Sublime industrial workscapes: socialist realist aesthetics and Kant in the East

This article starts from the premise that it has become increasingly necessary to revisit how Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, particularly in their Soviet context, shaped the contemporary understandings of modern concepts in philosophy. The essay also introduces the concept of the “industrial sublime” in order to analyze how the modern transformation of nature, especially in the context of socialist developmentalism, redirected the central concepts of idealism toward a sort of pragmatism centered on progress and automation. Drawing on works such as Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique (2003) and Michael Wayne’s Red Kant (2014), which explore the intersections between Marxist and Kantian aesthetic thought, the study examines how, in the absence of a fully articulated Marxist aesthetics, post-Marxist thinkers often reinterpreted Kantian categories from the Critique of Judgment. Special attention is given to the concept of the sublime, a notion that—despite Lenin’s explicit rejection in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, following Marx and Engels in opposing Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism—resurfaced in Soviet discourse. The paper traces the reintroduction of the sublime in the cultural policy discourse of the USSR, beginning with Bukharin’s intervention at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, where the term was reframed as a vehicle for articulating revolutionary enthusiasm. It then turns to the Romanian context (1948–1950), where local theorists attempted to formulate an “industrial sublime,” reconfiguring the Kantian category within the ideological framework of industrialization, echoing Maxim Gorky’s thesis on industrialization and fiction. By situating the evolving notion of the sublime within broader debates on socialist realism, the paper argues that socialist appropriations of aesthetic categories such as beauty and the sublime were not merely ideological impositions, but active reworkings designed to serve the goals of revolutionary transformation and industrial development.