Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Global cities
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

Beyond dystopia

Robert Misik 14th February 2022

To change the pessimistic Zeitgeist, left-wing politics and radical art must renew their alliance, Robert Misik writes.

radical art,revolutionary art,left-wing politics,Zeitgeist
Onward march—da Volpedo’s c1901 depiction of Il Quarto Stato, emerging as workers confidently on strike, hangs in the Museo del Novecento in Milan

Left-wing and progressive parties continue to win elections. Only rarely, it’s true, with strategic majorities, as for the socialists recently in Portugal. But there have been surprising successes, such as that of the SPD in Germany, and clear victories, such as that of Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the United States. Elsewhere, as across Scandinavia, they remain in office.

Yet today left-wing parties are almost never carried to power or sustained by a progressive Zeitgeist. There is no left-wing hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci would have called it. Mostly there is not even a mood of ‘modernisation’—a basic feeling society will improve over time. What prevails rather is a sense of standstill and stagnation.

Certainly, progressive parties promise necessary legislative improvements, here and there—on the minimum wage, on welfare-state rules, on taxes on global corporations or in support of diversity—but rarely does that add up to a spirit of reform and moving forward. Indeed often progressive electoral victories are the product of a defensive drive to prevent the worst, such as that the authoritarian aspirations of hard-line reactionaries would be realised.

Cultural movements

Now, it is rarely parties that create a Zeitgeist. It is art and culture, social discourse, the system of media (and critics of this system). It is change in everyday culture, as also in the sphere of ideas. Much of it happens ‘somehow’, as if the product of unseen vectors in a parallelogram of forces, while some is the result of conscious intellectual efforts that drag on for years. It is even hard to define a Zeitgeist: it is a new political climate, which may be the result of interacting weather patterns.


Become part of our Community of Thought Leaders


Get fresh perspectives delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter to receive thought-provoking opinion articles and expert analysis on the most pressing political, economic and social issues of our time. Join our community of engaged readers and be a part of the conversation.

Sign up here

And of course, a Zeitgeist cannot be magically invoked. Nevertheless, left-wing movements can inspire it, through alliances with the arts, through cultural work, through influencing the world of ideas. Indeed, where they have been sustainably successful left-wing parties were not only workers’ movements but also cultural movements. For more than a century, that was treated as a matter of course.

The early workers’ movements not only campaigned for higher wages and more workers’ rights but also founded workers’ educational associations. They were part of the democratic upheaval but they were also closely linked in personnel to the artistic bohemia and avant-garde of their time.

Art aesthetics

The critique of capitalism, as practised by the Marxists, was connected to anti-bourgeois aesthetics in the arts. Think of the poet Charles Baudelaire or novelist Gustave Flaubert, who was certainly no leftist but criticised the conservative bourgeoisie and the dumbness of conventialism with a spitefulness few could match. Or take the great social panoramas of Honoré de Balzac and 19th-century realism in general, from whom Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels learned so much for their grand theory. Heinrich Heine was both a man of letters and a leftist campaigner.

Nor would the revolutionary-reformist achievements of ‘red Vienna’ have been possible without the intellectual and cultural foundations laid by the intellectual and cultural movements of the fin-de-siècle city, from Sigmund Freud to the critic Hermann Bahr to the architect Adolf Loos or the composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler, the great modernist, even campaigned for his close friend, the legendary leader of the Austrian socialists, Victor Adler (although at the time Mahler was a direct employee of the emperor!).

The advanced, radical arts were filled with a passion for the new and disdain for the old, creating revolutions in style and new ways of seeing. They created new languages—metaphorical and literal—and undermined the conservative tastes of their day in anticipation of a richer tomorrow.

One revolution chased the other, from the Impressionists to the Fauves to Picasso and the Cubists and then Constructivism and outright abstraction. But the arts also had an impact, quite direct, on everyday life: the aesthetics of clear geometric forms influenced architecture, the Bauhaus movement and communal social housing, as in Red Vienna.

For long stretches of history, individualism with its paradigm of creativity was closely connected with the socialists’ ideal of equality and the demand for freedom. The basic tenet was that everyone should have the same chance to develop their talents and shape their lives, according to their preferences.

Critics of convention

The writer Oscar Wilde comprehended this perfectly in his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. Criticism of dead convention and conformism, as well as of the alienated experiences of modern life, was always deeply rooted in leftist cultural history. ‘Life’ itself was a keyword—the pursuit of a richer, more fulfilling, ‘non-alienated’ life.


Support Progressive Ideas: Become a Social Europe Member!


Support independent publishing and progressive ideas by becoming a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month. You can help us create more high-quality articles, podcasts and videos that challenge conventional thinking and foster a more informed and democratic society. Join us in our mission - your support makes all the difference!

