Let More on Marxism and Culture (SP 170)

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Terry Eagleton's article on "Marxism and Culture" was a welcome contribution to a subject which is usually confined to universities and intellectuals' discussion circles.

But precisely because of this it is necessary that we are aware of certain contradictions and misconceptions in his article.

Some of these seem to come from comrade Eagleton's previous broad adherence to the virtually incomprehensible use of language and the idealist philosophising of the French Stalinist, Louis Althusser.

so, for example, the definition of "culture" as "a set of social practices usually symbolising certain significant meanings and values, which are marked mainly by their primarily non-functional nature" is reminiscent of Althusserian thought and language-and surely pretty meaningless to most of your readers.

This is particularly so when "culture" is used throughout most of the article as a synonym* for "art"-which usage Eagleton himself declares "ideological"

And it is unexplained why terms like "greatness" and "genius". as used by Trotsky are idealist.

After all, in the same sentence comrade Eagleton speaks of. Trotsky as "one of the greatest Marxist cultural theorists"

If theorists can be why can't artists?

Further, the idea of "nonfusing, especially when it is shown how culture does function as "ideology" or a means of political agitation.

Presumably he means (like Lukacs, whom Eagleton too easily dismisses with total contempt) that culture is those social productions not necessary for the immediate maintenance of life.

Which means that the Parthenon was a cultural object for the Greeks, even if not so much an "artistic" one as it has become for us.

The most important point to make here is that art under capitalism has become totally divorced from the real lives of most people.

And comrade Eagleton is over-generous to the contribution of the Futurists and Constructivists to the beginnings of cultural revolution in the USSR in the 1920s.

Certainly some of them participated sincerely and valuably in the agit-prop programmes of the state and the For the most part, though, they were sectarian ultra-leftists.

They were unresponsive to the real cultural needs of the masses and of the workers' state, and too involved in their personal artistic development (which was firmly rooted in prerevolutionary Russian/Western society and culture) and their abstract and idealist concept of "proletarian culture"

In this regard, and in discussing the role of art in social revolution we should refer to Trotsky.

He made a valid distinction between that (usually 'inferior') art which is primarily politically significant, and that which has a longer-term value for the development of a truly new, genuinely mass-based communist culture.

revolutionists former iS incomparably more important.

In the later stages of the world proletarian revolution, the latter will play its part in the development of a truly human society.

Yours fraternally, L. Davidson Lukacs certain product.

This definition is indeed "Althusserian'. It also seems to me to be true. To call Lenin a "great genius is harmless enough; to call Leonardo a great genius suggests a whole bourgeois ideology of art.

Comrade Davidson questions my use of the word 'function' and then conveniently answers his own question. I did not dismiss Lukacs with 'total contempt: he is a major cultural theorist. I simply said that he was a Stalinist, which is accurate.

Comrade Davidson is right to warn us about the ultra-leftism of some of the Futurists and Constructivists.

I had done the same myselt, in a longer article of which this article was a necessary compression. This is certainly a part of the debate which needs continuing.

Terry Eagleton COMING SOON A series of articles by TERRY EAGLETON critically examining the work of Western Marxists. The series will include, and Sartre.

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functionality" as used definition quoted above is con-

among others, Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin