Marxism and art: unshackling culture from capitalism

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Under capitalism, art and culture are nothing but business, to be exploited for profit. Meanwhile, the finest artistic accomplishments of humanity are locked up in the private vaults of the wealthy, or behind the gilded doors of expensive galleries and theatres – what Trotsky called the “concentration camps of the mind.”

The vast majority of people are prevented from producing art, forced to devote the bulk of their time toiling for a parasitic few, with barely enough time left over for rest. Expensive art colleges and elitist salons ensure the working class is kept out of ‘high’ culture, while the need to make a living prevents artists from experimenting and developing their craft.

The crisis of capitalism is also a crisis of culture: as we see in the endless parade of near-identical Hollywood superhero blockbusters, and stagnation in one discipline after another: from literature, to theatre, to music. Marxists’ fight for revolution is also a fight to liberate art from the profit motive, harnessing the whole of humanity’s creative potential.

Transcription

Alan: At my time of life there aren’t many things that make me angry – but there is one thing that makes me very angry indeed. And that’s when I hear people – people who call themselves Marxists – saying things like “the workers are not interested in art and culture”. What we have here is the mentality not of the worker at all, but the mentality of an ignorant and pretentious petty-bourgeois snob; somebody who knows absolutely nothing about the working class or how it lives, feels, or thinks.

Now it is true that we live in a barbarous class society which tends to produce a race of barbarians. I include in that number not least the barbarians with university degrees in their pockets. And in this barbarous class society the worker is reduced to the role of a slave. The Romans used to describe it as instrumentum vocale; a tool with a voice, not a human being at all. And slaves are not required to think or feel. But you see, comrades, it is the essence of a revolution for the workers to break free from a slave mentality in moving to take the running of society into their hands. The masses suddenly begin to feel that they’re not just robots or beasts of burden, but free men and women.

Today is Sunday, isn’t it? I hasten to assure the comrades that I am a Marxist, and therefore an irreconcilable atheist; but I have read the bible and it contains some very interesting ideas. The Christians say that in order to accept the Christian religion you must be born again. That’s an interesting idea. You see, the working class is born again in a revolution. Maybe you’ve never lived through a revolution (I’ve seen several in my time), but the same miraculous transformation you can see actually in any strike. If you think about it, a strike is really a revolution in embryo; on a small scale. And yes, one can observe the very same processes taking place in any strike. To use a Hegelian expression, it's a process whereby the working class changes from ‘a class-in-itself’ into ‘a class in-and-for-itself. That is to say, they make real what was always there potentially. And ordinary workers can achieve things that they never dreamed they were capable of. You don't believe me? Speak to any worker that’s participated in a strike; particularly a big strike like the miner’s strike in Britain.

Now, I’m a great admirer of the film Spartacus. I know there are some petty-bourgeois idiots who try to belittle this film; which shows that they understand nothing, either about the film itself or about what a revolution is. There’s a marvellous scene in this film in which Spartacus – the leader of the great slave revolt – in a conversation with his beloved wife, Varinia (another slave) confesses that in spite of all his victories on the battlefield, he still feels that he has achieved nothing because he cannot read and write. He begs Varinia, who is literate, to teach him to read. Now of course you will tell me, quite rightly, that this conversation never actually took place. Of course it didn’t; It’s a piece of artistic licence. And yet it expresses a very great truth about the nature of a revolution. In a revolution the masses aspire to great things. They suddenly become aware that they’ve been kept in ignorance by their masters and they have a burning desire to know. You know what that is? I’ll tell you what that is. That is the very essence of a revolution; and whoever does not understand this can never be considered a revolutionary but merely an ignorant philistine.

You can see this process of liberation – and that is indeed what it is – in every great revolution in history. It was summed up brilliantly in the immortal lines of the young English poet Wordsworth, who articulated his own feelings on the great French Revolution – which he personally experienced – with the following: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” You see, in order to carry out the socialist revolution (that is to say, the socialist reconstruction of society) the masses must be inspired by a great idea. They have to look beyond the immediate and see before them a new horizon, a new and better world; something higher than themselves, something that’s really worth fighting for and, if necessary, giving their lives for.

