By 2011, music's long-standing role in the struggle for socialism in the United States appeared not to have survived the period of political regression, rapid deindustrialization, and conservative ideological optimism that led up to (and immediately succeeded) the end of the Cold War, the so-called neoliberal period. At least it had not survived in Zuccotti Park, the small semi-public square the NYPD tolerated as the site of the Occupy Wall Street encampments of that year. This is not to say that music was absent. On the contrary, it was all too present. At the height of the Occupation, drummers played incessantly, from the mid-morning until well after sunset. Organizers were at a loss to deal with the constant beating. Some of the drummers organized themselves into a ‘working group’ (the cellular form of self-organization in the park) but Occupy organizers were never able to negotiate for periods of quiet.Footnote 1 The music played had no definite content and the debates it inspired never turned to aesthetics. At this key moment for the American Left, music appeared on the scene as a worrying nuisance and an organizational challenge.
The Occupy movement is rightly applauded for opening up public discourse to the critique of capitalism. The years since have witnessed a revival of Marxism in both political and academic circles. New work in Marxist history, political theory, and (perhaps most unexpectedly) value theory has made what will doubtless be lasting contributions to the way capitalism and its alternatives are understood in the post-Cold War era.Footnote 2 Marxist writing on music and musical aesthetics, however, has largely missed out on this revival. While ‘cultural studies’ Marxism and the Frankfurt School still enjoy some currency, it is mostly consigned to seminar rooms and academic conference programmes. It remains an open question: how ought a committed socialist think about music making? Occupy's drums, now silent, continue to resonate insofar as this question remains unanswered.
Our fraught political moment is a propitious one for renewing the Marxist approach to music. Because that approach has consistently been folded into a more general Marxist discourse on art and aesthetics, any attempt must begin by revisiting what is essential to that discourse. I take the keystone of that discourse to be the realist conception of art. The realist conception of art holds that artworks are a means by which at least some of their appreciators come to know truths about the world outside consciousness. Insofar as they are representational, painting, fiction, music and drama potentially constitute vehicles for coming to understand real conditions. Artistic representation on this view is understood to be analogous to mental representation. Genuinely representational, artworks can complement the social sciences. Often the realist conception is descriptive and normative at once. Given that artistic representation is amenable to realistic representation, artists ought to avoid generating illusions and, so far as possible, provide audiences with a reflection of the real world.
Previous studies of Marxist aesthetics have followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty in making a sharp distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ branches of the tradition.Footnote 3 The Eastern, beleaguered by the exigencies of Communist Party rule is often presented as the corrupt twin of the Western. The latter, developed in relative freedom and informed by a Hegelian legacy suppressed by Stalinism, alone commands theoretical, rather than merely historical, interest.Footnote 4 In what follows, I depart from this Cold War framework in arguing that the Hegelian strand in Marxist aesthetics grows out of its Bolshevik predecessor and, crucially, shares with it a realist conception of art. After reconstructing the emergence and development of this conception (paying special attention to how music is directly addressed in the literature), I evaluate the compatibility of the realist conception of art with the materialist conception of history as it is found in Marx and Engels. I ultimately argue that moving past the realist conception of art is key to renewing the Marxist approach to music for our time.
The realist conception of art
The prominence enjoyed by realist theories of art among Marxists in the twentieth century cannot be explained with reference to the work of Marx and Engels alone. Indeed, the founders of historical materialism did not leave their successors with a theory of art. Evidence suggests that taking up the topic was a relatively low priority for the revolutionary pair. When in their writing they departed from the critique of political economy and its philosophical underpinnings, Marx and Engels were most often concerned with polemicizing about the natural sciences. Marx's mathematical theory, for example, is better developed than his thinking on art.Footnote 5 Their scattered writings on aesthetic topics, mostly restricted to literary criticism, cannot be said to point towards an aesthetic theory that could be expected to stand alongside, say, the value theory of Capital. As for music, Marx very rarely mentions it. Engels did demonstrate some music literacy and an early love for the art (we have a botched chorale harmonization in his hand), but never theorized about it as such.Footnote 6
Those paging through the collected works in search of the realist conception have often fallen upon Engels's reactions to agitational fiction written by his German socialist contemporaries. In a series of frequently cited letters, he critiqued their content for failing to properly characterize social phenomena relevant to revolutionary efforts. Ferdinand Lasalle, for instance, had in Engels's opinion failed in his 1859 novel, City Girl, to properly capture ‘the revolutionary response of the members of the working class to the oppression that surrounds them, their convulsive attempts . . . to attain their rights as human beings’.Footnote 7 Here as elsewhere, Engels's interest in literary realism stems from its being a source for accurate sociological data at a time when few empirical studies – such as his own on the condition of the working class in England – yet existed. However, recognizing that more or less useful and reliable knowledge can be garnered from the bourgeois novel is far from committing oneself to a fully fledged realist conception of art.Footnote 8 Ultimately, the Founders offer scant resources for building such a theory.
