance of the rich and powerful.
The African sculptures that influenced Picasso were products of pre-capitalist society where the role of art was quite different. It was not made to hang in palaces or museums but for use in daily life, particularly rituals, and its aim was not naturalistic imitation of status or property but the expression of “spiritual” (emotional-psychological) power. This is what made it such a useful source for the bohemian artists like Picasso who were rebelling against all the traditions of the bourgeois and aristocratic art academy.
If it were just the case of influencing one major modernist painting this could be dismissed as accidental, but it was not. The African influence on Picasso and Braque’s cubism as a whole and on Picasso’s later work is manifest. Paintings like the famous Three Dancers and even Guernica would have been impossible without the breakthrough achieved in Les Desmoiselles. And there were many other artists also directly influenced by African art: Brancusi, the pioneer of modernist sculpture; Matisse and Modigliani; the German expressionists, and the sculptor Giacometti ..
This was part of an even wider turn toward non-european sources of inspiration which ranged from the enthusiasm for Japanese prints of the Impressionists and Van Gogh, Gauguin’s physical migration first to Brittany and then to Tahiti, Henri Rousseau’s “primitivist” evocations of jungle scenes, Henry Moore’s inspiration by Mayan sculpture to Jackson Pollock’s influence by Native American (Navajo) sand pouring in his “drip” paintings.
Underpinning much racist ideology is the notion that the development of civilization was basically a European or western phenomenon. In reality, civilization – living in cities, literacy, law etc. – developed first in three main areas, none of them in Europe: the middle eastern fertile crescent (Iraq to Egypt), northwestern India and southeast China. Moreover Europe in the middle ages remained pitifully backward compared to China or the Islamic civilization in the middle east and north Africa.
But even those who accept these basic historical facts often still cling to the idea that “modern culture” and “modernism” are a uniquely European (and thus “white”) creation.
Then again in the anti-racist camp there are those who see different cultures as equal or “equally valid” but still think of them as separate and inherently linked to distinct ethnic or racial groups. Therefore they talk of preserving different cultures and maintaining their authenticity, resisting their contamination by external influences (for example by opposing mixed race adoptions).
A striking challenge to all these views of how culture develops is provided by the work and career of the greatest of all modern artists, Pablo Picasso.
At the beginning of the 20th century Picasso was already a rising star of the art world on the basis of the works of his so-called “Blue” and “Rose” periods, mainly powerful, if sentimental, depictions of the poor and the marginalized. Then in 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicting five prostitutes in a Spanish brothel displaying themselves to their prospective clients and staring implacably out of the canvass at the viewer. This painting opened the door to the development of cubism and the whole of modernist art. At the time it was deeply shocking not only to the establishment but also to all Picasso’s avant garde artist friends like Braque and Matisse. Among its many shocking features was the fact that two of the women’s heads were painted to resemble African masks while the other three were based on images from ancient Iberian culture.
The art critic John Berger describes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as “a raging frontal attack against life as Picasso found it” (The Success and Failure of Picasso, p72) and the African mask images are part of this. But if we look at how Picasso’s work develops we find that his use of African art also has a deeper significance.
What Picasso found in African art was the key, or one of the keys, to a new way of seeing and representing the world and a profoundly new conception of art, which broke more decisively than ever before – the break had been building for decades - with the dominant European art tradition.
Since the 15th century, that is in the era of the rise of capitalism, European painting and sculpture had focused on achieving a naturalistic representation of the physical world. In other words it tried to make more or less accurate copies of things, people and scenes, especially the possessions, land and appearance of the rich and powerful.
The African sculptures that influenced Picasso were products of pre-capitalist society where the role of art was quite different. It was not made to hang in palaces or museums but for use in daily life, particularly rituals, and its aim was not naturalistic imitation of status or property but the expression of “spiritual” (emotional-psychological) power. This is what made it such a useful source for the bohemian artists like Picasso who were rebelling against all the traditions of the bourgeois and aristocratic art academy.
If it were just the case of influencing one major modernist painting this could be dismissed as accidental, but it was not. The African influence on Picasso and Braque’s cubism as a whole and on Picasso’s later work is manifest. Paintings like the famous Three Dancers and even Guernica would have been impossible without the breakthrough achieved in Les Desmoiselles. And there were many other artists also directly influenced by African art: Brancusi, the pioneer of modernist sculpture; Matisse and Modigliani; the German expressionists, and the sculptor Giacometti ..
