[T]here are hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who don’t have the talent to make a living at writing, art, or music, but who would love to do it seriously and are willing to live modestly, if necessary. These people deserve [such] jobs – modestly paying, undemanding, part-time jobs with benefits. The alternative is [worse] jobs, which would pay more but kill the creative spark and leave them exhausted and miserable....Didn’t Marx promise that after the revolution we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening? Yes, the young Marx promised that. The mature Marx had second thoughts:Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production…Freedom in this field can only consist in the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;…But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
A Marxist I know tells me that the 'fish in the afternoon' quote was actually drafted by Engels, and that Marx included but always hated it. Pity; it was the only thing of value that Marx ever published. As an aspiration, who shouldn't want that? I quoted it just the other day while gently mocking a certain film critic.
2 comments:
John Adams said, famously: "“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain"...problem is, people who think that they are part of the "painting, poetry music" generation but don't have any talent at these things or the self-discipline to develop any talent.
That's not the only problem. I'm aware of a lot of great musical acts right now, for example, that aren't getting any radio play. Hollywood keeps making remakes that are worse than the original films but with not-so-subtle rewrites to make them fit a narrative better. Nashville won't work with bands that have steel guitars, but push to include hip-hop elements. The publishing industry doesn't want anything written by white men unless it has a strong gay/trans component.
There are lots of great artists being frozen out of the art world because the art world is controlled by money, and money is controlled by an elite that hates the society it dominates. Those people making great art while working day jobs to fund themselves are some of the best people we've got; they're keeping the Beautiful alive in a time when power is organized against it.
Post a Comment