Towards a Proletarian Aesthetic

El Lissitzky, Proun 99, 1924

///This essay is a contribution towards the defining of a proletarian aesthetic. I am hoping it will be one of a series. Though this defining is a globally ongoing historical and cultural venture, I will not attempt to track the history of this process and instead locate my analysis where I already am, i.e. I'll approach the question without too much anxiety about precedent and use what sources are convenient. It's within this framework I will attempt to address the potential problematizations of the project, and I should state explicitly that the goal of this reflection on potential problems is indeed to find a workable category of proletarian aesthetics. The stated goal is certainly not reachable in the crude sense of eventual success, but neither is it a contrivance that only exists to provide necessary framing for the eventual deconstruction of the category -- it is a sincere attempt at developing proletarian aesthetics within a broadly Marxist theoretical framework, and if the category doesn't exist so evidently that we can reveal and name it, we'll have to assemble it.\\\

(numbers in parenthesis are footnotes and/or sources, provided at the bottom of the page)

Paul C. Taylor, in his essay "Black Reconstruction in Aesthetics", begins with a disclaimer that "...nothing in what follows entails or requires that one accept Blackness as the only racial position with aesthetic dimensions worth exploring...It just happens to be the one I am interested in right now." (1) Though this may primarily be his shielding himself from potential accusations of reducing racial analysis to a black-white binary, it provides a useful opening that I would like to leverage for an application of Taylor's methodology and observations to a reconstruction of proletarian aesthetics (a task itself intimately tied to a reconstruction of black aesthetics). For a Marxist analysis of the aesthetic we will turn easily to the Frankfurt School, and Walter Benjamin in particular, to try and extrapolate his nearly century old conclusions about media and proletarianization into contemporary predicaments. This is of course a monumental task and this short essay presumes only to formulate a constructive question in regards to how such a thing might be approached.

Taylor uses the term Reconstruction in a dual sense that both refers literally to the reconstructing of a thing (in this case blackness) as well as the specific historical period following the American Civil War. His use of the term Redemptionism also provides a useful demarcation differentiating Reconstruction as the real movement of "rooting out the conditions for the persistence of white supremacist and anti-democratic practices" from Redemptionism as a way to soothe the guilt and feelings of responsibility of whites, as well as give a paternalistic symbolic badge to blacks for having moved beyond an implicitly shameful past (much of the art and message surrounding the popular memory of "the Civil Rights movement" would fall here). Taylor does not, however, restrict politically questionable art from inclusion in a black aesthetic — it does not seem as if he sees himself, or anyone, as having either the responsibility or capability of gatekeeping the category in such a way. His conclusion is open without shying away from a workable category: he aims to "expand the reference of the label so that it covers both the self-described Black aestheticians and the other participants in the tradition that informed and challenged them. Understood in this way, the unity of the enterprise does not require agreement on a set of claims about what Black art requires or involves." This allows him to identify some broad coordinates for the placement of a black aesthetic, his examples being "invisibility, authenticity, and appropriation."

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Hannibal (date unknown?)

Of the many divergences between black and proletarian as aesthetic categories, one of the first that presents itself as we attempt to formulate the question is how to draw some sensible distinction between blackness as a sociopolitical category absolutely inseparable from aesthetic designations, and proletarianism, an economic category that, especially in the latter half of the 20th century western world, has been effectively disguised and denied. Blackness inevitably involves aesthetics — though racialization of course functions on levels beyond the phenotypical, the ideological and personal grounding of racialization remains in phenotypic variety, the aesthetic characteristics of which precede racialism in such a way that race had to retroactively become self-evident in the aesthetic of phenotype. (2) Proletarianism, however, is an economic condition averse to aesthetic markers. To work for a wage, to have a surplus extracted from your labor, is lived but not visible (at least not in a similarly direct way). Following Althusser's expansion of Marx's ideological analysis, ideology is not the dressings disguising true labor relations, which can be stripped away revealing the awful truth. Ideology is the awful truth, and determines our horizons of possibility in such a way that the imposition of systematic analysis is necessary to see the way that ideology functions, from which material relations can be inferred based on an assessment of why such functions would be necessary ("freedom of association" only available when mediated through "freedom of property ownership" reveals, along with other identifiable relations, the necessity of wage-labor). The conditions of poverty and struggle are visible in various ways, but the proletarian condition that is operational in their maintenance is only "visible" through analysis, and poverty and struggle are not synonymous with the condition of proletarianism. Though our definition is broader, and we would include the "lumpenproletariat" as sources of surplus labor making up a real element of the proletariat, it is significant to distinguish this analytical category of wage-laborers (or in the case of lumpenproletariat, the definitive lack of wage-labor still the condition of relation to it) from a landed peasantry or a managerial middle class. This does raise questions about the viability of an aesthetic of proletarianism at all, but these are questions worth engaging.

