The Aesthetic Component of Socialism

by David Walsh

56 pages, Paperback

Reviews

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Film critic and Marxist polemicist David Walsh in this transcript of a lecture given at a Marxist conference in Australia sets out what he believes is the correct socialist critical stance to art in general. The lecture displays several things. First, it is a great example of the many divisions between different Marxist factions since Stalin took over the USSR. Second, it exemplifies a more or less forgotten current of Marxist thought. Third, it explains a way to return art criticism toward a more universalist and appreciative position than criticism has shown since "theory" took over the academies. Walsh is a devotee of Leon Trotsky, and most of Walsh's ideas about art criticism come from Trotsky's books "Literature and Revolution" and "Culture and Socialism." Seeing Trotsky as the true inheritor of Marx's ideas, Walsh brusquely dismisses other movements within Marxism and socialism, such as trade unionism, the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer, Adorno, Lukacs, Marcuse, etc.), academic Marxism (Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson), and most especially Stalinism, which he repeatedly refers to as "the bureaucracy" or the bureaucratic state. As Walsh sees it, all of these movements have not merely abandoned Marx's ideas, they have betrayed the Workers Revolution and 4th International. Where does art fit into a truly Marxist/Trotskyist ideology? Walsh spends some time dismissing the notion that art should be only realist and should only speak to the conditions of class and labor. Referring to Trotsky, Walsh argues that art gets at some human function, whether psychological or cultural or some combination of these, that transcends the immediate circumstances of its creation and of class and labor. Walsh insists, again referring to Trotsky, that even if the artwork contains elements of cultural oppression or is by a cultural elite (here he refers mostly to serf-owning Pushkin as an example), yet the art, if it is true art, is neither beyond the workers' understanding nor irrelevant to the workers' experience. Art has a place in the Revolution beyond being merely a cultural artifact (arguing here against academic Marxism) as an indelible and inextricable part of culture itself. The book contains a follow-up comment by Joanne Laurier that mostly reiterates Walsh's points without as much emphasis on Trotsky and the history of Marxist struggles with Marxism.