Diane Fieldes in R: Capitalism thwarts and stunts the creativity of human beings. It robs the mass of the population of control over their own labour, and therefore over production generally. It denies the vast majority of people creative expression in their daily work lives, and this affects all of life. Workers are robbed not just of artistic creativity but even of our potential to be an audience for art. Yet there is a constant struggle to free humanity’s potential. And there have always been troublesome artists and troublesome art. The contradictions of capitalism mean that it is possible, at least to some extent, for artistic expression to develop in opposition to the dominant trajectory of society. Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Motto” makes the point:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
But at high points of struggle, the possibilities of artistic expression expand exponentially. One of the chief aims of socialist revolution, according to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, is the “awakening of human personality in the masses – who were supposed to possess no personality”.
In 1845 in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels summarised the reasons social revolution is necessary: “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because only in a revolution can the class overthrowing it succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”.
The first reason is obvious: ruling classes do not volunteer to depart. The second goes to the heart of revolutionary socialism: the idea that “the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself”. Under capitalism, workers’ daily experience of subordination limits us in a thousand different ways. Revolutionary situations, with their demonstration of workers’ collective power, transform consciousness as well as laying the foundations for a new form of society in which all social, economic and political life is based on mass decision making and control.
Filming the Russian Revolution
The movies directed by Sergei Eisenstein during the 1920s provide much of the defining imagery of the Russian Revolution. According to cinema theorist Peter Wollen, the extraordinary upheavals of the 1917 revolution, when Eisenstein was 19, brought his interest in art to fruition:
“He was not prepared for the overthrow of the existing order of society, the collapse of his ideology and the dissolution of his family … The revolution destroyed him, smashed the co-ordinates of his life, but it also gave him the opportunity to produce himself anew … [H]e was compelled to become an intellectual, to construct for himself a new world-view, a new ideological conception both of society and art … [W]e cannot separate the ideas which he developed from the matrix in which they were formed, the matrix of the Bolshevik Revolution.”
None of this happened overnight. Eisenstein’s childhood and youth (he was born in 1898) were steeped in accounts of the 1905 Revolution, and in particular “Bloody Sunday”, when troops opened fire upon a peaceful demonstration at the tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Because of “the wild outburst of reaction and repression”, he wrote, “the brutality in my pictures is indissolubly tied up with the theme of social injustice, and revolt against it”.
Anna Chen, reviewing the centenary edition of his films, says: “Eisenstein developed his cinematographic theory which he would put into practice in making his films. Not only should there be conflict between shots, there should also be conflict within the frame at every level … Eisenstein was building a cinematic art with a painter’s eye and the method of an engineer. In him, music, literature, painting and science all converged.”
Eisenstein’s studies at the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd were ended by the 1917 revolution. Any thoughts of renewing them were rapidly eclipsed by the unleashing of mass creativity that followed. In the revolutionary years Eisenstein spent time in the Petrograd militia, as a cartoonist for the Petersburgskaya Gazeta, decorating the agitprop trains leaving for the front, and as an engineer in the Red Army during the civil war to defend the revolution.
His three great films about the Russian Revolution (Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October) were all made between 1924 and 1928, before Stalin had consolidated his power and thereby gained an iron grip on the arts (and everything else). The combined high point of both revolutionary politics and art is reflected in those films, so much so that in Germany the armed forces were forbidden to see Potemkin for fear of mutiny. So too were audiences in Pennsylvania in the US, on the grounds that it gave sailors “a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny”. In France the authorities burnt all copies they could find, and it was banned in Britain until 1954.
Eisenstein’s legacy is inseparable from the Russian Revolution, without which we might never have heard of him. He was at his most inventive and innovative during the initial throes of the revolution, in unprecedented conditions of mass creative liberation. Notably, his later films are failures, artistically as well as politically, turgid and hackneyed products of the Stalinist counter-revolution.
There is nothing romanticised about this. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in 1919 was scathing of those who “imagined socialism could be built by men of a new type, that first they would train good, pure and splendidly educated people, and these would build socialism”. Instead, he argued, “we want to build socialism with the aid of those men and women who grew up under capitalism, were depraved and corrupted by capitalism, but steeled for the struggle by capitalism …
“[R]evolutionary periods … are distinguished by wider, richer, more deliberate, more methodical, more systematic, more courageous and more vivid making of history than periods of philistine … reformist progress … in short, when the intellect and reason of millions of downtrodden people awaken not only to read books, but for action, vital human action, to make history.”
‘Imagination in power’, France 1968
In May 1968, frustration over unemployment and poverty under the French conservative government of general Charles de Gaulle boiled over on the campuses, starting with the Sorbonne, where student expectations of their education and future working lives were being dashed. Student uprisings eventually escalated to a national general strike involving millions of workers.
This challenge to capitalism sparked a revolutionary change in both popular and high culture.
Footballers occupied the national headquarters of the French Football Federation, erecting a red flag and a sign saying “football for the footballers” once they had ejected the general secretary. Three hundred workers at the Folies Bergère (dancers, stage hands and dressing room staff) struck and occupied the theatre. Orchestras went on strike, the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled, the Odeon theatre was occupied and turned into a permanent forum under the slogan, “When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, all bourgeois theatres must become national assemblies.”
Significantly, the movement began to create its own culture. Striking television workers, from technicians to journalists, produced films to be shown at political meetings. Art students established Atelier Populaire (the Popular Workshop), which produced 100,000 copies of 350 different posters.
In solidarity with the students at the Sorbonne, art students at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts also went on strike, occupying the studios and print workshops. These worked 24 hours a day producing a mass of posters and wall newspapers that were then pasted up in the streets in support of the revolt in the workplaces. As art erupted in the public sphere, it was not only the students who cried out “All power to the imagination!” Striking workers became part of the workshops’ artistic debates and production.
The posters were distributed all over Paris. Reflections of the struggle were on the streets almost instantly. Art theorist Kristin Ross points out the politics of the simple, direct artistic style adopted by the workshops: “Only the most ‘immediate’ of artistic techniques … could keep up with the speed of [this] event … To say this is … to point out how much politics was exerting a magnetic pull on culture, yanking it out of its specific and specialised realm.”
The original intent had been for the posters to be sold to raise money for the revolutionary movements. Yet before they could get to the gallery, the copies were taken from the arms of the student carrying them and plastered on the first available wall.
Some posters spoke against the government-regulated communication network, ORTF (Office de Radio Télévision Français) and drew attention to the false information being disseminated – and the struggle by the workers there. They stood against racism. Others exposed the otherwise hidden process of exploitation. They recognised workers’ collective power. They noted the repressive role of the police for capitalism.
Chilean murals 1970-73
In Chile’s 1970 election campaign, it was said that the National Party’s Jorge Alessandri had the press, the elite and the US embassy; Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic had the government apparatus, the church and the party faithful; but Popular Unity’s Salvador Allende had the walls, streets and slums.
More here.