Historically, the aesthetic elements of socialist movements have associated proletarianism with symbols of poverty and struggle, and this is of course a sensible and obvious direction for a proletarian aesthetic to take, certainly correct in political pragmatism. But there remains some basic discrepancy in that it is more difficult to work out even pragmatic boundaries for a workable range (like Taylor has done) of what can be considered proletarian aesthetics, because the lived experience that necessitates a study of black aesthetics already orbits an aesthetic priority that the analytic economic particularity of proletarianism does not. Though deriving socialist artwork from the experience of poverty and struggle is a good and common-sense direction, the defining of proletarian as synonymous with or being determined on the basis of generalized poverty and struggle (which are real circumstances indicated by symbolic markers, as opposed to circumstances indicated by analysis of specific economic relations) turns to an active aestheticization of politics, a reactionary maneuver and one that runs dangerously parallel to fascism. Racialization itself being an aestheticization of politics, introducing caste system and distribution of labor on the basis of preracial phenotypic aesthetics — in this arrangement a black aesthetics like the one put forth by Taylor has liberatory potential in the sense that it engages with the living conditions of blackness via aesthetic production, effectively repoliticizing the aesthetic category by acknowledging a field of multiplicity that struggle can occur within. In this schema in which we understand an engaged, liberatory black aesthetics as a politicization of an aesthetic, the aestheticization of what is already political (comprehensible as a category only through sociopolitical analysis) is fundamentally reactionary. (3) Kevin Rashid Johnson (4) provides an excellent account of the dangers of aestheticizing the political category of the proletariat in his dispute with Third Worldists presenting aesthetic signifiers as the basis of class and using them to deny the existence of an exploited proletariat outside of the Third World:

"Consider now [American Third Worldist sect claiming there is no First World poor or proletariat] MIMP’s revision of Marxist political economy with their totally invented class definitions using abstract metaphors like people who wear “rags” (which is how they define what they call “First World Lumpen”), and “those who have nothing to lose but their chains” (which is how they define the proletariat). They actually had to resort to such metaphors because the instant Amerikan classes are analyzed using Marxist political economy, everything MIMP professes politically collapses like a house of cards in a windstorm." (5)

Here it is useful to return to Walter Benjamin as a proletarian aesthetician. Benjamin is more concerned with the use of emerging technologies for aesthetic production than he is with the question of any definition of what should be considered proletarian artwork. He sees the advent of film as fertile with potential for its engagement with the proletarian audience — crucially, this is not because film reflects accurately some categorical truth of the proletarian experience, but because it recreates the conditions through which the proletariat experience the world; the actors' drama, romance, and conflict mediated through the invisible machinery of production and transformed into a commodity. (6) This places him immediately alongside Taylor's assessment of black aesthetics as the aesthetic production of black lives, as opposed to isolating those elements of black lives that are decided through some other criteria to be reconcilable with blackness. This is the point of connection we can proceed from that resembles Taylor's both in its acknowledgement of its own contingency as well as its categorical pragmatism.

