Miklós
Beauty is the enemy of seriousness. That’s why Lukacs was so concerned to create a Marxist aesthetics. Beauty seduces, beauty lures things into its web – into its silky lair – where purpose is lost in images of luxury. If beauty is approached first from the angle of purpose, it can be contained or utilized as a tool for making people understand the perversion of their capitalist relationships. The danger of course is always that beauty will seduce us so that we spend months or years in its velvet grasp and while away our time in blissful oblivion like Ulysses on the island of the witch Circe. The window for revolution will open soon and the opening will be small and the time to act will be brief and our biggest danger is not that we will be stopped by the corrupt capitalists who are stealing our money and our freedom. Our real enemies are the social democrats who believe that the system is fine but it just needs tweaking. Only real change can help us. Only a radical and so far untried form of communism can do anything that will really help anybody. We can’t afford to be seduced by the artists and the poets who make us believe that democracy has really only failed because it’s being twisted and exploited by bad people. That’s the same argument they make against socialism and communism in the Soviet Union. They should have learned by now that only something really different has any chance.
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