Trotsky on 'Literature and Revolution'. Part one

TROTSKY'S 'Literature and Revolution', , written 1923-24, brings his overall historical and philosophical outlook into extremely sharp focus.

It is a trenchant analysis of the various literary schools existing in the early years of revolutionary Soviet Russia.

Too often dismissed as a by-product or diversion from his more directly political writings, it is in fact a direct attack on the idea -- encouraged at that time by Stalin, Bukharin, Lunacharsky and others - of 'proletarian culture' and 'proletarian By analyzing these problems to their depths, which lie in the class struggle and the conflict between productive forces and relations of production, Trotsky was able to expound and enrich the Marxist theory of historical materialism, and also to provide a necessary foundation for the political struggle against the programme of Stalin and Bukharin.

Trotsky's introduction states his main point very clearly:

It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art.

'The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient.

The historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture which is truly human' (p. 14).

As for 'proletarian culture' under capitalism, before the conquest of power, Trotsky restates the Marxist position that the proletariat is first and foremost an exploited class, separated from the gains made by humanity in its struggle with nature.

Concentrated

The proletariat develops class-consciousness, concentrated into political strategy, tactics and organization and the methodological developments which underlie and enrich them. Only by abolishing itself as a class (by abolishing the property foundation of class society) will the proletariat put itself into a position to acquire and develop culture.

Whereas the bourgeoisie, before it rules society, growing up in the pores of feudal society, builds up its 'own' type of private ownership; builds its own schools, churches and academies; trains its own corps of administrators, philosophers, architects, dramatists and poets, the proI would like information about letariat grows up under capitalism in a state of deprivation from culture.

It becomes conscious of its historical aims only by becoming conscious of its lack of culture.

In our own day, reformists like the 'new left' Raymond Williams ('Culture and Society') and Richard Hoggart ('The Uses of Literacy') have put forward the idea of a 'working-class culture': meaning some special 'values' Or 'way of life' which the proletariat, quite apart from its trade union and political development, strives to preserve against 'industrialism'.

BUKHARIN

Such an idea is only a 'cultural' reflection (a reflection in the lower middle-class intelligentsia) of English reformism, with its message that capitalism can be gradually rendered harmless and unrecognizable by the gradual growth of progressive tendencies within it.

These gentlemen mean, of course, that middle-class intellectuals themselves and bureaucrats, leaning on the working class and preventing it from asserting its real strength, will be able to attain high positions and influence in bourgeois society and thus achieve the middle-class dream of stablizaWhat has this to do with the problems dealt with by Trotsky in 1924?

The differences over 'culture' are directly related to political differences. In his criticism of Stalin's and Bukharin's theory of 'socialism in one country', Trotsky insisted first of all that it was a reversion to reformism; to a national version of socialism which destroyed the revolutionary and internationalist essence of socialism.

When Bukharin, for example, commented on Trotsky's 'Literature and Revolution', he rejected its main argument (the impossibility of a proletarian culture) on political grounds.

According to Bukharin, Trotsky underestimated the length of time which would be taken up by the era of proletarian revolution. Trotsky, he said, was impatient and over-optimistic about the world revolution. There could La long period before socialism was achieved, and this would give time for the formation of a proletarian culture in Russia.

What Bukharin was actually arguing was that the cultural tasks in Soviet Russia should be tackled in a way consistent with the whole Stalin-Bukharin political line: capitalism is stabilizing itself, the Soviet economy can be built 'at a snail's pace', the workers' struggle in all countries-from through different stages, ten under non-communist leaderships, before the world revolution spreads; the "Trotskyist' (actually Leninist) theory of world revolution is dangerous and must be dropped.

'Proletarian culture' was therefore encouraged as the artistic and literary accompaniment of the 'experiment' of building a special Russian kind of socialism.

In 'Literature and Revolution', Trotsky presents a thorough Marxist analysis of the real relations between literary creation and the proletarian revolution. To do this he had to discuss fundamental questions of the Marxist method - and for this reason the book is invaluable to students of Marxism.