Aesthetic realism moved to the centre of Marxist discourse in the twentieth century at the same time as realist approaches to the philosophy of natural science. Both became the official doctrine of the most successful Marxist revolutionary organization to come out of the period before the Second World War, namely, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's Bolshevik faction, the party of Lenin. It is something of a historical accident that questions of art and science should have so significantly concerned Russian revolutionists in this period. Indeed, the topic of realism emerged in the course of internal struggle within the party over its ideological directives.
The counterrevolutionary years that followed the 1906 revolution in Russia saw a number of influential Bolsheviks, Alexander Bogdanov among them, become convinced that the success of an anti-capitalist movement required that workers develop their own ideological institutions separate from those inherited from, and presumably specific to, capitalist society. This involved creating both a proletarian art and a proletarian science. As Lynn Mally sums up the scope of the project's ambitions: ‘Using the old bourgeois culture, create a new proletarian one opposed to the old and spread it to the masses. Develop a proletarian science, strengthen authentic comradely relations in the proletarian milieu, devise a proletarian philosophy, and turn art in the direction of proletarian aspirations and experience.’Footnote 9 To this end, Bogdanov and others established schools that would allow workers to self-educate. These became models for spreading the effort across Russia after the October victory in 1917. What came to be known as Proletkult was organized more or less spontaneously, which fits well with the movement's self-image.
As Proletkult’s goal was self-development, the focus of arts organizations was on the participation of proletarians in creative work. This was borne out in the musical realm, where educators organized to teach music literacy to workers, as well as to form amateur choirs and ensembles. Those trained in composition often entered the movement as composers of mass songs for untrained voices. Formal experimentation in composition came in the form of new genres, including the vocal symphony and the amateur opera. A paradigmatic example of the movement's musical face is Alexander Davidenko's About Lenin (1925). The piece consists solely of an unaccompanied bass recitation. Davidenko himself characterized it as a ‘musical placard.’Footnote 10 Far from being a dramatic representation of action, the composition is part and parcel of political work. It is meant to speak directly to ‘proletarian aspirations and experience’.
For the movement's chief theorist, self-development in culture was not merely a means of empowerment or edification, but an aspect of forging a new proletarian reality. By the time Proletkult was in full force in cities across Russia, Bogdanov had elaborated his own philosophical tendency, drawing inspiration from the work of the physicist Ernst Mach. Bogdanov took from Mach a thoroughgoing pragmatism with respect to ontology. Whatever can be acquired through the senses, from this perspective, encompasses the whole of reality. There is no need to speak of a world as it is in itself, that is, apart from human perception. All concepts are merely bundled sensory impressions. The shape these bundles take is determined by the tasks to which they are put in the course of human life. Bogdanov accepted Mach's conception of a reality organized pragmatically, through practice, and extended world-organizing creative activity to encompass that of collectivities. Whole classes could mould the conceptual world to fit their historical tasks. In an attempt to reconcile this view with historical materialism, Bogdanov held that relations of production structured ‘lived experience’, and therefore the reality to which that experience pertained. His own rhapsodic prose is worth quoting:
In labor and in cognition, humanity works out its own ‘reality’ – its own objective experience with its strict regularity and coherent organization. The practice of this great social organism is nothing other than world-building . . . This world, which has been constructed and continues to be under construction – the realm of the conquest of elemental spontaneity by life and thought, the kingdom of the socially organized elements of the universe – is the most grandiose and perfected that we know; it is the incarnation of life in nature.Footnote 11
‘Elemental spontaneity’ in organization, so key to the proletarian culture movement, quickly came under attack by the Leninist wing of the Bolshevik party. Proletkult existed outside party institutions and was not initially subject to their discipline. Independence was required for its cultural activities to count as proletarian self-development. However, this flew in the face of Lenin's concept of a vanguard party. Central to that concept was the party's duty to move workers to a class consciousness to which their own activities could not lead them.
