The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx

Mikhail Lifshitz, Ralph B. Winn, Angel Flores

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839747090
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, first published in 1933, is one of the major works of the Russian aesthetician and literary critic Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshitz. The author and editor of numerous books and articles in Marxist aesthetics, including 'Marx and Engels on Art' 1933, and 'Lenin and Culture and Art' 1938. Lifshitz has been since 1925 a teacher of philosophy and aesthetics in higher education institutes in Moscow. His writings have ranged from studies of contemporary bourgeois culture to the history of aesthetics and the relations between political commitment and artistic production. Since the war much of his work has concerned itself with modern Russian and European culture.The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, is notable for its originality of method in approaching the subject of Marx's aesthetics. Far from being a mere compendium of Marx's comments on art and literature, it treats his writing in this field as an integral part of the totality of his thought. In his complex but lucid argument Lifshitz demonstrates the relations between Marx's changing views of art and the development of his revolutionary theory – ranging from Marx's own early Romantic poetry to 'Capital'. In the process the book discusses some of Marx's comment on art, in notebooks and articles, which are still little known.-Print ed.

The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx

KARL MARX, THE GREATEST THINKER AND LEADER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY working-class movement, was born at a time when men’s interests had already begun to turn from literature and art to political economy and sociology.

Even the eighteenth century, that classic age of æsthetics, could not remained confined to abstractions such as “the beautiful” and “the sublime.” In the background of purely æsthetic discussions concerning the role of genius, the value of art, the imitation of nature, practical problems of the bourgeois-democratic movement intruded themselves with increasing insistence.

The great French Revolution marked a transition in this respect. The “æsthetic period” in the development of the third estate ended at that point where the interests of the bourgeoisie were severed from the interests of society as a whole. In the course of time, the attitude of the bourgeoisie towards art became frankly practical. Problems of art were everywhere bound up with problems of business and politics; the quest for æsthetic freedom was followed by the struggle for laissez-faire and protective tariffs. And once the bourgeoisie attained political dominance, problems of history and art lost all public significance, and became the property of a narrow circle of scholars.

It was at this time that the independent revolutionary movement of the proletariat began. The working class was not concerned about the shift of social interest from poetry to prose. Quite the contrary, the sooner the “beautiful” revolution could be succeeded by an “ugly” one (as Marx liked to put it), the sooner the surface glamor of democratic illusions could be stripped from material interests to reveal the open class struggle, the nearer the ultimate goal of the proletarian movement. The founders of Marxism sought the secret of the exploitation of the working class in the economy of bourgeois society; and it was in the conquest of political power, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, that they found the means of its emancipation. Thus the doctrine of the historical role of the proletariat as the gravediggers of capitalism and the creators of socialist society became the distinguishing feature of Marx’s outlook, the basic content of which was, of course, his economic theory. The “aesthetic period” ended with Goethe and Hegel.

Whatever the views of the founders of Marxism concerning artistic creation, they could not deal with it as extensively as the philosophers of the preceding period had traditionally done. In a sense it is no doubt to be regretted that Marx and Engels left no systematic interpretation of culture and art. However, their failure to do so only proves that the founders of international working-class solidarity were fully equal to their historical task, and concentrated all their thought and effort upon the fundamental problem of suffering and struggling humanity. The revolutionary problem of Marx and Engels consisted in finding a means of breaking away from purely ideological criticism of the social order, and in discovering the everyday causes of all manifestations of man’s activities.

In dealing with questions of art and culture, the importance of Marxist theory would be immense even if nothing were known about the aesthetic views of the founders of Marxism. Fortunately, however, this is not the case. In their works and correspondence there are many remarks and entire passages expressing their ideas on various phases of art and culture. As aphorisms, they are profound and significant, but, like all aphorisms, they admit of somewhat arbitrary interpretation.

It is at this point that the work of the scholar begins. He must connect these remarks with the general development of Marxism. Marx’s æsthetic views are integrally bound up with his revolutionary world outlook. They have more than a mere biographical significance, although for various reasons we possess only fragments of his thoughts on art. In this connection the earliest sources belong to that period of his political development which might be called the period of revolutionary democratism.

I.

ÆSTHETIC PROBLEMS OCCUPIED A CONSPICUOUS PLACE IN MARX’S early intellectual life. In his university days (1835-41) he studied, in addition to law and philosophy, the history of literature—chiefly ancient literature—as well as the classical German aestheticians. At the University of Bonn, which he entered in the autumn of 1835 as a student of criminal law, Marx devoted as much attention to the history of art and literature as to jurisprudence. He attended Schlegel’s lectures on ancient literature; he delved into ancient mythology, a subject lectured upon at that time by the famous Welcker; he studied modern art. At the University of Berlin, Marx attended only one course in the history of literature (Geppert’s lectures on Euripides, 1840-41), but his independent work in connection with creative art is of particular interest to us: among the books which he read in 1837 were Lessing’s Laocoön, Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art and Reimarus’ Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Trieben der Thiere. In the course of his transition to Hegelianism, Marx made a thorough study of Hegel’s Æsthetik, read, no doubt, during the summer of 1837.

Young Marx’s interest in art was not confined to theory, however. He made numerous attempts to write verse, which, with some exceptions, were not particularly successful. In Bonn he wrote a philosophical poem which he sent his father (1835). To his Berlin period belong whole exercise books of verse dedicated to his fiancée, as well as forty other poems, the first act of a dramatic fantasy, Oulanem, and several chapters of a humorous sketch, Scorpion und Felix,{1} written in the style of Sterne and Hoffmann.

As he himself confessed, Marx made determined efforts to suppress his inclination to write poetry; the temptation remained with him, however, for many years. As late as 1841 he published two of his early poems in “Athenäum.”{2} The conflict between the urge to write poetry and the stern necessity of finding an answer in the field of science to the problems of life constituted the first crisis in Marx’s intellectual development.

The outcome of this inner battle was a complete renunciation of poetry and a conversion to the philosophy of Hegel, with its doctrine of the inevitable decadence of art in modern times.

Twice before in the history of German social thought there had been grave doubts as to the possibility of genuine artistic creativity under the new bourgeois relations. Shortly before the French Revolution classical German philosophy had given expression to aesthetic criticism of reality, and similar motives reappear in the thirties and forties, in the radical-democratic movement culminating in Marx.

A society based upon the blind struggle of egoistic interests, a society whose development is subject solely to the mechanical “pressure of wants”—this “realm of necessity” as Schiller called it—cannot serve as the soil for genuine artistic productivity. Such was the opinion of radical German youth at the time when Hegel and his fellow-students from Tübingen cultivated their so-called “tree of freedom.” Their negative evaluation of actuality implied a criticism of the feudal world of privilege and the bourgeois domain of private property. In modern times, wrote young Hegel, folk poetry knows neither Harmodius nor Aristogeithon, “whose fame will be eternal because they slew the tyrants and gave their fellow citizens equal rights and equal laws.” Hegel contrasted the epoch of decline with the era of the ancient city-state, when “the iron bond of necessity was still garlanded with roses,” and the petty prosaic soul of private interest did not stifle the love for poetry and the appreciation of beauty. The paralyzing effects of the division of labor, the increasing mechanization of all forms of human activity, the engulfing of quality in quantity—all these typical characteristics of bourgeois society, Hegel recognized as inimical to poetry, even after he acknowledged capitalism to be the essential foundation of progress.

The “daydreaming terrorists” of the French Revolution (as Marx described the Jacobins) revolted against bourgeois economy not in order to abolish it, but rather in order to subordinate the material world of property to the political life of the citizens. The “daydreaming” element ...