Who or what is “the historical Jesus”? Put crudely, the historical Jesus is the figure historians reconstruct from behind the embellishments, mythmaking, and ideas attributed to him, that took place after his death. From the best sources we have, a full biography remains impossible. What historians have instead attempted to do is assess the extent to which it is possible to reconstruct the words and deeds of the figure who was active in Galilee and Judea sometime around the year 30 CE.

While there has been a steady, if underappreciated, tradition of western Marxist scholarly analyses of Christian origins, there has been very little on the reconstruction of the life of Jesus. This is remarkable given how significant the quest for the historical Jesus has been in western thought since the end of the eighteenth century. Before we turn to why western Marxist analyses are relatively absent and what a Marxist analysis might look like, a brief overview of the early days of this quest and its ongoing influence can be provided.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

The most influential challenges to the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts came from Germanic scholarship. The conventional starting point has traditionally been the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), an Enlightenment thinker born in Hamburg. Reimarus’ fame in historical Jesus studies is due to extracts (Wolfenbüttel Fragments; hereafter, the Fragments) posthumously published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Reimarus had kept his more provocative views quiet during his lifetime and Lessing likewise kept the authorship of the Fragments anonymous, such was the explosive nature of their content. The two most relevant Fragments concerned the purpose of Jesus and the disciples (published 1778) and the resurrection narratives (published 1777), both of which made sharp distinctions between Jesus and Christianity and critiqued inconsistencies in the New Testament texts.

For Reimarus, Jesus was a reformist figure at home in the Judaism of his day who preached repentance before the imminent coming of the kingdom of heaven, in much the same way as John the Baptist had before him. Jesus’ recognisably Jewish teaching involved, Reimarus argued, simple, humble, trustworthy, peaceable, merciful, ethical, and inward-looking pious behaviours, and the prioritisation of loving God and neighbour. On Reimarus’ reading, Jesus did not seek to start a new religion and did not look to introduce any new articles of faith. Reimarus’ Jesus did not want to do away with Jewish religion or practices such as sacrifice, circumcision, purity, or Sabbath. Rather, it was the emerging church after Jesus’ death which distanced itself from these practices.

Similarly, Reimarus claimed that Jesus took on various messianic titles but that these should not be confused with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which was a later development. When Jesus used the term “Son of God,” he was doing so it in a way recognisable to Jews of his day, namely that it was a term employed paternalistically to refer to a person or people beloved of God, including a prophetic or kingly figure.

For Reimarus, when Jesus referred to the kingdom of God or heaven this too was a recognisably Jewish concept which involved the expectation of a kingdom established among Jews and expressed through their laws and with an understanding of God as their king. It was a concept that anticipated a future glorious kingdom in Jerusalem brought about through the Messiah when the Jews would be freed from the Roman yoke. And so, when Jesus entered into Jerusalem with his followers at the festival of Passover (Mark 11; Matthew 21; Luke 19), Reimarus suggested that this was seen as stirring up rebellion against the rulers and led to his death at the hand of the authorities.

This expectation of political redemption led to disappointment after Jesus was killed. The apostles then moved away from this hope for a powerful redeemer of Israel and developed a doctrine of humanity’s suffering saviour. Reimarus’ critique of the historical validity of resurrection accounts were part of his explanation that they too were a response to the unanticipated problem of Jesus premature death.

The publication of Reimarus’ Fragments effectively inaugurated the quest for the historical Jesus, at least as a sustained and serious intellectual enterprise. The historical Jesus was now to be viewed firmly in his original historical context. The extent to which he was different from (or similar to) the church that emerged in his name became a standard feature of theological scholarship by the end of the nineteenth century. But this was still controversial throughout the nineteenth century, especially through the work of the Protestant theologian, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). In 1835–1836 Strauss published The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined in German (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet) which became most (in)famous for the argument that the miracles were a part of Christian mythmaking, later additions to the Gospels which should be removed from a critical understanding of the life of Jesus. Such was still the scandalous nature of this argument that it cost him his position at the University of Zürich.

Today, the ideas of Reimarus, Strauss, and others are not controversial, even if we might dispute the details and even if their approaches look dated in light of advancements made in the analysis of the Gospels. Disputes now typically vary over what type of figure Jesus was (social critic? end-times prophet? wisdom teacher? progressive liberal?) but are built on the foundations of late eighteenth and nineteenth century scholarship. We should see figures like Reimarus and Strauss as representing significant advancements in the study of history and human society, not least because they helped open up areas of study once off limits.

We should also see the controversies their theological and historical works provoked as part of a wider struggle of their time. We should understand these scholarly advancements as part of the consolidation of bourgeois power of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century, gathering momentum in the build up to, and in the aftermath of, the American and French revolutions and their consequences. As has been argued in detail by Dieter Georgi and Halvor Moxnes, for instance, the most famous European biographies of the “earthly,” “human” Jesus the “great man” were a product of bourgeois nationalism, which challenged the presentation of the aristocratic, divine Christ of the old feudal order. Two centuries later, this bourgeois legacy is continued in liberal scholarship which has come to dominate the quest for the historical Jesus, particularly in North America. For all the differences of scholarly opinion, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on Jesus the great individual who acted with supreme agency.

A Different Tradition

While the Germanic bourgeois publications of the nineteenth century and their successors in liberal scholarship up to the present receive most attention, there were significant developments taking place elsewhere, including in emerging working-class and dissident circles. These reconstructions of Jesus were likewise critical of the presentations of an aristocratic, divine Christ of the feudal order but there was another tendency which turned this “human” Jesus against bourgeois dominance. In Britain, this understanding owes much to Thomas Paine who, in The Age of Reason (Part I published in 1794; Part II in 1795), controversially argued that the Gospels were written many years after the purported events and not by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and not by eyewitnesses.

In addition to criticising the historical plausibility of miracle stories, he argued that the Gospels are contradictory, distorted, and anachronistic accounts. About as much as we can know of the historical figure of Jesus, Paine suggested, was that he was a preacher of the “equality of man,” opposed to priestly corruption, and likely advocated the freeing the Jewish people from Roman rule. After Jesus’ execution on the grounds of sedition and conspiracy, later (non-Jewish) Christians created a mythological system whereby this Jesus was elevated and deified.

Age of Reason was cheap and found a sympathetic audience among labourers, artisans, and radicals (see, e.g., here and here). The influential Paine-style understanding of Jesus was then taken up in reaction to the economic hardships following the Napoleonic Wars, such as by Thomas Evans, a follower of the revolutionary Thomas Spence. Paine’s Jesus was also a major reference point for Chartists in the mid-nineteenth century. But Paine was not the only writer on the historical Jesus that the working class were reading. In 1845, Engels wrote that socialists were active in the education of the working class in England, including in the supply of cheap translations of French and German literature.

One such publication was Strauss’s Life of Jesus, first published a decade earlier (and which Engels had read). The cheap, serialised translation was circulated in the early 1840s and associated with the journalist and radical dissenting Christian, Henry Hetherington. This translation has been largely ignored in the historical of scholarship and overshadowed by the English translation of the fourth edition by the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1846. Whereas Eliot’s translation was for a dissenting middle-class audience, the Hetherington version was squarely aimed at a working-class audience, which goes some way to explaining why one has since been remembered over the other. 

Jesus the revolutionary

This working-class audience for and interest in historical Jesus studies has been overlooked, despite plenty of material being available in the Chartist press and its precursors in the 1830s. Of course, some Chartists were more theologically radical than others, but there is a consistent picture of Jesus that emerges from the newspapers, often at odds with the politics of the more conservative liberal Strauss. This Jesus of working-class interpretation was from a labouring or poor background who identified with his own kind. He was critical of exploitation, hypocrisy, tyranny, and the rich. Jesus’ opponents were typically understood in class terms too. Opposition from priests and other groups were categorised in near timeless class-based terms (middle class, upper class) as first-century equivalent of politicians, aristocrats, and church authorities (of varying denominations) in the nineteenth century.