Lenin understood the conditions of struggle within individual firms to be such that workers are compelled to bargain for as great a share of the value added of their labour as possible. This struggle, however, is structurally conditioned by the need for firms to remain profitable. The class consciousness of the trade union movement, the highest organizational achievement of the working class, then, was limited to workplace struggle. The goal of overcoming capitalist production as such had to be introduced to the working-class movement from outside its organically developed institutions, by a Marxist revolutionary party. In order to inspire labourers to secure for themselves more than just than a larger share of the value added of their own toil, the intellectuals of the Communist Party would provide them with the ideological weapons with which to take political power and establish a socialist economy. The rational basis for building and maintaining a vanguard party necessarily implied safeguarding its monopoly on this ideological role.
Lenin's essay ‘Party Organization and Party Literature’ (1905) offered a model for a cultural policy fit for vanguardism. There, Lenin insisted that ‘literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, “a cog and a screw” of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically-conscious vanguard of the entire working class’. The arts were to become a ‘component of organized, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work’.Footnote 12 On 8 October 1920, Lenin issued a statement that made clear his position on Proletkult:
Adhering unswervingly to this stand of principle, the All-Russia Proletkult Congress rejects in the most resolute manner, as theoretically unsound and practically harmful, all attempts to invent one's own particular brand of culture, to remain isolated in self-contained organizations, to draw a line dividing the field of work of the People's Commissariat of Education and the Proletkult, or to set up a Proletkult ‘autonomy’ within establishments under the Peoples Commissariat of Education.Footnote 13
Lenin found Proletkult’s organizational autonomy to be as dangerous a threat to Marxism as the philosophical anti-realism to which it was tied. He made his views on this latter clear as early as 1909 in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. That text polemicized against Mach's influence in the party, condemning ontological realism's opponents for adopting an irredeemably bourgeois standpoint. Lenin's steely realism had consequences for aesthetics. While Bogdanov had thought that art-making ought to be part of the historic world-building of the proletariat, the Leninist view understood art's role as fundamentally propagandistic. Aesthetic projects ought to inspire a properly anti-capitalist class consciousness among workers and peasants. It is on this basis that Lenin himself praised the German worker's chorus movement.Footnote 14
By the early 1920s Lenin had taken ideological and political command of the party and sidelined Bogdanov. The proletarian culture project did not last through the 1930s. These conditions allowed a realist art theory, in contrast to Bogdanov's idealist variety, to enjoy unchallenged prestige among Marxists from the 1920s forward. While Bogdanov had been concerned with the conditions of aesthetic creation, Lenin's focus was exclusively on the reception of art and culture. That focus would be maintained by Bolsheviks well after the party leader's untimely death in 1924. Embracing a reception theory of art allowed Marxists to see it as an extension of, or complement to, the sciences. Karl Kautsky articulated the view in his study of Christianity:
Art . . . does not merely give us a photograph of reality; the artist must reproduce that which strikes him as the essential point, the characteristic fact of the reality he sets out to depict. The difference between art and science is in the fact that the artist represents the essential in a physical and tangible form, through which he impresses us, while the thinker represents the essential in the form of a conception, an abstraction.Footnote 15
Art and science, then, are two means to the same end. Both are purposively reductive in their representations, allowing for systematic reconstruction of the world as it is. So it was that throughout the 1920s the literary critic Alexander Voronsky could write of ‘art as the cognition of life’ while polemicizing against the concept of proletarian culture. By the time the now-infamous Andrei Zhdanov came to impose party discipline on writers and composers in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period, the realist conception of art was firmly in place.
The realist conception that acquired official sanction in the Soviet Union largely lacked robust theoretical grounding as an aesthetic theory. It was Georg Lukács, drawing on his training in literary criticism and academic philosophy, who would provide this. His strategy was to adapt Hegelian aesthetics to Marxism. The Hegelian model allowed Lukács to maintain a Leninist focus on reception and continue to theorize art as a form of cognition, while dispensing with a simplistic propaganda model.
Hegel's aesthetics spring from in his extension and transformation of Kant's theory of subjectivity. Kant had argued that objective knowledge of the world was possible only by virtue of certain non-empirical concepts that reside in the mind prior to cognition. These allow for experience to be gathered together into a unity, an I, that can become the subject of experience. The subject's knowings, its judgements (to use the Kantian term of art), are objective because they are grounded in the authority of a self-referencing subjectivity. The unity of consciousness and the knowability of the world are therefore inextricably linked in Kant's philosophy.