If we take, for example, the question with which middle-class intellectuals are most often preoccupied in the discussion of Soviet literature: namely, the authority of the proletarian state and party, we find Trotsky presents it in quite different terms from the usual argument about 'freedom of the individual'.

Monstrosities

Of course the subsequent Stalinist monstrosities and atrocities in this sphere themselves contributed to alienating many intellectuals. But the most important point is to understand the more fundamental and historical relations between the revolution and the artist's work:

'The proletariat has to have in art the expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just beginning to be formulated within him, and to which art must help him to give form.

'This is not a state order, but an historic necessity. You cannot pass this by, nor escape its force' (p. 170).

It follows, therefore, that the proletarian state and the Marxist party under the proletarian dictatorship has to judge literary schools from the standpoint of their contribution to a future 'truly human' culture.

'It cannot create schools of literature by decree. Besides writers from the working class, there are writers who give only general support, and who are trying to adapt the literary forms they know to the historical forces created by the revolution.

'The party stands guard over the historic interests of the working class in its entirety. Because it prepares consciously step by step the ground for a new culture and therefore for a new art, it regards the literary fellow-travellers not as the competitors of the writers of the working class, but as the real or potential helpers of the working class in the big work of reconstruction.

'The party understands the episodic character of the literary groups of a transition period and estimates them, not from the point of view of These critics attacked a French writer's work, which depicted a stage of the struggle of the French working class, as 'repetitive' and tiresome — contrasting it with their own ideal version of the dynamism of the October Revolution, out of which they constructed in their minds a 'true' drama. Trotsky says:

"The party cannot tell them the class passports of the individual gentlemen literati, but from the point of view of the place which these groups occupy and can occupy in preparing a socialist culture' (pp. 218-219).

It was because Stalin and the Kremlin bureaucracy, representing all the most conservative forces in Russia and leaning on world imperialism, broke with these fundamental Marxist conceptions of the transition to socialism, that there ensued the later vicious repressions in literary and scientific fields as well as in the Stalinist threes of tak letarian culture' and 'socialist realism' simply as some sort of undemocratic and crude application of dictatorial methods can only seek for a liberalization or humanization of Stalinism — and cannot attack it at its roots, in a revolutionary way, from the standpoint of Marxism and the working class.

They become simply middle-class well-wishers of Stalinism.

By approaching the problem of literature and revolution with the method of Marxism, Trotsky was following out very consciously the line and the advice of Lenin. Lenin himself denounced all attempts to invent a special "proletarian' culture and especially emphasized the need for the proletariat to acquire the culture of past societies.

But there is a deeper sense in which Trotsky carried into effect the method and approach of Lenin on this question.

The whole book 'Literature and Revolution' keeps returning to the theme of this dialectical materialist method, as opposed to idealism: which is, course, rampant in fields like literary criticism.

LUNACHARSKY

For example, idealism of an ultra-left' variety was very common among dramatic critics at that time in the USSR. Instead of analyzing and presenting drama as the living expression of specific social and historical relations, these critics thought they could deduce a new and truly revolutionary drama from the general 'nature' of the revolutionary proletariat; its atheism, its activism and its need for objectivity etc.

"To carry over the action of a definite historical milieu into an abstract constructivism, is in this case a deviation from the revolution - from that real, true revolution which is developing : obstinately and put together ('Collected Works', Vol. 32, pp. 50-51).

pictured moving from country to country, and which appears, therefore, to some pseudorevolutionists as a boresome repetition' (p. 238).

We are back to the same methodological point as when Trotsky explained the role of 'fellow-travellers' in literature.

It is a matter of examining, and working on, as revolutionists engaged in making history, tetarian revolution in all its the actual process forms and with all its influences and shadings; examining the 'fellow-travellers' example, ... from the point of view of the place which these groups occupy and can occupy in preparing a socialist culture'.

In the 1920 controversy in the Bolshevik Party concerning the role of the trade unions, Lenin had laid great stress on this aspect of the dialectical materialistic method.

