Marxism and Culture

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Words like culture, cultivated, civilised, civilisationnot to speak of beauty, elegance, harmony have become so contaminated by bourgeois ideology as to be almost unusable.

This is the first problem which anyone proposing to write about Marxism and Culture' faces.

The second problem is that 'culture' is a deeply ambiguous term. It can mean, for example, the valued art-works in a society, and the processes ot roducing distributing and consuming' these.

Or it can mean nothing less than a society's whole way of life' • as when one speaks of 'Soviet culturé' Both of these definitions are fact ideological.

Elitist The first is narrowly elitist, itself the product of classsociety: it includes Raphael in culture, but not rugby league.

The second is so broad as to be meaningless: by including all activities and institutions in 'culture (political, ideological, economic and so on), it conveniently collapses together distinct social practices into one vague whole.

If culture covers everything, then it clearly means nothingits only opposite is Nature.

This, indeed, is the position known to Marxism as 'cultural. ism', which grants modes of production and the Marx brothers equal status.

More usefully, culture can be seen as a set of social practices, usually symbolising certain signifieant meanings and values, which are marked mainly by their primarily non-functional nature.

Saxophone

Such a definition should be handled with care: EMI obviously find producing records very functional indeed.

But there is a difference between blowing a saxophone and blowing your nose, at least with the more expert practitioners of the art; and it is this difference which is at stake in défining 'culture' It follows from this that culture is more than a matter of the arts: reading Goethe and Marx practical purpose, abstract values? WI standing and mast class?

TERRY EAGLI a materialist under keeping goldfish are both, in this sense, cultural activities.

It also follows that there is no kind of activity which is always, eternally, cultural, and another kind which is always eternally not.

An object may be a cultural artefact for one historical epoch but not for another: it is doubtful that the ancient Greeks regarded the Parthenon as 'art' in the sense that we do today.

Keeping goldfish in order to profit from their sale is not 'cultural' in the sense that keeping them for enjoyment is.

And if what counts as 'cultural' is socially and historically relative, so is what counts as 'great' culture.

Gjven a deep enough historical, transformation, a future society may find Shakespeare quite irrelevant, in which case he will cease to be 'great art' and become no more valuable than Bruce Forsyth.

Marx asks in his Introduc tion to the Grundrisse why ancient Greek art retains an 'eternal charm'. But who is to Luckacs Trotsky ›nal extra, or the culmi ence? Should it be desi or directed towards highe hat interest has the worki lering the art and culture ETON examines the probl 'standing of culture.

know that its 'charm' will indeed be eternal?

Just as any activity can become cultural, so any part of culture can become a centre of ideological struggle, Culture is part of the class-struggle. This does not necessarily mean that the culture which 'reflects' one class's experience enters into conflict with the culture which 'reflects' the experience of another class.

Chamber music For one thing, culture does not merely reflect class-consciousness: it helps to constitute it.

And though certain cultural practices are directly related to certain classes (chamber music and the upper middle class, for example), they still remain an area of class-contention.

The music of Beethoven is the product of the bourgeoisie, but its 'use value' isn't necessarily confined to that class. It can be fought for-wrested from the ruling class, and given a meaning within the revolutionary movement.

Such a Beethoven would not be 'the same' Beethoven as the bourgeoisie's: no culture is appropriated without being transformed.

Every social class, every historical epoch, re-invents the art-works it receives for its own purposes.

It might turn out that Beethoven, or Shakespeare, coula not be appropriated in this way-that they had nothing to say to the revolutionary working class, in which case they could safely be consigned to the museum.

Eternal

But the point is to find out in practice-not to presume, like Georg Lukacs, that bourgeois culture will continue to be eternally valuable, nor to take the ultra-leftist line of some of the Russian Futurist artists and dogmatically propagate the slogan 'Burn Raphael!' Both of these attitudes, in fact, reflect bourgeois views of culture: Luckacs'sin its idealism,, Lenin nation of man's ng class in underof the capitalist the Futurists' in their narrow pragmatism:

Indeed it is remarkable how tenacious has been the grip of bourgeois ideology over the whole history of Marxist cultural theory. Marx and Engels themselves laid the basis for a genuinely materialist theory of culture, but their own occasional writings about art remained for the most part conventionally Hegelian.

