Every ruling class creates its own culture, and
consequently, its own art. History has known the slave-owning cultures
of the East and of classic antiquity, the feudal culture of medieval
Europe and the bourgeois culture which now rules the world. It would
follow from this that the proletariat has also to create its own culture
and its own art.
The question, however, is not as simple as it seems at first glance.
Society in which slave owners were the ruling class, existed for many
and many centuries. The same is true of feudalism. Bourgeois culture, if
one were to count only from the time of its open and turbulent
manifestation, that is, from the period of the
Renaissance, has existed
five centuries, but it did not reach its greatest flowering until the
nineteenth century, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History
shows that the formation of a new culture which centers around a ruling
class demands considerable time and reaches completion only at the
period preceding the political decadence of that class.
Will the proletariat have enough time to create a “proletarian”
culture? In contrast to the regime of the slave owners and of the feudal
lords and of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat regards its dictatorship
as a brief period of transition. When we wish to denounce the
all-too-optimistic views about the transition to socialism, we point out
that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last
not months and not years, but decades – decades, but not centuries, and
certainly not thousands of years. Can the proletariat in this time
create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years
of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which
destruction will occupy more room than new construction. At any rate the
energy of the proletariat itself will be spent mainly in conquering
power, in retaining and strengthening it and in applying it to the most
urgent needs of existence and of further struggle. The proletariat,
however, will reach its highest tension and the fullest manifestation of
its class character during this revolutionary period and it will be
within such narrow limits that the possibility of planful, cultural
reconstruction will be confined.
On the other hand, as the new regime will be more and more protected
from political and military surprises and as the conditions for cultural
creation will become more favourable, the proletariat will be more and
more dissolved into a socialist community and will free itself from its
class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat. In other
words, there can be no question of the creation of a new culture, that
is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of
dictatorship. The cultural reconstruction, which will begin when the
need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will
have disappeared, will not have a class character. This seems to lead to
the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there
never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The
proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with
class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to
forget this.
The formless talk about proletarian culture, in antithesis to
bourgeois culture, feeds on the extremely uncritical identification of
the historic destinies of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie.
A shallow and purely liberal method of making analogies of historic
forms has nothing in common with Marxism. There is no real analogy
between the historic development of the bourgeoisie and of the working
class.
The development of bourgeois culture began several centuries before
the bourgeoisie took into its own hands the power of the state by means
of a series of revolutions. Even when the bourgeoisie was a third
estate, almost deprived of its rights, it played a great and continually
growing part in all the fields of culture. This is especially clear in
the case of architecture. The Gothic churches were not built suddenly,
under the impulse of a religious inspiration. The construction of the
Cologne cathedral, its architecture and its sculpture, sum up the
architectural experience of mankind from the time of the cave and
combine the elements of this experience in a new style which expresses
the culture of its own epoch which is, in the final analysis, the social
structure and technique of this epoch. The old pre-bourgeoisie of the
guilds was the factual builder of the Gothic. When it grew and waxed
strong, that is, when it became richer, the bourgeoisie passed through
the Gothic stage consciously and actively and created its own
architectural style, not for the church, however, but for its own
palaces.
With its basis on the Gothic, it turned to antiquity, especially to
Roman architecture and the Moorish, and applied all these to the
conditions and needs of the new city community, thus creating the
Renaissance (Italy at the end of the first quarter of the fifteenth
century). Specialists may count the elements which the Renaissance owes
to antiquity and those it owes to the Gothic and may argue as to which
side is the stronger. But the Renaissance only begins when the new
social class, already culturally satiated, feels itself strong enough to
come out from under the yoke of the Gothic arch, to look at Gothic art
and on all that preceded it as material for its own disposal, and to use
the technique of the past for its own artistic aims. This refers also
to all the other arts, but with this difference, that because of their
greater flexibility, that is, of their lesser dependence upon
utilitarian aims and materials, the ‘free’ arts do not reveal the
dialectics of successive styles with such firm logic as does
architecture.
From the time of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, which
created more favourable intellectual and political conditions for the
bourgeoisie in feudal society, to the time of the revolution which
transferred power to the bourgeoisie (in France), there passed three or
four centuries of growth in the material and intellectual force of the
bourgeoisie. The Great French Revolution and the wars which grew out of
it temporarily lowered the material level of culture. But later the
capitalist regime became established as the ‘natural’ and the ‘eternal.’