This was part of an even wider turn toward non-european sources of inspiration which ranged from the enthusiasm for Japanese prints of the Impressionists and Van Gogh, Gauguin’s physical migration first to Brittany and then to Tahiti, Henri Rousseau’s “primitivist” evocations of jungle scenes, Henry Moore’s inspiration by Mayan sculpture to Jackson Pollock’s influence by Native American (Navajo) sand pouring in his “drip” paintings.
Marxism and Terrorism
The forces of reaction have always tried to associate revolution, and by extension revolutionaries and Marxists, with terrorist acts of the kind that took place, in Madrid on the 11th or March. The fact is, however, that all genuine Marxists and socialists have always opposed the use of such methods.
Marxists do no reject all violence. The bourgeois politicians who make such claims – while supporting wars, nuclear weapons, armies, prisons etc – are simply hypocrites and Marxists recognise that in certain circumstances such as wars of national liberation and mass revolutionary struggle, violence may be unavoidable and necessary. But terrorism, as in the planting of bombs on government of civilian targets, or hijacking planes, or assassinations by small groups acting independently of class struggle has always been deemed unacceptable.
This is because terrorism runs counter to the most basic principles of Marxism. Marx showed that the root cause of exploitation, oppression, tyranny and war was not bad individual rulers or bad governments but the division of society into classes and the ownership and control of production by a minority class that lived off the labour of the majority. The overthrow of a ruling class and the economic system on which it rests cannot be achieved by killing or frightening even large numbers of individuals, but only by the struggle of a new class which is the bearer of a new economic system. It is class struggle, the collective action of people in their millions, which is the motor of history.
Applied to modern capitalist society this means that the only force capable of defeating and replacing the capitalist class and the capitalist system is the organised struggle of the mass of the working class. In the words of Marx, “The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.” This emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class is crucial not only for the overthrow of capitalism but also for the achievement of the aim, the establishment of socialism. Only revolution from below by the mass of working people themselves can lead to a socialist society run by working people in the interests of working people. Revolutions from above, even by forces claiming to act on behalf of the working class, result only in the replacement of one set of exploiters and oppressors by another (however good the intentions of the revolutionaries). This had been proved time and again in history but above all by the Communist, or more accurately Stalinist, military seizures of power in Eastern Europe, china etc which simply replaced private capitalism by state capitalism.
The methods of struggle used by Marxists and socialists from the most basic issuing of leaflets, collecting of petitions, organising trade unions and parties through to mass demonstrations, election campaigns and mass strikes are all steps towards raising the consciousness, confidence and organisation of working people to act on their own behalf.
Terrorist methods contradict this whole perspective. Frequently, as in Madrid, they are aimed at completely the wrong targets, striking not at rulers or oppressors but at ordinary working people. This repeats the “mistake” or should it be crime, so often perpetrated by the right, or collective national or racial guilt i.e. holding everyone of a particular group responsible for the actions or the rulers of that group. Often this has the effect of intensifying racial, national or sectarian divisions which weaken the struggle of the working class and which it should be the project of the left to overcome.
Even where that targets are more judiciously selected e.g. individual tyrants, direct and senior agents of the oppressor state, there is still a very high risk of error resulting in unintended innocent victims, with all the same political consequences.
Another common result of terrorism is that it strengthens and legitimises the repressive apparatus of the very state it is supposed to undermine. The regime on the receiving end responds the attacks on civil liberties, arbitrary round-ups of “suspects” etc. It cannot be said that this always happens. Recent events in Spain – due to the splendid response of the Spanish people – are a wonderful exception. But it is the most likely outcome. Similarly, terrorist acts can have the perverse effect of turning a roundly despised politician or businessman into some kind of martyr or national hero, as happened with the kidnapping and killing of former Italian PM, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978.
But even in the best possible case – where the target is an undoubted and generally acknowledged tyrant and the deed is meticulously executed with no innocent casualties – the terrorist operation remains at odds with the Marxist perspective because it is an attempt to substitute the deeds of a small minority for the collective struggle of the masses and its effects is to encourage the idea of liberation from on high rather than self emancipation from below. As Leon Trotsky put it:
“If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle?…If it makes sense to terrify highly places personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for a party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections?
