Leon
Trotsky: Culture and Socialism
Extracts,
February 3, 1926
[Leon
Trotsky on Literature and Art, New York ²1972, p. 83-91]
1.
Technique and Culture
Let
us recall first of all that culture meant originally a plowed,
cultivated field, as distinct from virgin forest and virgin soil.
Culture was contrasted with nature, that is, what was acquired by
man’s efforts was contrasted with what was given by nature. This
antithesis fundamentally retains its value today.
Culture
is everything that has been created, built, learned, conquered by man
in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature
has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species
of animal. The science which studies man as a product of animal
evolution is called anthropology. But from the moment that man
separated himself from the animal kingdom — and this happened
approximately when he first grasped primitive tools of stone and wood
and armed the organs of his body with them — from that time there
began the creation and accumulation of culture, that is, all kinds of
knowledge and skill in the struggle with nature and subjugation of
nature.
When
we speak of the culture accumulated by past generations we think
first and foremost of its material achievements in the form of tools,
machinery, buildings, monuments, and so on. Is this culture?
Undoubtedly it is culture; the material forms in which culture is
deposited — material culture. It creates, on the basis provided by
nature, the fundamental setting of our lives, our everyday way of
living, our creative work. But the most precious part of culture is
its deposit in the consciousness of man himself — those methods,
habits, skills, acquired abilities of ours which have developed out
of the whole of preexisting material culture and which, while drawing
on this preexisting material culture, also improve upon it We will,
then, consider it as firmly established that culture has grown out of
man's struggle with nature for existence, for the improvement of his
conditions of life, for the enlargement of his power. But out of this
same basis classes also have grown. In the process of adapting itself
to nature, in conflict with the hostile forces of nature, human
society has taken shape as a complex organization of classes. The
class structure of society has determined to a decisive degree the
content and form of human history, that is, its material relations
and their ideological reflections. This means that historical culture
has possessed a class character.
Slave-owning
society, feudal serf-owning society, bourgeois society, each
engendered a corresponding culture, different at different stages and
with a multitude of transitional forms. Historical society has been
an organization for the exploitation of man by man. Culture has
served the class organization of society. Exploiters' society has
given rise to an exploiters' culture. But does this mean that we are
against all the culture of the past?
There
exists, in fact, a profound contradiction here. Everything that has
been conquered, created, built by man’s efforts and which serves to
enhance man's power is culture. But since it is not a matter of
individual man but of social man, since culture is a
social-historical phenomenon in its very essence, and since
historical society has been and continues to be class society,
culture is found to be the basic instrument of class oppression. Marx
said: "The ruling ideas of an epoch are essentially the ideas of
the ruling class of that epoch." This also applies to culture as
a whole. And yet we say to the working class: master all the culture
of the past, otherwise you will not build socialism. How is this to
be understood?
Over
this contradiction many people have stumbled, and they stumble so
frequently because they approach the understanding of class society
superficially, semi-idealistically, forgetting that fundamentally
this is the organization of production. Every class society has been
formed on the basis of definite modes of struggle with nature, and
these modes have changed in accordance with the development of
technique. What is the basis of bases — the class organization of
society or its productive forces? Without doubt the productive
forces. It is precisely upon them, at a certain level of their
development, that classes are formed and re-formed. In the productive
forces is expressed the materialized economic skill of mankind, his
historical ability to ensure his existence. On this dynamic
foundation there arise classes, which by their interrelations
determine the character of culture.
And
here, first and foremost, we have to ask ourselves regarding
technique: is it only
an instrument of class oppression? It is enough to put such a
question for it to be answered at once: no, technique is the
fundamental conquest of mankind; although it has also served, up to
the present, as an instrument of exploitation, yet it is at the same
time the fundamental condition for the emancipation of the exploited.
The machine strangles the wage slave in its grip. But he can free
himself only through the machine. Therein is the root of the entire
question.
If
we do not let ourselves forget that the driving force of the
historical process is the growth of the productive forces, liberating
man from the domination of nature, then we shall find that the
proletariat needs to master the sum total of the knowledge and skill
worked out by humanity in the course of its history, in order to
raise itself up and rebuild life on principles of solidarity. …
2.
