The Success and Failure of Picasso

For nearly a hundred years all revolts and protests in Europe — whether political or cultural, left-wing or right-wing — were ideologically dependent upon an idealization of the past, or at least upon an idealization of the simple and natural as against the complex and artificial. This was the mode of the bourgeois revolutionary’s thought. The noble savage was the genius of his revolt.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the revolutionary initiative passed to the working class, and the mode of revolutionary thought changed. Instead of simplifying man to his original ‘essence’, the emphasis was now on releasing what man could become from what he was at present forced to be.

As early as the 1820s Saint-Simon had realized that the only hope for a juster society was through more industrialization, not less. It was as though a point of no return had been reached — it was impossible to turn back, one could only go on. Justification could no longer be sought in the past, but only in the future.

As industrialization increased, experience and habits reinforced this view. The workers began to become aware of their growing political power. At the same time, increasingly cut off from the countryside and tradition, they began to lose any natural sense of the past. A sense of class took the place of a sense of tradition. The beginning was the bottom of the scale at which they were forced to live. Slavery — or the equivalent of it which they suffered — was primeval.

The nature of industrial work had a similar influence. For peasants, work is a continuous response to a natural cycle — so that work can be equated with a man’s whole life. For an industrial proletariat their work, their labour is what they sell in order, having worked, to buy the means to live. For the proletariat, work, therefore, is equated with paying a ransom to the future. The increased division of labour in industry encouraged the same way of thinking. Each job only made sense at a later stage. The pawnshop was more than a bitter fact of everyday life: it too was a token of a way of living and hoping. From the pawnshop, one of the most greedy and grubby refinements of capitalism, it was only one step to the conviction of socialism. Tomorrow we shall redeem what belongs to us.

Communism [wrote Marx in 1844] is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus, the real appropriation of human nature, through and for man. It is therefore the return of man himself as a social, that is, really human being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development.

In this quotation you can see how the ‘noble savage’ has ‘returned’ as part of a larger idea — and how, in the process, he has been transformed. The transformation is the result of a new, more scientifically based understanding of progress; an understanding which was impossible until men were faced with the terrible contradictions of the wealth and poverty of nineteenth-century industry.

The publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848 was the first full exposition of the new revolutionary attitude. Paris of the Commune of 1871 was the first battlefield. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first victory.

Yet the new attitude was by no means exclusively marxist. The Fabians, for example, were, in their thinking, just as far removed, and for the same reasons, from the early-nineteenth-century revolutionaries. Only the anarchists were still close to the earlier attitude, but anarchism, as we have seen, became a political force in countries which were still at an historically earlier stage.

Today, even bourgeois revolutions in former colonial countries are planned and justified in terms of the new attitude. No society or empire is any longer criticized by reference to nature, but by reference to other societies at a higher stage of economic development. Perhaps the cosmonaut — with all that he implies of technical resources and of liberation from the earth itself — will soon take the place of the worker as a revolutionary image. Perhaps the one-time ‘savage’ demanding an end of his exploitation and the right to the most modern means of production has already taken that place. Events and their developments have put an end to the revolutionary role of the imaginary ‘noble savage’ — whilst confirming and clarifying his historic importance during one century.