…In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.” [Emphasis in original]
Sometimes the advocates of terrorism have claimed that terror tactics need not be counterposed to the class struggle but can be combined with it. Trotsky rejects this “compromise formula” insisting that in practice any movement adopting terrorist methods would come to be dominated by them to the exclusion of mass action.
“By its very essence terrorist work demands such concentrated energy for ‘the great moment’, such an overestimation of the significance of individual heroism and such a ‘hermetic’ conspiracy that – if not logically – then psychologically it totally excludes agitation and organisational work among the masses…terrorism is too ‘absolute’ a form of struggle to be content with a limited and subordinate role in the party.”
Quoting Trotsky here is appropriate for two reasons. First because Trotsky wrote, at different times in his political career a series of articles on terrorism which eloquently summarise the Marxist case and these have been collected in an accessible pamphlet, Leon Trotsky ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ (Pathfinder 1980). Second, because the articles grow out of, and make repeated reference to, the experience of terrorism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conducted by the Narodniks or Populists, and particularly by the organisation Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), this was one of the great terrorists campaigns in history and perhaps the first time terrorism was intellectually formulated as a systematic political strategy. The Narodniks were intellectuals who looked to Russia’s vast and deeply oppressed peasantry and who’s aim was to overthrow tsarism by systematic attacks on the tsar and his ministers. The Russian Marxist movement under the leadership of it’s founder, George Plekhanov, emerged precisely in opposition to Populism and therefore conducted an intense debate on the question of terrorism in the course of which the Marxist position was definitively established.
One further aspect of that position which was shared by all the Russian revolutionary socialists in particularly brought out in Trotsky’s writings. This is the distinction the Russian Marxists made between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, the latter had all their sympathy and their personal courage was always acknowledged. By all accounts the Narodnik militants were of a particularly noble cast but the point is clearly of contemporary relevance.
Ruling class politicians and their media habitually denounce terrorists as “cowards”, “evil” and “sub-human”. The Russian Marxists had no truck with such notions and never contemplated moderating their own opposition to tsarism on account of “the terrorist threat”, still less joining forces with the regime against the terrorists. Their criticism of terrorism was always in terms of its ineffective and counterproductive nature in relation to the real revolutionary struggle. And of course they were vindicated by history. It was no terrorist bomb but the mass action of the working class that eventually toppled both tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie.
The Marxist response to terrorism formulated around the turn of the century has stood the test of time and has served as a guide to action in recent decades. These decades however, have offered a rich and varied crop or terrorist campaigns on which certain observations can be made.
In the first place it is clear that there is a substantial strand of right wing and fascist terrorism. Examples include the Orange paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Bologna bombing in Italy, Oklahoma in the U.S, David Copeland of the Soho nail bomb, and Combat 18. But, obviously these present no theoretical problems for the left since we are opposed to everything about them. Other forms of terrorism divide broadly into two camps. On the one hand, mainly in the 1970s, there were various offshoots from the far left and the student revolt – the Weathermen in the U.S, the Angry Brigade in Britain, the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and so on. Typically these groups represented a frustrated, impatient reaction to the faltering of the mass movements from which they sprung. With the partial exception of the Red Brigades, they had no mass base and little capacity to inflict serious damage on the ruling class. Their main effect was to disorganise and disorient the left. It is clear that the job of revolutionary socialists is to do everything possible to discourage the development of such moods, but by argument and by ensuring the positive momentum of the mass struggle.
On the other hand, and much more important, have been various kinds of nationalist terrorist formations attempting to represent oppressed nationalities – the IRA, ETA, the different Palestinian organisations etc. These organisations usually do have a significant, if largely passive, social base, though it’s size can vary from being a small minority to a substantial majority of their respecting communities and, crucially, they usually have a base in a section of the national bourgeoisie. Essentially they are political formations who would like to be able to wage conventional war (or at least guerrilla war) but who are prevented from doing so by the overwhelming superiority of the oppressor’s military forces. Their class basis and their political outlook prevent them from looking to the working class as an alternative. Consequently they resort to terrorism.
Despite all the talk about Islamic fundamentalism Al Queda (like Hezbollah and Hamas) are basically spin-offs from Arab nationalism who have adopted Islamism in response to the past failures of secular nationalism and Stalinism. Their real aim, despite the rhetoric on both sides, is not to destroy the western way of life or overthrow capitalism but to drive out or limit imperialism in their part of the world.