The first major Russian Marxist art-theorist, Georgi Plekhanov, cobbled together his theory out of the two main bourgeois ideologies of his time, positivism and neoKantianism.

Even Lenin himself admitted to being something of a conservative in cultural matters, and had little sympathy TO. experimental art.

Trotsky, one of the greatest Marxist cultural theorists of all, still resorts to idealist terms like "greatness' and "genius' • and closely supported the leading Left Opposition spokesman on art, Voronsky, who believed in such things as the 'essence of beauty'.

•Classless The period after the Bolshevik revolution was one of fierce contention over culture, posing questions of vital importance to revolutionaries today.

Should the aim be to build a proletarian culture, or to strike directly for the classless culture of socialism? Should art be seen as a 'reflection' of given reality, or as an instrument for forging a new reality, a material force of production which could organise a new consciousness?

Should experimental art be condemned as mere decadent individualism, or celebrated as the cultura equivalent to political revolution? What attitude should be assumed to the inherited culture of classsociety: should it be discarded, integrated, transformed?

How far should art be 'partyminded' , directly shaped by political imperatives, or how far should the individual artist be left Ideologically free?

Should art be strictly functional, part improvement of material life, or should it still be seen as an end in itselt!

Does art reproduce ideology or does it transcend it-should it realistically reflect the actual, or romantically potential, the socialist future?

With the tightening grip of Stalininsm in the Soviet Union, the great cultural debate withered and died.

At the first Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934. Stalin's ultural henchman Zhdano propagated the bankrupt doctrine of 'socialist realism' and put paid to a whole era of rich cultural debate.

"The art of the Stalinist period", writes Trotsky, "will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution*.

Georg Lukacs, the 'greatest' Marxist art-theorist of the century, becomes the Stalinist watchdog of culture in the 1930s; denouncing all experiment as bourgeois decadence, insisting on the continuity between bourgeois realism and 'socialist' writing and thus reproducing cultural arena the Popular Frontism of the political sphere.

Left Front What was lost, above all, was the moment of the so-called Left Front in Art in the 1920s--those Bolshevik artists (Futurists, Constructivisits and so on) who had insisted that what was needed for revolutionary culture was more than just a change in the ideological contents of art.

What was needed, they argued, was a revolution in the means of cultural production themselves, which would take writers and artists out of their studies and studios into the factories, farms and workshops, to harness their talents to the needs of the revolution.

It was not, they claimed, just a matter of transforming the 'line' of the artist: it was a question of overturning the existing social relations between artistic producers, distributors, readers, actors, and audiences, by exploiting the material forces of production to create new art-forms.

Pioneering work

If that Soviet tradition was crushed by Stalinism, it lingered on in the Germany of the 1930s, with the pioneering work of the theatre director Erwin Piscator, the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, and the playwright Bertolt Brecht.

It survived, too, in the tradition of the socialist theatre movement agit-prop, which, however deeply deformed in political content by Stalinism; strived with its 300 European groups in the 1930s to destroy the social relations of artists and audiences established by bourgeois theatre.

Such movements followed in the great tradition of the Bolshevik theatre director Meyerhold, who celebrated the third anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution by taking over a whole town and producing a play which included a 15,000 cast, real guns and a real battleship.

Meyerhold was destroyed by Stalinism-not surprisingly because in those days culture actually had an impact.

It is not for nothing that the Nazis were extremely interested in hiring the talents of the German Communist Party theatre director, Piscator.

If Marxist cultural theory has become a rather less politiclly disturbing force, since that time, it remains true that culture nevertheless has its importance for revolutionaries.

For culture is one way in which individuals in classsociety are formed; cultural revolution is therefore central to ideological transformation.

Socialism concerns not only the production of a new economy, but of a new individual; and culture is a peculiarly effective form of shaping such individuals.

It engages with the human senses themseives; it is entwined with the very roots of language and perception; it penetrates deeply into the unconscious, and carries ideological positions 'straight to the nervous system.

Men and women do not, of course, live by culture alone. Far from it. Yet the assertion of Marxism is that in the end they will.

Once released from the oppression of labour, men and women will be able to live and move within that "surplus' existence we now call 'culture' rather than in the realm of material necessity. • Cultural revolution has a rightly subordinate place within the revolutionary movement as a whole. But in the end-in the very end-culture is what it is all about.

Stalin

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