Become a Social Europe Member

Through his plays Bertolt Brecht sought to political effect, representing reality in a way that made clear it could be changed. The dusty past had to be cleared up, Brecht contended: one needed the ‘tabula rasa’, the great ‘beginner’s feeling’. And until the 1960s and 70s, progressive cultural and protest movements, style revolutions in the avant-garde arts and left-wing politics were magnetic fields which together shaped a Zeitgeist.

In the background, a kind of anthropological optimism was at work—the assumption that tomorrow would be freer, better, fairer, more interesting than today. Most Dadaists and Expressionists moved significantly to the left, and Roosevelt later secured the support of the avant-gardists, just as Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky were to do in the 60s and 70s. Even pop and rock culture, even punk, contained ideas about a way of life which harmonised well with leftist proposals for its reform.

Rampant pessimism

That close connection between left-wing politics and radical art has not disappeared, but it has loosened as some fundamentals have changed. Politics has lost the utopian surfeit which the rapport with art, culture and radical ideas provided. Political art, in turn, has resorted to counteracting or ‘disturbing’ the dominant discourses at best, with no deep confidence in its efficacy. Artistic language and articulation seem good at deconstructing dominant ways of speaking but bad at winning hegemony.

Often, and by no means unjustifiably, contemporary art sketches a potentially dystopian future of environmental destruction or a ‘post-humanism’—the rule of automata, robots and algorithms over life. But such rampant pessimism, of course, can easily become self-fullfilling. And just because a progressive Zeitgeist cannot be (re)produced voluntaristically does not mean it is impossible to realise.

In the arts world we have had debates about ‘relevance’ for years but they rarely get beyond the bubble. We need revolutionary art again—new stylistic idioms but also radical new ways to interact with a broadly participating audience. Left-wing political parties and movements depend on that ‘beginner’s feeling’ for a supportive milieu to set societies in a progressive direction.

Then perhaps the aspiration to prevent the worst can be replaced, before long, by commitment to the creation of the better.

This is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal

Robert Misik
Robert Misik

Robert Misik is a writer and essayist in Vienna.  His latest book is Politik von unten: Gelingt das Comeback der Sozialdemokratie? (Picus Verlag). He publishes in many outlets, including Die Zeit and Die Tageszeitung. Awards include the John Maynard Keynes Society prize for economic journalism.

You are here: Home / Politics / Beyond dystopia

Most Popular Posts

Russia,information war Russia is winning the information warAiste Merfeldaite
Nanterre,police Nanterre and the suburbs: the lid comes offJoseph Downing
Russia,nuclear Russia’s dangerous nuclear consensusAna Palacio
Belarus,Lithuania A tale of two countries: Belarus and LithuaniaThorvaldur Gylfason and Eduard Hochreiter
retirement,Finland,ageing,pension,reform Late retirement: possible for many, not for allKati Kuitto

Most Recent Posts

prostitution,Europe,abolition Prostitution is not a free choice for womenLina Gálvez Muñoz
Abuse,work,workplace,violence Abuse at work: who bears the brunt?Agnès Parent-Thirion and Viginta Ivaskaite-Tamosiune
Ukraine,fatigue Ukraine’s cause: momentum is diminishingStefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko
Vienna,social housing Vienna social-housing model: celebrated but misusedGabu Heindl
social democracy,nation-state Social democracy versus the nativist rightJan Zielonka

Other Social Europe Publications

strategic autonomy Strategic autonomy
Bildschirmfoto 2023 05 08 um 21.36.25 scaled 1 RE No. 13: Failed Market Approaches to Long-Term Care
front cover Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound Talks: does Europe have the skills it needs for a changing economy?

In this episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast, Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound’s research manager, Tina Weber, its senior research manager, Gijs van Houten, and Giovanni Russo, senior expert at CEDEFOP (The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training), about Europe’s skills challenges and what can be done to help workers and businesses adapt to future skills demands.

Listen where you get your podcasts, or for free, by clicking on the link below


LISTEN HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The summer issue of the Progressive Post magazine by FEPS is out!

The Special Coverage of this new edition is dedicated to the importance of biodiversity, not only as a good in itself but also for the very existence of humankind. We need a paradigm change in the mostly utilitarian relation humans have with nature.

In this issue, we also look at the hazards of unregulated artificial intelligence, explore the shortcomings of the EU's approach to migration and asylum management, and analyse the social downside of the EU's current ethnically-focused Roma policy.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The future of remote work

The 12 chapters collected in this volume provide a multidisciplinary perspective on the impact and the future trajectories of remote work, from the nexus between the location from where work is performed and how it is performed to how remote locations may affect the way work is managed and organised, as well as the applicability of existing legislation. Additional questions concern remote work’s environmental and social impact and the rapidly changing nature of the relationship between work and life.


AVAILABLE HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube