Letter to the Editors from the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard
Socialist Art
Concerning your article on “Art and Civilization” in the March issue, I thought you might be interested in hearing the following comments by way of a corollary.
One of the effects of the domination of society by one class (whether openly by it alone or by extensions) is to concentrate subjective expression as an abstractly separated aesthetic in a small number of individuals. Necessarily, of course, they must come from the ruling class. Art as such sets itself apart from the daily experience of society because the ruling class must have an idea point of reference, an orientation, a theoretical statement in which it is emotionally represented as “the good,” the beneficial, the healthy, the desirable, etc — this, as part of its self-identification as authority. Which means that high Art presupposes a system of organized deprivation, oppression and manipulation; Socialist art, on the contrary — or rather, art under Socialism — is based on the direct universality of all persons, and so is pre-eminently a practical art, an art of practice. Under these conditions, what is artistic cannot really be separated from what is “practical,” and indeed, art must automatically be a matter of social practice — a separate pole from the thinking activity as such, but no more a separate compartment of existence. It is therefore to be concluded that, under Socialism, theoretical art would tend to disappear and to be replaced by an “art of praxis”; under conditions of classical communism (as indicated by Marx), daily existence would itself contain all the characteristics which theoretical art today corrals together in a separate and isolated function.
Ronald Elbert
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