Hegel departed from the Kantian model by demonstrating that individual subjects are not able to ground their authority as subjects in isolation. The authority of a unitary consciousness is a mere abstraction if conceived of as a function of concept use alone. For Hegel, concretely grounding subjective authority must involve winning recognition for that authority from another self-referencing subject. In a dialectical coincidence of opposites, true subjective independence is achieved through dependence. As Hegel puts it, authentic subjectivity is an ‘I that is a We and the We that is an I.’Footnote 16 The achievement of recognition is won through struggle. In fact, Hegel first introduces his concept of recognition in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit as an analysis of the experience of mastery and slavery. Social institutions – from slavery to paternal authority, law to religion – emerge in history as a means of regulating the structure of mutual recognition and establishing a normative framework for the reproduction of a given form of life. Making use of a religious term he intends to desacralize, Hegel calls that normative framework ‘spirit’. As subjects continue to struggle for increasingly concrete forms of freedom in intersubjective recognition, spirit can be said to mature through history.
Hegel distinguishes between two iterations of spirit: objective and absolute. Objective spirit refers to those institutions that are generally regulative of social life, but concerned with the practical, namely, the institutions of civil society, law, and the state. By contrast, absolute spirit refers to the conceptual framework that binds and articulates a form of life as such. Paradigmatically, this includes religious, artistic, and philosophical institutions. For Hegel, societies progress historically by coming to self-consciousness about their spiritual foundation. Hegel's concept of ‘science’ is an attempt at precisely this: ‘Spirit, appearing to consciousness in this element [as concept], or, what amounts to the same thing here, what is therein engendered by it, is science.’Footnote 17 The parallelism between science and art that Lukács inherited from Soviet Marxism finds its theoretical foundation here. Art in this system is like science insofar as it is a coming to self-consciousness of a form of life, a stage in the maturity of spirit.
Lukács was well aware that Marx's materialism was born precisely out of a critique of Hegel's theory of spirit. Marx set himself the task of replacing Hegel's history of spirit's coming to self-knowledge with an account of the relations that human beings enter into in order to maximally manifest their always expanding set of skills and productive capacities. However, throughout his career Lukács was intent on making room for a Hegelian concern for consciousness within Marxism. In the essay ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’, included in History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács insists that only a vulgar Marxism would apply the historical materialist method to the study of those institutions Hegel groups under ‘absolute spirit’, art included. In a footnote, he defends his use of Hegelian language, writing that, while Marx did not take on Hegel's theory of spirit as such, he nonetheless had a notion of the unity of subject and object that could be made manifest in art.Footnote 18 Thus Lukács appropriates for Marxism an essentially idealist understanding of art as a form of social self-consciousness. What becomes self-conscious for Lukács is the spirit of a mode of production.
A maximally developed proletarian class consciousness represents the capitalist mode of production fully coming to know itself. That form of consciousness is the condition for the possibility of Marx's critique of political economy. It represents a shape of cognition that allows for a transition to a more concrete form of intersubjective freedom, namely, socialism. Because it is a manifestation of developed class consciousness, the art of advanced capitalism offers a reflection of reality without illusions. The proletariat's ‘social being allows it . . . to transcend this [ideological] barrier and clearly see the class relationships, the development of the class struggle, that lies behind the fetishized forms of capitalist society’.Footnote 19 Thus, artistic realism represents the coming to self-knowledge of capitalism in the guise of absolute spirit.
Of all the arts, it is literature that appears most amenable to this account of realism. Indeed, Lukács's theory is focused almost exclusively on fiction. His theory, however, in principle extends to all the arts Hegel understands to be forms of absolute spirit, including music. Lukács himself, however, only rarely wrote about music directly. Two instances, both from the latter part of his career, are instructive. The first appears in his two-volume The Specificity of Aesthetics.Footnote 20 In the second volume, he acknowledges that music does not represent the world outside the self in the way painting and theatre do. It can, nonetheless, reflect the self's internal reality. In reflecting the emotional, affective aspect of individual experience, music is engaged in a ‘double mimesis’. The inner world of the subject is a reflection of exterior reality, and music is a representative reconstruction of the internal logic of that reflection. Since he takes it that rhythm is at once part of the external world and an aspect of subjective experience, it allows music to link affect to worldly events. As one of his commentators summarizes the thought: ‘In music, rhythm imitates the events, and tune and harmony are mimetic expressions of the feelings accompanying the events.’Footnote 21 In this model, Lukács is able to maintain music's reflection of the exterior world while limiting its ability to represent social reality.
