Marxism’s Limits

 

     I place this is the Politics category of my Index since the central point concerns not so much writings by Marx, Trotsky, or Breton as the attitudes of political people who identify as socialist, both in and out of power.

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses refer to pages in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, University of Michigan, 1970.

 

 

     The Soviet Union stopped claiming to represent the triumph of socialism a few decades ago when the regime was reborn in a new form, the equal to any of its predecessors in tyranny and chauvinism.   While few outside Russia’s borders will today defend Stalin, many leftist intellectuals in the West cling to remnants of Soviet-style “Socialist Realism,” a theory far more innocuous when its proponents are out of power.  In the vulgarest notion of Marxist literature, the hero is working class, the villain is capitalist, and the denouement is flushed pink with hope in works that can hardly be called “realism” at all, nor are they definitively socialist.  Simple-minded and reductive, this was the formula likeliest to prove comprehensible to those with little or no cultural background.  Social factors entirely unrelated to aesthetic concerns have kept this concept alive, though it is indefensible on theoretical grounds.  It remains influential today among socialists who should know better.

     Marxist writers have often, quite without warrant, considered their theory to be universally applicable, and have wandered from their proper territory in matters of ethical philosophy, economics, and politics into the aesthetic field.  In artistic questions Marxism has very limited though admittedly useful significance in recognizing the ideological elements of art and the nature of the production of culture in specific historical conditions.  The pressure of polemics in capitalist countries and the desire to maintain control in those that have claimed to be socialist have encouraged the mistaken notion that poetry and fiction can be judged by political criteria.  Equally misguided attempts to define Marxist science must similarly fail, as the criteria and assumptions of scientific research, like those of art, have little to do with social analysis. 

     Prescriptive literary models are not, however, inevitable accompaniments to Marxist economic analysis.  Marx and Engels themselves had traditional notions about literary value.  They discounted the radical writers of their day, preferring the classics.  Marx was, after all, an intellectual who read Ancient Greek for relaxation [1] and, when asked his favorite poets named Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Goethe [2].  Among modern novelists, Engels praised the royalist Balzac, saying that his pages managed to record more data about French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.”  Engels flatly declares that “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.” [3]  To him Balzac, in spite of his conscious political allegiances, encoded in his work a “revolutionary dialectic” [4] due to his insight and art, making his fiction more valuable (even to the revolutionary cause) than the well-intentioned novels of socialist partisans.

     Lenin likewise had an education that allowed him to read Latin poets and rhetoricians, as well as German classics like Goethe’s Faust.  Having little sympathy for his day’s avant-gardes, he wrote “I am a barbarian.  I cannot extol the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other ‘isms.’”  To him there is “very little sense” in modern writing, “Why worship the new just because it is new?” [5]

     When he does address the question of the construction of a revolutionary culture, he recommends that modern artists begin with imitation, coopting “the best models, traditions and results of the existing culture.”  [6]  To him the individualistic and spiritual Tolstoy in a sense “the Mirror of Russian Revolution.” [7]

     Though Lenin repeatedly calls for a “free literature,” he at the same time he refers to art as no more than “’a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” [8]  Lacking susceptibility to art on aesthetic grounds, Lenin laid the foundation for later repression.  His preferences for writers like Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov was based on no artistic criteria, but only their perceived sympathy for the people.  Lenin never felt moved to inquire more subtly into literature.

     During the ‘twenties, though, prior to Stalin’s taking power, a good deal of latitude was given cultural workers.  Under Lunacharsky’s tenure as Minister for Education (People's Commissariat for Education or Narkompros) the Symbolists, Suprematists, Constructivists, and Futurists who might seem petty bourgeois individualists, were tolerated, both within and without Bolshevik circles.  Even apparently reactionary formations, such as the “changing landmarks” movement, which had been associated with the Whites, and a number of religious writers wrote and published in the first years after the Revolution, though the scope allowed to them shrank consistently during the ‘twenties and Lunacharsky, who had been pursuing “god-building,” the construction of new rational surrogates for religion, was removed from office in 1929, the same year Trotsky left the country.

