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Class Conflict in the Caves

Image result for cave paintings


I remember years ago reading a book about cave paintings. 

It was an unusual book. I can't remember the title and am not going to work too hard on recovering information about it, but I'll just write down here what I can remember, for fun.

The writer seemed to be a Marxist, though of a specifically unorthodox kind. He disbelieved in the traditional Marxist notion of "primitive communism," that is, the quasi-Rousseauist idea that there was a time in human history before private property, surplus value, or class conflict. The rise of the ancient slave societies (on this trad-Marxist view) was over the dead body of those more primitive communities.

But the book I was reading said that Marx was wrong in this, that there was a class conflict underway even among the cave dwellers, and that the famous admired cave paintings are evidence of it. 

I don't remember the particulars of the argument, but IIRC at all, the author was telling us we shouldn't admire those paintings. We should rather revile them as the work of a very early leisure class, that had the chance to polish their artistic skills because their inferiors were out hunting for antelope or something. 

Just puttin' it out there. 

 

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  1. HenryJune 16, 2018 at 6:23 AM

    I infer that the author was not addressing the artistic merits of the painting, but was saying the equivalent of we should revile Wagner's operas because he was an anti-Semite or Dustin Hoffman's movies because he was a sexual harasser. As wrongheaded as the boycotters of Wagner's operas or Dustin Hoffman's movies are, your author is worse, for two reasons. First, his class conflict theory is speculative and may be wrong. Second, even if it's right, he has no knowledge of the particular artists. One of them might have donated most of his wealth to help the antelope hunters. Or he may have been unable to hunt antelopes himself because of a physical disability but could at least contribute his paintings.

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    1. ChristopherJune 16, 2018 at 6:01 PM

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    2. ChristopherJune 16, 2018 at 6:03 PM

      enry, I think your analogies are valid ones. As to finding out (through any means other than guesswork) what the role of the paintings was in the broad society, what the role of the painters, or even whether there was a separate painterly caste/occupation, I doubt that will ever happen by any means other than the invention of time travel. And if we want to imagine time travel, why imagine it only for passive inquirers? we can also imagine that some Future Man, not yet born in 2018, will send himself back to the distant past and paint antelopes on caves in order to give the history of art a start.

      There's a theory. Can I get an NIH grant for expounding on it further?

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    3. HenryJune 16, 2018 at 6:16 PM

      I think that we have tests to determine the age of the paint. But Future Man may come up with paint that can confound our tests.

      But why would Future Man want to confound us? He'd want to confound his contemporaries so as to gain some benefit from them, such as an NEA grant.

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  2. ChristopherJuly 18, 2018 at 8:48 AM

    Could our tests show that the paint hasn't been manufactured yet? "Uh, sir, according to our best carbon dating, the age of these samples is ... negative." "Aha! Future Man's work!"

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