Sometimes, and the Palestinian Intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, “condemn” Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance. Nevertheless the general force of the Marxist critique continues to apply. Therefore, Marxists within the context of uncompromising opposition to our “own” imperialist bourgeoisies must continue to make the case that ultimately the defeat of imperialism and the overthrow of capitalism are tasks that are bound together and that the only force that can complete these tasks is the international working class.
Marxists do no reject all violence. The bourgeois politicians who make such claims – while supporting wars, nuclear weapons, armies, prisons etc – are simply hypocrites and Marxists recognise that in certain circumstances such as wars of national liberation and mass revolutionary struggle, violence may be unavoidable and necessary. But terrorism, as in the planting of bombs on government of civilian targets, or hijacking planes, or assassinations by small groups acting independently of class struggle has always been deemed unacceptable.
This is because terrorism runs counter to the most basic principles of Marxism. Marx showed that the root cause of exploitation, oppression, tyranny and war was not bad individual rulers or bad governments but the division of society into classes and the ownership and control of production by a minority class that lived off the labour of the majority. The overthrow of a ruling class and the economic system on which it rests cannot be achieved by killing or frightening even large numbers of individuals, but only by the struggle of a new class which is the bearer of a new economic system. It is class struggle, the collective action of people in their millions, which is the motor of history.
Applied to modern capitalist society this means that the only force capable of defeating and replacing the capitalist class and the capitalist system is the organised struggle of the mass of the working class. In the words of Marx, “The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.” This emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class is crucial not only for the overthrow of capitalism but also for the achievement of the aim, the establishment of socialism. Only revolution from below by the mass of working people themselves can lead to a socialist society run by working people in the interests of working people. Revolutions from above, even by forces claiming to act on behalf of the working class, result only in the replacement of one set of exploiters and oppressors by another (however good the intentions of the revolutionaries). This had been proved time and again in history but above all by the Communist, or more accurately Stalinist, military seizures of power in Eastern Europe, china etc which simply replaced private capitalism by state capitalism.
The methods of struggle used by Marxists and socialists from the most basic issuing of leaflets, collecting of petitions, organising trade unions and parties through to mass demonstrations, election campaigns and mass strikes are all steps towards raising the consciousness, confidence and organisation of working people to act on their own behalf.
Terrorist methods contradict this whole perspective. Frequently, as in Madrid, they are aimed at completely the wrong targets, striking not at rulers or oppressors but at ordinary working people. This repeats the “mistake” or should it be crime, so often perpetrated by the right, or collective national or racial guilt i.e. holding everyone of a particular group responsible for the actions or the rulers of that group. Often this has the effect of intensifying racial, national or sectarian divisions which weaken the struggle of the working class and which it should be the project of the left to overcome.
Even where that targets are more judiciously selected e.g. individual tyrants, direct and senior agents of the oppressor state, there is still a very high risk of error resulting in unintended innocent victims, with all the same political consequences.
Another common result of terrorism is that it strengthens and legitimises the repressive apparatus of the very state it is supposed to undermine. The regime on the receiving end responds the attacks on civil liberties, arbitrary round-ups of “suspects” etc. It cannot be said that this always happens. Recent events in Spain – due to the splendid response of the Spanish people – are a wonderful exception. But it is the most likely outcome. Similarly, terrorist acts can have the perverse effect of turning a roundly despised politician or businessman into some kind of martyr or national hero, as happened with the kidnapping and killing of former Italian PM, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978.
But even in the best possible case – where the target is an undoubted and generally acknowledged tyrant and the deed is meticulously executed with no innocent casualties – the terrorist operation remains at odds with the Marxist perspective because it is an attempt to substitute the deeds of a small minority for the collective struggle of the masses and its effects is to encourage the idea of liberation from on high rather than self emancipation from below. As Leon Trotsky put it:
“If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle?…If it makes sense to terrify highly places personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for a party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections?
…In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.” [Emphasis in original]
Sometimes the advocates of terrorism have claimed that terror tactics need not be counterposed to the class struggle but can be combined with it. Trotsky rejects this “compromise formula” insisting that in practice any movement adopting terrorist methods would come to be dominated by them to the exclusion of mass action.