Another model is to be found in a 1970 essay Lukács wrote about Bartók on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer's death. There, Lukács praises the Hungarian composer for having broken with an inherited concert music tradition, characterized by Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms. That tradition is understood to be an ideological form of what Lenin called ‘the Prussian way’, that is, the reactionary coalition between urban capitalists and feudal landowners that followed the failed revolutions of 1848. By recognizing the imperative of addressing himself to the national question, inextricably tied to the struggle of the peasantry, and in breaking with his foreign inheritances and establishing an independent musical idiom, Bartók had successfully articulated a realistic assessment of the path of history for his people.Footnote 22 Presumably without having read either Lenin or Stalin on the national question, Bartók had nonetheless seen musically what the revolutionary pair had discovered in political struggle. This account of musical realism is markedly different from the one to be found in Lukács's earlier Aesthetics. It dispenses almost entirely with the specificity of the musical while maintaining music's ability to directly represent the social and historical.
Lukács's uneven attempts to integrate music into his theoretical account of artistic realism were supplemented by theorists for whom his Marxist aesthetics served as a model. One such theorist was Lukács's fellow Hungarian and one time pupil, János Maróthy, who succeeded in developing the Eastern Bloc's most sophisticated theory of musical realism. In his magisterial Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian (1974), Maróthy attempts to construct a theory of bourgeois music in a manner that is reminiscent of Marx's method in Capital. In the latter, the vast, diverse field of political economic phenomena is not derived from first principles, nor is it subject to descriptive generalization. Rather, Marx's method in Capital is to reconstruct the laws of motion that regulate a capitalist economy from its own most basic category: the commodity. The commodity, split between having a form as a useful object and being a form of exchange value, is an empirical concept out of which Marx builds his theory of money, of capital, and ultimately of prices of production and economic crises. From the bare practice of exchanging equivalents, the nature of the capitalist system is unfolded. Maróthy adopts a parallel approach by building a theory of bourgeois music from what he takes to be its cellular form, the ‘song’. This latter is a term of art in Maróthy. It does not refer to a musical genre, but to an abstract grammatical structure that ultimately regulates the complex reality of bourgeois music. While the structure of Capital serves as a reference for the Hungarian musicologist, the materialism in Marx's text is largely set aside in favour of a Hegelian framework.
Maróthy begins his long text by quoting the Marx of the Grundrisse, arguing that the kind of individuality specific to market societies arises on the basis of commodity production (production for exchange) rather than the other way around. The individuation of exchangers is a consequence of economic relations. Maróthy understands ‘ego-centredness’ to be the fundamental ideological profile of bourgeois, commodity-producing society. This ego-centrality is, for Maróthy, the shape of the spirit of capitalism. As such, it comes to characterize the structure of artistic representation produced by and for that mode of production. What he calls ‘song form’ is the manifestation in music of the structure of the self-specific to bourgeois productive relations.
By contrast, in pre-capitalist societies (in which a concrete notion of individualism had yet to arise) no song form was present. Rather, the music of pre-capitalist social formations was characterized by iterative and variative structures. These archaic forms were adapted to communal participation and improvisation. ‘Song’ form, on the other hand, is a closed and self-referential structure. Whether performed by multiple musicians, or made up of independent voices, the form holds itself together as a unity, what Maróthy, after Hegel, calls ‘a this’. Standing on its own, the song reproduces and represents the very bourgeois individualism that is its source and ground. It is a manifestation of absolute spirit under capitalism.
Maróthy's concept of musical realism is specific to this self-referential formal design. Song form is characterized by the presentation of musical material that remains recognizably itself through some transformation procedure or other. Ultimately, that material returns in something like its original shape. Maróthy's song is a game of identity in difference. ‘The same as something else and something else as the same’, he writes, ‘is a problem at the center of contemporary interest, which can appear either in the concrete shape of a picaresque novel or as a variation suite.’Footnote 23 Maróthy's musical realism involves the formal reconstruction in musical terms of the nature of individual subjectivity in an exchange society. In this way, it manifests a coming to self-consciousness of that society. As bourgeois music develops the potentialities inherent in its style, it comes to realize in artistic form the true nature of capitalist social relations. The analysis of that style and its history, then, becomes an analysis of bourgeois life, through its heroic early period through to its decadent fall into avant-garde obscurantism. Throughout, however, the interest of music lies in its ability to faithfully reflect social conditions at the level of formal design.
