Shop high-quality unique Trotsky T-Shirts designed and sold by artists. (Laughter) My estimation of the “fellow-travellers”, I repeat, was regarded as practically faultless; even Vardin made no objections to it. Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. And when this became clear, then there arose the howl, unexpected by its belatedness: Trotsky is on the side of the petty-bourgeois “fellow-traveller”! I remember what Kareyev wrote on this point, in a polemic with the Marxists: let them, the Marxides (that was how they ironically spoke of the Marxists in those days) tell us, for instance, what class interests dictated the Divine Comedy. Even the memories of revolutions long passed fill them with a deep sense of foreboding. 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. In these writings, Trotsky examines the place and aesthetic autonomy of art and artistic expression in the struggle for a new, socialist society. No tree can be grown from a kidney-bean. Of course, Pushkin’s language is magnificent – that cannot be denied – but, after all, this language is used by him for expressing the world-outlook of the nobility. We have put the cultural questions on the order of the day. In my view this is not tactics but a disgrace! Undoubtedly, in the development of the new society, the time will come when economics, cultural life and art will receive the greatest impulse forward. – which did not serve it before, and thus to open up the path of culture for itself. A small thing: it requires that these feelings and moods shall have received such broad, intense, powerful expression as to have raised them above the limitations of the life of those days. Where is it? Kuznitsa, Oktyabr and other such groups are in no sense landmarks along the road of the cultural class creativity of the proletariat, but merely episodes of a superficial nature. 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. But is it for the purpose of giving expression to their own internal proletarian world? For many years, Trotsky was an impossible subject for a Marxist. After the present breathing-space, when a literature strongly coloured by the “fellow-travellers” is being created – not by the Party, not by the state – there will come a period of new, terrible spasms of civil war. “Comrade Voronsky, by his political behaviour,” says Vardin, “has fully deserved this White-Guard kiss.” But this is an insinuation, not an analysis of the question! Trotsky had made many enemies within the Communist Party. 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. At one stage I was quite depressed by it. They only forget that Lenin’s sharp condemnation was aimed precisely at those who are now referring to him. 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. They contributed not to the growth of literature but to the growth of the revolution. Trotsky and a small group of Communists regarded the Soviet Union as doomed without the spread of Communism internationally. Raskolnikov says: “We didn’t invite ‘fellow-travellers’ into the pages of Zvezda and Pravda, but sought and found poets and writers in the depths of the proletariat.” Sought and found! On this basis, the line of purely literary creation will be an extremely zigzag one. Comrade Vardin, who speaks here as nothing less than the living embodiment of Party tradition, does not shrink from trampling in the crudest way on what Lenin wrote about proletarian culture. Trotsky reminds the KPD that the longstanding Comintern policy of the United Front means forming a tactical alliance between Communists and other working-class organizations. This way forward I reject absolutely. Here is a recent example, one of a hundred, where a slovenly, uncritical and dangerous use of the term ‘proletarian culture’ is made. But in fact, his writings on art and literature go back a long way before then. Dante’s work may act on me in a depressing way, fostering pessimism and despondency in me, or, on the contrary, it may rouse, inspire, encourage me. In these feeble verses was the pledge of a new and higher human culture which the awakened masses will create when they have mastered the elements of the old culture. Libedinsky’s last story, Zavtra [Tomorrow] is like the diagonal of a parallelogram, one side of which is Pilnyak and the other Andrei Byely. My attitude to Bezymensky has nothing in it that can be called negative, I hope. 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. But at present we do not yet intend to put Shakespeare, Byron, Pushkin in the archives, and we will continue to recommend them to the workers. At first sight it’s quite incomprehensible. You remember, of course, Novoye Slovo, the best of the old legal Marxist periodicals, in which many Marxists of the older generation collaborated including Vladimir Ilyich. Trotsky's intelligence did not make him a gentler person, however. It was because the Decadents were then a young and persecuted tendency in bourgeois literature. It has been said here that those writings of Pilnyak’s which are closer to Communism are feebler than those which are politically further away from us. The León Trotsky Museum keeps all of his belongings intact and exhibits photographs of his family and his life as a revolutionary., His ashes and those of his wife-Natalia Sedova are kept in the Gardens of the Museum. He says: they recommend the “fellow-travellers” to us, but did the old, pre-war Pravda or Zvezda print the words of Artsybashev, Leonid Andreyev