Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”

Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi

    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

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).

"Rot" by Johannes Becher

This poem first appeared in Kurt Pinthus’ influential 1920 anthology titled Menschheits Dämmerung (The Twilight of Humanity) with a subtitle “Symphonie jüngster Dichtung” (a “symphony of the youngest poets”). The collection opens with Jakob Van Hoddis’ “Weltende” (“The End of the World”) and includes work by Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Iwan Goll, Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, and others.

The career of Johannes R. Becher traces many of the most significant artistic and political developments of the first half of the twentieth century. At the age of nineteen he participated in a last gasp of German Romanticism by entering a suicide pact (he did admire Kleist) with his lover whom he killed with a bullet though he only wounded himself. His first book Die Gnade eines Frühlings (“The Grace of Springtime”; 1912) contains thoroughly Romantic poems. While coping with morphine addiction he associated with Futurist and Expressionist groupings in the art world and with revolutionary organizations such as the Spartacist League and then the Communist Party in politics. His pacifist novel, (CHCI=CH)3As (Levisite) oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg was banned in 1925 and he was indicted for "literarischer Hochverrat" or "literary high treason.” And that was under Weimar. When the Nazi regime took over, he escaped arrest by going into hiding, then making his way to the Soviet Union where he likely found he had little choice and eventually declared his adherence to the socialist realism of Zhdanov. Implicated in the purges of suspected Trotskyites, he informed on others, then suffered depression and attempted suicide again. After the war he returned to the eastern zone of Germany to accolades as the great poet of the new era. He was made Minister of Culture in 1954. His business had become the suppression of young dissidents such as he himself had once been. He wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs, unpublished until thirty years after his death, he renounced not just his service to the East German Stalinist government but to socialism itself as the great mistake of his life.

In “Verfall” (“Rot”) Becher expresses a real punk sensibility, insisting that the most appropriate images for the age are ugly, even disgusting. For all Becher’s leftist activism, his taste resembles that of the fascist anti-Semite Céline.


Our bodies already rotten,
let us dig while singing
these intoxicated evenings,
awash in night storms and the sea,
our hot blood dried up,
an abscess of pus trickles away
mouth ear eye in disguise
sleep dream earth the wind.

Yellowish carrier worms
on a narrow-wounded passage,
throbbing rolling storms,
our eyelashes, blood red and long.
“Am I a crumbling wall,
a silent pillar by the roadside?
or a tree in mourning
that leans over the abyss?”
Ah, the sweet smell of decadence
filling the room, the house, the head!
In the flowers, the waving grasses,
in the birds, in their songs!

”Yes, the trunk is rotten.”
Mold. Groans. Moans.
Flight under a teeming sky!
A frightful clamor ensues.
Kettle-drums! Tuba grunts.
Thunder and wild flames of light!
Cymbals. A sound of percussion.
A drum-roll. It’s breaking up!

I gave myself to you,
wide world, ah! too easily trusting,
see how the poor flesh fails
yet my mind looks still homeward.
Oh, night, your sleep’s a solace
The mouth rests deep and poor.
Bright day, you dissolve me
in total and harmless unease.

There’s no way out,
Oh, I’m torn in two!
Blinkered, soon, soon blind and bandaged.
No kiss can heal me!
That I find no way out,
I'm the only one to blame:
A wild current, wind of blood and fire.
Shame, impatience.

The day brings sharp bitterness!
May night bring dreams and wisdom!
Shit, contortion, cut and tear!
A cool resting place –
everything must be far off –
far, oh so far from me –
blooming aloft in the shine of the stars –
my home, there! above!

One day I will stand by the road,
pensive, gazing at a metropolis.
Light falls through the dull clouds’ course.
Enchanted forms, wrapped in white,
My hands make the move
toward heaven, filled with gold,
instantly opening doors of wonder!

The fields and the forests rise,
Waters roll on. Bridges.
A roof. Endless streams are running.
Grey mountain ridge.
Red and dreadful thunder rises.
A dragon. Earth spews.
Torn throat. The sun roars.
Disgust. Laughing. Cries.