The differentiation between black aesthetics as necessarily a response to an initial aestheticization of politics, and proletarianism as an economic condition that, though lived, has no necessary unifying aesthetic components, can provide direction towards what might be anti-proletarian proletarian aesthetic. United States "working class" culture is a constant source of this. Our culture's aestheticization of wage-labor is so distant from the Marxist derived labor movements of much of the world that images of the wretched — the homeless, the single mother, the prisoner, the drug addict — are widely understood as images so entirely removed from labor that they easily draw contempt as being always unvirtuous, usually lazy, even privileged and feigning despair. And, complicating this, those viewers holding these images in contempt often come from the populations just adjacent to if not themselves in those conditions. Images of labor, especially contemporarily, are rarely ever images of poverty, and are instead conflated immediately with the middle class. The expensive truck that is in great condition save for fresh streaks of mud across its gloss, the suburban home with a proud American flag in the driveway and a riding mower on the lawn, holidays spent fishing and hunting — these are American symbols of labor and productive engagement with society. To dismiss all of this as merely petit-bourgeois decadence or the vulgar and complete appropriation of some true culture of poverty is counterproductive and in economic Marxist terms incorrect (as Rashid demonstrates with his defense of labor unions as often reactionary but still largely proletarian), though relegating ourselves exclusively to Marx for analysis of these phenomena does understandably engender an understanding of such cultural asymmetry as merely a false-consciousness on the part of the proles who desire it and a straightforward projection of material interests into the cultural sphere on the part of the petit-bourgeoisie who have attained it. This quickly becomes an untenable explanation of cultural and aesthetic processes.

Emory Douglas, Black Panther Back Cover, 1971

Following Taylor we can understand reactionary cultural elements as entirely consistent with a truly proletarian aesthetic, in that the only real requirement is that these cultural elements are pervasive among the actually existing proletariat. Popular country music is undeniably a stronghold of cultural reaction, and utilizes symbolism of the working class to justify imperialist wars and the stripping of social rights, but it would be very strange to suggest that because it is not politically well aligned its enjoyment and proliferation among the poor must necessarily be a disingenuous false consciousness. Muddying the issue further, can we in good conscience claim that admiration and desire for wealth and entrance into the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois classes does not make up a genuine and extensive element of proletarian culture as it actually exists? Television like Shark Tank and The Apprentice are virulently anti-proletarian in their political direction, but nonetheless reflect a real desire for a functioning meritocratic capitalism (an ideal that very notably maintains ruthlessness and paternalism as essential). Of course there is the presence of manufactured demand and the full machinery of show-business and its demographic farming (to say nothing of the overt involvement of the US military in ensuring that movies and video games depicting them are appropriately sympathetic), but we should be careful here to assign a simple causal relationship that places capitalist media as some conspiracy of self-aware elites against the hoodwinked poor who need simply to be convinced to remove the wool from their eyes. Like all institutions, media contains its own contradictions and inevitably multiplies and exacerbates them through its own reproduction — in capitalist institutions the operative contradiction being the necessity of expansion into new markets (conditions of expanse that may endanger profitability), and in media this expansion can also be into aesthetics that have a genuinely subversive quality. How else could we understand bands like Rage Against the Machine, avowed communists with platinum selling albums on which they call attention to imperialism, or films like Sorry To Bother You, a Hollywood production explicitly demonstrating both exploitation in the workplace and the way to correct it? The dogmatic and unfortunately common response is something like, 'these are the crumbs of pseudo-resistance the elite allow us to have to misguide us and distract us from real struggle', which is eerily similar to the fascist response to the presence of anti-Zionist Jews, which goes something like 'they are either plants or useful-idiots, either way meant to distract us from the truth of Jewish conspiracy'. This is a stunted political analysis and one regressing away from good-faith Marxist applications. It is a shame that many contemporary leftists have attempted to force a round peg into a square hole with blunted dogma.

It is notable that the supposed alternative to corporate mediated propagation of culture, in the form of independent labels for example, tends to explicitly recreate the systems of distribution in a way not only compatible with capitalist subculture but necessary for the maintenance of capitalist monoculture. These efforts are usually seen as bastions of liberatory potential for their nominal ideological purity, their insistence in making absolutely no apologies towards the reactionary tendencies of the existing proletariat. Do-It-Yourself labels and bands like Leftover Crack can be as abrasive and subversive as releasing albums with the twin towers collapsing titled Fuck World Trade and espousing anarchism, but the system of distribution and consumption happens along socioeconomic infrastructure that is nearly identical in its fundamentals. Claiming the informal nature of such markets is evidence of their ethical potential is as absurd as claiming that hiring migrant laborers without papers who are not guaranteed minimum wage is more ethical because it lacks the formal involvement of labor unions and the state, likewise for appeals to their limited profitability compared to corporate labels. Early Americans fled the restrictions and prejudices of their government through westward expansion to invent new lives free from such burdens, and went on to recreate similar circumstances in more efficient ways unchecked by formality, with genocide against natives and hyper-exploitation of later settlers in mines, farms, and lumber camps; when these settlements became profitable enough, both their profitability and their social forms (a freedom from governmental mediation of market forces) were gladly absorbed into American hegemony, with formal governmental forces eliminating any resistance to the consolidation. Though this may seem distant from Do-It-Yourself music subculture, it is an example of one of the basic productive contradictions of capitalism, the tension between small decentralized market ventures and large consolidated market ventures that is essential for continued expansion and productivity. Independent music's absorption into corporate labels is not a fluke or betrayal of the values of a small ethical venture, it is truly a function of the market forces that such "independent" artistic efforts engage in from the start — this is not something to be moralistically condemned, but it is necessary for understanding the existing infrastructure for the distribution and consumption of culture. A desire to identify a workable definition of a proletarian aesthetic (with the goal of eventually finding methods to encourage and propagate its constructive elements) must understand that obscure subcultures (that can maintain via their obscurity and subcultural status a more developed political consciousness) are not necessarily an area of constructive engagement with or analysis of a potential proletarian aesthetic.

The creative work of Jay-Z and Beyonce is an interesting example of how this can be understood in relation to black aesthetics. Jay-Z and Beyonce are, especially taken together, an especially anti-proletarian phenomena. Remember here that we are mirroring Taylor and do in fact consider Jay-Z and Beyonce a proletarian aesthetic, but an anti-proletarian proletarian aesthetic — that is to say, they are a cultural phenomena extremely popular and influential among the proletariat and their theatrical wealthiness paired with a mythology of struggle and social climbing resonates with existing prole sensibilities. (7) They are, however, both a black aesthetic phenomena and a pro-black black aesthetic phenomena. Jay-Z's black captain-of-industry persona (he even wears a sweatshirt with only the word "Bourgeoisie" on it), Beyonce's engagement in the visual accompaniment to Lemonade with Yoruba religion and mythology, and both of their enthusiastic adoption of royalist terminology and aesthetics in a black American context along with shrewd business sense and the conscious carving out of their own media domain does function as a real defense and maintenance of black aesthetics in American culture. Perhaps it could reasonably be called anti-black in the sense that the propagation of black capitalism as an ideology is contrary to the interests of the majority of proletarian and peasant black people worldwide, but whether the inherent linking of blackness to the economic categories allowing for the exploitation of the majority of black people is a tenable position is a broader question beyond this. (8)

With some workable defining of the problem space of the aesthetics of an economic category like proletarianism, the stage is set to ask more particular questions regarding the movement towards an understanding of proletarian aesthetics. The best historical examples of successful engagement with a productive proletarian aesthetic in the US would likely be the Industrial Workers of the World and the Black Panther Party, and their artworks and strategies can be analyzed and we can speculate on the way in which they were uniquely suited for their purposes and how that helps account for their success. Also useful would be the analysis of contemporary American subcultures, particularly the way in which race is navigated within the identitarian constructions of the white proletariat. Possible subjects here include: Dixie whiteness as a unique category that distinguishes itself consciously from general US and western whiteness, in what is perhaps a strange attempt to subvert the anxieties of whiteness-as-void with the construction of a distinct regional and historical white nation (without any willingness to sacrifice the universalism or claims to superiority of whiteness); Juggalo as a proto-ethnicity that has a specialized mythology and culture that reactively, and with some efficacy, moves away from whiteness (both as particularism and universality) as a defining feature and is notably less reactionary in its general politics than the white proletariat at large despite its adaptation of much of what is seen as defining white working-class culture. Worth exploring too is the relationship between the cultures of retail and trade industries, with the contempt for retail workers being a pervasive anti-proletarian proletarian cultural edifice, and also one that must be carefully dealt with in its correction considering that retail and the historical rise of retail work is not necessarily worth defending. That is to say, the mythologizing of the hard worker building a house or maintaining a power line should not take precedence or inspire more sympathy than the reality of the hard worker doing ten hours on their feet serving abusive customers and stocking shelves, but there should be some way to unapologetically defend the legitimacy and struggle of retail and service industries while recognizing that the greater aesthetic appeal of constructive and maintenance labor has its origins in a real difference in the product of such labor and should not be held in contempt as reactionary due to its sinister appropriation by anti-proletarian aspects of American proletarian culture. To install a circuit board, put in a septic tank, fix a roof, conduct a train — the sense that these are more honorable than working in the service or retail industry has been warped for the further abuse of the service and retail worker, but the redundancy and hollowness of most service and retail work is a real phenomena, and is in its origins tied to the struggle of the service and retail worker. These are for now only speculative directions, and the actual procession may not follow each of them, but they still remain interesting hypotheticals for how an analysis of proletarian aesthetics could be applied as contextualization of different phenomena.