Thus the fundamental processes of the growth of bourgeois culture and
of its crystallisation into style were determined by the characteristics
of the bourgeoisie as a possessing and exploiting class. The
bourgeoisie not only developed materially within feudal society,
entwining itself in various ways with the latter and attracting wealth
into its own hands, but it weaned the intelligentsia to its side and
created its cultural foundation (schools, universities, academies,
newspapers, magazines) long before it openly took possession of the
state. It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with
its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the
power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as
late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power
into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture
began to fall to pieces.
But one may answer: It took thousands of years to create the
slave-owning art and only hundreds of years for the bourgeois art. Why,
then, could not proletarian art be created in tens of years? The
technical bases of life are not at all the same at present and therefore
the tempo is also different. This objection, which at first sight seems
convincing, in reality misses the crux of the question. Undoubtedly, in
the development of the new society, the time will come when economics,
cultural life and art will receive the greatest impulse forward. At the
present time we can only create fancies about their tempo. In a society
which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about
one’s daily bread, in which community restaurants will prepare good,
wholesome and tasteful food for all to choose, in which communal
laundries will wash clean everyone’s good linen, in which children, all
the children, will be well-fed and strong and gay, and in which they
will absorb the fundamental elements of science and art as they absorb
albumen and air and the warmth of the sun, in a society in which
electricity and the radio will not be the crafts they are today, but
will come from inexhaustible sources of superpower at the call of a
central button, in which there will be no “useless mouths,” in which the
liberated egotism of mana mighty force! – will be directed wholly
towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the
universe – in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be
incomparable with anything that went on in the past. But all this will
come only after a climb, prolonged and difficult, which is still ahead
of us. And we are speaking only about the period of the climb.
But is not the present moment dynamic? It is in the highest degree.
But its dynamics is centred in politics. The war and the revolution were
dynamic, but very much at the expense of technology and culture. It is
true that the war has produced a long series of technical inventions.
But the poverty which it has produced has put off the practical
application of these inventions for a long time and with this their
possibility of revolutionising life.
This refers to radio, to aviation,
and to many mechanical discoveries.
On the other hand, the revolution lays out the ground for a new
society. But it does so with the methods of the old society, with the
class struggle, with violence, destruction and annihilation. If the
proletarian revolution had not come, mankind would have been strangled
by its own contradictions. The revolution saved society and culture, but
by means of the most cruel surgery. All the active forces are
concentrated in politics and in the revolutionary struggle, everything
else is shoved back into the background and everything which is a
hindrance is cruelly trampled underfoot. In this process, of course
there is an ebb and flow; military communism gives place to the NEP,
which, in its turn, passes through various stages.
But in its essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an
organisation for the production of the culture of a new society, but a
revolutionary and military system struggling for it. One must not forget
this. We think that the historian of the future will place the
culminating point of the old society on the second of August, 1914, when
the maddened power of bourgeois culture let loose upon the world the
blood and fire of an imperialistic war. The beginning of the new history
of mankind will be dated from November 7, 1917. The fundamental stages
of the development of mankind we think will be established somewhat as
follows: prehistoric ‘history’ of primitive man; ancient history, whose
rise was based on slavery; the Middle Ages, based on serfdom;
capitalism, with free wage exploitation; and finally, socialist society,
with, let us hope, its painless transition to a stateless commune. At
any rate, the twenty, thirty, or fifty years of proletarian world
revolution will go down in history as the most difficult climb from one
system to another, but in no case as an independent epoch of proletarian
culture.
At present, in these years of respite, some illusions may arise in
our Soviet Republic as regards this. We have put the cultural questions
on the order of the day. By projecting our present-day problems into the
distant future, one can think himself through a long series of years
into proletarian culture. But no matter how important and vitally
necessary our culture-building may be, it is entirely dominated by the
approach of European and world revolution. We are, as before, merely
soldiers in a campaign. We are bivouacking for a day. Our shirt has to
be washed, our hair has to be cut and combed, and, most important of
all, the rifle has to be cleaned and oiled. Our entire present-day
economic and cultural work is nothing more than a bringing of ourselves
into order between two battles and two campaigns. The principal battles
are ahead and may be not so far off. Our epoch is not yet an epoch of
new culture, but only the entrance to it. We must, first of all, take
possession, politically, of the most important elements of the old
culture, to such an extent, at least, as to be able to pave the way for a
new culture.