Fade to black. The taste of dirt and blood.
A ball. A huge bloodbath . . .
. . . “oh, timeless day, when will you dawn?
Is there still time?
When will you blow, oh sounding horn,
are you screaming the tide’s time?
Out of the underbrush, the moorlands, tomb and thorns,
Calling the sleepers here”

Eisenstein's Strike and the Problem of Realism

Most people in most times and places, have derived their identity from their agreements with others. This is the case with church-goers and patriots. Others create a sort of artificial fraternity with sports loyalties or ethnic identity. It is only in our belated post-Romantic era that differences tend to be more highly prized. In the eighties I knew a critic who championed Night of the Living Dead as the greatest modern movie, proud of his choice for its singularity. Even a conspicuously individualist twentieth century critic, however, can enjoy assenting in a common judgment. With just such a pleasure in aligning myself with a widespread opinion, I regard Sergei Eisenstein as a very great filmmaker indeed. The work of this intensely original and idiosyncratic artist under a system where the collective received official endorsement when opposed to the individual poses aesthetic problems as well as the personal ones Eisenstein spent his life negotiating.

I recently watched Strike for the first time in decades and found it as rewarding, frame by frame, as I had in the past. Above all else, Eisenstein is a great master of montage, the most purely cinematic of techniques. His dazzling sense of composition satisfies the viewer in nearly every shot. What other director provides his audience with such an array of fascinating faces, each photographed with light and angle cunningly arranged to display every expressive irregularity? If Ivan the Terrible is operatic in its grand spectacle, Strike is a dramatic, intricately worked sonata, in which waves of formal beauty succeed each other one after another.

Curiously, Eisenstein’s formalism, which has brought such delight to cinephiles, would have been proof of its degenerate corruption for the Stalinist enforcers of Zhdanov-style socialist realism who oversaw his projects. Finding himself in the position of a medieval stained glass artist confined to Christian motifs, he, like they, produced work of captivating power. Though forbidden the pursuit of themes other than those prescribed by bureaucrats, he worked out his own dialectic between the generalizations of a vulgar Marxist vision and the myriad and unpredictable details of observed reality. The tension is encoded in the film’s casting, plotting, and montage.

The idea of “socialist realism,” while based in the precise and nuanced realism of Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, avoided the chaos, ambiguity, and obscurity of experience in favor of simple didacticism. Thus, while insisting that the work was true to life in a way unprecedented in earlier art, Eisenstein substituted a flat morality tale for the complexity of life, all the while claiming to be more “real.” While the result is considerably more palatable than the brilliant Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl, its plot-lines are as unconvincing as the “eight model plays” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

For instance, Eisenstein’s fondness for selecting non-actors for many roles might seem to narrow the gap between the art work and observed reality. Instead of Hollywood-style stars, one sees “real people.” In practice, though, the director selected people who most strongly suggested stereotypes -- the strong young worker, the capitalist, the priest – as little “real” as glamorous actors. Again, the pretense of heightened realism leads in fact to stylized convention as tight as that of the commedia dell’arte.

The concluding massacre of the workers, unforgettably presented with slaughterhouse images, belies the “optimism” that was prescribed for socialist realism. The intertitle listing places where such repression had in fact occurred reinforces the fidelity to lived experience. Yet the viewer experiences the denouement as a tragic ritual, a sacrifice which expands the worker’s suicide earlier in the story and presents death as redemptive ritual, very much resembling the passion of Christ.

Is Strike realistic? Of course, a film is a series of images on cellulose acetate with virtually no resemblance to life, just as a novel is ink marks on two-dimensional pages. The degree of realistic illusion differs from one work to another, but it is always dialectic, conflicted, and ambiguous. In Eisenstein’s great film, the pretense of reproducing data from lived experience allowed the artist to produce great formalist works. (His colleague Dziga Vertov, with his kino pravda, illustrates one further possibility of the aesthetics, less monumental and dramatic, more lyrical and loose, of claiming to reproduce reality.) At the same time in America, one might note Dos Passos’ USA trilogy for its combination of modernist technique and representation of documentary truth. Art is always art; reality, reality. The implicit claim of realism is simply one of a variety of artistic techniques. The difference between realists and formalists resembles the medieval one between Realists and Nominalists, or one might trace it back to Plato and Aristotle. In the end, surely, both and neither are correct. Struggling with these oppositions is our truth. In Eisenstein’s case, the contradictions between style and content, worked out by an individual artist operating under a murderous philistine tyranny resulted in some of the world’s most memorable movies