Against such class-based opposition, Jesus the Chartist-style martyr was said to have put up a dignified front, emphasising egalitarianism, virtue, morality, humility, discipline, and neighbourliness. It was believed that Jesus met the typical fate of the benevolent reformer—persecution and execution—but not everyone thought that he passively accepted his fate. Sometimes Jesus was in line with those Chartists who emphasised “moral force”, but at other times Jesus was more menacing and in line with those Chartists who emphasised “physical force.” Here I summarise articles from, e.g., Poor Man's Guardian, Northern Star, Northern Liberator, The Charter, dating from 1831 to 1852.

Whether right, wrong, or somewhere in between, we should see such late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century reconstructions as a significant development in what has become a recurring popular understanding of the historical Jesus as a radical, oppositional, even revolutionary figure. Yet the relative absence of prominent scholarship on Jesus in the western Marxist tradition over the twentieth century is even more striking against this backdrop. There nothing like the equivalent of, for instance, the influence the British Marxist historians had in university-based history departments. This dearth of comparable scholarship is likely due to the serious study of the foundational figure of Christianity having been located in university theology departments and theological seminaries where, particularly during the Cold War, the hostility towards Marxism (assumed to be atheistic and reductionist) has been most acutely felt.  

Consequently, for all the disagreements among scholars, the resulting portraits of Jesus have typically been idealistic to an extreme degree. There is a dominant tendency portraying Jesus as a great man of history who simply turned up and shaped the world around him, and whose ideas and actions had little connection to socio-economic changes happening at the time. Even when there have been attempts to locate Jesus in a world of economics and social structures, these are usually carried out to highlight his supposed theological distinctiveness or to engage in debates about whether the Galileans were especially oppressed thereby setting the scene for Jesus to provide a radical theological alternative.

This needs to be countered. The once thriving class-based analysis of the historical Jesus of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century needs to be revitalised, updated, and developed further by historians with historical materialist interests. A historical materialist understanding of Jesus in a world of competing class interests obviously turns such idealistic, liberal, or neoliberal readings of Jesus the great man on their head.

The Combination - A Poetic Coupling of the Communist Manifesto by Peter Raynard

£6 (plus £1.50 p&p). ISBN 978-1-912710-04-1

Culture Matters is proud to publish a remarkable new long poem by Peter Raynard written to mark the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto. 

Like the Manifesto, it protests the injustice and exploitation which is integral to capitalism, and the growing gap between capitalism’s productive potential and the unequal distribution of its benefits. And like that Manifesto, it is a dynamic and powerful piece of writing – pungent, oppositional and unsettling.

'A highly innovative long poem, loaded with history, radicalism and urgency.'
- Anthony Anaxagorou

‘This poetic coupling is something else. It's a re-appropriation, a reclamation, a making sing. It's bolshie (yes, in every sense), provocative and poignant too. It takes the Manifesto back from all that is dead, dry and terminally obfuscated. It's a reminder of reality, the flesh on the theory. It gives Marx to those of us who need him most. Not just relevant, but urgent. Not just angry, but hopeful."
- Fran Lock

Buy your copy here:

Martin Brown considers what a Marxist approach can tell us about our education system.  

Like everything else in a class-divided society, education is a battleground. In present conditions, what is taught, how and to whom, is largely determined by the capitalist class. “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” wrote Marx. That’s as true today as ever. Let’s start by looking at what Marx and his successors had to say about education.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels argue (in a mock address to the ruling class) that education is: “determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc. They added; Communists “have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

While Marx was alive, a fierce argument about the state’s involvement in education was going on within the British ruling class. On the one side was the view, expressed by the Bishop of London: "It is safest for both the Government and the religion of the country to let the lower classes remain in the state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them."

On the other side of the argument, employers wanted a workforce who ‘knew their place’, but had enough literacy and numeracy skills to follow instructions, and an increasingly important and complex British industry also needed increasing numbers of skilled workers like mechanics, clerks and accountants. By the middle of the 19th century leaving the working class in ignorance was no longer an option. A chaotic mix of voluntary provision had emerged – church schools, non-conformist schools, charity schools, dame schools and factory schools and of course, many children in no school at all. Fearful of the emerging trade union movement and of radical organisations like the Chartists, the state was eventually forced to intervene to ensure that the gaps in the patchwork of provision by voluntary religious organisations was completed, ensuring that it was their ideology that prevailed and not that of the emerging working class.

In 1870, Marx applauded the Paris Communards’ action in making education free and for removing interference by church and state, and also having studied the educational experiments of Robert Owen, “placed great emphasis on the educative effect of combining productive labour and learning; presupposing a society in which labour had become a creative activity.” (Brian Simon, Intelligence, Psychology and Education)

When workers seized power in Russia in 1917, Marx’s theories were put into practice and education was a priority. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar for Education and Enlightenment, spoke at the All-Russia Congress on Education, held within a year of the Revolution. He stressed the need for the workers and peasants to be given the education that give them the capacity to govern as the ruling class:

“When there came […] the October Revolution, the peasantry and the proletariat came forward without any skill in government, being as far removed from this as can be imagined. Now the power of the state has but one task: to give the people, as quickly as possible, the greatest possible amount of knowledge, to cope with the gigantic role which the Revolution has prepared for the people – to destroy the privileged right to knowledge, allowed before to only a small part of society …”

In a lecture ‘On the Class School’ given in 1920 at the Sverdlov University he emphasised that all children from whatever background should attend the same comprehensive co-educational school; “In a class society everything the state does has a strictly class character … what can we, as socialists, offer instead of this class school? … every boy and every girl, whatever family he or she is born into, goes to one and the same first class, to the unified labour school …” Lunacharsky promoted the understanding that children learn through play: “Play is a method of self-education. ‘Schoolroom’ teaching ignores this fact, it says: a child wants to run about – make him sit still; a child wants to make things himself, to occupy himself with something interesting – sit him down to his Latin! In a word it is a struggle against a child’s very nature. We take exactly the opposite standpoint … when children dance, sing, cut things out mould material into shapes, they are learning …”

Another feature of Soviet schools that was initiated by Lunacharsky was the importance of linking the school to human labour. A decree of 1918 declared that: “the principle of productive labour should underlie the whole educational system: the teaching in the schools must bear a polytechnical character”.

A Soviet poster describing the importance for all to be productive and help build new schools for the proletariat.

Cuba has applied and developed Marxist educational theory since 1959. Its education system is comprehensive, co-educational, secular and free from nursery to university level. Despite the US blockade Cuba spends a higher proportion of GDP on education than any other country in Latin America and the Caribbean, and has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

By contrast, Britain, or to be more precise, England, has led the world of education in the reverse direction. The Global 'Education Reform' Movement (GERM) is now largely controlled by the corporate world with deep connections to conservative politicians. The British 1988 Education Reform Act promoted standardisation, testing, accountability to central government, competition and privatisation. Initiated by the Thatcher government in Britain and the Reagan administration in the USA, GERM has become a global infection. In Africa and Asia profit-making, low fee-paying schools run by Pearson and other transnational corporations undermine national education systems.

The significant advances made in Britain after World War Two have been largely reversed. Selection, often under the guise of academies and 'free schools' is increasing, religious schools have increased in number and variety, and local education authorities (along with any semblance of local accountability) have disappeared. Tuition fees in universities are returning higher education into the preserve of an elite.

