The POWER of IDEAS

THE TRUE FUNCTION OF ART IS SOCIAL CRITICISM

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Dinesh ^club

It can seriously be claimed for Karl Marx that his ideas had a greater influence in a shorter time than those of any other thinker in history. During his lifetime he was a little known, improvised intellectual, living on the charity of friends and spending his days reading and writing, often in the British Museum. Yet within 70 years of his death in 1883 something like a third of the entire human race was living under governments that called themselves by his name -- called themselves “Marxist”

This included all the countries of Eastern Europe, the whole of Russia, and the former Tsarist land empire, and the whole of China. Nothing like this had ever occurred before, nor (dare one say it?) is likely to happen again. Even the spread of early Christianity or Islam could not match it, nor could the spread of Buddhism during its expansionist phase. It is an utterly amazing phenomenon, more so in view of the fact that on the practical level the record of Marxism was one of persistent failure: the ideas conquered, yet the societies to which they gave rise either collapsed or detached themselves from Marxist policies.

Many leading figures on the a stage of recent history have been guided by Marxism. In Russia there was Lenin, followed by Trotsky and Stalin. In Yo=ugoslavia there was Titop and there was Mao Zedong in China, Ho Chi-minh in Viet Nam, Fidel Castro in Cuba these were people who changed the world.

During its period of ideological triumph Marxism had a global influence on the arts as well as politics. World-famous figures in the arts such as the playwrights Jean Paul Sartre (who was also a leading novelist and philosopher) and Bertolt Brecht (who was also a major poet) -- or among poets, Pablo Neruda, or among painters Pablo Picasso -- regarded themselves as Marxists or Communists; and some of their work is almost bound to survive.

More generally, there is a specifically Marxist view of the role of art in society that remains widely held and is powerfully operative in the world of today. It is that the true function of art is social criticism. According to this view, art should get people to understand in a deeper way than they do what is wrong with the society they live in, and with their own relationship to that society, and therefore with their own lives; and it should make them want to change society. This Marxists view art as a revolutionary instrument. Bad art is art which upholds the values of existing society, and tries to lull or deceive people into accepting those values. This view of the role of art, which was not at all widely held before Marx, comes close to being the prevailing orthodoxy in today’s world. It may be the last bastion of Marxism to fall. ` Page 171

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

2 years ago.

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