Transposing the locus of reflection from content to form is equally the achievement of Adorno's realist aesthetics. Despite his explicit rejection of what he took to be the hallmarks of socialist realism, as well as the principle of commitment in art, Theodor Adorno nonetheless embraced the core theoretical premise of the tradition, namely, that artworks are a means to the cognitive attainment of truths about reality. Although he arrives at his version of this thought by way of a distinctive theoretical apparatus, Adorno consistently maintained that artworks have what he calls a ‘truth content’.
Adorno does not believe that an artwork enjoys truthful content by virtue of representing real conditions in a manner that is somehow artistically viable. Rather, the artwork in bourgeois society is not directly social. Instead, it is itself drawn into the social relation of the commodity form, in which the use value of products is of no structural importance to producers and the sociality of labour appears in alien form. Adorno does not, however, argue that artworks share the same commodified fate as shoes, wallets, and iron ore in capitalist society. They are economically exceptional. Indeed, he argues that ‘works of art are absolute commodities; they are social products which have discarded the illusion of being-for-society, an illusion tenaciously retained by all other commodities’.Footnote 24 The way in which artworks have been shorn of use value draws them closer to the commodity form, even while they necessarily fail to acquire an exchange value determined by socially necessary labour time. The artwork's alienation from direct social use, its monad-like quality of windowless sovereignty and isolation, makes its relationship to society problematic. Artworks cannot address themselves directly to social reality without giving up their sovereignty. At the same time, if they insist on their isolation, they do nothing but double down on the necessary illusion that sustains their status as commodities.
In order to arrive at truth, artworks must express themselves ‘as the wounds of society’.Footnote 25 Their alienation from human need is the ground of their ability to achieve truth in representation. When alienation becomes a premise motivating artistic design, the artwork is able to shed light on the ‘the untruth of the social situation’.Footnote 26 Articulating a Hegelian coincidence of opposites, Adorno locates politically relevant, truthful representation in the unpolitical and abstractly formal. ‘The liberation of form’, he writes, ‘which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form – the social nexus of everything particular – represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo.’Footnote 27
Adorno's realism opposes itself to politically committed art of all kinds. In the art of commitment, which he associates primarily with Eastern Bloc régimes and orthodox Marxism, the enlightenment that comes through representation is negated by the formal conditions of that representation. These latter are in conformity with bourgeois society and ultimately reproduce the conditions for mass deception. Those conditions are spelled out by analogizing art-making to the formation of Kantian judgements of the understanding. Kant theorized that empirical concepts require what he called ‘schema’, frameworks with which to graft themselves onto sense data. Formal design in art is, for Adorno, analogous to a Kantian schema. If cognizing and object is entirely successful, because what arrives through the senses is perfectly amenable to some empirical concept or other, the authority of subjectivity – the ground of judgements for both Kant and Adorno – is imperceptible. By twisting its formal schema so as to militate against the material it forms, truthful art at once liberates material content and indexes the role of subjective freedom in an otherwise reified and alienated world.
Importantly, what is at stake for Adorno's realism is the same as in the other versions of the realist conception we have seen. In line with the tradition, he takes artworks to offer a kind of access to reality that is specific to their status as artworks, and, just as Kautsky imagined, represent reality in a fashion that complements the conclusions of the social sciences.
The materialist conception of music history
The purpose of dwelling on the persistence of the realist conception of art within Marxism is to help clear a path forward for a revival of historical materialism in music studies. In order to make perspicuous what this entails, the key features of the materialist conception of history must first be made explicit. Only then can its compatibility with the realist conception of art be evaluated. Marx and Engels held that work and productivity are the ultimate drivers of change in the history of human society. A creative, ever-changing metabolic relation to nature is, in fact, necessary for human survival. Labour is presupposed by our biological makeup. For example, the human jaw is so formed as to require human beings to cook their food. Part of our digestive metabolism, then, occurs apart from our unconscious, somatic digestive capacities and exists fully in the realm of planned activity. Human beings, having no natural habitat of their own, are constantly in a process of reproducing and expanding their capacities for transforming their natural environment to suit their needs. Further, it is not in the nature of human labour to cease once the bare necessities for survival are met. The development of what Marx calls ‘forces of production’ (perhaps better translated as ‘productive powers’) entails the emergence of more, and more sophisticated, needs, including those that art making fulfils. Forces of production encompass both physical and intellectual skills and achievements, and for Marx, they are at once the essence of humanity and the driver of its historical trajectory.