“By its very essence terrorist work demands such concentrated energy for ‘the great moment’, such an overestimation of the significance of individual heroism and such a ‘hermetic’ conspiracy that – if not logically – then psychologically it totally excludes agitation and organisational work among the masses…terrorism is too ‘absolute’ a form of struggle to be content with a limited and subordinate role in the party.”
Quoting Trotsky here is appropriate for two reasons. First because Trotsky wrote, at different times in his political career a series of articles on terrorism which eloquently summarise the Marxist case and these have been collected in an accessible pamphlet, Leon Trotsky ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ (Pathfinder 1980). Second, because the articles grow out of, and make repeated reference to, the experience of terrorism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conducted by the Narodniks or Populists, and particularly by the organisation Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), this was one of the great terrorists campaigns in history and perhaps the first time terrorism was intellectually formulated as a systematic political strategy. The Narodniks were intellectuals who looked to Russia’s vast and deeply oppressed peasantry and who’s aim was to overthrow tsarism by systematic attacks on the tsar and his ministers. The Russian Marxist movement under the leadership of it’s founder, George Plekhanov, emerged precisely in opposition to Populism and therefore conducted an intense debate on the question of terrorism in the course of which the Marxist position was definitively established.
One further aspect of that position which was shared by all the Russian revolutionary socialists in particularly brought out in Trotsky’s writings. This is the distinction the Russian Marxists made between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, the latter had all their sympathy and their personal courage was always acknowledged. By all accounts the Narodnik militants were of a particularly noble cast but the point is clearly of contemporary relevance.
Ruling class politicians and their media habitually denounce terrorists as “cowards”, “evil” and “sub-human”. The Russian Marxists had no truck with such notions and never contemplated moderating their own opposition to tsarism on account of “the terrorist threat”, still less joining forces with the regime against the terrorists. Their criticism of terrorism was always in terms of its ineffective and counterproductive nature in relation to the real revolutionary struggle. And of course they were vindicated by history. It was no terrorist bomb but the mass action of the working class that eventually toppled both tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie.
The Marxist response to terrorism formulated around the turn of the century has stood the test of time and has served as a guide to action in recent decades. These decades however, have offered a rich and varied crop or terrorist campaigns on which certain observations can be made.
In the first place it is clear that there is a substantial strand of right wing and fascist terrorism. Examples include the Orange paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Bologna bombing in Italy, Oklahoma in the U.S, David Copeland of the Soho nail bomb, and Combat 18. But, obviously these present no theoretical problems for the left since we are opposed to everything about them. Other forms of terrorism divide broadly into two camps. On the one hand, mainly in the 1970s, there were various offshoots from the far left and the student revolt – the Weathermen in the U.S, the Angry Brigade in Britain, the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and so on. Typically these groups represented a frustrated, impatient reaction to the faltering of the mass movements from which they sprung. With the partial exception of the Red Brigades, they had no mass base and little capacity to inflict serious damage on the ruling class. Their main effect was to disorganise and disorient the left. It is clear that the job of revolutionary socialists is to do everything possible to discourage the development of such moods, but by argument and by ensuring the positive momentum of the mass struggle.
On the other hand, and much more important, have been various kinds of nationalist terrorist formations attempting to represent oppressed nationalities – the IRA, ETA, the different Palestinian organisations etc. These organisations usually do have a significant, if largely passive, social base, though it’s size can vary from being a small minority to a substantial majority of their respecting communities and, crucially, they usually have a base in a section of the national bourgeoisie. Essentially they are political formations who would like to be able to wage conventional war (or at least guerrilla war) but who are prevented from doing so by the overwhelming superiority of the oppressor’s military forces. Their class basis and their political outlook prevent them from looking to the working class as an alternative. Consequently they resort to terrorism.
Despite all the talk about Islamic fundamentalism Al Queda (like Hezbollah and Hamas) are basically spin-offs from Arab nationalism who have adopted Islamism in response to the past failures of secular nationalism and Stalinism. Their real aim, despite the rhetoric on both sides, is not to destroy the western way of life or overthrow capitalism but to drive out or limit imperialism in their part of the world.
Sometimes, and the Palestinian Intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, “condemn” Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance. Nevertheless the general force of the Marxist critique continues to apply. Therefore, Marxists within the context of uncompromising opposition to our “own” imperialist bourgeoisies must continue to make the case that ultimately the defeat of imperialism and the overthrow of capitalism are tasks that are bound together and that the only force that can complete these tasks is the international working class.
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