Comrades, what are we really fighting for? A couple of euros on the pay packet, or a shorter working day? Better housing, perhaps? A better health service? Yes, we fight for those things of course – that goes without saying. But we’re fighting for much more than that; we are fighting to build a paradise in this world – that’s what we’re fighting for. Neither more nor less. And that cannot be reduced, I’m very sorry to tell these smart guys, to a question of a higher wage or a shorter working day – important though such immediate and concrete demands may be. They are not our final goal.

As it’s Sunday, you’ll forgive me for quoting the Bible. The Bible says: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” my friends. “Man shall not live by bread alone”. And to reduce the revolutionary struggle for socialism to what are called bread-and-butter practical issues is to trivialise our struggle. As a matter of fact, it is to destroy it; because in the final analysis, if we’re going to reduce our struggle to ‘practical demands’ (which, by the way, was the policy of Eduard Bernstein, the founder of revisionism. Lenin rightly poured scorn on this contemptible rubbish), this is to reduce the class struggle to the reformist notion of obtaining more acceptable conditions of life under capitalism. That’s what it means: to reduce the working class to the passive role of contented slaves. The working class must never accept that role. The great historical task of the proletariat is to fight for the total abolition of slavery in all its aspects, not just the obvious ones; not just the physical slavery of poverty, but the mental and spiritual slavery that stultifies human development and denies men and women the possibility of ever becoming free human beings.

Now, it’s true of course that a slave can become accustomed to his or her chains. Workers can become accustomed to living in bad housing, eating bad food, watching bad programmes on television, dare I say it, listening to awfully bad music. That is because they’re enslaved to the humiliating division between mental and manual labour, and I’ll come back to the historical origins of this if I have time later on. This idea, which has been present for thousands of years, is that there are two kinds of people: those who think and know and command, and those who do not think at all, but only work and obey. To use the Bible’s expression: “the hewers of wood and the drawers of water”. But the eruption of the masses on the stage of history, their active intervention in politics (i.e. a revolution), signifies a sharp break with so-called normal life. Men and women who are normally content to leave their individual destinies in the hands of other people, the so-called experts (the members of parliaments, the councillors, the economists, the bureaucrats, the university professors; all those people who allegedly know best how to run society), suddenly decide that they will henceforth administer their own affairs and determine their own destinies. That is the essence of a revolution.

Marx and Engels long ago explained that in any society where art, science, and government are the monopoly of a few, the latter will always use and abuse its privilege in its own interest. But the most typical manifestation of a revolution, as I said, is precisely this thirst to know and to understand, and also for the masses to feel themselves as human beings and not slaves or animals. This is where art becomes fused with revolution, and becomes its very heart and soul. But first of all there's a question that must be asked: is art necessary?

Now some decades ago the Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer wrote a very interesting book called The Necessity of Art. I recommend that book. But is art really necessary? Most people would answer in the negative, I’m sure. I can understand that. If you enter most houses, people you know, you’ll find probably paintings on the wall. Are these paintings necessary? Well not really, because nobody ever looks at them. They might as well be there as not there, so therefore they’re not necessary.

Yet, in a deeper sense, art has always played a very fundamental role in the development of our species. In fact, you might say that art serves to define what is to be human. It’s the existence of art which separates us from other species in the animal world. Now, that’s not to say that there isn't some kind of aesthetic sense present in lower animals. For example, there’s a bird called the bowerbird which displays the most elaborate interest in designing a nest for the purpose of mating; for the purpose of attracting the opposite sex. So you could argue that some aesthetic sense is present at least. And I noticed that, recently, archaeological discoveries have revived interest in the theory that the Neanderthals possessed a kind of art that predates Homo sapiens sapiens by a long time. That may indeed be the case. But in all these cases, what we see is not developed in any sense that we would understand it. It is, however, an embryonic anticipation, out of which real art could and did develop.