and others whom now they would certainly call “fellow-travellers”? The bourgeoisie took power and created its own culture; the proletariat, they think having taken power, will create proletarian culture. His works on the subject include Culture and Socialism, Art and Revolution, and above all his book Literature and Revolution, which we reproduce here in full. In what sense am I against them? The revolution saved society and culture, but by means of the most cruel surgery. We are, on the contrary, following a course aimed at bringing the peasantry, under the leadership of the proletariat, to socialism. The principal battles are ahead and may be not so far off. Leon Trotsky. After Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet head of state, suffered a stroke in early 1923, Trotsky and Stalin engaged in a contest for power. If you let yourself go dry, like a Caspian roach, that won’t mean you’re poisoned, but you won’t be nourished either; indeed, it will mean nothing at all will happen. 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. (Raskolnikov: “There is, for instance, Demyan Bedny.”) Oh, well now, that I didn’t know, I must confess – that we discovered Demyan Bedny in the depths of the proletariat. 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). Does such an organic interrelation exist between our present-day proletarian poetry and the cultural work of the working class in its entirety? This complexity of the problems involved, and at the same time their reality and concreteness, is completely beyond the understanding of the Na Postu group, and not only of them. Such a historical classification is radically false. In order to overcome this it needs to abolish those conditions which keep it in the position of a class, the proletariat. 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. The bourgeoisie came into power fully armed with the culture of its time. 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. 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. Trotsky … 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. This is just one literary circle among other literary circles. It began to revive in our country at the same time as NEP began. This is the fundamental relationship between a reader and a work of art. In some of his works, the influence of “fellow-travellers” is even too noticeable. This nourishes the subconscious processes of their creativity. If Vardin disagrees with the multiplication table, while Voronsky finds himself in this matter on the same side as a White Guard who knows arithmetic, Voronsky’s political reputation has nothing to fear from that. You begin by proclaiming a new era of proletarian literature, you create circles, associations, groups for this literature, you again and again refer to Demyan. 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. 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. 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. Like Trotsky, Mao does not believe the working class should reject art from previous epochs, stating We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim … It is quite possible that revolutionary poets will give us martial verses, but the continuity of literary development will nevertheless be sharply broken. As a young man he wrote articles on Ibsen and Gogol. Is this for us or against us? This was a rupture with everything the working class had fought for in the period between 1914 and 1926. The Great French Revolution and the wars which grew out of it temporarily lowered the material level of culture. 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. Leon Trotsky . Those who talk about proletarian literature seriously and over a long period, who make a platform of proletarian culture, are thinking, where this question is concerned, along the line of a formal analogy with bourgeois culture. HTML Markup: David Walters. Let us try, indeed, to look more seriously at those pre-revolutionary workers’ publications, newspapers and periodicals, which have been mentioned here. Our task in Russia is complicated by the poverty of our entire cultural tradition and by the material destruction wrought by the events of the last decade. (Laughter). Instead, an unworthy juggling of quotations from White-Guard publications abroad which, do you see, have praised Comrade Voronsky for publishing the works of Pilnyak, or ought to have praised him, or said something against Vardin and, maybe, for Voronsky, and so on, and so on – in that spirit of “circumstantial evidence” which has to make up for the lack of knowledge and understanding. 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. To put the matter that way means simply to strike out the Divine Comedy – from the realm of art. 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? Now there’s something that’s really to the point! Literature and Revolution (Russian: Литература и революция) is a classic work of literary criticism from the Marxist standpoint written by Leon Trotsky in 1924. No. Our epoch is not yet an epoch of new culture, but only the entrance to it. And from the other side, the Italian Marxist, old Antonio Labriola, wrote something like this: “Only fools could try to interpret the text of the Divine Comedy as though it were made of the cloth that Florentine merchants provided for their customers.” I remember this expression almost word for word because in the polemic with the subjectivists I had occasion to quote these words more than once, in the old days. We are bivouacking for a day. At best it is a pious but unreal wish for something good. Knowledge in general begins with distinguishing between things and appearances, and not with chaotic confusion . 