This becomes especially clear when one considers the problem as one
should, in its international character. The proletariat was, and
remains, a non-possessing class. This alone restricted it very much from
acquiring those elements of bourgeois culture which have entered into
the inventory of mankind forever. In a certain sense, one may truly say
that the proletariat also, at least the European proletariat, had its
epoch of reformation. This occurred in the second half of the nineteenth
century, when, without making an attempt on the power of the state
directly, it conquered for itself under the bourgeois system more
favourable legal conditions for development.
But, in the first place, for this period of ‘reformation’
(parliamentarism and social reforms) which coincides mainly with the
period of the Second International history allowed the working class
approximately as many decades as it allowed the bourgeoisie centuries.
In the second place, the proletariat, during this preparatory period,
did not at all become a richer class and did not concentrate in its
hands material power. On the contrary, from a social and cultural point
of view, it became more and more unfortunate. The bourgeoisie came into
power fully armed with the culture of its time. The proletariat, on the
other hand, comes into power fully armed only with the acute need of
mastering culture. The problem of a proletariat which has conquered
power consists, first of all, in taking into its own hands the apparatus
of culture – the industries, schools, publications, press, theatres,
etc. – which did not serve it before, and thus to open up the path of
culture for itself.
Our task is complicated by the poverty of our entire
cultural tradition and by the material destruction wrought by the events
of the last decade. After the conquest of power and after almost six
years of struggle for its retention and consolidation, our proletariat
is forced to turn all its energies towards the creation of the most
elementary conditions of material existence and of contact with the ABC
of culture – ABC in the true and literal sense of the word.
Someone may object that I take the concept of proletarian culture in
too broad a sense. That if there may not be a fully and entirely
developed proletarian culture, yet the working class may succeed in
putting its stamp upon culture before it is dissolved into a communist
society. Such an objection must be registered first of all as a serious
retreat from the position that there will be a proletarian culture. It
is not to be questioned but that the proletariat, during the time of its
dictatorship, will put its stamp upon culture. However, this is a far
cry from a proletarian culture in the sense of a developed and
completely harmonious system of knowledge and of art in all material and
spiritual fields of work. For tens of millions of people for the first
time in history to master reading and writing and arithmetic is in
itself a new cultural fact of great importance. The essence of the new
culture will be not an aristocratic one for a privileged minority, but a
mass culture, a universal and popular one. Quantity will pass into
quality; with the growth of the quantity of culture will come a rise in
its level and a change in its character. But this process will develop
only through a series of historic stages. In the degree to which it is
successful, it will weaken the class character of the proletariat and in
this way it will wipe out the basis of a proletarian culture.
But how about the upper strata of the working class? About its
intellectual vanguard? Can one not say that in these circles, narrow
though they are, a development of proletarian culture is already taking
place today? Have we not the Socialist Academy? Red professors? Some are
guilty of putting the question in this very abstract way. The idea
seems to be that it is possible to create a proletarian culture by
laboratory methods.
In fact, the texture of culture is woven at the points where the
relationships and interactions of the intelligentsia of a class and of
the class itself meet. The bourgeois culture – the technical, political,
philosophical and artistic, was developed by the interaction of the
bourgeoisie and its inventors, leaders, thinkers and poets. The reader
created the writer and the writer created the reader. This is true in an
immeasurably greater degree of the proletariat, because its economics
and politics and culture can be built only on the basis of the creative
activity of the masses.
The main task of the proletarian intelligentsia in the immediate
future is not the abstract formation of a new culture regardless of the
absence of a basis for it, but definite culture-bearing, that is, a
systematic, planful and, of course, critical imparting to the backward
masses of the essential elements of the culture which already exists. It
is impossible to create a class culture behind the backs of a class.
And to build culture in cooperation with the working class and in close
contact with its general historic rise, one has to build socialism, even
though in the rough. In this process, the class characteristics of
society will not become stronger, but, on the contrary, will begin to
dissolve and to disappear in direct ratio to the success of the
revolution. The liberating significance of the dictatorship of the
proletariat consists in the fact that it is temporary – for a brief
period only – that it is a means of clearing the road and of laying the
foundations of a society without classes and of a culture based upon
solidarity.
In order to explain the idea of a period of culture-bearing in the
development of the working class more concretely, let us consider the
historic succession not of classes, but of generations. Their continuity
is expressed in the fact that each one of them, given a developing and
not a decadent society, adds its treasure to the past accumulations of
culture. But before it can do so, each new generation must pass through a
stage of apprenticeship. It appropriates existing culture and
transforms it in its own way, making it more or less different from that
of the older generation. But this appropriation is not, as yet, a new
creation, that is, it is not a creation of new cultural values, but only
a premise for them. To a certain degree, that which has been said may
also be applied to the destinies of the working masses which are rising
towards epoch-making creative work. One has only to add that before the
proletariat will have passed out of the stage of cultural
apprenticeship, it will have ceased to be a proletariat.