Productive forces are not exercised in isolation, but necessarily in human relationships of mutual dependency and co-operation, one of the most ancient forms of which is the sexual division of labour in procreation. Marx referred to those relations of mutual dependency as ‘relations of production’, and they manifest themselves as distributions of effective control over the means of productive labour. Importantly, relations of production – the power structures of social life – are adapted to the capacities they realize. For Marx and Engels, the direction of fit is from relations to forces. Maximizing human creative potential is any given productive relation's only reason for being. Ultimately, social relations survive to the extent they foster, rather than fetter, human labour potential.
Marx considered the expansion of our capacities to be an amplification of our natures. As human beings develop the means of their life, they express their own essence. This is key to understanding Marx's critique of the mode of production organized by capital. In the capitalist mode of production, labour is not exploited for its usefulness. Rather, labourers are employed in production so as to inflate the exchange value of the commodities that make up the means of production. The productivity of labour is measured in value terms. In capitalism, labouring produces more value than labourers receive in wages, and this surplus-value is the source of profit. Workers accept this exploitation because, having no property of their own, it is only by selling their capacity to work, their ‘labour power’, that they secure for themselves what they need to survive. As Marx spelled out as early as 1844, this estrangement of workers from their labour capacity estranges them from themselves: ‘This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but activity?) as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him.’Footnote 28 By reifying human labour and submitting it to market demands, capitalist productive relations set the stage for an immense increase in productive capacity. At the same time, however, they stultify and deskill the labour of the individual, who is severed from their essential productive powers and coerced into the production of value rather than utility.
Marx and Engels theorized that relations of production could outlive their usefulness. Capitalism structurally involves competition, which drives the constant revolutionizing of the means of production, and consequently the aggregate of skills and capacities held by society at large. This social drive increasingly reduces the labour time required for meeting the needs of the species. Capitalism, then, can be seen as setting the stage for a quantitative reduction in labour time to solicit a qualitative transformation in social relations. These new relations would allow for individuals to develop their productive capacities for their own sake, in free association with others rather than under relations of production transmitted from the past and outside of their conscious control.
Within this framework, musical skills and achievements are best understood as a domain of human productive forces. Tracking the needs that musical capacities meet is an integral part of music history, but the point of interest for the historical materialist is the way in which those needs transform and expand. Like the other productive forces in society, musical capacities develop throughout history, and as they do, are maximized in the context of ever-changing relations of effective control and ownership. The drive that animates the history of agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing also drives the history of music-making. The materialist conception of history offers no reasons for adopting a special method for the study of music.
Applying a materialist method to music history involves treating the art as part of the social base, rather than as an aspect of society's superstructure. This is a heterodox position among academic Marxists. The base/superstructure dichotomy that Marx outlines in the 1859 Preface to his Critique of Political Economy has frequently come under attack since the 1960s. The relevant passage from that text reads as follows:
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.Footnote 29
New Left theorists in particular were keen to characterize this model as unhelpfully reductive since it explicitly affirms that consciousness is not ultimately determinative of the progress of history. In those instances when the model is not simply dismissed, music-making is assumed to be superstructural, more akin to the law and the state than to the directly productive sphere.
Embracing the dichotomy, however, is clarifying for the materialist method. The distinction Marx is drawing is between the practices that are directly productive of social life and those institutions that are built to codify, sustain, and regulate such practices. These are paradigmatically legal institutions, but can be extended to include more or less informal regulatory norms. If what is being studied by musicologists is the practice of music-making, then it is clear that they are concerned with something that comfortably lies within the boundaries of the economic base. The making of instruments, compositional techniques, ensemble configuration, control over intellectual property, and the like are all basic in Marx's sense. Only the institutions that sanction and regulate musical production can be considered superstructural. Making the base/superstructure distinction clear for the arts goes some way to allay concerns that a materialist approach reduces them to a function of external, mechanical, and irredeemably ‘economic’ forces. On this reading, music-making just is one of those forces. Further, the intellectual culture and normative institutions which correspond to those forces are, in the last instance, determined by the level of development of music-making itself.
Setting music-making squarely in the productive, economic realm demands that its specific mode of production be analysed in every instance. Some music-making is homespun, made by and for its makers. Other music is made as small-scale craft production in which the maker controls the means of their production. It cannot be assumed that, even in the context of advanced capitalist societies, music is a commodity, made exclusively for the market and a bearer of value. A historical materialist is indeed committed to the idea that forces determine relations, but this is compatible with the claim that music's productive forces develop in a manner specific to the art and that the relations of its production are not always an instance of those that generally reign in society.