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. The question, however, is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Trotsky departs from romantic views that consider art capable of shaping reality, but also from mechanistic versions. 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. Before the First World War he wrote a lot about what were then th… The very fact of your referring to him is a refutation of your theory. What is the point here regarding the “peasant-singing” fellow-travellers? I have tested this and found it true as regards my own fate. In the whole of their peevish criticism there is not the shadow of a class approach. But then you agreed, you praised, you quoted, you gave your approval. 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. Bourgeois culture existed already before the bourgeoisie had formally taken power. In this cultural-historical sense their importance was no less than that of the works of all the Shakespeares, Molières and Pushkins in the world. T he Spanish Revolution is in many ways a how-to guide for how not to take power and implement a revolutionary workers’ democracy. This objection, which at first sight seems convincing, in reality misses the crux of the question. It is one thing to understand something and express it logically, and quite another thing to assimilate it organically, reconstructing the whole system of one’s feelings, and to find a new kind of artistic expression for this new entity. Trotsky went into depth on this question, because there was much debate in the Communist International on whether there would be a revival in the capitalist economy, and, if so, could this cut across the class struggle. What does this require? Does the proletariat of today offer such a cultural-ideological milieu, in which the new artist may obtain, without leaving it in his day-to-day existence, all the inspiration he needs while at the same time mastering the procedures of his craft? 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. To this must be added merely this, that arch-proletarian works also do not in themselves provide the writer in present-day conditions with any guarantees that his creativity will prove to be organically linked with the class. This is the fundamental process, intersecting with new intensifications of civil war, on an all-European and world scale. Poets and artists fell silent. This refers to radio, to aviation, and to many mechanical discoveries. This is their fundamental mistake. This basic feature of the transition period, taken on the international scale, is intense class struggle. 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. But to return to Comrade Raskolnikov. 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 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. This work is necessary and fruitful. Am I for the “fellow-travellers”, or against them? Of course, the Party must and will pay very great attention to every young artistic talent that is akin or ideologically close to it. Finally, Wellred Books has published a new edition of The First Five Years of the Communist International , which is a treasure trove of Trotsky's writings and speeches during the building of the Comintern. The establishment of the bourgeois regime was also preceded by a transitional epoch. But if this is so, does it follow that we have no proletarian science? 20 August marks 80 years since the assassination of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in Mexico. 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. Trotsky on revolutionary art There is a dialectical tension in Trotsky's writings on art and revolution that ultimately are rooted in some of the most fundamental questions of our epoch. Comrade Libedinsky is still very young. In reality, these revolutionary verses were a political event, not a literary one. Arts and Culture 'The Trotsky' and 'The Maid' Two small films offer an antidote to Hollywood's idiotic portrayals of class division. 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. 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? In this sense he is the revolutionary last-born child of our old literature. Why, then, could not proletarian art be created in tens of years? (Ryazanov: “That’s an exaggeration. It is impossible not to reckon with the facts. In our country, please don’t forget, we have the dictatorship of the proletariat in a country which is inhabited mainly by peasants. Trotsky’s “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership” Graeme Anfinson. This was most vividly shown in his remarkable judgement on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which in his opinion is valuable to us just because it enables us to understand the psychology of a certain class at a certain time. About its intellectual vanguard? I repeat: the answer entirely depends on the entire future course of development. "Communist Policy Toward Art" in On Literature and Art, p. 59. You can’t get away from that; Bezymensky doesn’t try to, and he does well not to. This thought corresponds to Trotsky’s theory that proletarian art and literature will not come about, and that socialist art and literature will only flourish years after the revolution, when classes will have ceased to be, when socialist ideas and attitudes have become rooted, and when society is prosperous enough to sustain a thriving culture. Available in a range of colours and styles for men, women, and everyone. In works of art he ignores that which makes them works of art. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture. And by that time there will have grown up scientists who are educated under the new conditions. But are we not travelling in a vicious circle? But why then do you now obliquely and insinuatingly argue against me about the “fellow-travellers”? However, for all that, you won’t deny that Shakespeare and Byron somehow speak to your soul and mine. 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. The bourgeois culture – the technical, political, philosophical and artistic, was developed by the interaction of the bourgeoisie and its inventors, leaders, thinkers and poets. 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. In the course of this process both the proletariat and the peasantry will bring forward their own intelligentsia. I think that Comrade Raskolnikov’s attitude not only to Dante but to art in general proceeds not from the Marxist criterion but from that of the late Shulyatikov, who provided a caricature of Marxism in this connection. What was the reason for that? Leon Trotsky. Nor do groupings of proletarian writers provide this guarantee, precisely because the writer, by devoting himself to artistic work, is compelled, in existing conditions, to separate himself from the milieu of his own class and breathe an atmosphere which, after all, is the same as that breathed by the “fellow-travellers”. 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. Source: Voprosy Kul’tury Pri Diktatura Proletariata [Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat] (1925), pp.93-110. True, after it has conquered power, the proletariat will find a much greater opportunity for mastering science and for revising it. All these works were written after the Revolution. And what we are considering is not an individual or group change in creative endeavour, but such a change on the class, social scale. In summary, for a socialist revolution, both are required – the mass insurrection co-ordinated by a leadership who understand what “ Marx and Engels called ‘the art of insurrection’. At present, in these years of respite, some illusions may arise in our Soviet Republic as regards this. What does this mean? This appears all the more in the sphere of fiction, where we have an old Populist tradition. I mentioned the “peasant-singers”, and we have heard here that the Na Postu group especially approved of that chapter. L. D. Trotsky, Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the proletariat (Speech of 1924) (London: New Park Publications, 1974) p. 18. No, things won’t develop like that. How is one to build a new society with the aid of the old science, and the old morals? Does its path lead towards us or away to us? 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. Leonid Andreyev died in a state of epileptic hatred of soviet Russia. This is a long and very complicated process. Someone may object that I take the concept of proletarian culture in too broad a sense. But this will be socialist culture, built entirely on constant intercourse between the artist and the masses who will have come of age culturally, linked by ties of solidarity. Red professors? Why? Of all the great Marxist thinkers, Trotsky was the one who showed the most lively interest in art, including modern art. The bourgeoisie knows this very well, it likewise approaches art from its class point of view, it knows how to get from art what it needs, but only because it approaches art as art. Whoever goes against us is not a fellow-traveller but an enemy, whom if necessary we will deport, for the well-being of the revolution is our highest law. Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin were political rivals. The bourgeoisie took power in order to perpetuate its rule. Some, starting from the principle of proletarian culture, say: we have in mind only the epoch of transition to socialism – those twenty, thirty, fifty years during which the bourgeois world will be transformed. This alone restricted it very much from acquiring those elements of bourgeois culture which have entered into the inventory of mankind forever. But Demyan is a product of the old, pre-October literature. Pilnyak may be good or bad, in this way or that he may be good or he may be bad – but Pilnyak is Pilnyak, and you must talk about him as Pilnyak, and not as Leonid Andreyev. The Gothic churches were not built suddenly, under the impulse of a religious inspiration. And here we have Comrade Libedinsky, the enemy of “fellow-travellers”, and himself an imitator of Pilnyak and even Byely. The idea seems to be that it is possible to create a proletarian culture by laboratory methods. (Cries: “Demyan wasn’t silent.”) Yes, you keep harping on Demyan, but it won’t do. Lu Xun was making a similar point when he said that although all sentiments are governed by economics, they are not ‘just’ so governed. Show us it! Let us not speak of periods of time. ‘To read Dante is to take a bath in the sea’, said Shevyryev, who was also against history, replying to Byelinsky.”) I don’t doubt that Shevyryev did express himself as Comrade Ryazanov says, but I am not against history – that’s pointless. 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