The Heritage of Spiritual Culture
Spiritual
culture is as contradictory as material culture. And just as from the
arsenals and storehouses of material culture we take and put into
circulation not bows and arrows, not stone tools or the tools of the
Bronze Age, but the most improved tools available, of the most
up-to-date technique, in this way also must we approach spiritual
culture as well. …
Dialectics
and materialism are the basic elements in the Marxist cognition of
the world. But this does not mean at all that they can be applied to
any sphere of knowledge, like an ever-ready master key. Dialectics
cannot be imposed upon facts, it has to be deduced from facts, from
their nature and development. Only painstaking work on a vast mass of
material enabled Marx to advance the dialectical system of economics
to the conception of value as social labor. Marx's historical works
were constructed in the same way, and even his newspaper articles
likewise. Dialectical materialism can be applied to new spheres of
knowledge only by mastering them from within. The purging of
bourgeois science presupposes a mastery of bourgeois science. You
will get nowhere with sweeping criticism or bald commands. Learning
and application here go hand in hand with critical reworking. We have
the method, but there is work enough for generations to do. …
Art
is one of the ways in which man finds his bearings in the world; in
this sense the heritage of art is not distinguished from the heritage
of science and technique — and it is no less contradictory than
they. Unlike science, however, art is a form of cognition of the
world not as a system of laws but as a group of images, and at the
same time it is a way of inspiring certain feelings and moods. The
art of past centuries has made man more complex and flexible, has
raised his mentality to a higher level, has enriched him in an
all-round way. This enrichment is a precious achievement of culture.
Mastery of the art of the past is, therefore, a necessary
precondition not only for the creation of new art but also for the
building of the new society, for communism needs people with highly
developed minds. Can, however, the art of the past enrich us with an
artistic knowledge of the world? It can, precisely because it is able
to give nourishment to our feelings and to educate them. If we were
groundlessly to repudiate the art of the past, we should at once
become poorer spiritually.
One
notices nowadays a tendency here and there to put forward the idea
that art has as its purpose only the inspiration of certain moods,
and not at all the cognition of reality. The conclusion drawn from
this is: with what sort of sentiments can the art of the nobility or
of the bourgeoisie infect us? This is radically false. The
significance of art as a means of cognition — including for the
mass of the people, and in particular for them — is not at all less
than its "sentimental" significance. The ancient epic, the
fable, the song, the traditional saying, the folk rhyme provide
knowledge in graphic form, they throw light on the past, they
generalize experience, they widen the horizon, and only in connection
with them and thanks to this connection is it possible to "tune
it." This applies to all literature generally, not only to epic
poetry but to lyric poetry as well. It applies to painting and to
sculpture. The only exception, to a certain degree, is music, the
effect of which is powerful but one-sided! Music too, of course,
relies upon a particular knowledge of nature, its sounds and rhythms.
But here the knowledge is so deeply hidden, the results of the
inspiration of nature are to such an extent refracted through a
person's nerves, that music acts as a self-sufficing "revelation.”
Attempts to approximate all forms of art to music, as to the art of
"infection," have often been made and have always signified
a depreciation in art of the role of the intelligence in favor of
formless feeling, and in this sense they were and are reactionary. …
Worst of all, of course, are those works of "art" which
offer neither graphic knowledge nor artistic "infection"
but instead advance exorbitant pretensions. In our country no few
such works are printed, and, unfortunately,
not in the students' books of art schools but in many thousands of
copies. …
Culture
is a social phenomenon. Just because of this, language, as the organ
of intercourse between men, is its most important instrument. The
culture of language itself is the most important condition for the
growth of all branches of culture, especially science and art. Just
as technique is not satisfied with the old measuring apparatus but is
creating new ones, micrometers, voltameters, and so on, striving for
and attaining ever greater accuracy, so in the matter of language, of
skill in choosing the appropriate words and combining them in the
appropriate ways, constant, systematic, painstaking work is necessary
in order to achieve the highest degree of accuracy, clarity and
vividness. The foundation for this work must be the fight against
illiteracy, semi-literacy and near-illiteracy. The next stage of this
work is the mastering of Russian classical literature.
Yes,
culture was the main instrument of class oppression. But it also, and
only it, can become the instrument of socialist emancipation.
3.
The Contradictions in Our Culture
What
is special about our position is that we — at the point where the
capitalist West and the colonial-peasant East meet — have been the
first to make a socialist revolution. The regime of proletarian
dictatorship has been established first in a country with a monstrous
inheritance of backwardness and barbarism, so that among our people
whole centuries of history separate a Siberian nomad from a Moscow or
Leningrad worker. Our social forms are transitional to socialism and
consequently are beyond comparison higher than capitalist forms. In
this sense we rightly consider ourselves the most advanced country in
the world. But technique, which lies at the basis of material and
every other kind of culture, is extremely backward in our country in
comparison with the advanced capitalist countries. This constitutes
the fundamental contradiction of our present reality. The historical
task which follows from this is to raise our technique to the height
of our social formation. If we do not succeed in doing this, our
social order will inevitably decline to the level of our technical
backwardness. Yes, in order to appreciate the entire significance of
technical progress for us it is necessary to tell ourselves frankly:
if we do not succeed in filling the Soviet forms of our social order
with the appropriate productive technique we shall shut off the
possibility of our transition to socialism and we shall be turned
back to capitalism — and to what sort of capitalism: semi-serf,
semi-colonial capitalism. The struggle for technique is for us the
struggle for socialism, with which the whole future of our culture is
bound up.
Here
is a fresh and very expressive example of our cultural
contradictions. There recently appeared in the papers a report that
our Leningrad Public Library holds first place for the number of
books: it now possesses 4,250,000 books! Our first feeling is a
legitimate feeling of Soviet pride: our library is the first in the
world! To what are we indebted for this achievement? To the fact that
we have expropriated private libraries. Through nationalizing private
property we have created a richer cultural institution, accessible to
everyone. The great advantages of the Soviet order are indisputably
shown in this simple fact. But at the same time our cultural
backwardness is expressed in the fact that in our country the
percentage of illiterates is greater than in any other European
country. The library is the biggest in the world, but as yet only a
minority of the population reads books. And that is how things are in
almost every respect. Nationalized industry, with gigantic and far
from fantastic schemes for Dnieprostroi, the Volga-Don canal and so
on — and the peasants do their threshing with chains and rollers.
Our marriage laws are permeated with the spirit of socialism — and
physical violence still plays no small part in our family life. These
and similar contradictions result from the entire structure of our
culture, at the meeting point of West and East. …
It
is now, I think, dear to everybody that the creation of a new culture
is not an independent task to be carried out separately from our
economic work and our social and cultural construction as a whole. …
When
Lenin spoke of the cultural revolution he saw its fundamental content
as raising the cultural level of the masses. The metric system is a
product of bourgeois science. But teaching this simple system of
measurement to a hundred million peasants means carrying out a big
revolutionary cultural task. It is almost certain that we shall not
achieve it without the aid of tractors and electric power. At the
foundation of culture lies technique. The decisive instrument in the
cultural revolution must be a revolution in technique.
In
relation to capitalism we say that the development of the productive
forces is pressing against the social forms of the bourgeois state
and bourgeois property. Having accomplished the proletarian
revolution we say: the development of the social forms is pressing
against the development of the productive forces, that is technique.
The big link by seizing which we can carry through the cultural
revolution is the link of industrialization, and not literature or
philosophy at all. I hope that these words will not be understood in
the sense of an unfriendly or disrespectful attitude to philosophy
and poetry. Without generalizing thought and without art, man's life
would be bare and beggarly. But that is just what the life of
millions of people is to an enormous extent at the present time. The
cultural revolution must consist in opening up to them the
possibility of real access to culture and not only to its wretched
fag ends. But this is impossible without creating very big material
preconditions. That is why a machine which automatically manufactures
bottles is at the present time a first-rate factor in the cultural
revolution, while a heroic poem is only a tenth-rate factor.
Marx
said once about philosophers that they had interpreted the world
sufficiently, the task was to turn it upside down. There was no
disesteem for philosophy in those words of his. Marx was himself one
of the greatest philosophers of all time. These words meant only that
the further development of philosophy, as of all culture in general,
both material and spiritual, requires a revolution in social
relations. And so Marx appealed from philosophy to the proletarian
revolution, not against philosophy but on its behalf. In this same
sense we can now say: it is good when poets sing of the revolution
and the proletariat, but a powerful turbine sings even better. We
have plenty of songs of middling quality, which have remained the
property of small circles, but we have terribly few turbines. I don’t
wish to imply by this that mediocre verses hinder the appearance of
turbines. No, that cannot be said at all. But a correct orientation
of public opinion, that is, an understanding of the real relationship
between phenomena, the how and why of things, is absolutely
necessary.
The
cultural revolution must not be understood in a superficially
idealistic way or as something which is an affair for small study
groups. It is a question of changing the conditions of life, the
methods of work and the everyday habits of a great nation, of a whole
family of nations. Only a mighty tractor system which for the first
time in history will enable the peasant to straighten his back; only
a glassblowing machine which produces hundreds of bottles and
liberates the lungs of the old-time glassblower; only a turbine of
dozens and hundreds of thousands horsepower; only an airplane
available to everyone — only all these things together will ensure
the cultural revolution, not for a minority but for all. And only
such a cultural revolution will deserve the name. Only on that basis
will a new philosophy and a new art come to flower. …