José Clemente Orozco, Barricade, 1931

(1): This and the subsequent quotes from Taylor are drawn from "Black Reconstruction in Aesthetics".

(2): These historical phenotypic markers for the advent of racialization are not meant to suggest that there is some core or root of blackness that remains in basic physical features racialized as black — such features becoming the indicator of blackness did of course obscure their visibility so that "mere phenotype" is largely inaccessible and overwritten by the whole cultural sphere of implications surrounding them. The claim is only that racialization in general orbits physical characteristics that are sensibly perceived so is distinct from proletarianism which is a condition that certainly produces sensible elements but has its origins in abstract relations of people and capital.

(3): This dichotomy is set up for the purpose of illustration — a more developed aesthetician would no doubt object to such a sharp divide between the political and the aesthetic, and this could be developed further to a more satisfactory schema, but I believe the insistence should remain on a real division between a politics derived from a moralist associative sensation (that undergoes analysis only to justify itself; e.g. fascism scrambling to explain how its own theoretical contradictions are only the result of conspiracy as sufficiently extensive as their purposes demand) and a politics that tries to establish a consistent analytical basis (one that should very well take into account sensation and its associative qualities, but without necessarily taking their existence as justification for their political application).

(4): Life-long revolutionary prison organizer and writer, Minister of Defense of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, one of the political successors of the Black Panther Party. http://rashidmod.com/

(5): Kevin Rashid Johnson, "MIM or MLM? Confronting the Divergent Politics of the Petty Bourgeois “Left” On the Labor Aristocracy and Other Burning Issues in Today’s Revolutionary Struggle" http://rashidmod.com/?p=1125 Though I do side enthusiastically with Rashid on most of his claims about inter-nationality and class, I have seen his name and aspects of his critiques invoked before in a tokenistic way to shut down criticisms of whiteness. Not dissimilar to certain opportunistic, decontextualized appeals to Fred Hampton's wonderful alliance with the Young Patriots. Both seemingly with the intention of saying "this Black Panther agrees with me [at least when the statement is sufficiently cherry-picked] so I can't be wrong and don't have to prove I'm right." For the sake of good faith leftist dialogue and the promotion of the neglected but absolutely crucial developments in radical black thought, here is the highly critical response of Sanyika Shakur, another imprisoned New Afrikan Nationalist, to Rashid's understanding of class and nation: https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/get-up-for-the-down-stroke-sanyika-shakur-responds-to-black-liberation-in-the-21st-century-a-revolutionary-reassessment-of-black-nationalism/ and here is Rashid's answer in turn: http://rashidmod.com/?p=1058&fbclid=IwAR3_aMAlWDLayNEsNJjl_LqvQOg0xM3Tf3AMMh64OifyPUnzQnPYjowdBm4

(6): Walter Benjamin, "The Work Of Art In The Age of Technological Reproducibility", Section XII

(7): It's a commonplace observation that the poor are preoccupied with ostentatious, often absurd shows of wealth, whereas bourgeois culture favors shows of humility and refinement in tandem with access to the inaccessible. It should then come as no surprise that there is such little popular outrage or even acknowledgement of the fact that despite his populist platitudes Donald Trump governs from literal gold-gilded suites.

(8): My suspicion is that it is an untenable position, considering that this would mean the relegation of many great black historical and contemporary works to a position of anti-blackness — should we say that Ethiopian and Yoruba artworks are anti-black because they were created under and in support of feudal economic systems in which the majority of the black people involved were exploited? And what should be done about this supposed anti-blackness? It is very unlikely anyone would make such a claim, but the problems hypothetically raised by it suggest that to remain consistent the claim would either need to be an ahistorical one that such societies were in fact free of class exploitation, or that it is useful to consider blackness as not entirely inseparable from the economic conditions black people are exploited under — even if those economic conditions were instrumental in the creation of blackness.