The aforementioned drawing is divided into two equal parts along a horizontal line, contrasting the surplus and deficit of fat to visualize the structural imbalance of nourishment among the rich and the poor. 7 Up until his 1933 exile to the United States, his images of biting social critique appeared in various Communist Party publications, including Roter Pfeffer. 6 Although Grosz gave up party membership by 1923, he did not break his ties with the workers’ movement. Known as one of the founders of the Berlin Dada group, Grosz joined the newly founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at the end of 1918, along with Dada friends such as John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde. 5īorn in Berlin in 1893, Grosz became an ardent critic of war, conservative politics, and bourgeois society during World War I. One could hardly find a more illustrative visual image to go with Marx’s unorthodox footnote than Oben und unten: Zwanzig Pfund zu viel / Zwanzig Pfund zu wenig, a drawing by the leftist German artist George Grosz, published in the April 1932 issue of the German Communist Party’s satirical picture magazine Roter Pfeffer. Copyright: Estate of George Grosz, Princeton N.J./VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Published in Roter Pfeffer, April (1932): 15. George Grosz, Oben und Unten: Zwanzig Pfund zu viel/ Zwanzig Pfund zu wenig. Dialectical images – some definitionsįig. Soviet-style propaganda, given the visual, material, and structural tensions embedded in them, which provided their potential to both become dialectical and to visualize the invisible: communist class consciousness. Juxtapositions, I argue, were particularly suitable for This article turns to such visual comparisons commonly associated with twentieth-century communist visual culture in order to ask: what makes a juxtaposition dialectical? While grappling with the visual and ideological operations of communist dialectical images, I seek to probe the capacity of still images – such as drawings, paintings, prints, or photographs – to challenge their own static statuses by forming juxtapositions and thus provoking political transformations. 4 Here, in this lengthy and rather complex footnote, one finds an early manifestation of what, half a century later, would become one of the most widespread visual clichés of Soviet communism: the grotesque depiction of the fat, evil capitalist, contrasted with the oppressed worker. If such a gesture, otherwise commonly associated with food consumption, directly relates to barter and commerce in other cultures, it is, according to Marx, no surprise that “in the South the stomach serves as the organ of accumulated property, and that a Kaffir estimates the wealth of a man by the size of his belly.” 3 “The Kaffirs know what they are doing,” Marx concludes, with a cruel irony that ultimately targets the rich and fat British upper classes of the 1860s, whose corpulence, his remark suggests, is the result of their social privilege. Marx reminds his readers that in some cultures, the act of licking articles with the tongue plays a key role in procedures of exchange and the appropriation of commodities. The piercing remark in the footnote serves to highlight Marx’s argument that price – or what he refers to as the “money-form” of the commodity, usually displayed on a ticket – is not the only means to express a commodity’s value. His juxtaposition suggests a clear (if invisible) relation between the fact that while the bourgeoisie happens to be over-supplied with fat, workers suffer from a lack of proper nourishment. 2 In this case, Marx confronts the conclusions of an annual state health report with a frivolous piece of bourgeois advertising. In Capital, as David Harvey has noted, Marx often draws on contemporaneous appearances of social distinctions to point to a much deeper entanglement of social structures beneath the surface. Notwithstanding the problem of using what today would read as a fat-shaming comment against the British bourgeoisie, the footnote encapsulates the avant-garde method of Marx’s scientific investigation and especially the surprising array of sources he mobilizes to describe the political economy of capitalism. This observation about the deficit and surplus of fat in mid-nineteenth-century Britain appears as a side note to Karl Marx’s intricate explanation of the mystified operations of money and the circulation of commodities in Chapter 3 of Capital, Volume 1. …at the same time as the official British Health Report of 1864 was bemoaning the deficiency of fat-forming substances among a large part of the working class, a certain Dr Harvey (not, however, the man who discovered the circulation of the blood) was doing well by advertising recipes for reducing the surplus fat of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
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