British education is in meltdown. Author and educationalist Peter Mortimore, writes: “Since 1988 our education system has been transformed into a market economy -- as if schooling is similar to shopping or using an estate agent. The ideological inspiration for marketisation stems from the work of Milton Friedman. His 'Capitalism and Freedom' provoked a new strategy for governing […] The key elements of this strategy are individualism, competition, choice, privatisation, decentralisation, deregulation and the use of the market in all public services.”

Along with these developments, governments, both Tory and Labour, have centralised control of the curriculum and established draconian inspection and testing regimes. As a result, the teacher's role has been reduced to that of technician with little control over what is taught and how. Austerity budgets have slashed education spending and while the devolved governments of Wales and Scotland have been able to resist some of these developments and retain a degree of local accountability (and Scottish higher education students do not pay tuition fees), both countries' education systems are massively underfunded. It is no surprise that there is now an acute teacher shortage. The Times recently reported “applications for teacher training have fallen by a third in a year, the government has missed its recruitment targets for the past five years and teachers are quitting in record numbers with a quarter leaving after just three years.”

A Marxist approach can help us understand how this situation came about and what has to be done to change it. Marx's views on school education were not elaborated - there are only scattered references in various of his works and there was no universal state education when he was writing, but later thinkers have developed his approach. Antonio Gramsci coined the phrase 'cultural hegemony' to describe the influence that the ruling class has over what counts as knowledge. The dominant class controls the subject class not with force but with ideas that conceal the true source of their power and the nature of the exploitation.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed radical Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, described conventional teaching under capitalism as the 'banking method', which he saw as mirroring and reinforcing an oppressive society. Under this model of teaching the teacher is viewed as knowing everything and the student nothing. The teacher talks and the student listens. The teacher (or rather the government) determines what is taught and how it is taught. Students become empty vessels and their role is to store the knowledge bestowed on them. Above all they are not required or expected as a result of their education to change the world by reflection and action. In contrast, the humanist, revolutionary educator will adopt another approach: problem posing education based on a dialogue between teacher and student in which both become responsible for a process in which they both grow. Their aim should be to become critical thinkers questioning and challenging what they encounter in the learning process.

At last the hegemony of free market education model is being challenged by the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s emerging policy on a National Education Service is a breath of fresh air, and the skeleton policy - currently out for consultation has refocused debates around what children should be taught, how, and by whom. It includes the aim that education should be free at the point of use, that all barriers to learning are to be tackled, that all areas of skills and learning deserve respect. It promotes collaboration and co-operation over competition, proposes a restoration of local accountability, of practice being based on evidence, of assessment and inspection being used to support teachers and learners. At this stage the policies imply advances but lack detail. One response from an alliance of educational campaigning groups that makes the proposals explicit is to be found at www.reclaimingeducation.org.uk. Abolition of student tuition fees is implied but on the future of academies and free schools – a key ingredient of the market model – the alliance is unclear as is how local accountability can be restored.

There are historical injustices that will have to be dealt with too. Private education buys privilege. Grammar schools, religious schools and above all so-called ‘public’ schools are used to exclude others and have no place in a society that is building a socialist future.

In A Life in Education Brian Simon, the late Marxist, campaigner for comprehensive education and educational historian, summed up what is needed:

“Up to the age of 16 all children should have the opportunity to experience a full all round education embodying the humanities, arts, sciences and technology - this is and always has been the aim of comprehensive education. In such schools there are no blind alleys, no once-and-for-all tests to cut off or divest children from access to learning. Opportunities remain open for all. Well-equipped schools of this type serve their own neighbourhood in every locality. Such is the objective. To achieve this schools not only need generous resources in terms of buildings, equipment and staff; they also need to evolve the relevant pedagogical means carefully honed to ensure that all children are effectively assisted in their learning. This is an area where much has been lacking in both primary and secondary schools.

Education should be holistic, should address mental and physical health and wellbeing. It should help pupils think rather than learn facts, it should encourage pupils to question everything, to be sceptical, to think. Philosophy should be a central plank of education, from the earliest age. It should enable pupils to live their lives to the full not simply enable them to join the workforce.” 

Here, then, is a programme for the 21st century for any government worth its salt. The need now is to go even further, and finally create a genuinely national system of education. Current provisions, historically based are no longer acceptable. Such must be the agenda for the future.

Martin Brown considers what a Marxist approach can tell us about our education system.  

Like everything else in a class-divided society, education is a battleground. In present conditions, what is taught, how and to whom, is largely determined by the capitalist class. “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” wrote Marx. That’s as true today as ever. Let’s start by looking at what Marx and his successors had to say about education.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels argue (in a mock address to the ruling class) that education is: “determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc. They added; Communists “have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

While Marx was alive, a fierce argument about the state’s involvement in education was going on within the British ruling class. On the one side was the view, expressed by the Bishop of London: "It is safest for both the Government and the religion of the country to let the lower classes remain in the state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them."

On the other side of the argument, employers wanted a workforce who ‘knew their place’, but had enough literacy and numeracy skills to follow instructions, and an increasingly important and complex British industry also needed increasing numbers of skilled workers like mechanics, clerks and accountants. By the middle of the 19th century leaving the working class in ignorance was no longer an option. A chaotic mix of voluntary provision had emerged – church schools, non-conformist schools, charity schools, dame schools and factory schools and of course, many children in no school at all. Fearful of the emerging trade union movement and of radical organisations like the Chartists, the state was eventually forced to intervene to ensure that the gaps in the patchwork of provision by voluntary religious organisations was completed, ensuring that it was their ideology that prevailed and not that of the emerging working class.

In 1870, Marx applauded the Paris Communards’ action in making education free and for removing interference by church and state, and also having studied the educational experiments of Robert Owen, “placed great emphasis on the educative effect of combining productive labour and learning; presupposing a society in which labour had become a creative activity.” (Brian Simon, Intelligence, Psychology and Education)

When workers seized power in Russia in 1917, Marx’s theories were put into practice and education was a priority. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar for Education and Enlightenment, spoke at the All-Russia Congress on Education, held within a year of the Revolution. He stressed the need for the workers and peasants to be given the education that give them the capacity to govern as the ruling class:

“When there came […] the October Revolution, the peasantry and the proletariat came forward without any skill in government, being as far removed from this as can be imagined. Now the power of the state has but one task: to give the people, as quickly as possible, the greatest possible amount of knowledge, to cope with the gigantic role which the Revolution has prepared for the people – to destroy the privileged right to knowledge, allowed before to only a small part of society …”

In a lecture ‘On the Class School’ given in 1920 at the Sverdlov University he emphasised that all children from whatever background should attend the same comprehensive co-educational school; “In a class society everything the state does has a strictly class character … what can we, as socialists, offer instead of this class school? … every boy and every girl, whatever family he or she is born into, goes to one and the same first class, to the unified labour school …” Lunacharsky promoted the understanding that children learn through play: “Play is a method of self-education. ‘Schoolroom’ teaching ignores this fact, it says: a child wants to run about – make him sit still; a child wants to make things himself, to occupy himself with something interesting – sit him down to his Latin! In a word it is a struggle against a child’s very nature. We take exactly the opposite standpoint … when children dance, sing, cut things out mould material into shapes, they are learning …”

Another feature of Soviet schools that was initiated by Lunacharsky was the importance of linking the school to human labour. A decree of 1918 declared that: “the principle of productive labour should underlie the whole educational system: the teaching in the schools must bear a polytechnical character”.

A Soviet poster describing the importance for all to be productive and help build new schools for the proletariat.

Cuba has applied and developed Marxist educational theory since 1959. Its education system is comprehensive, co-educational, secular and free from nursery to university level. Despite the US blockade Cuba spends a higher proportion of GDP on education than any other country in Latin America and the Caribbean, and has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

By contrast, Britain, or to be more precise, England, has led the world of education in the reverse direction. The Global 'Education Reform' Movement (GERM) is now largely controlled by the corporate world with deep connections to conservative politicians. The British 1988 Education Reform Act promoted standardisation, testing, accountability to central government, competition and privatisation. Initiated by the Thatcher government in Britain and the Reagan administration in the USA, GERM has become a global infection. In Africa and Asia profit-making, low fee-paying schools run by Pearson and other transnational corporations undermine national education systems.

The significant advances made in Britain after World War Two have been largely reversed. Selection, often under the guise of academies and 'free schools' is increasing, religious schools have increased in number and variety, and local education authorities (along with any semblance of local accountability) have disappeared. Tuition fees in universities are returning higher education into the preserve of an elite.

British education is in meltdown. Author and educationalist Peter Mortimore, writes: “Since 1988 our education system has been transformed into a market economy -- as if schooling is similar to shopping or using an estate agent. The ideological inspiration for marketisation stems from the work of Milton Friedman. His 'Capitalism and Freedom' provoked a new strategy for governing […] The key elements of this strategy are individualism, competition, choice, privatisation, decentralisation, deregulation and the use of the market in all public services.”

Along with these developments, governments, both Tory and Labour, have centralised control of the curriculum and established draconian inspection and testing regimes. As a result, the teacher's role has been reduced to that of technician with little control over what is taught and how. Austerity budgets have slashed education spending and while the devolved governments of Wales and Scotland have been able to resist some of these developments and retain a degree of local accountability (and Scottish higher education students do not pay tuition fees), both countries' education systems are massively underfunded. It is no surprise that there is now an acute teacher shortage. The Times recently reported “applications for teacher training have fallen by a third in a year, the government has missed its recruitment targets for the past five years and teachers are quitting in record numbers with a quarter leaving after just three years.”

A Marxist approach can help us understand how this situation came about and what has to be done to change it. Marx's views on school education were not elaborated - there are only scattered references in various of his works and there was no universal state education when he was writing, but later thinkers have developed his approach. Antonio Gramsci coined the phrase 'cultural hegemony' to describe the influence that the ruling class has over what counts as knowledge. The dominant class controls the subject class not with force but with ideas that conceal the true source of their power and the nature of the exploitation.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed radical Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, described conventional teaching under capitalism as the 'banking method', which he saw as mirroring and reinforcing an oppressive society. Under this model of teaching the teacher is viewed as knowing everything and the student nothing. The teacher talks and the student listens. The teacher (or rather the government) determines what is taught and how it is taught. Students become empty vessels and their role is to store the knowledge bestowed on them. Above all they are not required or expected as a result of their education to change the world by reflection and action. In contrast, the humanist, revolutionary educator will adopt another approach: problem posing education based on a dialogue between teacher and student in which both become responsible for a process in which they both grow. Their aim should be to become critical thinkers questioning and challenging what they encounter in the learning process.

At last the hegemony of free market education model is being challenged by the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s emerging policy on a National Education Service is a breath of fresh air, and the skeleton policy - currently out for consultation has refocused debates around what children should be taught, how, and by whom. It includes the aim that education should be free at the point of use, that all barriers to learning are to be tackled, that all areas of skills and learning deserve respect. It promotes collaboration and co-operation over competition, proposes a restoration of local accountability, of practice being based on evidence, of assessment and inspection being used to support teachers and learners. At this stage the policies imply advances but lack detail. One response from an alliance of educational campaigning groups that makes the proposals explicit is to be found at www.reclaimingeducation.org.uk. Abolition of student tuition fees is implied but on the future of academies and free schools – a key ingredient of the market model – the alliance is unclear as is how local accountability can be restored.

There are historical injustices that will have to be dealt with too. Private education buys privilege. Grammar schools, religious schools and above all so-called ‘public’ schools are used to exclude others and have no place in a society that is building a socialist future.

In A Life in Education Brian Simon, the late Marxist, campaigner for comprehensive education and educational historian, summed up what is needed:

“Up to the age of 16 all children should have the opportunity to experience a full all round education embodying the humanities, arts, sciences and technology - this is and always has been the aim of comprehensive education. In such schools there are no blind alleys, no once-and-for-all tests to cut off or divest children from access to learning. Opportunities remain open for all. Well-equipped schools of this type serve their own neighbourhood in every locality. Such is the objective. To achieve this schools not only need generous resources in terms of buildings, equipment and staff; they also need to evolve the relevant pedagogical means carefully honed to ensure that all children are effectively assisted in their learning. This is an area where much has been lacking in both primary and secondary schools.

Education should be holistic, should address mental and physical health and wellbeing. It should help pupils think rather than learn facts, it should encourage pupils to question everything, to be sceptical, to think. Philosophy should be a central plank of education, from the earliest age. It should enable pupils to live their lives to the full not simply enable them to join the workforce.” 

Here, then, is a programme for the 21st century for any government worth its salt. The need now is to go even further, and finally create a genuinely national system of education. Current provisions, historically based are no longer acceptable. Such must be the agenda for the future.

Richard Clarke considers how a dialectical methodology can help scientists ask the right questions.

‘Science’ and ‘scientific’ can mean at least three different things, including: 1) the ‘knowledge content’ of different disciplines (as in physics, chemistry, biology) about the universe; 2) the processes by which this understanding is acquired (the ‘scientific method’ and wider issues in the philosophy of science); and 3) the relationship of science to society, in particular the organisation, funding and control of research (in the laboratories of universities, by pharma companies or within the ‘military-industrial complex’) and how access to and use of that knowledge is controlled. 

All three of these are connected, and it’s easiest to take them in reverse order.

Science is often conceived as ‘pure’ knowledge or ‘facts’, independent of the way these are produced, controlled or used. Marxists would challenge this, pointing out that throughout history, the changing content of scientific knowledge - what are understood at any point in time as facts - are closely related to the social conditions of their production, though in a dialectical rather than a deterministic way. Marx, writing to Engels about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection commented: ‘It is remarkable how among beasts and plants Darwin recognises his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’’ (Letter from Marx to Engels, June 18, 1862)

In 1931 a Soviet delegation arrived unannounced at the second International Congress of the History of Science in London, where its leader, Boris Hessen delivered a paper entitled The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia. Hessen argued that Isaac Newton’s  Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica  (first published in 1687) - perhaps the single most important scientific treatise of western civilization - was intimately connected to the social conditions of its production. Newton’s Laws of Motion and his ‘discovery’ of gravity were not a gift of divine providence, not (just) the product of individual genius (or the consequence of being hit by a falling apple). They were a response to specific technical problems of early capitalism, in particular the need for improved maritime navigation, the development of new machinery and ballistic weaponry in warfare.

That scientific theories are related to the social context of their production does not of course mean that they are ‘wrong’ or lacking in objectivity. But it challenges the conventional view of science and scientists as autonomous, having an impact ‘on’ society but not being influenced by society. In reality the relationship is two-way; it is dialectical. This approach - emphasising the reciprocal links between science and its social context was later popularised by the communist scientist J D Bernal in his four-volume Science in History, and it is now broadly accepted by the majority of historians of science.

Under capitalism, ‘natural science acts as a direct productive force, continuously invading and transforming all areas of human existence.’ It is one of the principal agents of technological and social change. It can be immensely liberating, but also hugely destructive. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, ‘the twin roles of science as a force of production and of social control have become both dominant and manifest, and […] this transition is linked with a change in the mode of production of scientific knowledge, from essentially craft, to industrialised production.’ (Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, The Incorporation of Science, in The Political Economy of Science.)

Coalbrookdale by Night, by Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801

Science can be exciting. It is one of the things that separates humans from all other animals. But the mode of production of scientific knowledge has changed since Marx’s day, from essentially craft, to industrialised assembly. Today the daily work of most scientists is routine. Most scientific research is conducted by or funded by commercial organisations. The overwhelming majority of scientists are employees, working (often under short-term contracts) under the direction of their managers on specific problems which are part of a greater whole of which they are often unaware - a situation analogous to the Taylorism of factory work (maximising efficiency by breaking jobs down into simple routine elements) and funded either by external grants or directly by the companies for which they work. 

Scientific labour (the work of practising scientists) itself produces ‘use value’ as knowledge, much of which, through patenting or commercial secrecy, is appropriated for profit. The activities of pharmaceutical companies, agricultural research and the nuclear industry all demonstrate the subordination of science to capital, often in particularly oppressive and (socially and environmentally) destructive ways.

And capital makes profit from science not only through its technological applications (from foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals to energy technologies and software systems) but also in other, essentially unproductive ways, from restrictive patents to publishing. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in turnover – a 36% margin, higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year. The careers of scientists depend on publishing in ‘reputable’ journals which charge extortionate prices for access.

Marxism also has something to say about the philosophy and methodology of science. Marx and Engels both emphasised the way that science itself moves in a dialectical way from induction to deduction, from analysis to synthesis and from the concrete to the abstract, and back again. For example, induction involves making a generalisation from a set of specific observations. This results in the formulation of an hypothesis (an explanation or prediction) which, if not contradicted by further observation, becomes incorporated in a body of theory. Deduction works the other way around - start with a generalisation (a theory), produce an hypothesis about what will happen in a particular situation, then test this through further observations, sometimes involving experiments. The two processes of induction and deduction are inseparable and lead to a progressive refinement of theory as the best explanation, generally supported by the scientific community, of observations to date.

One of the most influential philosophers of science was (Sir) Karl Popper. Popper emphasised that a ‘scientific’ statement (or theory) is not one that is necessarily ‘true’, but rather one that is framed in such a way that it can be tested (or falsified). For Popper, an anti-communist liberal, Marxism is not ‘scientific’ because it is not falsifiable. However the same criticism also applies to most of the social sciences and indeed to much natural science. Darwinism (the theory of evolution through natural selection) is itself primarily inductive.

A rather different view of scientific progress was popularised by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. In his extraordinarily influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn argued against the Popperian notion of science as a gradual orderly progression towards ‘truth’. Most scientists, most of the time, he argued, operate within an unchallenged conceptual framework, or paradigm, filling in bits of a jigsaw or ‘puzzle-solving’ but rarely challenging the overall picture. Periodically, however, anomalies accumulate, ‘normal science’ breaks down and a new paradigm emerges. Examples of such ‘paradigm shifts’ include the Copernican revolution (a heliocentric rather than an earth-centred universe), Darwinian evolution, and Einsteinian relativity theory. Kuhn emphasised that paradigm shifts are not confined to the internal logic of science but involve social and political factors as well.

Kuhn’s work resulted in a surge of interest on the social relations of science — including the rediscovery of Hessen’s paper on Newton a third of a century earlier and of which Kuhn appears to have been unaware. It also chimed with the ‘anti-science swing’ of the 1970s, leading some to argue that science was ‘nothing but’ social relations. Both extremes - the view of science as ‘pure’ knowledge independent of society, but also the argument that science is merely another form of ideology or culture - have always been challenged by Marxists. The questions science asks (and the answers that it gets) are closely related to the way that science is organised, who pays and who profits, as well as to the more general needs of society. But that doesn’t mean that science is necessarily lacking in objectivity (although sometimes this is the case). Scientific knowledge is a special form of knowledge. The scientific method and the knowledge it produces have a relative autonomy.

But a Marxist approach can take us still further in relation to ‘the facts’ of science. The underlying philosophical basis of Marxism, dialectical materialism , is not a magic key to provide the ‘right’ solution to any problem. There have been periods in the not-too-distant history of science where it has been abused, notably during the ‘Lysenko period’ of Soviet genetics. It is, rather, a potentially helpful approach to asking the right questions (and to examining and challenging answers which are put forward by others) – about nature as well as about human society.

The dominant mode of science is reductionist – studying individual parts of a system, isolating one variable at a time and ignoring other aspects. Reductionism is potentially a powerful procedure in science. But of itself it can only provide partial answers to relatively limited questions. Reductionism alone can never provide the whole picture. And in some areas, notably in human biology and psychology, it lends itself to (unintentional or deliberate) abuse. An example is when supposedly ‘scientific’ justifications are put forward for social inequality, discrimination and the status-quo.

This was particularly the case with what came to be known as social Darwinism, pioneered by Herbert Spencer, one of the most influential European intellectuals of the late 19th century, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ (never used by Darwin himself) and applied it to human affairs. A free market was the reflection in human society of natural law. Regulation and welfare provision, he argued, should therefore be opposed (he used the phrase ‘There Is No Alternative’ more than a century before Thatcher). Ironically, Spencer’s ashes are interred in Highgate cemetery opposite Karl Marx’s grave.

Science has been used repeatedly since in a similar way. Today sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are still used to justify inequality, racism and sexual discrimination on the basis of supposed inherited biological traits. Competition, aggression, xenophobia are (it is argued) programmed into us from our ancestral past. They are ‘in our genes’. The notion of the ‘selfish gene’ is an example of a reductionist approach which ‘naturalises’ what are essentially social phenomena and fails to look at the relations between different levels of analysis. Sometimes the biases in science are unconscious. Sometimes they are deliberate. Sir Cyril Burt was a hugely influential educational psychologist who ‘proved’ that intelligence was overwhelmingly inherited. His work was used to justify selective schooling and the subordination of black and working class people. His work was always challenged by progressives but it was only after his death in 1971 that it was found to have been fraudulent.

Good science (and major advance) needs to look critically at the evidence for any explanation of phenomena, and also to understand the limits within which those explanations are appropriate. It needs to examine the functions of each part of a complex system but also the interactions between these parts and the way they affect the behaviour of a system as a whole. A dialectical approach in science is valuable both in what Thomas Kuhn called ‘normal science’ but also in the major transformative shifts which change the way that we perceive the world. Many Marxist scientists have found such an approach helpful in their professional work.

An example in the physical sciences is the quantum physicist David Bohm, one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century. Following his early work on nuclear fission Bohm collaborated with Albert Einstein at Princeton University before being forced to leave the United States because of his links with the Young Communist League and activity in peace movements. At London’s Birkbeck College he showed how entities - from sub-atomic particles to everyday ‘objects’ - can be regarded as ‘semi-autonomous quasi-local features’ of underlying processes, later extending this to the nature of thought and consciousness.

J D Bernal

Other notable Marxist physicists include the crystallographer and polymath J D Bernal (also based at Birkbeck), Dorothy Hodgkin (pioneer of three dimensional protein structures such as penicillin and insulin) and the biochemist Joseph Needham (the first Head of the Natural Sciences Section of UNESCO). Perhaps unsurprisingly the most productive applications of a dialectical approach have been in biological science. One of the most prominent was J B S Haldane (originator with the Russian biochemist Alexsandr Oparin of the ‘primordial soup’ theory of the origin of life) who combined his scientific work with popularisation of science and Marxist philosophy. And other scientists (including some who would disclaim the descriptor ‘Marxist’) nevertheless see dialectical materialism as a key guide in their science. An example is Ernst Mayr, one of the most eminent biologists of the 20th century, whose 1977 essay Roots of Dialectical Materialism is a good brief introduction to the subject and its controversies. 

More recent conspicuous examples of Marxist scientists include Steven Rose in his work on the relationship between consciousness and the human brain, the evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould (author with Niles Eldredge of the theory of punctated equilibrium), the ecologist Richard Levins (a pioneer of metapopulation theory) and the geneticist Dick Lewontin.

