Manifesto. Karl Marx

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      In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

      the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… [U]ninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…¹⁴

      And, in a system of commodity relationships, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” become “paid wage laborers” who must “sell themselves piecemeal” and “are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of exploitation, all the fluctuations of the market.” For the artist, this can also mean censorship by the market.

      Che elaborates this theme:

      The superstructure [of capitalism] imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents [I read this phrase as in ironic quotes] may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed… Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated.¹⁵

      But he also points to the blinders of earlier socialist revolutions-in-process, where “an exaggerated dogmatism” has tried to address the question of culture, demanding “the formally exact representation of nature” in art, followed by “a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.”¹⁶

      Che struggles here with the dialectic of art as simultaneously embodiment and shaper of consciousness, rooted in past forms and materials even as it gestures toward a still unachieved reality. What is to be the freedom of the artist in the new Cuba? It can be difficult, living under present conditions, to conceive of how a freedom expanded to all, to each and every person, might expand, not limit, the freedom of the imaginative artist, and the very possibilities of art. Difficult for those who are already artists — even as, outraged, we are forced to market ourselves piecemeal and struggle for what Marx called “disposable time”¹⁷ — to see the “invisible cage” within which we work. Difficult, too, perhaps, for the navigators of a new society to apprehend the peculiar, but not exceptional, labor of the artist.

      In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

      …to be precise, one should speak of a struggle for a “new culture” and not for a “new art” (in the immediate sense)… [P]erhaps it cannot even be said that the struggle is for a new artistic content apart from form because content cannot be considered abstractly, in separation from form. To fight for a new art would mean to fight to create new individual artists, which is absurd since artists cannot be created artificially. One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately engrained in “possible artists” and “possible works of art.”¹⁸

      The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a self-indulgent or self-deceiving life. Patience, realism and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. Yet all the writers in this book speak emotionally of the human condition and of human realization, not as “losing oneself” within a mass collectivity but as release from the frozen senses, the dumbed-down alienation of mass society: Marx of “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object”¹⁹; Rosa Luxemburg of “social happiness,” of the mass strike as “creativity,” of “freedom” as no “special privilege” and of the “love of every beautiful day.” And Che of the revolutionary as “moved by great feelings of love” though this may “seem ridiculous” in bourgeois politics; of the need for a “new human being” created through responsible participation in a society belonging to all.

      As Aijaz Ahmad has written, “The first resource of hope is memory itself.”²⁰ Marxism is founded on the historical memory of how existing, apparently immutable, human relationships came to be as they are. In the essays that follow we hear voices from three different generations of people who believed, as recent enormous antiwar and anti-imperialist gatherings on every continent have been asserting, that “another world is possible.” If for some today this still only means trying to regulate and refurbish the runaway engine of capitalism, for an ever-growing number of others it means changing the direction of the journey, toward an utterly different, still-forming reality. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

       Adrienne Rich

       March 2004

      1. see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p53.

      2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” Che Guevara Reader, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p115.

      3. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p70.

      4. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p35.

      5. “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” Che Guevara Reader, p123.

      6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed., (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p27.

      7. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p71.

      8. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p126.

      9. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p128.

      10. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorated Fidel’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks.

      11. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p154.

      12. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p328.

      13. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p155.

      14. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p33.

      15. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p161.

      16. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p162.

      17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus, (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p708.

      18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., tr. William Boelhower, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p98.

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