A granular analysis of the modes of production in which music-making takes place is often avoided by Marxist writing on art. This is especially the case among writers who insist that capitalism is a ‘totality’. The notion of totality invites the assumption that capitalist social relations are all-encompassing, and that whatever does not occur in a value generating circuit (Marx's paradigmatic M-C-M’) is nonetheless pulled into its logic. There does appear to be some textual support for this assumption. In a memorable passage from the Grundrisse, Marx writes that ‘in all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus align rank and influence to the others’. He turns to metaphor in characterizing this mode as a ‘general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity’.Footnote 30 However, Marx does not claim that in bourgeois society everything is subsumed under capitalism.Footnote 31 Rather, he is defending the method he develops in the Grundrisse and perfects in Capital, one in which the structure of capital is studied as if it were a kind of organism. The categories that order its logic are parts of a greater, self-moving whole. It is in this way that capital ought to be understood as a ‘totality’. Marx distinguishes this method from a chronological, historical approach, which would fail to account for capital's special systematicity.
That capital is a system, however, does not imply that it is an all-encompassing system. A great deal of production takes place outside of that mode. Marx himself pointed out that John Milton, who certainly lived in a bourgeois society, produced his writing in a manner analogous to the way silk worms produce silk: for itself and as an expression of innate capacity. Much musical work is external to the self-valorization of value. The private music teacher who sells her services does not advance capital. The civic orchestra that is funded through municipal taxation does not produce surplus-value for the investor class. Music-making at church does not have to be bought as a commodity in order to be used by those who otherwise must sell their labour in order to live. Western musical life has given rise to three prominent types of capitalist investors: the instrument manufacturers, the impresarios, and the publishers of both print and sound recordings. All three have transformed the nature of musical production. For instance, piano manufacturers in the nineteenth century, pressured by competition, revolutionized the means of production of the instrument to such an extent as to bring the price of pianos to a level where they could appear in a great many private homes throughout Europe and the Americas. Those three kinds of capital, however, hardly represented the full range of music-making.
A granular analysis of music's productive processes can be the basis for explaining the evolution of the theoretical legacy that has attended music-making throughout its history. The concepts that are relevant to music are a function of the specific relations of production on which its making is founded. So it is that the realist conception of art, say, can move from being the ground of a Marxist aesthetics to being a phenomenon to be materially explained using Marx's method.
In the end, historical materialism leaves little room for taking artistic realism seriously. Marx addressed realism very early in his career. His second Theses on Feuerbach reads as follows:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.Footnote 32
It is unclear how any version of art realism could meet this standard. The reflections of the real that representative art offers are inherently spectatorial. At their most engaged, they can only be said to change minds. Historical materialism, on the other hand, aims at realism in Marx's sense. Its analyses are not validated by correspondence to reality, or by their capacity to predict future events. Materialism is realistic insofar as it participates in the transformation of social relations so as to bring them in line with the level of development of society's ever more impressive capacities.
With the drummers of Zuccotti Square in mind, it ought to be clear that the issues to be faced in the coming century have primarily to do with the relations we enter into in our music-making. And these issues are material and political rather than aesthetic. The drumming crisis during Occupy stemmed from the nature of making-music on upturned pales, the horizontal relations of effective control each player enjoyed in the square, and the conflict between that arrangement and the economic structure of a city that surrounded it, managed and regulated by a government whose armed police force menacingly surrounded the ceaseless banging. The features of the music made which caused problems for political strategy were selected for by the material conditions in which it took place. Aesthetics is simply out of its depth in confronting the complexity of this social reality.
A materialist approach to music would provide a rational basis for bringing about music production, that is, as a celebrated passage in Capital has it, ‘production by freely associated men, [standing] under their conscious and planned control’.Footnote 33 Recent years have seen music-making undergo significant shifts in its mode of production. Few industries were as thoroughly undermined by the technology of digital distribution as music publishing and recording. Even bourgeois intellectuals are beginning to see the long-term prospects of the emergence of digital platforms that are best suited to a sharing economy.Footnote 34 De-commodification is no longer an ideal, but a rapidly advancing actuality, at least in the musical realm.Footnote 35 If a musicology that is committed to socialism is to be up to the task of participating in the transformations to come, it would do well to focus on the real conditions that determine musical life and abandon the search for truthful art.
