Last week’s Scottish parliamentary election results demonstrated the continuing dominance of the SNP over Scottish politics, as the party won the largest number of seats – 63 out of 129 – and secured 47% and 42% of the constituency and list votes respectively. Continue reading Holyrood 2016: What happened to Labour?
“We don’t have a say in the referendum, but the politicians and press talk about us as if we are an underclass who cannot read – and it’s terrifying”
A Polish journalist based in London, Jacob Krupa expresses feelings shared by many EU migrants in the run up to June’s Brexit referendum. Continue reading Open Borders Now! The EU referendum, xenophobia, and the free movement of peoples
Is it true then that we are doomed to live in a state that resembles nothing more than barbarism – an unstable economic system that will forever go through booms and busts, with the dictators passing their money around amongst themselves while the vast majority of mankind has to suffer for it?
The world of art, cinema and music, however, show us many things that contradict the idea that people are self-centred and care
nothing for unity and human solidarity.
In the towns the bourgeoisie established for themselves a system of trade and business that could exist independently of the Church and Crown. And with the rise of the bourgeoisie there came a huge advancement of the arts. No longer was art purely designed to display the majesty of God. Now art was a way of displaying one’s position in this world. For the bourgeoisie of the Italian Renaissance, art was directly linked to intellectual knowledge of the classical past, the beauties of nature, and the importance of the individual in the world. We see this in various works such as Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Primavera, the portraits of Raphael and Titian etc.
Amongst this new breed of intellectual artist, probably the greatest was Leonardo da Vinci, a man who sought not glory and fame, but rather an understanding of the material world and its intricacies. Perhaps Leonardo’s greatest contributions to art were his scientific drawings. Here we see an artist who really saw a value in his work. These drawings were not made for money, and were never made to be seen by anybody apart from Leonardo, and yet they possess something which is fundamentally understandable to all humans: a need to observe and understand the essence of life.
The most striking example of this is his anatomical drawing showing a foetus in the womb. To call this a purely observational and scientific work is to misunderstand what Leonardo wanted to capture in his study: the fundamental beginnings of all human beings, the state in which mankind exists before it enters the world; something every human being has to go through.
When we are told by bourgeois collectors and critics that art is something beyond everyday human life, in a realm of ideals of beauty, they ought to be reminded that Leonardo, one of the greatest artists of all time, never sought to reflect anything but the most fundamental human life in his works. Even in religious works Leonardo offers us humanity first and foremost. In the Virgin of the Rocks we see a mother looking after children. In the Last Supper we see a group of individuals eat a humble meal.
In Golden Age Holland, people of all different social standing were buying art of different varieties. The poorer folk could buy etchings or cheap paintings showing ‘genre scenes’, which usually depicted comic depictions of quack doctors, drunkards, prostitutes etc. as well as still life paintings, which displayed all the fundamental material requirements for the good life. This was art that could be understood by anyone, and the Dutch people took pride in being able to own individual works of art.
The more wealthy class could have their portraits painted, reflecting their belief in their own self-worth. Among the portrait painters of Amsterdam was Rembrandt van Rijn, a man who revolutionised the way we see each other. Rembrandt painted in a style of thick impasto and dirty colours, determined to capture the essence of his subjects rather than painting an exact likeness.
Amongst his most intimate and touching works are those he made of the women and children he knew. The portrait of his son
Titus is a great example of this.
Here we see a boy stare directly into the eyes of his father. As a portrait, it is miles away from the flamboyant and over-complimentary style of Rembrandt’s contemporaries like Rubens and Van Dyke. Rather than create an image of an ideal,
Rembrandt has sought to show us directly the connection he feels to another human being. It is not only in pictures of people he loves that Rembrandt does this, in almost all his portraits, commissioned or not, Rembrandt attempts to show us the humanity of his subjects.
Vermeer’s work is notable in that unlike contemporaries like Jan Steen, he does not attempt to present the people he depicts in a humorous way, but attempts instead to show them in their apparently most dull and uninteresting moments. He paints a lady reading a letter or a child playing on the street with as much intense care as any other artist would paint a mythological scene.
For Vermeer at his most profoundly beautiful and touching we should look at the small painting known as The Milkmaid. Here we have a women at work, doing something she must have to do every day. Seeing something like this in real life we would be forgiven for being uninterested or bored. And yet this painting is anything but boring. It shows directly the beauty of everyday life most people will miss if they do not pay attention.
Here Vermeer seems to be calling for us to appreciate the little things that go on every day. It is miles away from what a working class person might understandably think of the art of the Old Masters. Who could fail to see why Vermeer has felt the need to use Lapis Lazuli, an expensive blue pigment, to create the stunningly beautiful apron around her waist? The bourgeois historian may (wrongly) point out that these works reflect humanity only due to Dutch Protestant materialism (Vermeer converted to Catholicism). In reply to this we should examine some of the Catholic art of this period and see if we find anything different
Caravaggio painted everyday reality; the people he saw on the streets of Rome – prostitutes, beggars, criminals – and the religious aspects of his works are always linked to the poverty and deprivation Caravaggio saw all around him.
Caravaggio was not a slave to the power of the Church. Many of the works he produced were rejected by those who commissioned them because of his insistence on using real life models for his religious figures, particularly his use of famous Roman prostitutes as models for his Madonnas. Many bourgeois art historians have depicted Caravaggio as a straight foreword thug (he famously killed a man in a duel). Yet what they forget is that Caravaggio lived in a time of extreme poverty and crime, from which he could not escape. He saw the world around him was full of horrors, and yet he was able to look through these horrors and see the humanity that connects us all.
Take for example his altarpiece The Seven Acts of Mercy. Here we have a religious work, based upon a Christian ideal of mercy. Yet where is the work of God? Where is the authority of the church? The angels and the Madonna and child do not appear any less human than the rest of the figures. On the right we see a woman feeding an old prisoner with milk from her breast, on the left a man taking off his cloak to give to a naked beggar. What could be more human than an image like this? Here Caravaggio reflects how our worst moments we can still rely on our fellow man to help.
Marxists have absolute confidence in the working class. Art has the power to influence people, and so it should not be seen as a useless luxury reserved for those who have too much time and money. Art reflects better than anything else the beauty of human existence. Art is not necessary in the way food and shelter are, but rather it is there to offer us consolation and give us reason to live, and this is something we all need. Without some means of understanding life artistically, we would be left with a hollow kind of existence.
Art is at once a reflection and a driving force for life. Under socialism, the alienation of working people from art and culture will be destroyed and art can finally take the place in society it should have.
The 1st of February this year marks the 5-year anniversary of the beginning of the Hetherington Occupation at Glasgow University. Coming in the midst of the militant 2010-11 UK-wide student movement against fees and cuts, it marked a peak in political activity on campus and served as a rallying call to thousands of students across the UK. What lessons can we take from this? Continue reading The Hetherington Occupation: Memories and Lessons for The Student Movement
Since the Easter holidays 7,000 children have been denied their education due to the discovery that 10 primary, 5 secondary and 2 additional support schools, built on a PFI scheme are unsafe for the children and young people to be in. Continue reading Edinburgh School Crisis – the dangerous effects of privatisation
The Keynesian Economic doctrine is one of the most dominant doctrines taught in schools and universities around the world as an example of how capitalism can work in a positive way. Many cite Keynesianism as the solution to the inherent ills of capitalism. The reformist parties such as The Labour Party cite it as a credible of way of making capitalism work by supposedly making capitalism state regulated to serve the interests of all. As Marxists we know this to be wrong, but why and how?
One explanation from a Marxist perspective is the 70’s recession (1973-5), which reasserted the Marxist truth that capitalism goes through up’s and down’s – or booms and busts. However Keynesian economists are not big fans of the slumps as they tear apart the fantasy that anything progressive is sustainable in capitalism. Marx explained that capitalism creates and requires a ‘Reserve Army of Labour’. Unemployment is a structural part of capitalism, not a flaw we can iron out. This reserve army is required for times when there is overproduction. Capitalism is inherently unplanned and competitive, and so is chaotic.
Periodically, the capitalists create overproduction, that is they discover they have collectively over-invested and must therefore massively cut back. This occurs partly due to the short-sighted nature of this anarchic market, and partly due to the necessary exploitation of workers, whose low wages will be insufficient to buy all that can be produced. Crises are therefore unavoidable and mass unemployment must be periodic.
