Christian Noakes takes aim at nostalgic mobilizations of socialist realist visual art, arguing that U.S. socialists must both become more familiar with socialist art made outside the Soviet Bloc and begin to make art of their own.
Socialist realism has traditionally tapped into the real lives of “ordinary people” to better convey struggle, revolutionary optimism, and glimpses of a new world beyond capitalism. However, the apparent preference among socialists in places like the US for art that is, in some cases, nearly a century old could easily lead one to see socialist realism as a conservative trend divorced from lived experience and the current struggle. The irony is that so many who latch on to this stylized look backward are turning the ethos of socialist realism on its head. That is, socialist realist art—art which almost always comes from another time and place—becomes a fantastic distraction from our lives under capitalism. For those that cannot imagine a future, socialist realism becomes a form of stylized escapism from the here and now; it becomes nostalgic fantasy.
The historical and social context of what a piece of socialist realist art might convey takes a backseat to purely aesthetic concerns, changing its social function from that of inspiration and agitation to sedation, resignation, and ultimately consumption for those living under capitalism. This ossification of socialist realism reflects the stifling reality (not to be confused with the Real) of capitalist realism. The late Mark Fisher characterized capitalist realism, in part, as “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”1 Fisher expanded on this in a 2011 interview, stating that “[t]here’s various different ways of looking at it. One is looking at is (sic) as a belief, a belief that capitalism is the only viable political economic system… it’s also an attitude, an attitude in relation to that belief, an attitude of resignation and defeat.”2 Analogous to capitalism’s subsumption of anti-capitalist critique, socialist realism has, in a sense, been subsumed by capitalist realism. While its explicit historical and ideological references may suggest its antagonism to capitalism, the dominant conception of socialist realism is in fact a perfect fit for the petrified reality of capitalist realism.
I contend that the apparent trendiness of a detached socialist realism is indicative of the cultural inadequacy of the “western Left”—a collective shortcoming we’ve stubbornly ignored in favor of reflexive impotence and insular cliques. As Fisher states, “[a] culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.”3 In lieu of a living revolutionary culture, the Left has a fixation on (someone else’s) nostalgia. This is too often portrayed as revolutionary or proletarian culture, when it is indicative of not taking culture seriously, of not forming a living culture, save for the occasional empty sloganeering prepackaged from China’s Cultural Revolution. Such works—created long ago to instill hope in the future—are today reduced to little more than the raw material of an aesthetic lifestyle.
In Art and the Working Class Alexander Bogdanov distinguishes between two bourgeois conceptions of art: that which is considered ‘pure’ and that which is considered ‘civic.’ The former represents the idea that form should reign supreme over content as “art for art’s sake” while the latter overemphasizes content at the cost of form or, more accurately, artistry. He asserts that reducing art to its civic component undermines its organizing capacity to communicate ideals and compel people to act.4 Professing revolutionary ideals is not enough for art to realize its potential as an organizing and animating force. Art that serves political revolution must balance form and content without falling neatly into the bourgeois dichotomy of ‘pure’ and ‘civic’ art. “True as it is that the essential function of art for a class destined to change the world is not that of making magic but of enlightening and stimulating action, it is equally true that a magical residue in art cannot be entirely eliminated, for without that minute residue of its original nature, art ceases to be art.”5 Stripped of its magic, old socialist realist works become something like a segment of an old documentary watched countless times before, requiring little thought or action and providing only habitual comfort. Brecht, whose epic theater stands as an example of art which is capable of both instruction and entertainment, likewise points out that the quality of any truly socialist art is politically decisive.6 Quality–where questions of political effectiveness are concerned–is partly dependent on a work’s relevance to current circumstances (i.e. the audience, the character of contemporary struggle, etc). The innumerable and masterfully created paintings of peasant life in the Soviet Union or Serov’s depictions of the Soviet Revolution may elicit a sense of nostalgia in communists interested in those particular pages of history, but they do not move a working class generally unconcerned with depictions vastly different to their own experiences under capitalism. In such cases, content completely overshadows form and art is reduced to a cold historical lecture for the already converted–a cathartic act of consumption.
Early socialist realist artists and writers were explicitly opposed to the scholastic classicism, nostalgia, and utopian romanticism that were so prevalent in the art and literature of the time. In his address to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov captures much of the initial ethos of socialist realism: “we must know life so as to depict it truthfully in our works of art—and not to depict it scholastically, lifelessly, or merely as ‘objective reality’; we must depict reality in its revolutionary development… To be an engineer of human souls means to stand on both feet on the ground of real life. And this, in turn, denotes a break with the old-style romanticism… that spirited the reader away from the contradictions and oppression of life to an unreal world, to a world of utopias.”7 The socialist realism of people like Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky, like most modern art movements of its time, was premised on creating a new world in opposition to the static, conservative past it found itself in contestation with.