The real origins of art can be traced to the cave art of the Palaeolithic period. Particularly in the spectacular paintings found in places like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. If my memory serves me correctly, these remarkable paintings were made between twenty-nine thousand and thirty-two thousand years ago. Now this art tells us a lot about the people who made it, but there are many strange things about it also. For example, where would you expect this art to be found? Logically it should be near the mouth of the cave where there's more daylight. That’s the area where people would have lived, part of the time at least. Certainly not the dark and dangerous interiors of the cave. But no, these paintings are always found in the deepest, most remote parts of the cave, very difficult to access. So whatever the purpose of this art was, it certainly was not a mere ornament; it was something profoundly important to the community at large.

Now just imagine the scene. A man (or a woman – we don’t know – because there is definite evidence that women also played the role of shamans, the equivalent of ritual priestesses); but this person, crawling on their belly, in complete darkness, with only a flickering lamp of burning animal fat to light their way. Struggling, you could say, from darkness to light. Now isn’t that really striking as a metaphor for the whole of human history: our constant struggle from darkness to light? And at the end of it these unknown individuals – we don’t know their names, but they may have been people who excelled at certain skills – were capable of producing the most fabulous art. But what strikes one about this art is that it is essentially social and collective, not personal.

And what about its content? That's an interesting point. The first thing to note is what we do not find. No trees, flowers or plants of any sort, only animals. And not just any animals: bulls, woolly mammoths, etcetera. These were the animals that were hunted for food; to keep people alive. And these animals were depicted with great skill, tremendous skill. Obviously painted by people with an intimate knowledge of their anatomy. I would actually say that in their amazing realism these paintings of animals have never really been improved upon. If I remember correctly, Picasso said, upon seeing these things: “Well, we have nothing to teach them”. But there’s another strange absence here, isn’t there? No human beings, or hardly any. Those that appear are carelessly painted, like a child’s picture of matchstick men. Now that’s obviously not a lack of skill; it was because they weren’t seen as important.

There is an exception, of course: a mysterious figure which seems to be human but appears to be wearing an animal headdress – most likely a shaman. Now, probably what this art represents is sympathetic magic. This is one of the earliest forms of religion in which men and women tried to gain control over their environment through a series of rituals. Clearly these paintings played a role in such rituals, probably accompanied with dancing and music or drums. That of course has been lost; we can only imagine that. But this was definitely religion involving the whole community. Organised religion was unknown. That came later in the period which we will now consider, known as the Neolithic period.

Now the great Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe (who, by the way, was a Marxist – not many people know that) wrote some very good books which I recommend. One of them is What Happened in History? and the other is Man Makes Himself – which is a phrase from Marx, by the way. It was Gordon Childe who invented the expression “The Neolithic Revolution”. This was arguably the greatest revolution in history. It represents, on the one hand, the transition from simple hunter-gathering societies (which were of the Palaeolithic time) to a more complex form of society based on farming.

This great revolution began in the Middle East twelve thousand years ago, and represents a tremendous revolution in human society and culture. You see, the rise of agriculture forced men and women to understand nature more clearly. The advances of the productive forces actually permitted men and women to conquer and subdue the forces of nature in practice through the application of collective labour on a grand scale. The new conditions of production gave men and women more time for complex analytical thought; to contemplate the workings of nature, to follow the movements of the stars and the planets. And the mysteries of life and death appeared to men’s minds in a different light.

So, on the one hand, it was a huge advance. But it also represented an enormous step back; when the old egalitarian, communistic society was overthrown by private property and the division of societies into classes. Nevertheless it was this division between mental and manual labour that permitted a colossal development of culture: of science, of art, of architecture (the pyramids, for example). And it was Aristotle who wrote in The Metaphysics (a profoundly materialistic explanation of culture): “Man begins to philosophise when the needs of life are provided”. Consequently, astronomy and mathematics were discovered in Egypt because the priests did not have to work: simple as that. And that’s been the case for the last ten thousand years.

