Search
Close this search box.

Trotsky, revolution and culture

Geraldine Drayton and Warren Gropper review “Culture and revolution in the thought of Leon Trotsky” (Porcupine Press, London 1999, part of the Revolutionary History series, £9.95)

How important are cultural activities – the creation and consumption of works of art – for the working class, and for humanity in general?

Revolutionary History have performed a valuable service for all socialist lovers of art and literature by publishing Culture and revolution in the thought of Leon Trotsky. The book consists of articles by Trotsky, previously unavailable in English, some of his collaborators and socialist historians discussing Trotsky’s contribution.

The book covers a wide spectrum, from literature, through philosophy and painting to art theory and criticism. Alongside his 1924 book, Literature and Revolution, and other writings on culture and art, this new publication sheds more light on Trotsky’s ideas on the subject and how they evolved in the context of the world events shaping his political life. As the editors point out,

“Of all the great figures of Marxism, there can be no doubt that none took a deeper interest in the cultural aspects of life than Leon Trotsky.”

The first two parts of the book mainly comprise articles by Trotsky written before the 1917 revolution, on literature and painting. Trotsky’s love of classical bourgeois literature is evident. What he emphasised in these great novels and plays was how they could illuminate the inner psychology of the classes in society through the interaction of individuals.

His study of Henrik Ibsen first of all places the playwright historically in “the peaceful, inert, set-in-one-and-the-same-ways of life of the small Norwegian towns” and among its petit-bourgeoisie whose moral hypocrisy was “suffocating like soot from a bad lamp, sticky like thick treacle, as an atmosphere penetrating every pore and pervading every relationship – family, kinship, love, friendship”. Ibsen’s genius is to lay this bare.

His revulsion at stultifying conformity leads him to portray his hero Dr Stockman in the play An Enemy of the People as an honest doctor who is forced to make a (correct) stand when a town’s polluted water-system threatens its inhabitants’ livelihoods:

“What is the dangerous enemy of truth and liberty? [Ibsen] asks through Dr Stockman: ‘It is unanimous majority, the accursed liberal majority.’ What is the most pernicious lie? It is ‘the teaching that the crowd, imperfect, and ignorant beings, have the right to judge, direct and rule, as the true aristocrats of intellect.” (p11)

Here, both the two-faced hypocrisy of bourgeois liberalism and the hopeless elitism of the technocratic petit-bourgeois individual are depicted in a mutually destructive struggle. And here, for Trotsky, is the value of nineteenth century realism: its ability to reveal general truths about the relationships between the classes and the effects of this class struggle on the lives of individuals. In his review of Maxim Gorky’s novel, The Three of Them, Trotsky draws out how the three poor, downtrodden characters are representatives of sections of their class:

“‘Fate is strangling me ‘, complains Lunev, ‘and it’s strangling Pashka, and Yakov, and everybody.’ All the horror of the situation of these ‘three’ and the hundreds of thousands like them, is that they have no chance to come face to face with their mysterious enemy In their consciousness, the cause of their misfortune is fate, chance and an uncontrollable dark force.” (p29)

But these are not just general workers and urban poor, they are Russians too, weighed down by the overbearing bureaucracy and tyranny of the Tsarist regime. The characters, at once both general and specific, illuminate the real-life experience of the reader. It is this quality that “enriches the consciousness, and that lifts and inspires thought.” (p132)

Trotsky was more ambiguous when it came to modern, nineteenth century painting. This can be seen from the fact that two of the articles in this section are written as dialogues, for and against!

“The philistine shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘This man has taken a big bucket of blue paint and smeared it over this enormous headless statue. Why on earth did he do that? Evidently to epater [shock] le bourgeois, to bowl me over!'” (p65)

This is the honest reaction of many workers on seeing modern and abstract art. And though Trotsky is being deliberately one-sided, he is clearly disappointed that modern painting (impressionism, Secessionism, etc.) refused to depict the real life of labour, “the great field of collective human life”, and hence was condemning itself to social irrelevance.

While he admired the modernity of its technique (“a new personality in new circumstances, with a new nervous system, with new eyes, a modern person”) Trotsky felt that impressionism “merely repeats and turns over old motifs”. Ever the historical materialist, Trotsky puts this down to modern art’s ultimate dependent relationship to wider society:

“Something larger has to come together beyond the boundaries of art, in the very bowels of our society, if art is to return from its exile, be enriched with the drama of working and struggling man, and, in turn, enrich his labour and his struggle.” (p.82)

The second half of Culture and revolution in the thought of Leon Trotsky deals with Trotsky the participant, rather than the observer of artistic development. From 1917 to 1925, he took an active interest in the various artistic schools in revolutionary Russia – and beyond, as is revealed by a reply from Antonio Gramsci to Trotsky’s request for information about the Italian Futurists. Trotsky is best known for his public debate with the Proletkult group, who believed the task of artists under the dictatorship of the proletariat was to construct a new, proletarian culture from scratch and in exclusive contradiction to bourgeois art.

Trotsky’s dialectical response was to insist that the artistic epochs of slave societies, feudalism and the bourgeoisie were the products of hundreds of years of nurture, patronage and relatively stable class rule, producing different schools of philosophy, the visual arts, literature and so on. The workers’ dictatorship, on the other hand, was a transition period towards a classless, truly human society; as such it would be marked by civil wars, social upheaval and an immediate task of the general raising of the masses’ living standards.

As John Plant points out (pp111-12), in revolutionary Russia only a third of all men, and just 14 per cent of women were literate. In such circumstances, the mass production of cheap copies of classical literature and the nationalisation of museums were pre-requisites for a new human culture. Trotsky was also mindful that this culture would take its starting point from the highest achievements of bourgeois and pre-bourgeois art and not, as Proletkult insisted, by throwing these achievements into the dustbin of history.

Given Trotsky’s personal tastes for realist literature and his distrust of modern painting’s ability to connect with the lives of the labouring classes, this stress on the role of art in raising the cultural level of the workers and peasants led him, according to Plant, to turn a blind eye to early Soviet censorship of literature. While Plant fails to prove his point (he can only cite to Trotsky’s criticisms of poets who were censored in the early years of the Stalinist era) he is correct to point out that Trotsky was to shift from praise of realism to a more libertarian, art-for-art’s-sake position.

Why this shift? In the 1930s, artistic freedom and creativity was being strangled by the totalitarian regimes, not only of Hitler but also Stalin. “Socialist Realism” in the USSR was a caricature of what a realist practice should be – i.e. a representation of the real experiences of the working class.

As a response to this increasing bureaucratic control of cultural production Trotsky would, from Literature and Revolution through to the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art which he wrote with André Breton and Diego Rivera in 1938, become more tolerant of aestheticism, claiming that art should be “judged by its own laws”. As such, the party could (and should) comment on developments in the various fields of artistic endeavour, but not dictate. A letter of Trotsky’s is quoted illustrating his conviction that artistic freedom was necessary for it to serve the revolution:

“A few words on Breton. I don’t think we can, as a party, demand that he should make his literary review into a review of the bloc [of revolutionary artists]. He represents the surrealist school Any attempt on our part to subordinate artistic tendencies as such to a political interest could only compromise us in the eyes of true artists.” (p.144)

So if you are going to an exhibition or planning to read that big nineteenth century novel that’s been gathering dust on your shelves, give this book a read first. It will get you thinking.

Content

You should also read
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram