ARBKD (Asso) : Manifesto Germany 1928

Art is a weapon, the artist a warrior in the people's struggle for freedom from a bankrupt system!

'Social being determines consciousness'

Karl Marx

In all cultural epochs of the past economic circumstances have determined the development of art as a whole and left a distinct mark on it.

The rise of the money economy and trade in the fifteenth century created the conditions for individual artistic activity.

The rising middle class needed art, as one of the most effective methods of demonstrating its power and dominance to the rest of the world. Moreover, the accumulation of money in individual hands offered an opportunity of investing it in treasures of all kinds, and in works of art.

Only thus can the vast luxury and magnificence of the Renaissance be explained, and only on these economic foundations was it possible for art to rise in so spectacular a way.

In the epoch of fully established industrial capitalism, however, matters are different. Even at the height of its development, industrial capitalism did not require the aid of art to boost its power by glorifying it. It had a very different and much more efficacious methods at its disposal. The expansion of production, investment of capital in stocks and shares, and ownership of all society's consumer goods allowed the bourgeoisie to display their power and safeguard their dominant position by creating a strong bourgeois state, with all its attendant means of enforcing its power.

Profit is the first principle of the capitalist system! Only thus can the fact that the same criterion was applied to art be explained. As a result, the art trade came into being and works of art became market commodities, although only those which fetched high prices from the point of view of profit.

What, in these circumstances, is the situation of the majority of artists? We need only quote the proverb which says that 'Art goes a-begging' to indicate the situation of artists in a capitalist society clearly enough. Unable to make a bare living, lacking any kind of social protection, the artist is given no chance to develop.

These are the real facts concerning the place of art and culture in the capitalist society. Where expensive colleges and academies are still maintained today, it is only to make the ruling classes appear to patronize art and culture. By comparison with the many millions spent annually on armaments and the apparatus of power (the police, the judiciary, etc.), the expenditure of the Länder and local government authorities on the encouragement of freelance artists is ridiculously low.

This system, which could not have succeeded without the cruel exploitation of millions of working people, is now approaching its end. Shaken by economic crises, threatened in its very existence by the struggle for liberty of the revolutionary proletariat, the bourgeoisies sees only one means of delaying its fall: Fascism! But Fascism means the ruthless dictatorship of capitalism to suppress any kind of progress in cultural life. Fascism means a further drop in the standard of living of all working people, and wholesale cuts to all funding for cultural purposes, which is already low enough.

This fact, clearly recognized by Marxist-minded artists, must be brought home to all destitute artists, dispelling the hopes and illusions still placed by some of them on the 'strong man' [Hitler]. The devastating influence of the system will not be countered by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the form of Fascism. Only the fall of the capitalist system and the establishment of a socialist order of society can free mankind from the fetters of want and oppression.

Only in a socialist society, where the entire means of production are in the hands of the working people, will all workers have equal rights and be able to enjoy the benefits of all social and cultural achievements.

Only the revolutionary proletariat as the creator of all social assets (the fruits of which it could not gather under the capitalist system) is competent, acting with all the oppressed, to do away with the old system root and branch. When the material situation of millions of working people in the socialist system has been improved, there will be a great new hunger for knowledge and culture. New forces are stirring and need room to develop.

Look at Soviet Russia!

While the army of the unemployed is growing to vast proportions throughout the capitalist world, while the material and cultural level of great strata of society there has sunk to a minimum, and art and artists seem doomed to perish, the USSR has not hands enough to satisfy all its new needs. The most distinguished scientists, architects and city planners of today are already at work in the Soviet Union, the first state of workers and peasants in the world, where they receive an enthusiastic welcome and find an unparalleled field in which to operate.

'Revolutions are the locomotives of world history!'

It is an historical fact that revolutionary upheavals always bring a great stimulus to all areas of life, but whereas the radical changes of the past and their achievements benefited only a ruling minority, today's social revolution serves the liberation and higher development of all mankind...

-from Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas , pp 390-392.