Now here we have the first great instance of alienation. Man’s essence, the human essence is alienated in a double or triple sense. First of all, private property signifies the alienation of one’s product, which is appropriated by another. Secondly, the individual’s control over life and destiny is appropriated by the state, which appears for the first time – ultimately in the person of the king or the pharaoh. And last but not least, alienation is carried over from this life to the next. The inner being – the soul as it was known – of all men and women is appropriated by the deities of the next world, whose good will must be constantly obtained through prayers and sacrifice. And here we have the origins of organised religion, for the first time. The priest caste possessed a monopoly of knowledge and of power. Just as the services of the monarch formed the basis of the wealth of the upper class – of mandarins and nobles – so the sacrifices to the gods formed the basis of the wealth and power of the priest caste, which interposed itself between the people and the gods or the goddesses.

Now, all of this finds its reflection in art. Let us take Egyptian art as the clearest example. I should add of course here that great art is by no means confined to Europe. Egypt is not in Europe, of course, it’s in Africa, and you also have great art in India, Cambodia, and in other parts of Asia which displayed tremendous energy, exuberance, and vitality. China and Japan approved great masterpieces, watercolours for example – natural scenes that have never been equaled in my view. And let’s not forget that it was the Arabs in Spain that kept the lamp of learning burning when the rest of Europe was plunged into the spiritual blackness of the dark ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. The great achievements of these unfortunately fall outside the scope of the present lecture.

But we must not forget that it was the Middle East where civilisation was born. There could be no Greek art without Egyptian and Babylonian art, and no Greek Science without Egyptian and Babylonian science. Now, Egyptian art speaks to us, you know. It's an art of the message; a very clear and obvious message. If you come to London and go to the British Museum you will find in one of the Egyptian rooms the fragments of a gigantic statue of a pharaoh (I’ve forgotten which one, maybe Ramesses II). But just the forearm alone is considerably bigger than a man’s body. What's the message of this art? It’s speaking to us: it says “I am big, you are small”; “I am all-powerful, you are weak and impotent”; “I am everything, you are nothing”. And the same message, by the way, has been repeated many times in the history of art.

Now, Egyptian art achieved many remarkable things, it’s true. But there is something lacking in it. Let’s take the statues for instance. They’re extremely stiff and lifeless, and almost all of them have the body of a human being and the head of an animal or a bird. So this is art which has not yet attained the level of true humanity, and it didn’t change fundamentally for thousands of years. Why? Because this is not free art; it’s entirely bound by the fetters of religion – by the priest caste.

Now with Greek art we feel more at home, should we say. Look at these wonderful statues of the human form. Again I think it's never been surpassed. Possibly in the Renaissance they came close to it. But the rigidity of Egyptian statues has disappeared altogether and for the first time we’re left face to face with the human form; the human body, in all its naked glory. The cult of the human body begins with the male form, and that's not an accident. This was a warrior society: as you find in the writings of Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And therefore the cult of the warrior was paramount. In the national museum in Athens, Greece, there’s a remarkable statue of Poseidon, the sea god. He’s in the act of throwing a spear, or maybe a trident. This statue is so alive: the tension in the muscles, the balance, the extreme concentration is so perfectly captured that you’d think it was alive. In these marvellous statues we see the contours of every muscle, every bone, indicating that the Greeks had a very exact idea of human anatomy. And yet, if you think about it, this art cannot be properly described as realistic. I wish I had a body like that, but that’s another matter.

What it really represents is an idealisation of the male body. It corresponds to the rise of idealism in Greek philosophy. This was a period of war, civil strife and also revolution. In Athens, above all, one tyrant succeeded another until the revolution of 508 BC, the first recorded popular revolution in history. And following this revolution, Athens blossomed. Its culture and art underwent a renaissance based upon economic prosperity, which was the real basis of Athenian power. This is art that breathes a new spirit, the spirit of Athenian democracy. But you must never forget that the basis of this art was slavery. Athens was a wonderful democracy for the free population, but it wasn’t so for the slaves, or for women, who also had no rights. The fact that all of culture is based on slavery has always been the case – of art and culture in general.

