THE ESTHETICOF THE FOUNDING FATHERS
William Phillips
The Myth
By
ALL
the devices of propaganda, the organs of the Communist
Party have circulated the myth that there exists a ready-made set of
esthetic principles, fashioned by the hand of Marx himself, and known
as "MarXist criticism." In its name polemics have been conducted-
against "bourgeois criticism"; there were heresy hunts for "devi-
ations"; and Marxist criticism was regularly invoked as the final
arbiter of all literary questions. Yet what was actually presented as
this revolutionary esthetic hardly went beyond a few platitudes about
the political roots of art, while no extended treatment by Marx or
Engels has ever been uncovered. Not that communist critics have
failed to cite chapter and verse from the founding fathers as author-
ity for their own dogmas, but these quotations were usually so vague
and irrelevant as to lend themselves almost equally well to the purposes
of anti-Marxist critics.
Such myths and distortions are hardly latter-day inventions, nor
have they been solely the privilege of out-and-out opponents of Marx- -
ism, for Marx and Engels themselves, on more than one occasion, had
to defend their doctrines against the interpretions of their disciples.
Marx, for example, said of the French "Marxists," to whom the
materialist conception of history was a substitute for the actual study
of history: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." And Engels, in
1890, wrote that he could not "exempt many of the more recent
Marxists ... for the most wonderful rubbish has been produced from
this quarter too." In the realms of philosophy and politics, the classic
mode of distortion, by those who have had some axe to grind, has
been to tear one emphasis out of the many-sided theories of Marx,
and to set it up as
Marxism.
Proof?-it is relatively easy to prove
almost anything by ferreting out isolated quotations from the writ-
ings of Marx and Engels. But it is the Stalinist critics, here and in the
Soviet Union, who are rt'-sponsiblefor the most monstrous mystifica-
tion, for they have created a "Marxist criticism" out of the whole
cloth.
In
order to foster the illusion that the general theories of Marx
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