So: a Marxist approach can reveal a good deal about the relation of science to society, and it can also help to illuminate the process whereby scientific knowledge is produced. As far as the knowledge content of science is concerned, Marxism of itself offers no especially privileged insights into the workings of nature - that is the job of science and scientists. But a dialectical methodology is an essential complement to reductionism. And in key areas it can help us question the popular presentation of ‘facts’ which might otherwise be taken on trust. A socialist science has the potential to be a better kind of science.

An abbreviated version of this answer was published in the Morning Star in two parts on 18 September and 6 November 2017.

Richard Clarke introduces some of the main Marxist insights into the nature and value of art, and its links to political and economic realities.

Most Marxists would say that the value of a work of art such as a painting, or the pleasure they get from it - in its original or as a reproduction - is above all else an individual matter, not something that ‘experts’ (Marxist or otherwise) can or should pronounce upon. At the same time experts can enhance that pleasure, for example by explaining the technique and methodology of the composition of a painting. Again, this is no more the exclusive province of a Marxist than (for example) a commentary on the technical skills embodied in the design or manufacture of a washing machine.

However a Marxist approach may help to deepen the appreciation or understanding of an art work by revealing the historical context of its production and the relation of a work of art or of an artist to society. Art, just as any other human activity, is always created within a specific social and historical context, and this will impact on the art work itself. This is why Marxists argue that one can only begin fully to appreciate and understand a work of art by examining it in relation to the conditions of its creation.

Here a fruitful starting point for discussion is a materialist view – looking at the production and consumption of art, the position of artists in relation to different classes, and the conflicts embodied in a work of art and in the history of which it is a part. For example, Ernst Fischer’s seminal essay The Necessity of Art (1959) is a Marxist exposition of the central social function of art, from its origins in magic ritual through organised religion to its varied and contradictory roles within capitalism and its potential in building socialism.

The Marxist art critic John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (a 1972 four-part television series, later adapted into a book, Ways of Seeing) was hailed by many people for helping to deepen their understanding of art. Berger argued that it was impossible to view a reproduction of ‘old masters’ (generally paintings by European artists before 1800) in the way they were seen at the time of their production; that the female nude was an abstraction and distortion of reality, reflecting contemporary male ideals; that an oil painting was often a means of reflecting the status of an artist’s patron; and that contemporary advertising utilises the skills of artists and the latest artistic techniques merely to sell things for consumption in a capitalist market. 

Berger’s work remains controversial and has been revisited many times, particularly since his death in January 2017. Many have argued that he over-simplifies and that he incorporates the deeper perceptions of others such as Walter Benjamin, working at the interface between Marxism and cultural theory. Some have asked (for example) why there is no reference to feminist theorists in Berger’s chapter on the ‘male gaze’. However Berger’s work needs to be seen in context as a polemical response to the ‘great artists’ approach which characterises much establishment art history and ‘art appreciation’ typified by Kenneth Clark’s (1969) Civilisation television series.

What is clear is that cultural expression (art, lower case) is characteristic of all human societies and that while art and society are intimately connected, the former is not merely a passive reflection of the latter. The relationship is a dialectical one. As Marx declared in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘The object of art, like any other product, creates an artistic and beauty-enjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object’. 

A distinction is often made between the performing arts (including music, theatre, and dance) and the visual arts (such as drawing, painting, photography, film and video). Performing arts are of their nature ephemeral, and as Robert Wyatt, the communist percussionist of the ‘60s psychedelic rock group Soft Machine, declared, ‘different every time’. The performance is the initial product, although it may be recorded, reproduced and subsequently sold.

‘Art’ (as in painting, on canvas) is sometimes presented as the highest point in the development of ‘civilised’ culture. Jean Gimpel, an historian, diamond dealer, and expert in art forgery, attacked the concept of ‘high art’ in his book The Cult of Art (subtitled Against Art and Artists). He argued that the concept of Art - especially oil paintings, on transportable framed canvas - is specifically a product of capitalism, personified in the Florentine artist Giotto ‘the first bourgeois painter’ of the Renaissance and his successors.

Under the patronage of the Medici and other nouveau riche Italian patrician families, the ‘artisan’ workmanship of frescos on church walls or decorated altarpiece was superseded by the movable (and marketable) canvas. In short, it was commodified. ‘People no longer wanted a 'Madonna' or a 'Descent from the Cross' but a Leonardo da Vinci, a Michelangelo or a Bellini.’ The cult of art and the artist was born.

Yet it was not until the eighteenth century that the distinction between ‘artisan’ and ‘artist’ became fixed. Even today people can be heard asking – of everything from the Lascaux cave paintings to some suburban topiary — ‘but is it Art?’ High art of course also produced its supposed antithesis - the artist in his garret (women artists were to a degree excluded from the equation), suffering, sometimes starving in the cause of art unless they are lucky enough to be ‘discovered’, often only after death. With capitalism, for the first time the artist became a ‘free’ artist, a ‘free’ personality, free to the point of absurdity, of icy loneliness. Art became an occupation that was half-romantic, half-commercial.

Dire Straits’ ‘In The Gallery’ is a song about the conversion of use-value (the worth the artist or her audience see in an art work or the pleasure they get from it) into exchange value. Harry is an ex-miner and a sculptor, ‘ignored by all the trendy boys in London’ until after he dies, when, suddenly, he is ‘discovered’ (too late for Harry, of course) – the vultures descend to make profit from his work.

In The Gallery

Don Mclean’s ‘Starry Starry Night’ carries a similar message. The principal difference (beyond the tempo of the songs) is that Harry is politically engaged, very much of this world whereas tormented Vincent (Van Gogh) was ‘out of it’ - unlike his post-impressionist erstwhile friend, Paul Gauguin, who asked his agent what ‘the stupid buying public’ would pay most for and then adjusted his output accordingly.

Vincent (Starry Starry Night)

Irrespective of their recognition or fame, art and artists are frequently presented as apart from, sometimes above, society. For Marxists it is clear that the arts and artists are an integral part of society. In terms of aesthetics and policy however, Marxists would suggest caution - the history of art within socialism is a mixed one. The early flowering of post-revolutionary Soviet avant-garde art is well known. Constructivism strived to put art at the service of the people. The subsequent rise of socialist realism as ‘official’ art was an attempt to make art more accessible (and it existed alongside a flourishing variety of unofficial art forms).

Left: Gustav Klutsis – Workers, Everyone must vote in the Election of Soviets! Right: Russian Propaganda Poster

In the United States modern art was promoted as a weapon in a cultural cold war with the Soviet Union and its ‘socialist realist’ art forms. In the 1950s and 1960s, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Farfield Foundation, and other covers, the CIA secretly promoted the work of American abstract expressionist artists - including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - in order to demonstrate the supposed intellectual freedom and cultural creativity of the US against the ideological conformity of Soviet art.

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Even when art is oppositional, capitalism has an uncanny knack of appropriating it. The Royal Academy’s 2017 exhibition of Russian revolutionary art was accompanied by vicious and ignorant curating – presumably to disabuse any who might otherwise have been inspired by the works on display. Banksy’s graffiti, a determinedly uncommercial form of art ‘for the people’ (maybe a modern equivalent of the Lascaux cave paintings?) is now ‘in the gallery’ – decidedly a collector’s item with a price tag to match. Another (dead) graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 depiction of a skull was auctioned in May this year for more than $100 million. Banksy’s own comment on this is conveyed on a wall of the Barbican where a posthumous exhibition of Basquiat’s work runs until January 2018 (admission £16). City of London officials are currently considering whether (and how) this fresh graffiti might be preserved.