If we come to Roman art, this is heavily dependent on Greek art. I don’t think it really made any original contribution, except that it did develop a certain realism later on in the republic. But the fall of the Roman Empire undoubtedly signified a colossal retrogression of culture at all levels. In saying this, I’m well aware that this view is no longer fashionable due to the postmodernist mania that is sweeping academia – which persists in telling us that there’s no such thing as progress, and that one society is as good as another. Well, I think the historical record definitely speaks against them, and this is easy to explain from a Marxist point of view. Culture has a material base, and if you destroy the material base you destroy culture: simple as that. It would seem they are trying to revive the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages was a great time to be alive according to these nitwits. Look at the Vikings: they had very nice jewellery and very clever ships. They also had very sharp swords and battle axes for cutting people in two, but there we are. What’s the meaning of this praise of barbarism that’s become the fashion? I think we’re heading for barbarism now so they’re just getting us ready for it. Look, I’ll give you just one example. A thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, the only half-decent roads in Europe were Roman roads. The art of road building had been lost, along with most of the other arts.

It was also from the Dark Ages that feudal society eventually emerged, which destroyed all the glorious achievements of the ancient world and submitted us to the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church for a thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages, all cultural life was dominated by the dictatorship of the Church. The proper subject of art was God, not man; and least of all women, who were regarded as the source of all evil, through the concept of original sin. The great cathedrals which dominated the landscape were constructed in the same way as the Egyptian pyramids and so on, to emphasise the smallness and insignificance of real men and women. You entered into these dark buildings, where the only light came from stained glass windows depicting the lives and torments of saints and martyrs. And the soaring towers, the vaults, direct your eyes upwards, away from this sinful world and towards heaven. Now, this was a very dark period indeed, in which human beings were taught to despise the real world, despise their flesh, despise their bodies, despise sex and dedicate all their lives to one thing: death.

But even here, in this cultural desert, gradually a new spirit began to penetrate this world. You see it in art: for the first time you see the Virgin Mary holding a real baby, and that’s not an accident. It was a period in which the Church was already in crisis; and by the end of the Middle Ages it was hated, frankly. I quote: a Catholic historian notes “a revolutionary spirit of hatred of the church and the clergy has taken hold of the masses in various parts of Germany”. The cry “death to the priests,” which had long been whispered in secret, was now the slogan of the day. And of course this culminated in the great schism provoked by Martin Luther. That was a revolution; the reformation was a revolution, a bourgeois revolution. It reflects the rise of a new middle class, of the bourgeoisie in the cities and the towns. Luther himself played a great cultural role translating the Bible into German, and wrote hymns which were revolutionary songs, actually. The greatest one of course was Ein Feste Burg (A Strong Fortress) which Engels describes as “The Marseillaise of the 16th century”. And part of this rise of a new class was a new spirit called the Renaissance, which means the rebirth.

From about 1420, art became more realistic; the faces are recognizable individuals. It is the spirit of a new age: a bourgeois age, the age of the individual. It was a genuine revolution in art, first of all in Italy and Flanders. I can’t go into details but you have genius. And when Constantinople, which was the last remnant of the Roman Empire, was overturned by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, there was a flood of statues and manuscripts, documents and all sorts, which transformed the art world. It revolutionised painting and sculpture, with the great works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others.

Now it’s interesting to note that one of the high points of the Renaissance took place in the Netherlands; and people don’t realise that the first bourgeois revolution didn’t take place in England, it took place in Holland. It took the form of a war of national liberation of the Dutch protestants against Catholic Spain, a very violent and bloody affair. But the victory of Holland meant the victory of the bourgeois revolution, which again meant a victory in art. Put it this way, only in 17th century Holland could a miller’s son aspire to become a famous painter. Rembrandt’s father was a miller; his brothers were a baker and a shoemaker. So you have this great art coming from the Netherlands.