     Before that time, however, even the committed revolutionary writers of the Kusnitsa (or Smithy) group demanded “complete freedom” in their manifesto and Bogdanov’s Proletkult sought autonomy from the Party.  To replace such undependable cultural groups an organization for writers willing to follow the government’s line without fail, the Russian Association of Proletarians Writers, was founded in 1925.  The preference for unquestioning loyalty from writers with little regard for other standards was clear by the time of the 1932 Central Committee’s order that all arts groups must come under centralized control.  In 1934, when Gorky prescribed Socialist Realism as the sole acceptable literary method in a speech to the Soviet Writers Congress, he established the parameters that later were enforced by the Kharkov Doctrine (later identified with Zhdanov) which required absolute obedience to the state line from intelligentsia and artists. 

     The Soviet example, now continued under Putin’s kleptocracy, has perniciously influenced other countries claiming to be socialist including China, Korea, and Cuba.  In spite of outstanding and creative Communist revolutionary poets like Mayakovsky, Césaire, Quasimodo, Neruda, Alberti, Hikmet, Darwish, and countless others, it is inevitably philistine timeservers who come to administer these repressive systems. 

     The relations between artists, even those, like the Proletkult members, who are sympathetic to socialism, and bureaucratic ideologues has often been uneasy in capitalist countries as well.  In 1925 Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Péret, and Unik joined the French Communist Party though neither side knew quite what use to make of the other.  Though Surrealists officially supported (for a time) the Party, their delegates were viewed with great suspicion as bourgeois bohemians, solipsistic individualists whose writing style could never be popular among the masses.  The leftists were particularly offended by real or fancied homosexuality which to them meant degeneracy, while many Surrealists objected to the imposition of a mandated political line for the movement.  Breton was repeatedly criticized by the French party’s Central Committee for insisting on maintaining his Surrealist identity along with his Marxist one. [10] Aragon, Buñuel, and Unik abandoned Surrealism when obliged to choose between the art movement and the party.  In later years Surrealism and communism remained intertwined in Situationism and Franklin Rosemont’s Chicago Surrealist Group.

     Leon Trotsky was one figure prominent in the Bolshevik revolution who avoided the narrow-minded restrictions of Stalinist Socialist Realism, deviations which, among others, resulted in his exile and eventual assassination.  In 1938 Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico and they composed a “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” [11].  This document opposes “those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself” and insists on utter freedom as a necessary precondition for the production of art.  “The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –- these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable.” 

     While conceding the role of central economic planning, Trotsky and Breton contend that direction from the top is wholly out of place in the realm of culture.  They could hardly have been more emphatic in their contention that autonomy is imperative not only for the arts, but for all intellectual work.  The reader can sense in their urgent words the distress of suffering Soviet writers and revolutionaries under Stalin. 

If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

     While the manifesto compares the threat fascism poses to culture to the legendary depredations of the ancient Vandals and maintains that art or science in the cause of reaction is in an “absolutely intolerable” position, the authors were careful to object in equally strong terms to government control of writers in the Soviet Union.  Breton and Trotsky express guarded sympathy with anarchists, Futurists, and Freud, implying acceptance of a popular front broader than any the Comintern would have tolerated. 

     Yet they went further, to a far more sweeping claim.  In the end they assert that, since art offers fresh perspectives “expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time,” all art is in fact at heart revolutionary.  For them “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it.” 

     In signing this statement Trotsky was perhaps seeking allies in his attacks on Stalin and his attempts to construct a Fourth International independent of Soviet rulers.  Yet when he held power years earlier he had espoused similar views in his book Literature and Revolution (1924).  In this volume he lays out the theoretical basis for his view of revolutionary art as well as discussing the current Russian literary scene in rich and lively detail, sometimes vituperative.  Few, even among specialists in the period, will recognize the names of many of the writers he discusses.  Yet Trotsky has strong opinions on them all, which he expresses in often colorful language.  His polemics do not, however, focus directly on the class origin or loyalty of the authors, or on their party fealty, but rather on their personal qualities or their allegiance to metaphysical ideas.  Thus to him Blok’s work is “romantic, symbolic, mystic, formless, and unreal,” (116) and Schkapskaya’s religious inclinations are “so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic.”  His misogyny allows him to include in his ridicule Akhmatova and other “real and near poetesses.” (41).