Let us also not forget that the upper layer of the bourgeois third
estate passed its cultural apprenticeship under the roof of feudal
society; that while still within the womb of feudal society it surpassed
the old ruling estates culturally and became the instigator of culture
before it came into power. It is different with the proletariat in
general and with the Russian proletariat in particular. The proletariat
is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental
elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois
society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does
not allow it access to culture. The working class strives to transform
the state apparatus into a powerful pump for quenching the cultural
thirst of the masses. This is a task of immeasurable historic
importance. But, if one is not to use words lightly, it is not as yet a
creation of a special proletarian culture. ‘Proletarian culture,’
“proletarian art,” etc., in three cases out of ten are used uncritically
to designate the culture and the art of the coming communist society,
in two cases out of ten to designate the fact that special groups of the
proletariat are acquiring separate elements of pre-proletarian culture,
and finally, in five cases out of ten, it represents a jumble of
concepts and words out of which one can make neither head nor tail.
Here is a recent example, one of a hundred, where a slovenly,
uncritical and dangerous use of the term ‘proletarian culture’ is made.
“The economic basis and its corresponding system of superstructures,”
writes Sizoy, “form the cultural characteristics of an epoch (feudal,
bourgeois or proletarian).” Thus the epoch of proletarian culture is
placed here on the same plane as that of the bourgeois. But that which
is here called the proletarian epoch is only a brief transition from one
social-cultural system to another, from capitalism to socialism. The
establishment of the bourgeois regime was also preceded by a
transitional epoch. But the bourgeois revolution tried, successfully, to
perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie, while the proletarian
revolution has for its aim the liquidation of the proletariat as a class
in as brief a period as possible. The length of this period depends
entirely upon the success of the revolution. Is it not amazing that one
can forget this and place the proletarian cultural epoch on the same
plane with that of feudal and bourgeois culture?
But if this is so, does it follow that we have no proletarian
science? Are we not to say that the materialistic conception of history
and the Marxist criticism of political economy represent invaluable
scientific elements of a proletarian culture?
Of course, the materialistic conception of history and the labor
theory of value have an immeasurable significance for the arming of the
proletariat as a class and for science in general. There is more true
science in the
Communist Manifesto alone than in all
the libraries of historical and historico-philosophical compilations,
speculations and falsifications of the professors. But can one say that
Marxism represents a product of proletarian culture? And can one say
that we are already making use of Marxism, not in political battles
only, but in broad scientific tasks as well?
Marx and Engels came out of the ranks of the petty bourgeois
democracy and, of course, were brought up on its culture and not on the
culture of the proletariat. If there had been no working class, with its
strikes, struggles, sufferings and revolts, there would, of course,
have been no scientific communism, because there would have been no
historical necessity for it. But its theory was formed entirely on the
basis of bourgeois culture, both scientific and political, though it
declared a fight to the finish upon that culture. Under the pressure of
capitalistic contradictions, the universalising thought of the bourgeois
democracy, of its boldest, most honest, and most far-sighted
representatives, rises to the heights of a marvellous renunciation,
armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science. Such is the
origin of Marxism.
The proletariat found its weapon in Marxism not at once, and not
fully even to this day. Today this weapon serves political aims almost
primarily and exclusively. The broad realistic application and the
methodological development of dialectic materialism are still entirely
in the future. Only in a socialist society will Marxism cease to be a
one-sided weapon of political struggle and become a means of scientific
creation, a most important element and instrument of spiritual culture.
All science, in greater or lesser degree, unquestionably reflects the
tendencies of the ruling class. The more closely science attaches
itself to the practical tasks of conquering nature (physics, chemistry,
natural science in general), the greater is its non-class and human
contribution. The more deeply science is connected with the social
mechanism of exploitation (political economy), or the more abstractly it
generalises the entire experience of mankind (psychology, not in its
experimental, physiological sense but in its so-called philosophic
sense), the more does it obey the class egotism of the bourgeoisie and
the less significant is its contribution to the general sum of human
knowledge. In the domain of the experimental sciences, there exist
different degrees of scientific integrity and objectivity, depending
upon the scope of the generalisations made.
As a general rule, the
bourgeois tendencies have found a much freer place for themselves in the
higher spheres of methodological philosophy, of
Weltanschauung.
It is therefore necessary to clear the structure of science from the
bottom to the top, or, more correctly, from the top to the bottom,
because one has to begin from the upper stories.
But it would be naive to think that the proletariat must revamp
critically all science inherited from the bourgeoisie before applying it
to socialist reconstruction. This is just the same as saying with the
utopian moralists: before building a new society, the proletariat must
rise to the heights of communist ethics. As a matter of fact, the
proletarian will reconstruct ethics as well as science radically, but he
will do so after he will have constructed a new society, even though in
the rough.
But are we not travelling in a vicious circle? How is one to build a
new society with the aid of the old science, and the old morals? Here we
must bring in a little dialectics, that very dialectics which we now
put so uneconomically into lyric poetry and into our office bookkeeping
and into our cabbage soup and into our porridge. In order to begin work,
the proletarian vanguard needs certain points of departure, certain
scientific methods which liberate the mind from the ideological yoke of
the bourgeoisie; it is mastering these, in part has already mastered
them. It has tested its fundamental method in many battles, under
various conditions.
But this is a long way from proletarian science. A
revolutionary class cannot stop its struggle because the party has not
yet decided whether it should or should not accept the hypothesis of
electrons and ions, the psychoanalytical theory of Freud, the new
mathematical discoveries of relativity, etc. True, after it has
conquered power, the proletariat will find a much greater opportunity
for mastering science and for revising it. This is more easily said than
done.
The proletariat cannot postpone socialist reconstruction until the
time when its new scientists, many of whom are still running about in
short trousers, will test and clean all the instruments and all the
channels of knowledge. The proletariat rejects what is clearly
unnecessary, false and reactionary, and in the various fields of its
reconstruction makes use of the methods and conclusions of present-day
science, taking them necessarily with the percentage of reactionary
class-alloy which is contained in them. The practical result will
justify itself generally and on the whole, because such a use when
controlled by a socialist goal will gradually manage and select the
methods and conclusions of the theory. And by that time there will have
grown up scientists who are educated under the new conditions. At any
rate, the proletariat will have to carry its socialist reconstruction to
quite a high degree, that is, provide for real material security and
for the satisfaction of society culturally before it will be able to
carry out a general purification of science from top to bottom. I do not
mean to say by this anything against the Marxist work of criticism,
which many in small circles and in seminars are trying to carry through
in various fields. This work is necessary and fruitful. It should be
extended and deepened in every way. But one has to maintain the Marxian
sense of the measure of things to count up the specific gravity of such
experiments and efforts today in relation to the general scale of our
historic work.
Does the foregoing exclude the possibility that even in the period of
revolutionary dictatorship, there might appear eminent scientists,
inventors, dramatists and poets out of the ranks of the proletariat? Not
in the least. But it would be extremely light-minded to give the name
of proletarian culture even to the most valuable achievements of
individual representatives of the working class. One cannot turn the
concept of culture into the small change of individual daily living and
determine the success of a class culture by the proletarian passports of
individual inventors or poets. Culture is the organic sum of knowledge
and capacity which characterises the entire society, or at least its
ruling class. It embraces and penetrates all fields of human work and
unifies them into a system. Individual achievements rise above this
level and elevate it gradually.
Does such an organic interrelation exist between our present-day
proletarian poetry and the cultural work of the working class in its
entirety? It is quite evident that it does not. Individual workers or
groups of workers are developing contacts with the art which was created
by the bourgeois intelligentsia and are making use of its technique,
for the time being, in quite an eclectic manner. But is it for the
purpose of giving expression to their own internal proletarian world?
The fact is that it is far from being so. The work of the proletarian
poets lacks an organic quality, which is produced only by a profound
interaction between art and the development of culture in general. We
have the literary works of talented and gifted proletarians, but that is
not proletarian literature. However, they may prove to be some of its
springs.
It is possible that in the work of the present generation many germs
and roots and springs will be revealed to which some future descendant
will trace the various sectors of the culture of the future, just as our
present-day historians of art trace the theatre of Ibsen to the church
mystery, or impressionism and cubism to the paintings of the monks. In
the economy of art, as in the economy of nature, nothing is lost, and
everything is connected in the large. But factually, concretely,
vitally, the present-day work of the poets who have sprung from the
proletariat is not developing at all in accordance with the plan which
is behind the process of preparing the conditions of the future
socialist culture, that is, the process of elevating the masses ...