Within capitalism, as its crisis deepens, ‘high art’ (provided it is portable, saleable, in a word, alienable) is – next to land and other property – one of the best investments that there is. A recent example is Sir Edwin Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’, ‘saved’ for the nation in March 2017 at a cost of £4 million, through a fund raising exercise to pay its owner, Diageo. This multinational drinks conglomerate (profits last year £3 billion on net sales of £10.8bn, 15% up on the previous year; CEO Ivan Menezes’ salary £4.4m) graciously agreed to accept just half of the paintings ‘estimated value’ of £8 million. More than half of this money came from the National Lottery - itself sometimes described as a ‘hidden tax on the poor’. 

Edwin Landseer,The Monarch of the Glen

Gaugin’s Nafea Faa Ipoipo? (‘When Will You Marry’?), painted in 1882 and, like his others, presenting a romanticised view of Tahiti, sold for $300 million in 2015 — just topped by de Kooning’s Interchange the following year. A 24ct gold bracelet, designed by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese ‘dissident’ and ‘champion of democracy’, inspired by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (the deadliest earthquake ever, 90,000 dead, between 5 and 11 million homeless) sells for a modest £45,500 from Elisabetta Cipriani, (ElisabettaCipriani). The majority of artists and their artworks of course, never reach such dizzy heights.

The role of the artist in society remains a controversial subject. In the meantime it is clear that art and artists can and do play a vital role and that artistic freedom and license are crucial. Perhaps a good model is that followed in the former Yugoslavia and other socialist countries (as today in Cuba). Artists were not paid or employed as such by the state, although the arts in general were and are given generous state support. As in capitalist countries artists had to make their living through commissions, though these would be more likely to come from community associations, trades unions, local councils and the like, rather than from wealthy patrons or investors. Many would have to supplement their incomes by teaching, or by doing other jobs. But their social position was recognised and their social security contributions were paid so that on ill-health or retirement they would not suffer.

In both the appreciation, understanding and, indeed, production of art, and whether you love or loathe his own designs, one assertion that all socialists would surely agree with is that of the communist William Morris, who declared ‘I do not want art for a few; any more than education for a few; or freedom for a few...’, (Hopes and fears for art). What is certain is that art - of all types - can enrich our lives. It can also be galvanising, a force for social progress. But it is also clear that art that is subject to capitalist market forces involves a chronic distortion of the artistic product and process in which art works are valued for their price tag rather than their intrinsic quality. A Marxist approach can deepen our understanding of art provided that we avoid dogmatism and accept that this is an area of debate - one to which we can all contribute.

An abbreviated version of this article was first published in the Morning Star on 14 August 2017.

In the second part of his series, Mark Abel asks how Marxists should judge music.

In the first part of this series of articles, I argued that critique was at the heart of any application of Marxist theory, and that therefore a Marxist musicology must be a critical, rather than a disinterested (or complacent) activity. But this immediately raises the question of what kind of judgments can be made about music, and on what basis. Where is the meaning in music and how might it be revealed?

Perhaps the most obvious and most common way that Marxists (in general) make judgments about any kind of cultural text, whether literary, dramatic, or visual, is on the basis of its discernible, or overt, political meaning. But since, arguably, music as such does not have a discernible political meaning, the focus of this method of attributing value in the case of songs tends to fall on their lyrical content. The immediate effect of this approach is to regard the music as no more than the accompaniment to the sung words, an enhancement of what is held to be really important in the song – the words.

On this basis, a strong trend in the history of Marxist approaches to music involved the valorisation of forms of music which prioritise the clear delivery of lyrics and downplay the importance of instruments. The ease with which judgments could be made on the basis of the political values expressed in the lyrics was one of the reasons why much of the Left in the mid-20th century became particularly associated with folk music. The other was that this kind of music proved to be well-suited to mass, amateur participation at political events. The protest songs of singers like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger drew on a variety of sources, like this American union song, ‘Which Side Are You On?’

The value being attached to the music itself, in this relationship between the Left and folk music, relates to the tunes’ simplicity, even unobtrusiveness, in relation to the message carried by the words.

To the extent that the actual musical content was a factor in making political judgments about folk music, it was an instance of the use of another kind of criterion – the supposed class basis of the music. Here we have a judgment based on a concept of popular authenticity: the idea that some forms of music are part of a folk culture which is the authentic expression of a people, that is, of ordinary, poor, oppressed or exploited people. This quality is held to set such music apart from ‘bourgeois’ art or highbrow music.

The authenticity criterion was applied at around the same time to another music – jazz – whose progressive nature was held to derive from its connection with an oppressed section of society, as well as its resulting difference from both the classical concert tradition and commercial popular music. The logic of this latter criterion meant that when jazz began to develop in both directions – an artistic one with bebop and a commercial one with the big bands – there was a need for a new focus. That need found fulfillment in the Dixieland Revival, which was essentially the celebration of early, ‘traditional’ (‘trad’) jazz as the authentic, popular and democratic original form of the music. Much of the soundtrack of leftwing political events in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and elsewhere comprises both folk-like singing and marching jazzbands. This is footage of the 1959 Aldermaston march: 

Although politically interesting things can be said about the musical procedures of jazz compared to other forms of music-making, part of its attraction for progressives was the perceived ‘outsider’ status of its original New Orleans protagonists. The British trad-jazz revival of the 1950s was an echo of a similar American revival led by New Deal progressives in the 1930s and celebrated the apparent purity of a music produced by an oppressed community in another part of the world.

If Billy Bragg might be regarded as a descendant of the folk-protest tradition, the late twentieth century fashion for ‘world music’ was a descendant of the trad jazz revival. Far flung parts of the globe were scoured for sounds to satisfy a demand amongst Western progressives for authentic popular expression which had not (yet) been poisoned by the values of capitalism. This was, however, a pale, somewhat compromised, echo of the earlier movements in that whereas both the folk and the trad jazz scenes were built around performances by idealistic musicians dedicated to keeping a form of music alive, those doing the scouring for world music represented the very forces that threatened this music’s integrity – multinational record companies. Listen to these tracks from Ken Colyer’s Crane River Jazzband, which performed at many political events, to hear the quality of the recreation of the New Orleans sound by 1950s British musicians:

What is common to all these cases is that the political judgment is being made largely on non-musical, or extra-musical, grounds: this music is politically sound because of who makes it, or where it comes from. This is also true of the parallel tendency of valorising art-music composers for their supposed commitment to Marxism, socialism or progressive politics. On this basis, composers such as Alan Bush and Michael Tippett were celebrated by sections of the British Left, their political stance evidenced partly by their anti-elitist involvement with non-professional music-making, such as choral societies, but mainly by the themes of their works, particularly operas (thereby relying on overt verbal meanings). This is part of Bush’s opera about nineteenth century Northumbrian miners, Men of Blackmoor:

And this is Tippet’s oratorio Child of Our Time, which incorporates arrangements of African American spirituals, thereby combining in one work all the criteria for progressive approval discussed so far.

What is left out of such judgments is the musical success or otherwise of the outcomes of these efforts, as though good intentions are enough. In addition, this approach suffers from the ‘intentional fallacy’ of believing that art is simply the product of the execution of an intention on the part of its creator. This holds that an artist is solely responsible for the art she produces, and this will be socialist art if the artist holds socialist beliefs and principles.

In fact, this is a form of idealism which has nothing to do with Marxism. Marx initiated an approach which understood art, by virtue of its social roots, as expressing something beyond the intention of its individual creator, perhaps even at odds with its creator’s personal views. For example, he thought that the novelist Balzac had succeeded in cutting through bourgeois ideology to show the truth of social life despite his own conservative politics.

