Socialist Appeal
The Marxist voice of Labour and youth
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Capitalist fetishism and the decay of art
Someone has said that one of the criteria for winning the Turner Prize is not to be understood. The philosophy behind this is: the less I am understood, the better the art. Yet the kind of art that wins the Turner competition also has merit. They have the merit of holding up a mirror to the society that produced them, and saying: “This is what you are, and this is all you are capable of producing.” These works point out to us that beneath the sleek, comfortable bourgeois surface of modern society, horrors are lurking: dead vermin, murder, death and decay.
Art and Politics In Our Epoch
“Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably — as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery — unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.” Leon Trotsky, 1938.
Art and the Class Struggle
We publish here the transcript of a speech by Alan Woods on the subject of the relationship between Art and the Class Struggle. The speech was given at a Marxist Summer School in Barcelona (Spain), in July 2001.
William Morris: How I Became a Socialist (extracts)
William Morris is probably known best today as a designer of wallpaper
and fabrics. This is a travesty. Morris was a revolutionary socialist,
a Marxist. Morris read Capital when it was only published in German,
and therefore unavailable to most British workers. Inspired, he joined the Democratic Federation, later called the
Social Democratic Federation, the first British Marxist organisation.
From that time on he was a tireless agitator for socialism till his
last days.