While the current consumption of old socialist realist art is not without its own unique pitfalls and shortcomings, such stylistic reduction can in fact be traced back to the Soviet Union. According to John Berger, this shift in what constituted socialist realism stemmed from the practical concern of large-scale popular taste after the revolution which resulted in the state’s over-reliance on holding up a mirror to what had been gained in the struggle and the subsequent neglect of human expression and underlying impulses which fueled the revolution.8 Official state policies after the civil war contributed greatly to the adulteration of the art form’s underlying principles, in which “revolutionary romanticism [was] replaced often by sentimentalism, optimism by overt fantasy.”9 In short, it came to represent the antithesis of its most central initial impulses. Given this significant shift, one has to ask to what degree socialist realism is useful in the current struggle against capitalism. According to Ernst Fischer:
The concept of ‘socialist realism,’ perfectly valid in itself, has frequently been abused and misapplied to academic historical and genre paintings and to novels and plays in fact based on propagandist idealizations. For those reasons, as well as for certain others, the term ‘socialist art’ seems to me to be better. It clearly refers to an attitude—not a style—and emphasizes the socialist outlook, not the realist method… ‘Socialist realism’ and, even more widely, socialist art and literature as a whole imply the artist’s or writer’s fundamental agreement with the aims of the working class and the emerging socialist world. The fact that the distinction is the result of a new attitude, not simply of new stylistic standards, was often obscured by the methods of administrative interference in the arts practiced during Stalin’s lifetime.10
In line with official sanctioning in the Soviet Union, which saw the artform reduced to a static style, what is meant by socialist realism today is typically only classicism produced in socialist countries. Rather than providing a “glimpse of our tomorrow,” the common sense understanding of socialist realism is fraught with nostalgia and artistic conservatism.11 As Fischer states, “[a]rt forms, once they have been established, put to the test, transmitted, and ‘sanctioned’ in the full sense of the word, have an extraordinarily conservative character…the magic-social law…is gradually diluted to make an aesthetic one.”12 Today, socialist realist art of the 20th century maintains a conservatism introduced by administrative interference through a deep nostalgia and yearning for the past.
In contrast, Fischer’s insistence on the more open—or at least less historically compromised or restricted—term of ‘socialist art’ does not tie the artist’s hands or foreclose on what socialist future might look like. Much as the first artists to espouse socialist realism intended, it positions the artist within the class struggle rather than within the constricting role of a scholastic or administrative functionary for schools of the past. It affords the artist a freer form of expression not enjoyed by artists confined to discrete genres or styles.
It may seem counterintuitive, but a potential first step out of outdated conceptions of art is to familiarize ourselves with other historical art forms or movements. We are inheritors of far more than the Soviet Union’s misguided, rigid socialist realist policy. From around the world examples of socialist art abound—from dada and surrealism to the revolutionary art of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Figures such as Tristan Tzara, John Heartfield, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Emory Douglas all provide different glimpses at the potentially boundless world of socialist art. Socialist realism, as it was originally conceived prior to administrative interference, also has a place in this heritage—albeit less than the undead cult of socialist realism suggests. Any socialist that wants to take the arts and artistic production seriously ultimately cannot stay confined to the world of socialist art. Like Marx, who extracted social and political insights out of the writings of the conservative Balzac, we should not shy away from taking what we can from non-socialists. The Joyces of the world have far more to offer us than the Upton Sinclairs. To refuse to build off past achievements is to impede our ability to make meaningful and moving art—thus undermining its organizational or revolutionary potential.
Perhaps one of the most essential steps out of this undead malaise is for people to push themselves to be more than passive consumers and instead contribute to the production of new art. In contrast to the stuffy, academic ethos of a misappropriated socialist realism, socialists should take up a “do-it-yourself” attitude. Produce art that not only does not require official state support, but which is, on the one hand actively antagonistic to capitalism, and on the other capable of communicating to the working and oppressed of this century. The act of making even bad art has more political weight than passively staring at reproductions of old Soviet-era paintings. What we need is the courage to fail which has always been a prerequisite for new and groundbreaking art to emerge.
- Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), p.16.
- Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004- 2016) (London: Repeater Books, 2016), p.637.
- Fisher 2009, p.3.
- Alexander Bogdanov, Art and the Working Class (Iskra Books, 2022), p.116.
- Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: a Marxist Approach (Penguin books, 1963), p.14.
- Bertolt Brecht, “Cultural Policy and Academy of Arts” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, p267.
- John E. Bowlt (ed), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 (Thames & Hudson), p.293.
- John Berger, Landscapes: John Berger on Art (New York: Verso, 2018).
- Bowlt, p.292.
- Fischer, pp.107-108.
- Zhdanov in Bowlt, p.294.
- Fischer, p.165.