It is a cornerstone of Marxist approaches to culture that works of art are social products. Indeed, more than that, the very language available for the creation of artistic expression, whether literary, visual or musical, is socially and historically determined. This means that musical judgments based on the intentions of the composer can never be the whole story. But it also means that simply pointing to the social roots of a particular music is not enough either.

Both are ways of avoiding tackling the difficult issue of the meaning involved in the music itself, a meaning which is not stable but will mutate as circumstances change. For example, as time went on, the post-war British trad jazz bands arguably became a staid parody of the raw, innovative music they sought faithfully to emulate.

Exposing how those meanings inhere in the very language of music is the central task of a Marxist musicology.

Roland Boer sets the scene for a series of articles on the complex and contradictory relations between Marxism and religion, with an introduction to some of the issues. An embedded poem by Patrick Lodge is mutually illustrative.

Two preliminary topics are important for any effort to reconsider the difficult relations between Marxism and religion: 1) the tensions between illusion versus reality, or idealism versus materialism; 2) the political ambivalence of religion.

Illusion and Reality

Religion is an illusion, an excrescence of the human brain, a response to alienated social conditions, a diversion for the working class movement, a manifestation of idealism – these and more continue to be common positions among Marxists and those on the Left more broadly. In other words, religion and its claims do not correspond to reality. The gods do not exist, nor does a supernatural world with its spirits of the dead, and we will not go to heaven or hell when we die.

I could respond by challenging a certain caricature of religion that is assumed with such positions. Or I could take the line that ‘religion’ itself is an abstraction from specific circumstances – European imperialism and the need to categorise the rest of the world in the light of Christian assumptions. But I prefer a different approach that draws on Marx’s own thought.

In some of his early works, Marx was quite clear that religion is other-worldly, heavenly and not concerned with the grim realities of this world. For example, in a piece from 1842 concerning the Rhine Province Assembly, he describes religion as mystical, arbitrary, base, fantastical, imaginary, other-worldly, and a sham that functions as a ‘holy cloak’ for political aims. Indeed, a religion like Christianity with its heavenly focus should not bother itself with this-worldly matters such as politics, economics and society.

Fortunately, this is not the only approach to religion in Marx’s works. The best example of an alternative appears with his complex use of the fetish. He had first encountered the term in the early 1840s, and was clearly conscious of its religious sense – a fetish is an object attributed with distinct powers in human transactions, powers that are simultaneously transferred and yet have a real force.

No surprise, then, that Marx found the idea immensely useful in his work for the next forty years. Each time he drew upon the fetish – in analysing labour, money, commodities and indeed capitalism itself – he deliberately mentions the religious dimensions of the fetish. Most well-known is the fetishism of commodities from the first volume of Capital, so let me make a few observations on this use. Marx was seeking a way to speak of a double process: the fetishism that attaches itself to commodities is simultaneously a transferral of powers from workers to the product of their hands and a reality of such commodities. In other words, commodities seem to gain human attributes as they interact among one another, while workers become more and more like things (reification). At the same time, the power or fetishism of commodities is very real, for it affects workers directly.

How to speak of such a process? Marx works at the edge of language, arguing that the fetishism of commodities is both illusory and real, imperceptible and perceptible, mysterious and concrete, mist-enveloped and actual. In the process, he coins a crucial phrase: ‘socially valid as well as objective thought forms [gesellschaftlich gültige, also objektive Gedankenformen]’. Thought forms can become objective and socially valid.

In order to gain this insight, Marx made use of a religious category: fetishism. In the subsequent volumes of Capital, he developed this initial insight much further. Indeed, he came to argue that fetishism operates at the core of capitalism. The belief that money simply produces money, without the crucial intermediate stage of commodity production is the ultimate fetish. The idea that we can generate money in and of itself, or what is now called the ‘financialisation’ of the market, is fetishism through and through. So much so that Marx coins another term: capital-fetish.

The implications are immense and not often realised. Marx’s focus was on the internal dynamics of capital, but what does this mean for religion? Can it too be seen as an objective thought form, as one that is both illusory and real at one and the same time?

Political Ambivalence

One example among many will suffice for now. It concerns the political ambivalence of religion, which can just as easily slip into the seat beside despotic power as it can foster revolutionary movements that seek to overthrow such power.

For this insight we need to turn to Engels, who developed this argument over the long decades after he gave up – with much pain and soul-searching – the religious commitments of his youth. During these years, Engels had much to say about the reactionary nature of religion, but he also became increasingly aware of the radical movements inspired by religion. These were evident in his own time, such as Etienne Cabet’s Icarian communities with their slogan ‘Christianity is communism’, as well as Wilhelm Weitling, whom Engels called the ‘first German communist’.
The first extended assessment of radical religious movements was Engels’s study (1850) of Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasant Revolution of the sixteenth century. This widespread revolution was clearly fostered as much by theological concerns as by economics and political ones. Although this was the first work of its kind in the Marxist tradition, it is not Engels’s best work. He tends to see the theological language as a cloak for economic and political grievances, a language that could be cast aside with the advent of modern socialism.

Engels’s study of early Christianity is much better. Published close to his death in 1895, it argued that early Christianity was a revolutionary movement. The reasons: Christianity drew its adherents from the exploited classes of the Roman Empire; it had much in common with the socialist movement of his own day; and it succeeded in conquering the Roman Empire. While we may quibble with some of Engels’s points (especially the last), we should not miss the importance of the proposal as a whole. It was a clear recognition and analysis of the revolutionary potential of a religion like Christianity, as Christopher Caudwell recognised in 'The Breath of Discontent: A Study in Bourgeois Religion' (discussed elsewhere on this website).

The Respectable Working Class
by Patrick Lodge

 
Week in, week out, I give my labour for
next to nowt. I’ve doffed my cap threadbare;
tugged my forelock so fierce
my hairline recedes from the back.

I’ve seemed grateful for mistress’s
sawdust buns, for master’s leaking roof
above my head, under which I wake
each sun-up, practicing my yokel grin.

Come Sunday they want much more;
want me to deny my own self. I draw
the line at that. Aye, I’ll go, sit in the pew
bide quiet, think “more pigs, less parsons”.

I pull the curtains across the window
of my soul. I become opaque.
They prate on about heaven’s rewards
while I think of Jenny warm under the down;

afterwards, buttered toast, scalding
sugared tea, the smell of her on my skin.
I hear the choir sing – “The rich man
in his castle, the poor man at his gate”.

Amen, I’ll say, and look pious too,
but mark this, and mark it well,
when the end times come, the first will
surely be last and going straight to Hell.

Author’s note: This poem, first published in the Morning Star, was written after a trip to the Lincolnshire Wolds. There was, in particular, a spectacular church from the 1840s which stood on a hill and dominated the landscape around. The church was full of memorials to the local great and good and the pattern of land ownership around effectively left the bulk of workers as tenants owing home, hearth and livelihood to the dominant landowners. There was a story told of a requirement made for all tenants to attend Anglican services despite their tendency to Non-Conformity.

Others would carry on Engels’s approach, especially Karl Kautsky and Ernst Bloch, so much that they established the existence of a revolutionary religious tradition. This has enabled the awareness that movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Liberation Theology and Political Theology, are the latest examples of this tradition.

So it seems that a religion like Christianity can be both reactionary and revolutionary. I am not taken with the common core-distortion position in dealing with this tension. Thus, one or the other side constitutes the core while its opposite is a distortion. Not so, for Christianity is constituted by this profound tension. Both are perfectly valid and in many respects connected to one another. However, it does require that we take sides.

Much, much more may be said concerning religion and Marxism. I have not dealt with Marx’s most famous phrase, ‘opium of the people’; with other religious revolutionary movements such as the Taiping Revolution in China (precursor to the communist revolution of 1949); with the approaches to religion by different communist parties and so on. But the topics I have discussed here at least set the scene.