Scottish Labour membership is a closely guarded secret. The last time the party published official figures they reported around 12,000 members. That was long before the independence referendum that proved to be a political disaster for Scottish Labour. Continue reading The Strange Death of Labour in Scotland
RISE: Scotland’s Left wing Alliance was launched in August 2015 as an alliance of left wing organisations, the largest being the Scottish Socialist Party. Its initial aim is to run candidates in the 2016 Holyrood elections. Comrades of the International Marxist Tendency in Scotland have joined the alliance as members of the SSP. At the December 2015 conference, around 300 delegates participated. In a country of 5 million, this is not a mass organisation but also not an organisation to be dismissed. Continue reading Which Way Forward for RISE?
The point is hammered without fail, at every chance SNP ministers have to mention it: all Scottish students are entitled to free university tuition. A noble initiative, one that would clearly appear on first inspection to be the epitome of progressive civic policy – each citizen, regardless of social class, given a chance to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer or any other profession they so desire. On the surface, this would suggest that Scotland’s higher education system is characterised by the values of equality and social mobility. But beneath the SNP’s egalitarian rhetoric lies a more complex reality. Continue reading The Masked Inequality in Scottish Education
Like many you may feel shame when you put paper in the plastic bin but why is this? Its because you’ve had an individualist form of environmentalism thrown at you every where you turn. The ruling classes have managed to cement their ideology so firmly in your psyche that you feel guilt for environmental failings which are currently outwith your control. They’ve done it so successfully we think that our personal failings are some how leading to environmental failures across the world.
Your actions are of course well intentioned and stem from a progressive instinct to preserve our planet. However whilst big corporation and their stooges in national governments do what they need to do for the sake of profit, these individual changes are like minnows swimming against a tidal wave.
The problem is not that you put clear glass and green glass in the same bin at the dump. The problem is that the dominant economic system, capitalism, is a destructive all encompassing brute. So your feeling of guilt when you put plastic in the paper bin is really symptomatic of the problem. Its symptomatic as it shows us the deep rooted nature of the ruling ideology.
Karl Marx famously comments in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
This deeply embedded environmental individualism Is therefore a form of what Marx would call the ideology of the ruling classes. Although this is a micro example of how well engraved the ruling ideology can be, it nonetheless highlights the validity of Marxism today. This deeply seated ideology does not just span the things we recycle but also to products we buy.
We feel we can ‘ethically’ consume. Ideas like ‘fair trade’ and other corporate ‘green washing.’ (By corporate green washing I mean sponsoring which makes a company seem ‘green’). We can be gregarious consumers and can feel a bit better for the poor plantation owner because we’ve paid an extra fifty pence and bought a specific product. If we can’t afford this we feel that bit worse. We’re filled with individual guilt and a feeling that we need to ethically consume when the problems are systematic not moralistic or individualist.
We are certainly not telling you to stop recycling, gardening or buying fair trade fruit. Like many you will be disgusted by the barbaric practices of capitalism and will do what you can to remove yourself from it even slightly. However, we must recognize these flaws are symptoms of our socio-economic system and also recognise that environmental safety and preservance ultimately cannot exist under capitalism. These are achievements which only socialism can deliver. Acknowledging this is relatively small but significant step towards true emancipation.
As Slavoj Zizek points out we live in a society were we are in constant search of “beer without alcohol” and “coffee without caffeine” but the reality is capitalism will never be ethical. You may cite social democracy but essentially this is just diluted capitalism and cannot solve the looming environmental catastrophe.
After the Paris Climate Talks it is clear we need a change . Not just an individual change but a systematic change, to put the needs of profit before people. We may believe we can some how stop the ice caps melting. We can but not as individuals. Imagine a world the toiling masses of the world take the wealth they create into their own hands and controlled democratically.
At the very least, the fact that acts such as recycling and fair trade are carried out by masses of people show their is a powerful force thriving for such change. Under socialism our natural environmental instincts can be harnessed and our plant truly saved.
As the old adage goes, “We need system change! Not Climate Change!”