Then you had the English revolution, of course, which warrants a separate subject. From this period you had the great poet John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost; who was not just a great poet, he was also an active revolutionary – a member of Cromwell’s revolutionary government. But of course in many parts of Europe there hadn't yet been a bourgeois revolution: you had the absolute monarchies. Especially in France, the monarchy of Louis XIV; and that had its own art. You see, art always reflects the existing society one way or the other. That was classicism, a very rigid, stylised form of art. Absolutism imposed rigid rules on everything, even on nature. Comrades, if you’ve been to France perhaps you’ve visited the gardens of Versailles. That’s the court of Louis XIV. What do you notice about these gardens? Geometry, straight lines! But there are no straight lines in nature. And what these vast gardens, with their fountains and their statues, are saying to us is: “we are so powerful we can control nature”. That’s what they thought, but unfortunately they were mistaken. The whole thing was eventually overthrown, blown apart, by one of the greatest revolutions in history: the French revolution. Now that again would be a subject in itself. But the French revolution opened a whole new vista for human culture, and not just in France. Not just in art either, but in literature, in poetry, in music.

It had a big effect on someone like Beethoven, for example, and in general it was the beginning of the romantic movement in the 19th century. By the way, Wagner has a very bad name (I’m sure John McInally will want to speak on this). When somebody mentions the word Wagner, what do you think of immediately? You think of Hitler and the Nazis, don’t you? Poor Wagner, it was not his fault that Hitler liked his operas. Would it surprise you to know that Wagner was a personal friend of the anarchist Bakunin? He was very much under Bakunin’s influence. He wrote a work called Art and Revolution in which he declares himself to be a follower of Feuerbach. And Wagner personally participated in the uprising in Dresden in 1849 and had to flee for his life. There were a lot of artists and poets and musicians at that time who were very sympathetic to the revolution. But it is always the same with the intellectuals, you know, with a few exceptions. When the revolution ebbs they become depressed and withdraw into themselves.

But you know, “Revolution,” Trotsky said, “is the locomotive of history”. Nowadays of course, it’s fashionable for all these bourgeois, these scoundrels, to portray the Bolsheviks as blood-thirsty monsters bent on the destruction of all civilisation and human values. And that’s entirely false. The Bolshevik revolution was the greatest single event in human history. It emancipated millions of people. Not just the workers and peasants, but it attracted the best elements among the intelligentsia, the artists, and so on. They were drawn to the revolution; and far from being a totalitarian wilderness, which is what they try to portray, revolutionary Russia was buzzing with excitement, with all kinds of schools of art, literature, and music contending with each other. It produced wonderful composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich, and many others. Theatres and opera houses were full of workers and soldiers eagerly drinking in a culture and a world which was completely unknown to them.

The poetry of Mayakovsky, who was a member of the Bolshevik party, and also his posters, played a significant role in the revolution. Later on he committed suicide in protest against the encroachments of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which suffocated art just as it suffocated Soviet democracy itself. Now it goes without saying that totalitarianism and bureaucracy are entirely destructive of art. The suicide of Mayakovsky in 1930 marks a turning point, and his suicide note was the tragic epitaph on the tomb of revolutionary art.

Incidentally, Trotsky was the Marxist theoretician who showed the greatest interest in art, and a couple years before he was murdered – in a very critical stage for the world revolution – he joined together with the French surrealist author Andre Breton to write a revolutionary manifesto for the freedom of art. You think Trotsky was wasting his time doing this? Can you not see that this great Marxist understood the necessity of a revolutionary approach to art? And of course it’s in our interest to win over the best of the intellectuals, the best of the artists. But we can’t expect them to be interested in our ideas if we don’t express an interest in their ideas.

