Studi di estetica, anno XLVI, IV serie, 3/2018 ISSN 0585-4733, ISSN digitale 1825-8646, DOI 10.7413/18258646067 Sven Lütticken1 Council aestheticism? Pannekoek, the avant-garde and contemporary art Abstract Focusing on the Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek, this article left communist im- pulses in 20th and 21st century aesthetic practice. The point of departure is Panne- koek’s theory of revolutionary mass action – centred around the general strike – and its aesthetic as well as political implications and repercussions. The text then proceeds to discuss the workers’ council as the nucleus of socialist self-organization and the avant-garde’s use and indeed fetishization of that concepts, and ends with a more speculative section on the potential contemporary relevance of Panne- koek’s writings on epistemology, the history of science, and evolution. Keywords Marxism, Council communism, Avant-garde 1. The “aesthetic turn” in Marxism Discussions of Marxism and aesthetics have tended to focus on West- ern Marxism since the period between the World Wars – with Lukács, Adorno and others initiating an “aesthetic turn” in Marxism. As Perry Anderson has put it, Western Marxism “paradoxically inverted the tra- jectory of Marx’s own development itself. Where the founder of his- torical materialism moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics, as the central terrain of his thought, the succes- sors of the tradition that emerged after 1920 increasingly turned back from economics and politics to philosophy”, and to aesthetics: “Aes- thetics, since the Enlightenment the closest bridge of philosophy to the concrete world, has exercised an especial and constant attraction for 1
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