At that time grave dangers had arisen from a tendency to impose a schema of what the workers' state ought to be upon the working class and the trade unions; to deduce from the theory of trade unions and the workers' state what their interrelation ought to be.

Lenin hit very hard, against both Bukharin and Trotsky at that time, insisting that the actual struggle of opposites within reality must be established by the 'concrete analysis of concrete conditions': 'The truth is always concrete.' Such a 'concrete study' showed up the bureaucratic distortions in the workers' state, and made necessary the independence of workers' trade unions from 'their state.

Thus it was no idle philosophical discussion. The dialectical method had to be fought for as a matter of the life and death of the workers' state.

Bukharin not only refused to correct his mistakes but persisted in them, and this was largely responsible for the Party crisis of 1921 which led to the ban on factions.

This Party discussion own dialectic.

Mistakes

Those who persisted in their mistakes thereby created a new situation. Small mistakes, given a new development in the class forces and the revolution, became the transition to big problems and to a major party crisis.

Lenin considered that Trotsky made errors in this respect at that time, but the apologists for Stalinism always like to forget that at the vital stage it was Bukharin - soon to be Stalin's main 'theoretician' who made the fatal descent into syndicalism by persisting in his mistake.

As Lenin put it:

"Trotsky, who had been "chief" in the struggle, has now been "outstripped" and entirely "eclipsed" by Bukharin, who has thrown the struggle into an entirely new balance by talking himself into a mistake that is much more serious than all of Trotsky's Interesting here is a comparison made by Trotsky, which incidentally may be noted by all those who try to separate historical materialism from the dialectics of nature.

Between 1921 and 1924 (when 'Literature and Revolution' appeared), of course, Lenin embarked upon his alliance with Trotsky against the bureaucratic methods of In his work on literature, then, Trotsky was fighting against the growth of bureaucracy, and this fight coincided and was identical with the fight for the dialectical method against idealism, which proceeds with norms of what ought to be.

Against all these who 'deduced' from the 'revolutionary nature' of the proletariat the programme of a proletarian art and literature, Trotsky asks: why not a proletarian science also?

'What are the metaphysicians of a purely proletarian science going to say about the theory of relativity? Can it be reconciled with materialism or not?

Has this question been decided? Where and when and by whom?

It is clear to anyone, even to the uninitiated, that the work of our physiologist, Pavlov, is entirely along materialist lines.

'But what is one to say about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud? Can it be reconciled with materialism, as for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also), or is it hostile to it?

"The same question can be put to all the new theories of atomic structure, etc., etc..

It would be fine if a scientist would come along who could grasp all these new generalizations methodologically and introduce them into the dialectic materialist conception of the world. He could thus, at the same time, test the new theories and develop the dialectic method deeper (pp. 219-220. My emphasis-CS).

Trotsky, proceeding as a naterialist, considers the variius arts, as well as natural cience, to be elements of nan's living struggle to control ature and his own destiny. hey must develop in and hrough this struggle, and annot be deduced from bstract theories.

For example, having desribed briefly the social and echnical elements of rchitecture developing in ioviet Russia, Trotsky says:

"Thus, beyond a practical problem and the steady work of solving this problem, one cannot create a new architectural style.

'The effort to reason out such a style by the method of deduction from the nature of the proletariat, from its collectivism, atheism and so forth, is the purest idealism, and will TV give nothing but an ingenious expression of one's ego, an arbitrary allegorism, same old provincial dilettantism' (p. 136).

In our next article, we take up the Marxist theory of literature in its most general sense, as dealt with in 'Literature and Revolution'.

Trotsky makes many brilliant and profound explanations on this matter, but it is only because he has been able to enrich the Marxist outlook: precisely by a materialist and dialectical analysis of the revolutionary conditions of Soviet literature, and not by writing a general textbook on Marxism and literature.

Readers of 'Literature and Revolution' should therefore not be put off by the fact that the book deals with schools of writers with whose works we are unfamiliar, and should not simply try to extract passages of more general interest.

It is precisely because he makes that detailed analysis of the relation of writers to the Russian revolution that Trotsky can make a major contribution to Marxist theory in this book.

• To be continued.