But what about art today? Let's begin to draw the threads together. I'm sorry if you feel a little bit dizzy about this tour from the Palaeolithic to modern times, but there you are. Now, as I’ve explained, in its youth, in its revolutionary period, the bourgeoisie played a progressive role in pushing back the horizons of human culture. What’s their position now, in the period of senile decay of capitalism? The bourgeoisie is engaged in a wholesale destruction of culture. Its entire being is centred on money-grabbing in its narrowest and most repulsive sense. A poverty of ideas, a total lack of any originality in content, capable of producing only a sense of tedium and disgust in any minimally cultivated mind. Big business gives the public what it wants, that’s what it is. In reality, capital gives the public what it thinks that they should have: a steady diet of rubbish, sex, sport, and scandal, with a minimum of politics and culture. A diet that’s neatly tailored to the requirements of the bankers and capitalists. It's the modern equivalent of bread and circuses of the Romans – except there’s not much bread, it seems.

But even in a slave society, bread alone was never sufficient to keep the masses in a state of obedient stupor. And art today has become reduced to the level of a mere commodity. More than that; the artists themselves have been reduced to mere commodities. You know, the wonderful painter Vincent Van Gogh never sold a single painting during his lifetime, and he died in abject poverty; as did Vermeer and many others like him. Now, of course, these paintings, if you can get hold of them, sell for astronomical sums. I was watching a terrible program on the TV the other night and the figure emerged that the art market – that’s what they call it – now has a total value estimated at $56 billion. With such profits to be made from art, why should anyone in their right mind bother with productive investment? The so-called art market is only an extreme manifestation of the parasitic nature of capitalism in its phase of decay. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on rubbish, actually. These insane sums of money bear absolutely no relation to the intrinsic artistic value of the works on sale. They are objects of speculation, neither more nor less. And most of them end up locked up in the vaults of banks, never to be seen.

Of course, quite a few of them lose nothing by remaining unseen, since their artistic value is nil. Like the works of the American pop artist Jeff Koons, for example. Typical of his work is a statue called Michael Jackson and Bubbles. It depicts the pop singer in the company of a monkey. The initial purchase price of this masterpiece in 1991 was a mere $250,000. It was later sold on for $5.6 million. Now, it would probably sell for twice or three times that amount. In my opinion if the entire production of Mr. Koons were to be locked up in a vault forever it wouldn't be a loss to anybody. But among the works thus disposed of are some real treasures of world art. In this way, the human race is being robbed of a precious part of our heritage. Now some years ago I wrote an article in which I said the following: “great art must be the voice of suffering humanity”. I stand by that. I firmly believe that great art must have something important to say, like the wonderful work of Pablo Picasso, Guernica. This is an astounding work of art: a cry from the heart, a shattering denunciation of the cruelty of war and of fascist barbarism.

Lenin said that capitalism was horror without end; and with all the horrors and sufferings that the human race is suffering today, what does art have to say about it? Where can one find the equivalent of Goya’s Disasters of War or his black period? Nowhere. Instead we have what? An unmade bed, or a shark in formaldehyde. We know what Picasso’s Guernica represents and we know what Goya’s works represent. What does a shark in formaldehyde represent? It represents a shark in formaldehyde, nothing more and nothing less. Such is the blind alley of spiritual emptiness and artistic triviality into which the senile degeneracy of capitalism has plunged the human race. I believe it was Engels who said that in any society in which art, science, and government were in the hands of the few, that few will abuse its position to establish a cultural, political, and moral dictatorship over the rest of society. Art and science require freedom in order to develop, complete freedom.

Art must oppose the yoke of tyranny in all its forms – not just the policeman with his baton and his handcuffs, and not only the soulless bureaucrat with his rulebook in his hand (not to mention the spiritual policeman of the church), but also the dictatorship of capital, which is the mother and father of all forms of oppression, both material and spiritual. Real art, comrades, is always revolutionary by its very nature. In the 18th century, the road to the great French revolution was prepared by the enlightenment. In just the same way, the road to the socialist revolution will be paved by a struggle to defend the conquests of art and culture against the threat posed by the decay of the degeneration of capitalism. Only when society breaks the suffocating stranglehold of rent, interest, and profit will the material conditions be created for the attainment of genuine freedom, for the free development of human beings. Therefore the revolutionary struggle against capitalism is at the same time a remorseless struggle against capitalist degeneration, and in defence of human civilisation – and its highest and most noble manifestation: art and culture.