     Trotsky’s approach, while impressionistic, is based in theory.  Trotsky begins with the assumption that the art of every era reflects its socio-economic structure, art, in fact is “the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.” (9)  Yet the evolution of such an internalized Weltanschauung, what Trotsky calls “the formation of a new culture” requires “considerable time.” (184)  Those qualified in the arts at the time of revolution are inevitably bourgeois and even those who are sympathetic to the cause of the people will be “not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her ‘fellow-travelers’” (57).  Proletarian literature is, he maintains, unlikely to emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the altogether classless society of communism in which art will have no class character.  Thus “there can be no question of the creation of a new culture.” because “there is no proletarian culture” and “there never will be” due to the brevity of the transitional period.  Furthermore, during this “brief period” (185) the regime will be unable to afford much art and will be obliged to dedicate its resources to material economic progress. (185) 

     These rosy expectations sound sometimes quite like utopianism.  Under communism according to Trotsky “the powerful force of competition” over wealth under capitalism will be alchemically transmuted to “a higher and more fertile form,” “the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste.”  Using Freudian language, he says that what had been greed will be “sublimated,” “channelized into technique, into construction which also includes art (230).”  The book’s conclusion sounds romantic, starry-eyed. 

Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant.  Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree . . .Life in the future will not be monotonous. (254)

The prospect inspires Trotsky to grand and lofty rhetorical flights.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. (254-255)

     Of course, a hundred years later we are aware that these hopeful expectations have not been realized in history.  The whole idea of the inevitability of the coming of communism under a workers’ government as predicted in The Communist Manifesto has always sounded like a kind of messianism, though it looked more plausible a century ago.  Still, this question has no bearing on Trotsky’s skepticism about the possibility of proletarian culture or his recommendation that artists must have, in the words of the 1938 Manifesto, “free choice” and “the absence of all restrictions” as “inalienable” rights.

     Ironically, on the cultural side, Breton actively exercised his Surrealist leadership in a dictatorial manner himself, parodying the official Soviet government authoritarianism without knowing it, prescribing requirements and ousting those he saw as dissidents while maintaining a more libertarian stance in theory.  Radical artists as well as dogmatic rulers, it seems, may seek to impose their visions on others.  Under externally imposed limits, art can prove resourceful.  Roman Catholicism did not disable the brilliance of Dante and Eisenstein’s imagination glows brightly even under Stalin’s scrutiny.  Imposing non-aesthetic requirements does not preclude the creation of great literature and great paintings though the interference of reductive and overly confident systems is likely to set them askew.   

     Surely the strongest revolutionary movement must be one in which each field’s progress is guided, not by expertise dictated from outside but by practitioners and their peers.  Farmers are experts in farming; printers in printing.  The principle is no different in intellectual work than in the production of goods.  Scientists must have autonomy to do good science, and artists must have no less.  There is no “party line” in aesthetic endeavors any more than there is in particle physics or hydraulic engineering. 

     Since the Romantic Age, a good share of artists has been politically radical, for the most part more or less on the left, though with extreme rightists as well.  This critical stance is not dictated by aesthetic theory, but rather by the compassion of the creators upon witnessing the suffering of the poor and the indifference of the comfortable.  Since the whole business of art is the exchange of subjectivities, the artist is likely to be more adept than some with the practice of empathy.  In a curious ironic turn, for some the spontaneous charity of the heart entails, or at least renders attractive or acceptable, the imposition of non-aesthetic standards on their own work as well as, what is worse, seeking to extend these irrational limits to others.  Every advance toward socialism, toward the greater well-being of most people, is welcome, while at the same time each expert should be allowed sovereign freedom in every field whether it be fishing, mining, construction, chemistry, mathematics, or, yes, art. 

 

 

 

1.  This journalist’s questionnaire is reprinted in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 436

2.  Letter from Marx to Engels. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 261

3.  Letter to Margaret Harkness.  Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 93.

4.  Letter to Laura Lafargue Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, 439.

5.  See K. Dasgupta, “Lenin on Literature,” Indian Literature XIII, 3 (September). 

6.  “Rough Draft of a Resolution on Proletarian Culture” (1920).

7.  “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908).

8.  “Party Organisation and Party Literature” (1905).

9.  Proletkult, under the leadership of Lenin’s rival Bogdanov, was absorbed into the education ministry in 1920.  The Kuznitsa writers challenged the regime from the left, denouncing, for instance, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, but they moderated their deviations carefully enough to survive until 1932

10.  See Robert S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, Left-Wing Intellectuals between the Wars (1966). 

11.  Though signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera, the statement was written by Trotsky and Breton.  In a translation by, Dwight MacDonald it appeared The Partisan Review 1938, vol. IV #1 , Fall 1938.

12.  A high point of Trotsky’s polemic is surely his ridicule of Biely who, he says, “day in and day out caught in his immortal soul certain little insects and spread them out on his fingernail,” etc. (Literature and Revolution, 54).